Skype Screen sharing – doesn’t work

Hmm… Interesting little problem here.

My Mum’s running Skype 5.1.0.104 on Windows XP. She told me that she couldn’t share her screen in a call, because it was greyed out.

I logged in using LogMeIn, and set up a Skype call with myself on my Win7 x64 laptop. I went to View->Share your screen, and saw that it wasn’t greyed out. However – clicking it yielded… nothing. No shared screen. No error.

Annoying. Of course, Googling for this problem doesn’t really find anything useful.

 

BA Amex card – any good? The answer is No

Well, not if you’re only a Blue Executive Club member, in any case.

I have 125,000 BA miles. A fistful of miles, thanks to my BA Amex card – enough to fly to Australia and back. If I can find a seat.

The thing is, you can only spend BA Miles on a limited number of seats if you’re a Blue Member. And guess how quickly those go?

Well, let’s put it like this:
- I tried to book a set of companion tickets for me and my wife to go London->Sydney in mid-Feb. I tried booking 3 months before. How many flights were there? None. For mid-Feb. None for any of Feb! In fact… none for January, February or March at all!

So – I’ve now just tried to book a seat for 2012, over the Christmas Period. Forget the companion voucher – it only counts for flights from the UK (we’ll be in Australia). And despite it only being possible to book a year in advance (so a 14th Jan 2012 return has only just become bookable), there are already NO flights at all, for December or January! The only route I can find is one via Sinagpore and Frankfurt, for a date 5 days before my preferred time.

So… I have 125,000 completely useless BA miles, and two even more useless Companion tickets. Hmmm… What to do with them… Maybe I’ll stock up on carriage clocks from their online store.

 

Addendum: To add insult to injury, BA Amex charge a fee of £150 a year to take advantage of the vouchers. So – by the time you’ve subtracted this, the airport taxes, the cost of a hotel if the only routes available require a stopover, plus travel at an inconvenient time, and in not-that-great-an-airline… don’t you wish you’d just taken out the Amex cashback card instead, pocketed the cash, and chosen what you wanted to do with it? I wish I had!

Print a Report of All Trips from Tripit

You can’t.

At least, I couldn’t find a way to print all my trips from Tripit. It would have been handy – I’ve just been asked to list all the countries I’ve visited in the last 10 years for a visa. Although I’ve only used Tripit for two, it’s a start… So being able to print or export a grid of all my trips, countries, and dates, would have been fantastic.

As it was, I was only able to go to the Itinerary list, where I could view 20 trips per page, and then print each set of 20 to PDF, and merge them together. It wasn’t pretty, but it does show each date and country, and that’s a decent start.

And, of course, if you don’t use TripIt, but need to do some kind of analysis of your trips like this, then now would be a perfect time to join