I’ve done a few reviews of Goalpro versions over the years and so I was interested to find out just what the new GoalPro 7 had to offer.I used to be a daily user of GoalPro up until version 6. It managed all my work and life goals and I was a great piece of software in those days, even if the user interface was a little unusual.

Since then I feel that the software has completely lost it’s way, and version 7.0 only reinforces this view. So many of the brilliant features of earlier versions seem to have been dropped from this version in an effort to "streamline" (aka "dumb down") goal setting. These include:

• Infinite number of sub-goals. I don’t know what the limit is; but youcan bet someone will hit it.
• A full scheduling calendar. I used to be able to drag tasks from the task list and drop them on the day and time I was going to work on them. That functionality has been dropped.
• Specifying the number of  support items required. I found this essential as a check that I had all the required support in place. If I knew a goal needed 6 tasks; but I’d only assigned 5, then I knew I had t revisit that goal and work out what was missing. This really helped prevent things from falling through the cracks.
• The scratch pad. Again this was really useful for brainstorming a goal and then creating tasks and goals from the resulting list. Another loss.
• Outlook sync. I could keep my goals and tasks scheduled in Outlook by syncing the two products. This was invaluable in a business environment with group collaboration – when someone on the team wanted a piece of my time they could see at a glance what aspects of the projects I was working on and when. In version 7.0 I’d have to do all that scheduling manually.

This is the first of two web sites for bird watchers that I’m reviewing. I’ve been a keen birder since the mid ’80s and part of the appeal is  not only the birds and the excitement of finding something unusual; but also my love of lists and statistics. So I went looking online for tools for birders to record and share their sightings.

First up is www.birdpost.com. This is a great site for recording your sightings, it’s attractive to look at and has some really great features wrapped up in a modern and functional interface. When you log in you’re presented with a page showing your life list in the main part of the page with your recent sightings and a picture of the currently selected bird in the left column.

At the top of the main section are three tabs to show you the:

• List View that shows the species in a list (obvious)
• Image View that shows thumnails of each of your species seen
• Map View, a Google map that can be used to locate where you saw each sighting.

You can add an observation and record basic information:

• The species
• When you saw it (date and time)
• Tags
• Whether it was in flight
• Proximity (10 feet, 100 feet, 0.25  miles or 0.5 miles)
• Notes

Here the site starts to let itself down, note that the only way to include a location is to put it free hand into the tags. More on this later.

Once you’ve added your observations they’re available to add to the map. You do this by pulling down your list of unmapped sightings and clicking a balloon next to each sighting. You can then position the balloon on the map and save its position. You can zoom in and drag the balloon to exactly the position you saw the bird. It’s pretty cool and when you roll your mouse over a balloon on the map up pops the details of the sighting and a thumbnail picture of the bird. Nice!

 Overall the site is a very good piece of work; but it has some short-comings that prevented the site receiving a full five stars. The first of these, and for me the biggest issue, is the lack of location details. When I record a sighting where I saw the bird is important becuase I want to see all the birds recorded at that site, and then roll these sightings up to a wider geographical area. Let me give you an example:

• Birds seen at the site list
• In that town list
• In that county list
• In that country list
• In that continent list
• Global list

So a bird seen, say, at home will automatically appear in my home list, Ballinascarthy list, County, Cork list, Ireland list etc. Birdpost.com has a flat tags structure that doesn’t lend itself well to this sort of hierachy. You have to remember to put every location into the tags for each sighting, it really doesn’t work well.

The next issue I have is with the map facility. This is great functionally; but has one drawback. When you add a sighting it’s flagged as unmapped until you map it. Now if you’re a birder like me you record just about every sighting. So at home I record each species seen each day. However if I enter them all into birdpost.com they’re all flagged as unmapped. Before long the list of unmapped sightings becomes huge and unmanagable. The antidote to this is to map all the sightings; but then the map becomes saturated with every bird you’ve ever seen. There really needs to be an option to discard a sighting from the unmapped list and not map it.

Final gripes. Performance is very, very slow. There’s a lot of AJAX and other Javascript going on and the site really suffers from some pretty awful performance. There’s also a few bugs in the site that will pop-up lists of Javascript errors and debug, though overall the site is stable. I’ve also not found any way to export the sightings so there’s no way to back-up the data.

In summary, a great looking site with some great features; but also some functional drawbacks, some bugs and some very poor performance.

In the past I’ve reviewed Mind Manager – an excellent piece of software for producing mind maps – a tool I that forms part of my daily work flow for information gathering and organizing. However I’ve recently discovered something called "Personal Brain" from TheBrain.com that really takes mind mapping to a whole new level.

