Wednesday 30th July 2008
So I finally bought myself and iPhone. It's lovely. I can use it as a sprit level, which personally I think is a vital function for a phone to provide.
It's quite amusing in a way, in that I find it very apparent that it's been made by a computer company, and not a phone company. It is a truly fantastic little device, loaded with crap. As well as the normal GSM module, it's also got the obligatory camera, an accelerometer to detect movement, a GPS module so it knows where it is, a light sensor so it can adjust the screen's brightness, and a "proximity sensor" so it knows when it's next to your head when on a phone call, so it turns off the screen to save battery and stop accidental cheek button presses. Interestingly this is all powered by a 620 MHz ARM CPU, which has been underclocked to 412 MHz. I wonder why they did that. Maybe to keep battery life longer and/or reduce heat output.
Anyway yeah, its clearly been made by a computer company, not a phone company. All the software works brilliantly. I have had software crashes, but it is still all very young, and as someone who writes software I feel I empathise slightly with it. (MS Windows after 20 years though really is a lost cause). All the integration though is lovely. Web apps behave exactly as they should, all the applications open each other where they should etc. The web browser is brilliant. Double tapping anywhere zooms that particular thing to fit the width of the screen. This is lovely for pages where there's adverts along the side with an article down the middle. Double tap the article and it zooms into the middle so the adverts are out of site and the text is now a readable size. It also then adds a teeny bit of resistance to horizontal scrolling. This means when you scroll down the article, the phone doesn't have a tendency to slide sideways a bit, as inevitably there's no way your finger will ever scroll entirely straight down without going to the side a bit. These are the sort of little brilliant things that Apple do to make it behave like a human would want it to work.
However then there's the bad things which I feel Nokia or Siemens just wouldn't have done... I don't understand why you can't clear your list of missed calls. You can, but only if you also delete your entire call history. That seems odd, especially as they're presented as two separate lists. If the phone is "asleep", and you miss a call, there's no indication on the screen or phone that suggests I've missed a call. This means every time I walk back to the phone from being away I feel I should just press the button to make the screen come on to see if I've missed something. This has two unfortunate effects of wasting battery, and making me look like I just like making it come on all the time. A final thing I wish was improved but wasn't a show stopper was the Bluetooth. Bluetooth has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. I've always found it quite exciting, when really it quite frankly has limited use. Anyway the phone can't do any OBEX stuff, so you can't send or receive files to other phones or a computer. Bit annoying, but I imagine knowing Apple they were just trying to keep you away from having any sense of a file system. Perhaps they could have engineered a pseudo file system of sorts, but I think they prefer everything being accessed only through the phone's interface. That is pictures are in the 'Photos' section, and songs and videos are in the 'iPod' section.
With all that said, it doesn't feel like the phone ability was an afterthought to a little computer that Apple made. It definitely feels like a phone, just made by a computer company.
One final gripe I have with it, is that the 'Contacts' screen is slow. When you select it, the list appears instantly, but you can't scroll or touch anything for a few seconds. This is a problem that loads of people seem to have noticed, and I have no doubt it will be fixed in a future firmware update. I have also read that there's evidence of a new firmware already having been developed and currently being tested.
Anyway yes, it's lovely. I'm pleased with the purchase.
Monday 21st July 2008
Oh! The other thing I was going to say about was my birthday. I forgot to mention that before, which is exactly the problem. I keep forgetting about it. I don't like making a fuss about birthdays as a general rule, especially when it's my own birthday. My mum's been asking me what I want as a present, and as ever I don't really want anything. I'm at an age now where two unfortunate things have taken affect. One being presents from parents are generally small things for a small price. Also now working full time, I'm at a place where I can afford to buy myself small things for small prices if I want them. I don't really know what I'm supposed to ask for. To make things worse, I don't really like surprises... So if I don't ask for something, I'll end up with something unexpected and I'm always very bad at doing the, "Oh my God it's amazing thank you so much!" thing. Even if I genuinely like it and am greatful, I'm really bad at expressing it.
I don't really mind getting older, like some people seem to. At least for now. I'm sure I won't be saying that once I'm closer to 30 than 20. For now though I quite like things in life. Despite saying that, I've heard that the late 20s are more enjoyable than early 20s or of course the teenage years. Quite looking forward to this decade of my life. However, once I hit 30, I probably won't be so optimistic for the future.
