It’s iPhone Day, and there is already a queue outside the Apple Store in London!
Tag Archives: London
Mac Expo and the Launch of Leopard
I have to say that if I’d paid £15 per person to come into this years Mac Expo I’d be decidedly disappointed. In our case, having got complimentary tickets we made the best of it and headed off into central London.
Anyway, what was wrong with the expo? Firstly it was noticeably smaller – although having the seminar theatre made up for it a bit, the biggest absence was glaringly obvious the moment you walked through the door – Apple themselves.
Last year they had the largest stand at the show, and had their entire range of hardware and software on show for you to play with. I wanted to have a play with the new iPod’s and they were nowhere to be seen – other stands had the new iMac’s to play with, and the organisers had managed to pull together a number of Mac’s to demonstrate what you could do with the platform. There were some big stands though – with Quark, HP and Microsoft all having big stands. Amusingly Microsoft were trying to plug Office 2008 – but demo wise aside from the Mac version of Expression, only had Office 2004 to show.
So where on earth were Apple? You didn’t have to go very far to find out. A trip on the Underground up to Regent Street and at the flagship UK Apple Store and you found out – it was absolute chaos!
When we got there at 4pm the store itself was closed, but was filled with a lot of staff frantically rushing around ready for the 6pm launch of Leopard. There were seemingly as many on the pavement outside. Several were managing the queue that even at this point was around the corner of the block and halfway over to Hannover Square – many sitting there with MacBook’s open. Other staff were fielding questions from people wanting to go into the store – one was even running an impromptu Genius Bar with a girl who had come up especially with a MacBook problem.
We hung around outside the store for a bit, and overheard a couple of conversations which highlights quite what the store is known for. Firstly a guy came past and asked why the store was closed, and was told it was for the launch of a new operating system – “What, for the iPod?â€? came the reply. I heard other people describe it as “The iPod Storeâ€? too.
Not wanting to hang around in the queue – I’m doing my usual wait-and-see with regards to Leopard – we headed off to have some dinner, and came back just after 6pm to see how it was going.
After 6pm it was even more chaotic. Crowded around the doors were camera crews filming the events, the rush hour commuters were all trying to get past on the street, and the queue had now reached back round into Hannover Square itself, despite the store now being full of customers putting down the cash for Leopard and in some cases putting down a lot more money to buy a new Mac. If you want to see what the launch was like from someone in the queue, check out this great photo set by Christianno Betta – as you can see from this set he also got a copy of Leopard too.
So that it seems was where Apple were. Whilst the Mac Expo organisers we’re busily trying to attract people by opening late for the launch – the real action, and all the hard-core Apple fans were queuing outside the Apple Store hence it was all hands on deck for that, and I guess they couldn’t spare the staff to man a stand at the show.
Just as a postscript, looking at the seminar schedule, Apple are going to be there today – demonstrating Leopard not surprisingly! It wasn’t a total dead loss from our point of view either, as over in the corner we found the stock picture site that Beth has been using for some of the online look of Displaced Moose who said that there are no problems with her using the same images on her business cards – the only no-no is reselling the pictures themselves.
Better Late than Never
Today, the CrossRail project was finally given the go-ahead.
To give you some idea of how long the project has been trying to get the go ahead, it was originally announced when I was still at school and Margret Thatcher was Prime Minister but ever since then nobody has stumped up the cash to actually complete the project.
The basic idea behind the project is simple – getting across London by public transport is very slow. If for example you want to take the train to get from Essex to Heathrow Airport it involves taking a train into central London, then taking the Underground – probably the Circle Line – around to Paddington to catch the Heathrow Express. The line proposed is a new high speed route running under central London on an East/West route – something that would make that journey a lot quicker and simpler.
Back when the route was originally proposed it was a bit more extensive, with a branch running out to Amersham and Watford, and extending as far as Reading. What has now been given the green light is not quite as extensive with the line only reaching as far as Maidenhead in the west, with a branch to Heathrow. Needless to say from a personal point of view that does slightly lessen it’s convenience for us out here as we’d still require a train change at Maidenhead – having said that it certainly will make getting into central London a lot more convenient. Sadly though it won’t be ready in time for the London Olympics – probably the biggest upcoming event that would benefit as the railway won’t be finished until 2017, five years too late.
The Fastest Way to Brussels
You can always rely on Ryanair and it’s charismatic boss Michael O’Leary for some entertaining news stories. After discriminating against disabled passengers by charging them for a wheelchair, winding up the green lobby and sitting right at the bottom of the pile as the worlds least favourite airline, today it lost out in another battle over one of it’s adverts, this time claiming that it in a comparison with Eurostar it was the fastest and cheapest way to get from London to Brussels.
