andrewbuonocore.com

According to the BBC, supermodel Gisele Bündchen is refusing to accept payment for her work in US Dollars because she has concerns about the stability of the currency.

Instead, she has asked for Procter & Gamble to pay her in Euros.

I think it’s the most significant story of the year.

Perhaps a model asking for payment in Euros instead of Dollars is not significant on the face of it, but what if it were not a model, but a major oil producer asking for payment in Euros instead of Dollars?

If the OPEC members railed against the Dollar and decided that the price of Crude oil would be denominated in Euros, then the USA really would be struck with higher prices at the pumps. Not only would they have to stomach the upward creep in the price of oil, they would have to cover currency fluctuation too.

If the price of oil and the Dollar both went in the wrong direction, there is no ceiling on the liability of Americans in terms of what they will have to pay to fuel their thirsty vehicles.

I am a regular traveller and usually book flights from one of three services.

Keeping track of my travel plans usually means copying and pasting parts of confirmation emails from travel sites and airlines into events on Google Calendar. It works fine but it is a touch cumbersome.

I read about tripit.com on techcrunch and so far, it looks like the perfect site for me. The idea behind it is simple, but its execution of the idea is just as good.

When you book a flight, hotel, car hire etc online, you just forward your email from that company to the tripit.com address (you have to register your email address in your tripit account first) and an itinerary is automatically created for you.

The smart thing is that travel items are grouped intelligently so that the flight you hotel you booked in Zurich between two flights in and out of the same city are threated as part of the same trip, so moving items around between itineraries is minimal.

Also, you can mix your travel suppliers so you can get the flights you booked on ba.com grouped with the hotel you booked from Expedia.

The list of sites and travel companies supported is already pretty large. Here is the list of sites supported by tripit.

My only gripe so far is that each day of your trip is displayed on the itinerary, even if you have nothing booked against those days. I don’t need that, to be honest.

Other than that, my itineraries have gone thorugh perfectly. It seems the ideal service for me and one I hope will go from strength to strength.

Tripit.com

Well, I am done with MediaCoder. Even for free software, it is a waste of money.

I consider myself a well advanced Computer user across all flavours. When it comes to Media, I am a very proficient Adobe Premiere user, as well as After Effects but MediaCoder is the most frustrating, least user-friendly piece of software I ever (try to) use.

I have installed it three times only to use it once on each occasion and get rid of it immediately once I saw the results.

I used it tonight to split a Windows Media video file into smaller chunks for transferring to a client. It did the chunking alright, into 6 files that would not play.

I give up with it. if anyone can use this software and get anything other than a full recycle bin, I would love to know. At the moment I just think Mediacoder is a great advert for paying for your software.