Sep 18 2009

Airmiles and frequent flier points

Airmiles and frequent flier points

Lately I have become a little obsessive with Airmiles. I now have 1500 of them earned since December which is enough to get a free flight to most central European cities, or two (750 each) free flights to Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and various parts of Scotland (interestingly enough including Lerwick in the Shetland Islands)

I would need about 5000 to fly to Tel Aviv or New York from London, or 10,000 to get to Auckland or Alaska, so at the moment its not that useful for my current travels plans currently, but for any people doing charity work overseas or for people with needing gratis bonus holiday it can be a nice treat.

Catches. The ticket is free including all taxes and charges, and you are flying with a “grown up” airline (usually British Airways who own Airmiles) so meals and drinks are included, although maybe not if you flight its brief one (ie: Heathrow to Amsterdam you don’t get food as its only 1 hour 10 minutes if I remember correctly) But the catch is you have to buy at least one nights stay in one of their recommended hotels. I haven’t checked to see what this or if this comes at a premium, but as Airmiles the company has been around since 1986, if this was really a devious trick the company wouldn’t be around now. Also as far as I know they don’t get fussy about what time you can or cant fly as long as long as all the seats on the plane aren’t all booked out. Points cant be sold or given to anyone else. One last thing, the points don’t have a expiry date but if you don’t accrue any points at all in a 12 month time period they will charge you £30 when you eventually get to book.

Airmiles isn’t a frequent flier scheme, its purely an loyalty scheme to earn a little bit each time to your holiday, the great thing is I can earn incentives from buying things that I would of otherwise have bought anyway. I have converted most of my Tesco points to them, some from fuel (Shell points) for my longish drive to work, also from Scottish and Southern Electric, and buying things through popular online retailers such as ebay, CD wow and Play.com. All of these businesses I am already a customer before I signed up for Airmiles. Although I have got a Lloyds TSB credit card which earns me 1 mile/£10 spend so combined these can rack up the points a bit sooner, I also got an invite to fill in some simple questionnaires online by a partnership organisation which the points accrued there can be traded for Airmiles.

A good tip to get the extra Tesco points is to take your aluminium drinks cans to the bigger stores where they get crushed and recycled and the points added by the computer operated machine in the car park, ask your work place if you can take home spent inkjet cartridges (you can get 100 Tesco points each for most HP ones, and their T&Cs say you can send in up to 30 a year, so once they are converted to Airmiles, 30x cartridges is nearly enough for a free return flight to France) and to also take your carrier bags to avoid taking new ones.

Don’t forget to earn the miles from each of the respective partner companies, you must log into your Airmiles account on their site then click on the link to take you to the respective retailer (ie CD Wow) to get the points. I didn’t do this when I originally got my Lloyds TSB credit card and when I phoned up to ask if they could add the miles, they said they wouldn’t do it.

BMI miles

On advice of a web site I applied for a BMI American express card to get the 20,000 (will get you as far as Istanbul or Moscow) miles on this. This only needed a £250 spend (couple of months of fuel and grocery shopping easily took care of this) I cancelled the card afterwards as lots of stores don’t take Amex so its not that useful.

This was not as good as it seems you still have to pay taxes and charges but not under any obligation to buy any other services. In reality the ‘free’ flight is actually a third off the usual price of the ticket as the taxes and charges make up the other two thirds. Still this is useful to have this when I plan to fly at somepoint.

I earned a little (500 miles) when I paid the £293 for my ticket from Heathrow to Tel Aviv. I don’t think I get really anything for these though.

I may try the Easyjet or Flybe credit cards, as I am going to Ireland and Spain for a birthday and a wedding in 2010….

Sep 18 2009

furry neighbours

Some weeks ago I was walking back from a friends birthday party today, just said goodbye to our friend Daniel who lives a few blocks away from me and his friend who staying over for the weekend, and I was walking down these stairs in an alleyway and spotted this wee creature :o)

It was very tame I thought it might have been injured, but seemed a little scared and appeared ok, having shiny black eyes and wet pointed nose, its prickles were quite soft so I guess its quite a young hedgehog.

I don’t think I have ever seen one live (sadly they are usually seen dead on the roads at home) before this close up as they are nocturnal animals. It was strange to see one not in a hurry to escape from me.

I passed further down the steps and saw a student on the way up, I told him not to step on him, he thought it was quite cute seeing this prickly mammal resting half way down the path too.

Hedgehog on path

Hedgehog

Sep 17 2009

my back

Few days ago I played frisbee with about 10 of us in the park.   Has to be said I don’t really do sport.  If I engage in anything that might involve tackling or taking control physically of some item like a ball from someone else I tend to ending hurting someone.   Instead I took a leap to grab the spinning plastic disc about 6 feet away from me and try to do a goalkeeper type leap and later that afternoon I found that my back was sore.