Sunday 20th July 2008
Alright alright, I'll admit... I want an iPhone. Imran came round last night, and as ever a discussion about the iPhone ensued, and specifically this time about the new one. I had heard it was cheaper now, but it wasn't until last night that I realised how much. It's actually affordable now! They do a £35/month tariff, with a £99 one off fee for buying the piece of magic. My phone contract is up soon, and I had planned on renewing with Vodafone just as a matter of course, but I have been having some hassle with them over charging me for stuff lately... and oh and I want the iPhone which isn't available on Vodafone.
I went yesterday to see Wall-E, with Anthony, Daniel, James and Imran. It wasn't really as good as I had hoped. I really wanted to like it, after seeing some funny little clips on YouTube of this adorable little robot playing about with things. But eh... I dunno, I didn't really find it that engaging. Bit of a shame. In other news from yesterday, we finally got our landlady to get around to sorting out stuff that was wrong with the house. Most exciting of all, we have a fence panel! This means we get a bit of privacy in our kitchen and living room at last.
Earlier today, James and I embarked on a trip out to Southampton. Due to other comittments, we didn't leave until a bit before 3pm, so we didn't really get much time to wander round the shops. Then to finish there was a really boring car drive home, involving lots of traffic and hops on and off the motorway.
Oh, also yesterday I performed surgery on an old guitar of mine. I put back the original pickups which I had replaced a couple of years back. The reason for this was that the pickups should sell by themselves, but the guitar isn't really worth that much at all. If anyone wants an electric guitar, they can have it for free. I really just want to get rid of it as we don't have much space, and it's never going to get used.
I've got so rubbish at this blogging lark lately. I keep thinking of brilliant things to write about, and then when I actually come to sit down and write it, it all goes. Oh well...
Saturday 5th July 2008
So, the blog is back! I'm not 100% sure this works from the internet yet, but in my room, everything's currently working fine!
So for those who've not heard... Daniel, James and I have moved house. We're now located in Chessington. It's taken a few weeks, but we've now got most stuff sorted out. We've got furniture and stuff sorted for our rooms now, but we still need to get living room stuff. We're waiting for our deposit back from our old place. I'll probably do a better update over the weekend, but just thought I should tell everyone I'm back!
Saturday 28th June 2008
So, I've now spent every night in the new house for a week. I've become acquainted with Chessington, and it's not all that bad! The local supermarket (in walking distance) in a Sainsburys. I foresee my Nectar points rocketing up. Oddly Chessington seems to be home to a lot of elderly people, and they all seem to know each other. Everyone in Sainsburys seemed to be having a chat about their lives. Very odd. There's a small selection of shops there, but a pleasant selection none the less. A post office that's not yet shut, some charity shops, and a place selling baguettes. Tonight I've also treated myself to a burger and chips from the local kebab place (also in walking distance). It was good.
Also the drive to work is quite pleasant from here. We're further from the A3 now, but I now join it further down, so it's still only about a 35 minute drive, but it's a bit less monotonous as the first 10 minutes aren't on the A3 anymore.
Anyway, got a car full of stuff outside that I need to bring in now!
Monday 16th June 2008
Today's been a good day, I feel. Today was to be the day that we got the keys to our new house. I got up a little later than planned, but we were at the letting agents by about 10, and we had a nice little chat, signed some things, and then we were given the keys. Hurrah! We were told to go in and find everything that's a problem and make a note of it. Apparently the girls who lived there before were pretty awful tenants, and left the place in a bit of a mess, and our letting agents didn't want us to be held accountable for any of the mess. So we did that, wrote a little list, and then came back to our flat to send the email.
Later in the day was a trip to Ikea. It was a little odd shopping for a bed, I've never had to do that before. I love how Ikea has everything in bits. You can't buy a bed, you have to buy the frame, midbeam, and slats separately, and then of course the mattress. When we got to the bit where you pick up the bed (both James and I were getting a bed), it turns out that even the bed frame comes in three separate boxes! Anyway, we then debated whether or not we'd be able to fit a double mattress into my car (an old Ford Focus). We decided it wasn't worth chancing, and that we'd put the bed frames in the car and see how much space is left. On the way out back to the car, thinking again about these mattresses, we jokingly said about how many people must have bought too much to fit in their car, and wondered what you do if that happens. Karma then struck. 30 minutes later, we'd got a bit over half of all these boxes in the car, but clearly no more was getting in and we were left standing there wondering what to do. I ended up phoning my Dad who seemed a bit surprised, but did seem fairly happy to come and rescue us which was good. We decided to go and have something to eat from Ikea while waiting. I was quite impressed with the food. Quite cheap, and surprisingly enjoyable. We then went back downstairs to wait for my parents. After a minute or two I get a message from my mum saying, "just leaving". Sigh. So we were then there absolutely ages, with nothing at all to do. Pleasingly my Dad eventually turned up, and got the remaining bits in fairly effortlessly. His car's not that much bigger than mine, but clearly enough to make a difference. So we then drove back to the new house, and I was a bit worried of what my parents would think. Pleasingly they both seemed very positive about it, my mum in particular. This was good. There's a few things which need sorting out, but on the whole it is very nice. I'm pleased it's all worked out alright, now we've just got to get furniture and bills and stuff sorted out.
