Time For A Change

After spending what seemed like most of my life on planes I had managed to accumulate three hundred thousand EuroBonus points. Unfortunately due to an incredibly annoying and difficult to use flight booking application (you can't just ask for all available flights you could buy with your points, you have to spend ages putting in your exact required itinerary only to be told there aren't any seats) I've never been able to spend them. Even worse, SAS points expire after five years so I lost 100,000 of them at the beginning of last year. I was pretty much resigned to never being able to do anything useful with them, when SAS introduced a EuroBonus shop which allows you to spend your points on actual things. So with another 100,000 due to expire at the end of the month points burning a hole in my pocket I finally had something to do with them and an incentive to actually spend them because soon they would be gone.

Now, the things you can buy in the EuroBonus shop aren't too dissimilar to the things you can buy in an in flight magazine. Which is to say, a load of overpriced designer bollocks. And the flights, assuming it was actually possible to book one are much better value for points than the stuff in the shop. But obviously, even overpriced designer bollocks is better than just letting the points expire unspent, so I applied myself to the store with vigour, determined to find something, anything, that was worth spending my hard earned points on.

After two days I was beginning to lose heart. Yes, I could buy an Eva Solo Smiley Nut Bowl, but really, I didn't think it was something I was prepared to give house space to. I had originally intended to get a watch but there wasn't anything that seemed remotely comparable to my previous one. And then in desperation I clicked onto the sports/climbing section and saw a watch that for some strange reason wasn't listed with all the others in the, er, watch section. It was the iROX iClimber and I knew it was the watch I was looking for.

It arrived a few days later and I'm very pleased with it. I admit it doesn't quite have the looks of the Tissot and yes, it doesn't have a fancy touchscreen either. But let's face it, although the touchscreen is quite effective it's hardly an essential in a watch. In terms of sheer functionality though, it does everything the Tissot does and more. Yes it's got a compass, yes it's got a thermometer, an altimeter and a barometer. But, it's so much more than that.

The barometer has a full on weather station including min/max temperatures and most excitingly a weather forecast! It's fairly accurate too, although it does seem to be a little confused by high pressure in the winter, it keeps predicting sun when that's hardly what we've been having lately. It's been childishly exciting to set the watch to the forecast screen last thing at night then check it first thing in the morning before opening the curtains.

The altimeter has a fancy "vertic log" which charts your progress up and down in meters, hence the iClimber bit I suspect. But realistically I doubt I'll be using that much as I'm not a climber. Still, you never know. Other cool things include user replaceable batteries (take that Tissot!), it even comes with a spare battery supplied, and two countdown timers which can be set to interleave. You can't set them for seconds though unfortunately so no use for the Tabata protocol.

Anyway, so far I've been delighted with it. Hurrah for EuroBonus!

Post Shortage

Yes, I've been quiet. Not much going on really, but fear not faithful readers I've got plenty more posts in me yet. At least some of which should be appearing fairly shortly...