Feeling small in Dubai international airport

Travelling long distance to many destinations requires a connection with a quick stop in Dubai. This vast airport serves more than 65 million passengers each year and continues to expand. With traffic of this nature the scale of the airport is frightening with the bulk of the airport in one location unlike the sprawling multi terminal approach taken by London heathrow airport. Dubai features dozens of business lounges, trains, terminals and more shopping than you can enjoy in Westfield. As a passenger flowing through this ocean it is easy to feel very small and overwhelmed by the scale as you hunt down your terminal number rushing along with the rest of the army of daily passengers including families braving this madness with small kids on tow at early o'clock. The airport is spectacular and even more so by the multitude of modern planes dotted around its perimeter. Dubai international airport epic in its size. 

The Emirates quality chauffeur service

Travelling long distances by planes means lots of waiting around and generally not the best way to spend your days. Emirates (www.emirates.com) work to ease your pain with a quality service for those lucky enough to secure business or first class tickets. A chauffeur service is available to help you begin your journey on the right foot and end it without any return to home trauma. With airlines under pressure to improve their offering this is certainly the way forward. With a Mercedes door to door and no waiting around elongating your trip. Emirates helping make things more epic. 

Running shoes dilemmas

The sport of running is a past time accessible to the masses with low entry costs and high availability of facilities - you can run straight from your front door!  With marathons looking many will have been training for months in preparation for the big run ahead of them and hopes for personal bests as important as hopes for making it round without incident. The key component in these events is the running shoe with hundreds of different styles on offer from minimalist to complete support. Anyone serious about this will have headed to a decent running shop and has their run assessed on a treadmill with a gait analysis video giving them accurate advice on which shoes are best. But what if this goes wrong?  I went through this earlier in the year and were convinced to adopt a different shoe to my normal selection based on what would suit me best. Three months later and after three separate injuries I have had enough and reverted to my favoured brand of shoe and exact model in the hope I will suffer no more injuries.  I may be wrong and it will be the same with my new shoes but I'm happy to blame my tools and cling onto the hope that a return to a classic will be the answer to all my problems!  Epic customer experience sometimes means sticking with what you know. 

Check-a-trade helping you track down reliable professional services

Many of us thrash around our homes proving our DIY mettle but there comes a time when every man must admit defeat and recognise his limitations. While the prospect of putting up a shelf sees us fire into action and strap on our tool belt the thought of fixing a leaking roof is not something we feel so compelled to tackle. In these instances our lack of knowledge also hinders out capacity to select any help in these matters as we pour over the internet trying to meaningfully compare tradesmen. This is before we even try and find out about their availability. Thankfully check-a-trade (www.checkatrade.com) is at hand with real life reviews of local people able to help us find that diamond in the rough and the right man for the job. So if your roof has flown off head to the site and see what people like you think of the various companies on offer and select with confidence. 

iTunes iMatch woes

iTunes introduced iMatch as a cloud extension to iTunes allowing you to have access to your full music library from any device streamed from the cloud. Brilliant?  I have written an earlier blog on this but felt worth revisiting as there is one major issue that people are experiencing with this. How to remove songs that are local to your device?  Many iPhones and iPods only have a limited memory of 16GB so managing your data usage is important to juggle music and apps and any other data hungry resources. This left Most of us regularly deleting and refreshing what we had on the device to manage the memory restriction. Problem is no with iMatch you can't delete tracks from a sync to your computer. The option has been removed. What this means is that you need to remove them locally from your device by selecting with a swipe from right to left and then delete. A bit more cumbersome but still an option so if you have battled with this. A solution is at hand. Epic step forward or backward? 

Zoopla for planning how to spend that lottery win

The classic long journey conversation of how to spend your lottery winnings always includes a chunk of time dedicated to your dream home and all the details down to where the pool will be located. This fantasy planning can be greatly aided by zoopla (www.zoopla.co.uk) that can help you find homes and prices for dream properties to let you know just how big a lottery win you need to make.  Go running down a picturesque lane where the houses are all hidden from view in idyllic settings. Whack the address into zoopla and find out how far out of reach that home is the. Head straight to the newsagent and purchase your trusty lottery ticket ready to wallow in misery on Saturday when no surprises you don't win. But the service of zoopla in understanding this dream is hard to knock and something that would have taken days of research in the past. The data and availability of this through the likes of zoopla is epic and we should not fail to recognise this. 

Amazon local - does anyone know what this is?

I have been an amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) customer for a number of years not put off by documentaries showing the pressures of the workforce but sold on the range of products and price. The store and corresponding services have grown beyond recognition from the original offering swallowing up businesses along the way. Since the start of this year I have seen a new product splattered all over my inbox from amazon for Amazon local. Why I have started receiving these emails I am not sure and the value proposition is not clear I assume it is more of the groupon type discounts that I steer well clear of. As a frequent amazon customer I would have expected them to value the position of the brand and not want to risk this with an existing customer base but they seem to have decided to start pushing this new service uninvited. As it is clearly still amazon I will associate it with the main company but at the moment as I have no idea why I am getting this or how it meets any consumer need I have the only impact it is having is annoying me and threatening the value I put on the main amazon brand. Epic fail.