This kind of worried me, but after some praying and sitting in hard upright chairs for a couple of days, the pain has gone.   Similar things healing has been happening with some other people I work with.  The Lord is good.

Sep 13 2009

electronic bible

I am thinking of getting an old Windows PDA for use purely for bible study, looking for ideas amongst fellow IT pros on some ideas.

Often I rely on using biblegateway.com for searching for keywords on some scripture and a small device in which I can carry around in addition to a bible in a carry case would be good.

Now old HP/Compaq ipaqs and Dell Axims can be got for as little as £25 on ebay,

This is what I need,

Basic, cheap, reasonable battery life, clear screen, SD card slot, not scratch prone, some app to show bible (maybe multiple translations) easy to make notes on things, possibly a way to sync things from google calender via Activesync, usable on screen keyboard. 64Mb or even 32Mb would be probably be fine. Maybe a bolt on real keyboard.

What I dont need: iPhone/iPod Touch, these are great but wants some basic as its more or less going to be used for one purpose only, so I dont want to get distracted by messing about with some other things when I want to use it just for bible study. I dont need a phone (I have a basic one that suits me fine) I dont need wireless or bluetooth or MP3 or camera.

I want to stick with Windows just to stick with something mainstream.

Suggestions are welcome from anyone.

Sep 13 2009

day visit to Modi’im

On Sunday the day after my birthday we went to a town called Modi’im, mainly with the intention of seeing a movie and looking at the shops in the mall. Sadly this particular cinema only did two English films and neither of them seemed that good. Looked at a few shops, one of the being Tower Records, I got chatting with the guy behind the counter, as it was quiet, we would the only people in the store, and there was some nice reggae tunes playing that the man on the till had chosen to put on, after a bit of chatting he said the Skatalites were playing in Israel in a few weeks. Sounds great, but cant really afford to get a ticket for them currently.

After the mall went to visit one of my friends’ family, this South African couple who had made Aliyah to Israel not so long ago, the flat they had was lovely, very modern, but extremely spacious but best of all was getting out onto the balcony, as it was on the 18th floor you could see for miles, everywhere from Ashkelon all the was to Petah Tikva, with the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv in the distance.

Afterwards this man called David pointed out that me and the other 3 of us were from complete seperate continents (myself from UK, one guy from the US and the two girls from South Africa and Japan.) kind of similar to what the bible says about God bringing people from the four corners of the earth. Fascinating stuff.

My Birthday went really well, I was nervous about not having the right amount of food but it all turned out perfect, had 12 of us out in the porch outside our small flat, then there was 5 of us at Jerusalem comedy club at the top of Ben Yehuda Street, this was fun, was 40 Skekels to get in (£6)  we had the barman who was also MCing the event, and inevitably, as it was by birthday, I got lifted up on a chair with some people and had some Israeli song sung by the guy with the microphone, next was the warm up guy who looked very new to stand up, he was ok, but had to keep looking at his piece of paper to remember his gags, after 20 minutes there was the main guy called Charley who was a real natural, he kept the jokes coming thick and fast and I liked the fact he used a lot of his experience of making Aliyah from the US and getting used to life here was the main bulk of his material.   Was a really great night.

Aug 29 2009

33

Today I hit 33, Jesus died at this age at the peak of his ministry somewhere probably no more than a mile than a live at the moment.   Thats quite a sobering thought.

Lately I get to go round someone’s house, either with one of the Bridges for Peace volunteers, or to some friends who work for one of several other Christian organisations in the city, and have food on friday night (Shabbat) which I did yesterday, its always great fun and everyone tends to much in making something.

Today I have some people coming round my house tonight so I am trying to make a bunch of things, have assembled together a Lasagne in a long aluminium tray, I have never cooked anything this big nor for and organise for 10-12ish people who are coming tonight, I need to make some chilli as well as Lasagne with its meat and diary combination isnt kosher, hopefull this should be ok, no one has told me if they are vegatarian or has any special requirements, I am just a little nervous this is all going to work out ok tonight.

Later tonight a few of us are heading to a comedy club in town, as have been recommended this is a must do experience when doing Jerusalem, not been to one of these before, so should be interesting.

Aug 29 2009

Apples tablet Mac/Netbook rumour – Jon’s predictions

If you have read any of IT new sites in last few weeks you would of seen talk of the much rumoured Apple netbook thats possibly in the guise of a tablet form factor. Apple’s PR people have often dismissed netbooks as ‘junk’ but the public often have complained Macs are still too expensive and a low end stripped down Mac laptop would be much welcomed.

