In my brief stop over in London on Tuesday, I bought a bottle of water at Heathrow. It was 1.80 GBP. (Technically it was buy one get one free, but I only wanted one!)
I’m aware of the fact that that the Pound is stronger than the USD - after all, I had been in London back in 2003. And frankly, the USD hasn’t been feeling so well as of late.

Still, I was pretty surprised when I checked my credit card statement today and saw that 1.80 GBP became $3.60 USD. Of course, Amex charged a 2% markup (that’s fine, I get 1.5% back) - but still, that’s practically double!

A quick check to Moneycentral reveals this:

Yowsers. I wish I had kept more Pounds when I last went there - that would’ve been a 25% appreciation.

When the student from London in ORD said “I’m visiting because it’s so cheap here for us…” - she wasn’t kidding. The last few times in NY and at the Union Square Macy’s in SF, I’ve heard a lot of British accents. No wonder - I’d come here too if I were denominated in Pounds.

Dear USD: Please get well soon. Your friend, -Dennis

Actually I’ve been back for a few hours - it took about 25 hours to go to Rome, and “only” about 24 hours to come back.

Hopefully I’ll find some time eventually to post about what it’s like to change your flights while sitting on a leaking aircraft in Dallas, why it takes over an hour to drive from LGW-LHR, and how I ended up eating 2 breakfasts, 3 dinners, and 2 lunches in one day…

But first… gotta catch up on emails!

Last night I had the fortune of being able to attend Making a List: Fourth Annual What’s Hot and What’s Not in Personal Technology. This event was hosted by the Churchill Club - Walt Mossberg, Chad Hurley, Kara Swisher, and Greg Harper were the presenters.

Here’s a photo I took of Walt and Chad on stage:

The event started with Walt making fun of the Zune - most well deserved. Walt got it though - Microsoft’s in it for the long run.

That said, Walt also noted that this wasn’t a great year for gadgets - I tend to agree. I didn’t really see anything that was “OMG” worthy.

Check their podcast site later to see if this shows up there. Otherwise, here are some of the gadgets I remembered:

1. Chad showed the $150 laptop from the MIT Media Lab. Personally, I’m not convinced that having governments contribute $150 per child for 3rd world nations is a good investment - seems to me that clean water and malaria prevention/treatment would be a better bang for the buck - but then again, I’m not an expert in public health/education policy.
2. Chad also showed the Chumby. I’d have to agree with Kara that it’s a little disturbing.
3. Kara showed some neat LED candles as part of the romance theme that she had.
4. Kara showed the Sky Scout.
5. Greg showed way too many things to remember. One was a watch that showed videos. One was a belt buckle that showed videos (which Walt called a “celibacy” device). One was a $1200 HD camcorder that’s a joint venture from Panasonic and Sony.
6. It was pretty unanimous that if you had to buy a gift for someone that was under $100, the new iPod Shuffle was the way to go.
   

All in all, a good time was had - it was pretty light and fun. The gadgets were kind of eh.

Here’s to 2007 being a great year for gadgets!

So on Friday, I received a new hard drive I bought from Buy.com. I bought this hard drive to install Vista Ultimate onto.

The box was pretty beat up, and it was rattling. This is what it looked like inside:

I’m pretty sure that that’s not the right way to ship a hard drive.

Now, it’s conceivable that the “boots” didn’t fit and they simply slid off - but I have a feeling that they were never on as the boots were impossibly hard to get onto the device.

I wonder what the new MTBF is.