Skype is starting to look like the poor relation of other applications like iChat that can support video conferening with multiple participants. You would have thought this is a natural feature for Skype to add - so either it is presenting major technical problems to them, or they are not interested in it because it will not necessarily generate any new VOIP revenue for them.

If iChat was available on PC and the UI wasn’t such a confusing pile of surprisingly uncool crap for an Apple app, we and all my work colleagues would be switching over to it pronto. Not to mention the app sharing features of iChat. We need a solid "whiteboard" solution that lets us show the documents we are looking at locally to other participants in the video chat, to facilitate "round table" meetings when we’re not together.

Skype guys - what is going on? Your software seems to be stagnating. Have EBay drained you of all innovation? Are you chasing the VOIP cash without your eye on the wider picture of user loyalty?

These are not particularly advanced requirements, and it seems strange that Skype is behind the market here, having been an innovator for a long time.

So here we go…

1. I love energetic/complex music and have very wide tastes. Death Metal (Strapping Young Lad, Mastodon, Cephalic Carnage, Death…), Progressive Rock (Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull) , Skacore (Voodoo Glow Skulls), Qawwali (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), eastern European folk music (Marta Sebestyen), contemporary classical (Steve Reich, Steve Martland) and even some unusual pop (Cardiacs, William D. Drake) and even Outkast. However I tend to like only a few artists from each genre that really do it for me. "Metal" does it for me the most though, and now I am the "old guy in the corner" at metal gigs as this passion won’t ever leave me, which is going to get strange when I’m 60 (I’m only 34 now!).
2. I have two wonderful daughters, both born into this world naturally, at home in our living room in birth pools, medication- and intervention-free thanks to the dedication of my wife. They are healthy, full of vitality - at times it seems like too much!
3. I am passionate about organic food, food production issues and environmental ethics and sustainability. This is a large part of the reason for me being a vegan.
4. I’m a "flunkie". I left school at the age of 16 as I did not like what conventional educational offered me, and my computer programming skills were already far beyond what the system could give me… my path was already predetermined. Anyway, that means no science degree, no further/higher education etc. Funnily enough I feel like I’ve turned out OK, and have avoided a whole load of pointless examinations and assessments and student loan debts.
5. I love helping people and organisations improve working methods and IT stuff, but sadly the job description of "someone who will help you organize your sh*t" isn’t often found, so I work for myself as a freelance contractor as I have done for 10 years now.

Somehow I don’t think the world will change for me revealing this information, but hey…

However making it a greener house will be challenging. At the time of arrival there was no insulation other than 5cm or so of rock wool between the first 4 rafters of the loft floor. When it is cold outside (say below 10C) the top floor definitely has that cold and damp feel to it, despite there being no damp - but likely ventilation issues. We also have more than our fair share of drafts.

We have however discovered that we definitely do have cavity walls, despite the odd concrete blocks used to build the place. This is great news and we have people coming to quote for insulating the cavities.

The biggest insulation challenge we have is related to the eaves of the roof. The 1st floor rooms have the eaves coming down through them, to about 1m or so off the floor. This presents us with a very difficult to insulate void, and the depth of the rafters is only 4 inches. I’m seeking spray / infill solutions to at least make some difference.

Of course we have the windows to replace too - they’re the original 1930s Crittal metal-framed windows. The frames themselves are ice cold and the condensation is terrible, even with the poor quality secondary double glazing that is here.

Having had a friend do an energy efficiency survey we know what needs to be done, we’re just trying to find a sensible way to do it all.

A couple of things do really annoy me about the UK. The first is that the government gives grants specifically to landlords to voluntarily improve insulation. i.e. we tax payers are subsidising those who exacerbate the UK housing stock shortage by holding onto multiple properties.
Landlords should be compelled by law to insulate their properties to the highest standard possible or be forced to put the house on the market for sale (or equivalent penalty such as 50% tax on rent received). The subsidy given to them might be acceptable if they were required by law to do the work, but they are not and it is giddying to think of all the hundreds of thousands of rental properties in the UK with poor insulation.