The problem I’ve always had with a mind map is that it’s essentially only two dimensional. You start at the ‘root’ node and work outwards in a hierarchy. You can create any number of hierarchy from the centre; but problems start to occur when you want to link from one hierarchy to another. Things start to get complicated and a complex map can be difficult to navigate and locate the information you need.

The Personal Brain takes a more 3 dimensional approach to organizing data. You can link nodes to multiple parents and to multiple children allowing for a network of cross links between information nodes. In addition to linking parents and children you can ‘jump’ create links to other topics. These are links to topics that are related but don’t form part of the current parent / child hierarchy. I guess an example might help:

Here we see my TulligWeather server is a child of Servers; but because it is weather related there’s a jump link to Met Eireann. In practice this makes it simple to create complex relationships between topics and yet make them easy to navigate.

As well as creating the topics you can add notes and attachments to them as well as giving them a type and adding tags. The latter allows you to view the tags as a virtual topic showing you all the topics with that tag. Here’s a shot showing a PHP tag and it’s associated topics.

Full search capabilities and and trail of recently accessed items make locating items in unrelated parts of a map easy. Additionally you can pin major topics to the top of the work area to help facilitate moving around different parts of your ‘brain’.

Personal Brain is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. That last one is a big bonus for me as I’m using Linux most of the time at present. The Linux version does have some features that don’t work like dragging files onto a topic to create an attachment; but for most things there’s a valid work around and I haven’t found anything that I really couldn’t do. There’s 3 versions available; free, Core and Pro. The free version has quite a few restrictions; but should still be usable. The Pro version includes integration with Microsoft Office, integrated calendar and a number of other useful features; but is very expensive at $249. I’ve been trialing the Pro version which is die to expire in a few days. Due to current financial constraints I’ll be switching to the free version at that time and I’ll let you know how that works out.

There’s nothing makes me reach for the blog faster than the feeling I’ve been ripped off and this is certainly the case with the video game Dirt2 on the Wii.

I’m a long term fan of motor sport video games ever since I owned Gran Tourismo on the PS2. I rue the day I gave that to my daughter in favour of a Wii. So I was delighted to see the announcement of Dirt2 available on the Wii platform. However I was hugely disappointed when I fired up my console and started the game.

Right from the opening sequence the game displays the poor quality graphics that are present throughout, though thankfully not quite as bad as the opening sequence. The game is divided into the usual arcade mode and championship mode in which you can unlock new vehicles and ‘body kits’, the latter being little more than alternative skins for the cars. There are very few cars available even once you’ve unlocked them and no upgrade or maintenance facilities.

The racing itself is reasonable; but here again the poor quality graphics really show the game up. Surrounding textures, trees for example, are little more than green blobby things and there’s little in the way of distant textures. The vehicles don’t show any highlights and even though we’re racing on dirt there’s no clouds of dust to obscure the view. The driving experience is OK; but there’s very little available in the way of drift. Touch the brakes to try and fish tail the back end in a corner and your more likely just to come to a stop than slide round the bend. The AI cars frequently don’t put up much of a fight and will often brake hard on a straight stretch for no apparent reason. They’ll usually do this at the same point on each lap so you can predict where it’ll be easy to pass them. Altogether unsatisfying.

You can play the game using a variety of different controller combinations and I started using the Wii remote and nunchuck, which was OK. However I then switched to the Wii steering wheel. Turning the wheel is supposed to steer the car, only it doesn’t! The car is almost completely unresponsive to the steering wheel necessitating a switch back to the nunchuck for steering.

Once you’ve won a race you can sit back and watch a replay of your triumph. Or can you?

For a start pressing A on the remote to continue after a race is often misinterpreted as a double press which takes you right past the replay menu and out to the race menu again. At this point you’ve lost the ability to watch the replay. If you do get to watch a replay the results are very poor:

• The replay is often jerky so you twitch round corners rather than gliding round them
• Again there’s no improvement in the overall video quality, no highlights or clouds of dust
• Your vehicle will have a shadow; but the AI vehicles often have no shadow at all which looks weird and is just sloppy programming
• If your car leaves the track and flies though the air it carries its under body shadow with it which makes it look like it’s flying on a big sheet of something. Poor!

The final nail in the games coffin for me is that most of the replays terminate before the race is over so you never get to see yourself cross the winning line. How naff is that? I’m not sure; but it might be dependent on the particular track. On at least one replay I watched it ended half way round the last lap. !?!

I think the only saving grace for this game is the sound track which contains some pretty catchy rock tunes without too much grunge. So while you’re waiting for your race replay to end prematurely you can at least listen to a nice ditty. This earned the game its second star.