Apple are always hugely secretive about their future hardware releases, and the press often get whiff a new release of something when patents get applied for or, or noticed as Jap/Korean companies who make LCDs, flash RAM, etc suddenly get asked for a big order of parts to a certain fruity brand in Cupertino.

I thought I would put my opinions on this, you probably heard of Kindle and similar devices that are used for e-books, that have a specialised LCD display that is much easier on the eye for low light conditions unlike traditional TFT displays that need a backlight lamp, but Kindle and similar devices are too expensive and use a lot of proprietary (DRMed) different formats for books to come in.

The ‘iTablet’ could well fill this gap. Where as Apple were completely new to the mobile phone market but the snazzy and slick interface of the iPhone and the ability to customise with extra applications really surprised the world. Apple’s tablet device could shock the world again maybe. The chances are it would have a 7” or so screen and use flash ram and maybe just have an SD card slot for quick changeable storage.

Heres an idea, a company I have worked for had a whole room full of Macs used for graphics and publishing team, everyone knows that Macs are the standard for this sort of work, even though all of Adobe’s graphics software is also available for Windows (as far as I am aware) Now, imagine this, an artist needs to do some simple sketching work, or a engineer needs to do some CAD work let say, have a device they can take out onto a site and do the bulk of the sketching using some more simplified versions of typical Adobe or AutoCAD apps. Your typical owner can take it back home and plug it into a dock and use the stylus and use it as a pointing device coupled to a Mac.

There you have it, a product that can be used but some of Apple’s traditional customers in the graphics/creative niche and something that can be used as an ebook reader and for general other domestic uses (music, videos, word processing, browsing when out and about or whatever) by normal consumers.

Now the chances are Apple are waiting until OLED screens (that I think don’t need backlights) and SSD disks which are both are quite expensive to come down next year, to make such a device possible.

By Jonathan • Posted in it
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Aug 24 2009

prayer around Knesset

In view of the news about Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu appearing to side with the US about stopping building work in some of some of the disputed land, and I forgot to do my one hour prayer slot at work on tuesday, I decided to go prayer walking around the government buildings. I live not far from there but today I thought about taking a different route and went via a main road past one of the museums, after a mile or so I saw some very attractive gardens with neatly trimmed hedges next to the stone perimeter walls of the Knesset and there is a smell of lavender from the bushes, a glimpse of the days of Solomon in some ways. There was a road turning off here directly to the Knesset buildings themselves and approaching some booths with a barrier across the road, seeing a park on the left hand side I was not familiar with I ventured into there. Although its dark and not easy to see, I suddenly saw a family in a tent there, or to be more exact two or three tents with a large canvas over all of them, and a man and his two sons sitting outside. There were various cardboard signs in Hebrew and some in broken English they had been thrown out of their house by the government. I asked the man if he knew English, he called for his son who got his friend from another tent close by who looked about 15. This boy was telling me they had been living here for 2 months as their house was seized without saying any reason why. They didn’t say much why this was, I think they were living before in Jerusalem and not in any of the parts of the West Bank or in East Jerusalem. I asked if maybe I could get someone to interview them as this might made a good story for our magazine, the man said he would be ok with this. I went away sad for them, a little confused of why this community of people were living in a park. I told them Christians would be praying for them.

I went and finished my praying for Mr Netanyahu and the government and headed off back home.

Around the government building and in the hedges I have seen some spools of cassette tape wrapped around trees, I have seen this a fair bit back in Portsmouth, but there’s quite a bit of it around this city, I have been told its some kind of occultic practice, I don’t know who does it, but I always make a point of praying over it and breaking it.

Aug 23 2009

learning experiences

Learning experiences

If anything, my 6 months in Israel is a big learning experience. In many different ways, I am learning the culture here, that people don’t queue for the shops and if the guy in the car in front of you hasnt notice the lights have gone green its quite acceptable to lean on the horn, but also having to expand my technical skillsets with learning how the computer network runs and troubleshooting a dead server at work, and supporting users on Macs something I havent done before. My own laptop keeps overheating, so have several times replaced the fan and put some new thermal paste on the ships but its still not working quite right.

I still havent figured out a way to learn Hebrew yet, as don’t have money to do proper lessons. Its hard shopping when I need a 5 shekel coin to release a trolley and I have to ask someone for change, or looking at items on the shelves which a lot don’t have English labels so I have absolutely no clue what they are.   Would welcome any suggestions on this.   Probably something I could put on my iPodI could listen as it takes me 35 minutes to get to work.