Secondly, plumbers and heat engineeers must be required by law to fit adequate pipe lagging. I am yet to see a house that is not new-build, that has any lagging on sub-floor or loft piping. The heat losses from this must be huge, and I’m sure it accounts for problems where radiators never get up to temperature on the ground floor where the under floor void is very drafty, as in our previous house.

The lagging is so cheap and easy to fit and yet is a nightmare to fit once the floors have all been put back down. There’s no excuse - the plumbers could even earn more to do it if it were required by law!

However, given that property search sites and estate agent sites have been developing for a long time now I am still disappointed by how backward and un-user friendly these services are. There are lots of big property search sites - Rightmove, Propertyfinder, Primelocation and their ilk. They are all pretty much the same. Only one deserves notable mention - Propertyfinder - because it supports RSS feeds of your saved searches. A revolution in the world of property sales!

Rightmove is apparently the market leader:

• With Safari browser on Mac you can never get it to remember you, so you always have to log in to view saved searches - its quicker to just retype the search, but very boring
• No RSS (even if there was it would probably require a login which it couldn’t remember for me)
• You can’t search for multiple property types, i.e. House OR Character Property. Why assume people only want one kind of property?

Propertyfinder seems like rightmove with a bit more intelligence:

• It supports RSS feeds
• It provides a lot more useful info related to your search area and the properties - names of local towns, market information such as average time to offer acceptance, average prices in the area, and free past sale price information
• Doesn’t allow you to restrict your search to properties added in the last N days, you always get them all (unless you use RSS)

Primelocation is the worst of the bunch - the interface is ugly and clunky, they make you log in to access certain features, and they don’t seem to have nearly as much property - at least in the areas we are looking.

All of these fail to address basic and simple usability criteria:

1. Allow me to specify multiple property types in a search
2. Record from the agents more structured common data, so that you can search on this information too - i.e. is bathroom downstairs or not (in the UK at least this is often an issue), is there parking (off-road, on-street, on-street with permit etc), when was the house put on the market (sensitive issue I imagine but important to buyers)
3. Record structured locality specific data, for example in a hilly area, the properties should have extra fields that you can search when searching those areas specifically - i.e. “Has level gardens”
4. Capture the house build year, and allow searching on it. The distinction between “New” and “Resale” homes is daft, if people want a victorian/period house they always have to skip through dozens of “new” houses that are being resold. It is an inadequate distinction.
5. Show hit counts for the properties - show which are the most popular, the number of people who have viewed the full details. They have this information, the estate agents see it!

Many in the industry would undoubtedly say that much of that information is not in the vendor’s interest to publish, but the industry needs to sort itself out and start serving the people buying houses, especially with property at such high prices now.

The bottom line is, don’t waste peoples’ time sending them to properties they will not be interested in. People who have imagination to see beyond limitations will tailor their searches to be wider than those who want very specific things.

The laughable thing is that the agents waste their own time and money sending out inappropriate details to buyers because they don’t capture the buyer’s desires properly.

Plus, with our house on the market, its hard to see in this day what value an Estage Agent really adds when you are selling. About the only thing I can think of is (a) high street presence, and (b) somebody to show the buyers around your house. With future generations possibly more at home on their computers than looking through shop windows, I think direct sale via online sites like House Web are going to increase massively. There’s such a lot of money involved, I’m not sure I’d trust any Estate Agent, even if they were family!

Anyway I ordered an HP LaserJet 3050 yesterday, and to my surprise it arrived this morning. Great service I thought. It’s a cheap and cheerful mono laser printer with fax and scanner, hence copier too, and is sheet feeding for scan/fax so it takes less desk space. It connects via USB to the computer, and is Mac compatible.

Unpacked it all, ready to connect it up to the computer and… no USB cable supplied. Find a note buried in the docs “USB cable not included”. Turns out you have to order an HP-specific USB cable to even connect this thing to a computer.

Utter, utter, madness. Destroyed any good will I had formed towards HP - to trick your users into falling at the first hurdle is brain dead.

So, if you’re buying HP check that it includes all the cables you need, and if it doesn’t order them at the same time… or maybe better still find another printer that is actually ready to use out of the box and doesn’t have an artificially lowered price by excluding vital cables!