Finally I have to say that as a racing experience Dirt2 way, way better than Mario Cart Wii and for that reason I’ll continue to play it; but come on Codemasters, you can do better than this.

Up until now we’ve used a Miele S718 vacuum cleaner to quite good effect; but since we got a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel last year it was obvious that the Miele was struggling to pick up the pet hair off the carpet.

By the way these dogs are described as “moderate shedders” of hair. I’d hate to see one that sheds a lot!

So we decided to replace it with a Dyson DC23 “Animal”. The vacuum is a compact format, as opposed to an upright, and comes with a good selection of tools and accessories including the all important turbo head for removing pet hairs. The vacuum has reasonably well packaged and took only a few minutes to assemble, though I struggled at one point to figure out just how the hose fitted around the cleaner body.

Time for a try out. There’s a reasonable length of electric cable; but I did think it could have been a few yards longer to reduce the need to keep moving sockets. I had hovered the sitting room only the afternoon before and the dog hadn’t been in there so I was completely amazed by the amount of hair that the vacuum picked up. Hopefully you can see this in the image.

So that’s a result! If I had any criticisms on this cleaner it’s in the very plastic construction of some of the parts. Only time will tell if these stand the rigors of domestic life.

As well as the large turbo head you also get:

• Small turbo head for tight spaces (good for the stairs)
• Wide brush head for hard floors
• Small round brush head
• Small narrow head for maximum suction
• Small flat head for upholstery

The large turbo head and the three small heads all fit neatly onto the body of the cleaner for easy transport from one room to another.

Here are images of the vacuum Cylinder and the turbo heads:

This software seemed like a great idea – something that would automatically backup my files as and when they’d changed. Unfortunately the reality fell far, far short of the promise with software that functioned very poorly and support to match.

Functionally this software looks very good. You create backup ‘plans’ in which you decide where you want the backup files to go and then select which areas you want to backup. This you can do by selecting from a set of quick picks, e.g. My Documents, My Pictures, My Music etc; or you can select directories from the file system or you can choose files by their Tag. Grand.

Once you chosen the files to backup the Memeo goes off and makes an initial backup of everything you’ve selected. CPU usage during this process is very high, which is only to be expected really, so it’s best to start this process at night or let it run over a weekend.

After the initial copy has been made then Memeo runs in the System Tray and every time you save a file it gets backed up. You can also keep a number of copies of files, which is good for things like documents.

So things were going well for me and my Memeo. I created a few plans to backup everything I have on disk, documents in one plan, pictures in another…. Away Memeo went merrily backing everything up. However after a couple of days I noticed that when I saved a file there was no longer a little pop up to say the file had been backed up. When I opened Memeo I found that all the backup plans had stopped working several days before.

There’s an active support forum for this product so I posted my problem and got a response from someone in Memeo support:

Delete all the backup plans in the file system and start again.

Now to me that doesn’t sound like a solution, it sounds like a desperate measure. Not being offered any alternatives that’s what I did. There are instructions in the forum for ‘reactivating’ a backup; but these didn’t work as documented so I deleted all my backups and started again.

However the same thing happened again a few days later. I reported the problem again and was given the same response; start again. Even after emailing the log files to Memeo support the response was; delete all the plans and start again.

To cut a long story short here I’ve done this ’start again’ process at least 5 times now. I’ve had Memeo customer support do a remote access session on my PC to try to find the problem. After that they downgraded my Memeo version from Premium to Standard; but the same thing happened. After that their suggestion was (you’ve guessed it) delete all the plans and start again.

In addition to the problem with the plans that stopped working I’ve also had he following issues with the software:

• With all plans suspended (paused) the software was still using between 50% and 90% of the CPU (Intel Core 2 2.13GHz). This meant I couldn’t just pause the plans, I had to quit the software altogether.
• Once I got to more that 5 plans they’d (the plans) would start disappearing off the list meaning I could no longer edit their configuration or remove the plan.
• Plans could not be reactivated once a plan had been deleted. I was a case of starting the whole thing again from scratch.

In defense of the software I will say that I’m running it on Vista Ultimate SP1. Maybe it runs fine on XP; but given the activity in the support forum and the huge FAQ list of issues I’m not convinced of this.

I’ve given the software one star because

• Louder Voice won’t let me give it 0 stars
• It deserves something for being a good idea

If I ever get the software working properly I’ll update this review.

I did a lot of research on-line before I bought this product, read lots of reviews, though most of these reviewed what was in the box. Unfortunately I failed to connect with the ETEN European Users forum. Had I done so I would have thought again about buying this device.

