Month: October 2010

Hotels, and what makes them good

I’m currently in York, staying in a very nice hotel for three days. I like this hotel because it provides free wifi and enough tea and coffee to get me through an average week. These things are important, and I think I probably judge hotels quite a lot on their ability to provide me with the facilities I actually need, as opposed to ironing boards and hair dryers and things I generally just don’t use.

So yes, this hotel seems to tick all the boxes. I’ve often said I could easily live in a hotel room if there was a decent net connection and easy access to food. This is the sort of place I mean.

The Chokehold of Calendars

Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Chokehold of Calendars.

Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time.

In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening.

I largely agree with this. For a while I’ve been booking out huge blocks of time to ensure that I actually do what I need to do and to match the tasks I have to complete with the time of the day I’ll be at my most productive.

It makes me wonder why more people don’t do this, because from where I’m standing it really works.

New BlackBerry PlayBook & Tablet OS

New BlackBerry PlayBook & Tablet OS at BlackBerry.com.

Visually this looks really good, although I think it would be much more useful to someone who actually uses a Blackberry.

In other news, I’ve been taking the iPad to every meeting I’ve been to over the last few weeks, and have actually found I’m getting a lot of use out of it. Somehow it seems rude to pull out a laptop to demonstrate something quickly, but the iPad seems totally permissible in these circumstances. Yes, there are things I’d change, but it is certainly an enjoyable mobile computing experience.