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Following the mishap of my Nokia N81 (broken screen) I needed to obtain a new phone. As I had another phone that was out of contract I was able to get the new HTC Touch Diamond. This is an awesome touch screen phone. The apple iPhone is basically a poor copy of the HTC touch phones only running substandard software including the Music crippling DRM iTunes software. In reality there is no comparison. The iPhone is an iPod with a phone application attached. It does the internet badly (no java or flash support) has no Bluetooth (OK it has bluetooth but you cannot use it to transfer files or data – isn’t that he point of bluetooth?), cannot MMS pictures, has a very bad battery life and you have to install and run iTunes before you can even use the phone application. The HTC Touch Diamond by contrast is first and foremost a Smartphone. That is, it is a PDA phone  running the Windows Mobile 6.1 software. Not only does it have the full phone functionality that every mobile phone should have, it combines this with the PDA capability of Mobile Office, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, integration with Outlook and Exchange, SMS and MMS, photos and video (using a 3.2Mega Pixel camera) has a touch screen interface including some cool scrolling applications just like the iPhone has. Data connectivity includes Bluetooth, Wifi, multi-band Phone (3G, GSM and HSDPA). GPS can be integrated easily (using an external device which is good because it doesn’t then rely on cell coverage). Possibly the only poor comparison to the iPhone is the internal storage is fixed at 4GB. The battery life is also poor, but it can be replaced unlike the iPhone!

I have lots of things in draft format to be posted on here. I will endeavour to get them all written in the near future. Some pressing client issues are to be dealt with first however.

So in the next few days look for posts on:

• Why I was in hospital most of last night
• Live Mesh - How to set it up and use it (being written by aManda)
• Photosynth – what it is, how to use it and the ones I have created so far
• Books I have read lately (mostly so i can stop tripping over the stack beside my desk that isn’t getting put away until I write this post)
• And if I get time, the next VBA primer.

Ok back to work!

I promised to start writing a series of VBA primers. This is the first one.

For many using Excel is a daily thing. From office secretaries who manage the petty cash through to financial whizzkids who monitor stocks and bonds, Excel is a very versatile tool. It also has a lot of potential for automating repetitive tasks easily by being able to create macros.

A macro is a simply a “recorded set of instructions”. These can be as simple as saving two different sets of print options so you don’t have to continually change them. Basically the concept of a Macro is that you can get the computer to record the key and mouse strokes you use and save them so they can be repeated. While the reality is that the macro that is recorded is written in a language called VBA (visual Basic for Applications) this is irrelevant to people who first start using it.

Wow! what a day yesterday was. I have never had so much fun as a coach! I thought the athletics was fun but this was even better!.

First I had to get all the girls from the convention site down to the gym and ready to play. This was harder than it sounds. It was absolutely belting down with torrential rain, I was looking after my two youngest girls – who were very well behaved, and some of the girls were doing other performances beforehand. Also the captain was too sick to play.

We all got to the courts and started warming up – and dodging the rain that was falling onto the court through holes in the roof – it was so heavy the roof leaked! we did have a good warm up which was great and the girls were the first team there which is also a psychological advantage. They were not very switched on for a while but eventually we got them into some drills that made them focus and get the blood pumping. My fantastic assistant coach aManda was also sick so that made it even harder as I had to do all the other organising things I usually left her to do.