What really swayed me towards the X800 was the VGA screen. There’s no doubt that this is much higher resolution than similar products from HTC, Palm, Toshiba & the like available at the time. The reports that the CPU was ’slightly under powered’ didn’t deter me. The lure of the screen pulled me in.

I also wanted a device with Windows Mobile 6 so that I could fully sync my Outlook calendar and use Microsoft Office and other productivity tools. The X800 also came with Spb Mobile Shell which is a great enhancement to the basic Today screen.

So what went wrong? Given that the phone was bought to support my business the reliability problems I experienced rendered it worse than useless.

• The phone would frequently lock up and need rebooting at least once a day. This would often happen when a call was incoming and so this was more than just an inconvenience.
• It would often drop incoming calls when I pressed the answer button. On one occasion someone (Unknown number) tried five times to call in quick succession, every time I pressed answer the line was dead. Another reboot required and probably lost business.
• Call quality was poor with a lot of echo on the line and a lot of static too.
• The camera quality is very poor for a 2 megapixel camera. OK, not essential for business; but it’s something I like to use.
• Often the phone would go completely crazy and start playing an Arctic Monkeys MP3 track at high volume. Most embarrassing when talking to a client and also requiring a reboot to fix.
• The voice command will switch on at random. Turning it off would only temporarily alleviate the problem as it would come back on again a short time later. Another reboot.
• Overall the device is badly underpowered and most operations are sluggish.
• Battery life is dreadful. The phone needs about 2 hours charging a day to last 24 hours. It’s a lot better with all the radios switched off.
• Support from ETEN is very, very poor and really only limited to the occasional release of new firmware. My device had the latest firmware when it was delivered.

Some time after buying the X800 I was surfing the net and came across what has to be the best kept secret ETEN users have, the European users group forum. There’s some real experts on this site providing updated firmware and fixes for the problems the X800 has. I’ve installed a fix for poor screen performance that greatly enhanced the response of the touch screen. However I’ve not tried a firmware upgrade yet as this can completely wreck the phone if it goes wrong.

The Glofiish X800 does have some good features:

• There’s no doubt that the screen is good with a nice VGA resolution.
• Wifi performance is reasonable though Internet Explorer often hangs. This is probably a problem with IE rather than the phone.

So not many redeeming features. I’m now using a fairly basic mobile phone (review to follow) which also syncs with Outlook and gives me a lot more confidence that I’m going to be able to answer all calls and won’t need rebooting. Now I’ve an alternative I might try replacing the firmware with a version from the user group. If this fixes the issues I’ll update this review, otherwise I’ll just continue to use it for wifi access.

It was some time ago that I stopped using Goalpro 6 in favour of MyLifeOrganized (MLO) for organizing my goals and getting things done. At the time I felt that Goalpro had an outdated user interface and lacked certain functions that GTD requires such as contexts. Whilst Goalpro has some nice features, like the scratch pad, it just didn’t cut it for me as a tool for day to day use.

I was interested to try out the new Goalpro 2008 version released recently to see if there was any new functionality that would tempt me back to Goalpro. I have to say that I was very disappointed with what I found. Sure there’s a new set of icons that give the tired user interface a bit of a face lift; but really that’s where it ends. The “what’s new” list give a few other items that have changed like the ‘completely revised journal’; but when I looked at the journal it looked exactly the same as the previous version. Other examples include new Calendar and Success Tree options; but it fails to say what those options are and again the Success Tree and Calendar look exactly the same as in Goalpro 6 with the exception on new icons.

Then you come to the price. A purchase isn’t cheap at $89.95; but if this software fits your requirements then it’s worth paying the price. It’s the upgrade price that gets me; a whopping $59.95 for no new functionality. That is nothing short of a rip off and is certainly very, very poor value for money. I, for one, won’t be upgrading.

I’ve only eaten in The Brick Oven at lunch times so I can’t comment on the evening menu. However if the lunch menu is anything to go by I can’t see there being any problems.

The menu is fairly standard for a bistro restaurant with a range of pizzas, in two sizes, plus hot baguettes, salads and some pasta and fish dishes. The most unusual item is the Quesilladas which is a tortilla that’s been heated, the ingredients (cheese, smoked chicken etc) placed on top and then folded to seal it all in. Finally it’s turned over to cook on the other side; delicious! The pizzas too are very good having been prepared on a nice thin base and then, like everything else, cooked in the brick oven. You can watch the chef preparing the food from the eating area and the logs burning at the back of the oven make a nice feature.

The Brick Oven restaurant is situated at the Cork end of the main square in Bantry just next to the Garda Sation and is an excellent place to eat.