In order to make this comparison, they compared the time it takes the train to get from London to Brussels, with the time for their closest route, which flies from London Stansted airport 30 miles north-east of London to Charleroi Airport 28.75 miles from Brussels. The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the comparison of both time and cost were misleading because the comparison did not include the time and additional cost to get to and from Stansted or Charleroi.
The response from Ryanair was typical – they said that time and costs involved in getting to an airport or railway station were irrelevant as they applied to both modes of transport – they also said that “no stupid rulingâ€? could hide the success of the airline.
Not surprisingly, I don’t agree – if I’m wanting to go somewhere, the time taken for the whole journey is the most important, as is the convenience of the schedule. Last year when I went on a day trip to Brussels I made exactly that decision. For a start, Ryanair didn’t get a look in – flying from pretty well the opposite side of London to somewhere miles outside Brussels it was a non starter. We did consider the Eurostar, but that lost out because to get to the terminal we needed to spend an hour on South West Trains to get there and back. In the end, thanks to our close proximity to London Heathrow, and the much closer location of the main Brussels Airport to the city compared to Charleroi where Ryanair arrive, we opted for a BMI flight instead.
The basis of the Advertising Standards Authority ruling is that comparing the time from central London to central Brussels is a fair comparison – in which case the Eurostar wins easily as it’s only a short hop on the respective city metro system to the terminal rather than a much longer and more expensive journey out to the airport. Put simply, they are saying that the only fair way to compare is to pick a start and end location and compare the whole journey. Having said that, Ryanair would probably pick Stansted and Charleroi and add the time to get to each airport to the time for the Eurostar…
Dan and Jas Get Married
This time last week, we were both sat in a school hall in Hayes celebrating the marriage of my cousin Daniel to his long-time girlfriend Jas. They had both been and the same university studying medicine and ended up as junior Doctor’s in Basingstoke. The issue though was that Jas is Sikh, and Daniel most definitely isn’t, so there was certainly of goings on in the background to get to last Sunday. All credit to Dan he agreed to the full Sikh wedding – which as you can see from the picture included growing a beard – and everything seemed to go pretty well okay.
Unfortunately, with an important service at St James, and Carolyn my fellow Churchwarden away I missed the actual wedding ceremony, but Beth went along to that, and I arrived in time for the reception. Not ever having been to a Sikh wedding before I can’t comment on quite where the schedule differed from normal, but when it came to speeches only my Uncle, Dan’s father, Daniel and the best man made speeches, when you’d usually expect the Father of the Bride to give a speech. We also had several hours of disco between the starter and main course with the meal, but perhaps that is because apparently at a traditional Sikh wedding the host have little idea who is ultimately going to be there.
The invitation we got to the wedding was addressed to myself and Beth – usually the way it works, however when my Uncle was confirming numbers he found that he had no details of replies for the other half of the guest list, and discovered that they had, as is traditional gone to the head of each family, and as is traditional nobody had RSVP’d. My uncle was also warned that they had gone to the households, so they could reasonably expect almost anybody in the family to turn up. It may well be for some other unrelated reason, but if you don’t know how many guests will be there, having the main meal relatively late in proceedings gives you some opportunity to feed everybody.
Having said that, having the disco part way through does cause problems, particularly for people who don’t like the noise – and despite the fact we were seated on the opposite side of the hall from the disco it was still really loud. Incidentally, the people providing the disco had a decidedly odd name – Massacre Sounds – considering the meaning of the word usually relates to some sort of mass killing, it seems a weird name, all sorts of wrong connotations when you’re marketing to events like weddings and other parties!
Anyway, we had a good time, and the Bride and Groom certainly seemed to enjoy themselves which is the main thing. I’ve posted a selection of our pictures from the day, which include a chance to see the spectacular (and apparently rather heavy) dress, and my brother trying to hide the other three cans behind his back as he heads back to the table!
A couple of miscellaneous points to mention. Curious discovery of the day is that Beth is now related by marriage to one of the other teachers at her school. Beth met up with her at the ceremony and found out that Jas’s grandfather and he colleagues grandfather were brothers – not quite sure what the relationship is actually titled. The other point came up from the Best Man’s speech, with the revelation of the day being that Dan was in fact a former trainspotter – sadly led astray by my brother, who thanks to the fact that he did it with his best mate, probably won’t have to contend with that being highlighted on his wedding day!