Anyway, I need to go to bed now, as I've had today off work, got to get back into it tomorrow. Woo.
Saturday 14th June 2008
So I got my chat with Bill off the Podcast thinger. I don't really like my voice that much. Anyway, click here! to have a listen at a piece of radio history.
I'd like to phone Bill up again, he was nice. Can anyone explain that knife to the floor, man to the door thing? I didn't really get it.
Friday 13th June 2008
I've just been on the radio! It was a bit terrifying. I don't really have much confidence with those sorts of things. After talking about wanting to do it for ages, I phoned up Bill Buckley on LBC (a talk radio station) for a brief chat about Friday 13th. I had to keep redialing loads of times as I kept get an engaged tone which I hadn't expected. I assumed they'd have a ton of free lines. I also thought it wouldn't be that busy, as it's 2am. Anyway it did eventually start ringing and I got a bit more scared. It then rang, and rang, and rang for ages. I very nearly hung up but eventually Bill's producer Rebecca answered. She was lovely. I've heard her talk a few times on the radio, but she generally stays quite quiet. Anyway, I gave my name and location and she said she'd ring me back. Hooray! It was happening. It then felt like aaaages. Again assuming that it wouldn't be that busy I was expecting the call back in about 30 seconds. I don't know how long it had been, I wasn't really looking at the clock. I was however, looking at my phone a lot. Eventually she rang back, confirmed that I still wanted to talk to Bill, and then said I'd be on next! I could then hear the normal radio show on the phone, so promptly turned off my radio.
I wasn't talking to him for long, and I don't think I did it particularly well. I would like to have another go in the future though, as I'd quite like to be able to do it a bit more confidently. He's probably the least intimidating presenter on LBC, so I'd be pretty much useless with anyone else. I wouldn't mind a chat with Clive Bull at some point though. He seems nice. I think my account for the LBC podcasts is still active, in which case I'd quite like to download the show, so I can keep that piece of radio history forever. Anyway, the reason I'm up this late is to do some work, so I should get back on with that!
Tuesday 3rd June 2008
Sunday was quite good fun... I found myself up at the Silverstone race track, where Matt was going to be driving a Lotus Exige for 9 laps. It was quite exciting, I was a bit surprised at quite how proper everything looked, but then I remembered it's where the UK stop of the F1 racing thing is. What got me a little bit excited after that was when Hayley pointed out to me that we were standing around at the same spot where Girls Aloud were, and specifically where Sarah managed to crash a Ferrari. I still cringe everytime I see that. Anyway, there was a bit of a whimsical purchase made. It was meant to be me driving some sort of Lotus round the track for two laps, but it turned out to only be a passenger ride. However, it was an incredibly enjoyable passenger ride. There's something quite fun about going sideways at 70mph around a corner! Before we set off, the driver guy was telling me about the car, where I learnt that the car had only done 5,600 miles so was barely broken in, and the two back tyres are pretty much brand new meaning they're barely broken in. He also added that they've tweaked it a bit to get more power out of it, and modified the front splitter to make it have less grip... Just to set the mood. An over powered, not broken in car with slippery back tires and not much grip at the front either. It was sooo much fun! Here's a picture of me with the panic building in me:
I was actually getting a bit scared while sat there, but as soon as we set off I soon started smiling. :) We were sort of skidding sideways for 10 seconds around a corner only to exit the corner facing dead straight already going at like 80mph and ready to accelerate up from there. Good times.
Once this little bit of messing about was over, I headed over to where Matt was doing his driving thing. At the time of my arrival he was on a little break in the middle of two sessions of driving. He seemed to be enjoying himself anyway. On the way home we then stopped off at some very random American Diner. It was quite exciting. They shut pretty much as soon as we got in, so we then had the place to ourselves which was nice.
I'm now watching Loose Women for the first time ever, it's actually quite enjoyable. I'd never really given it much of a chance before. I am getting fed up with the Malteser adverts at every break though.
I'm not sure when I got grown up, but I've found myself using the calendar on my phone to actually organise my time. I'm not that busy really, but I just find it good to keep track of things. I also recently bought some strange looking picture to put up in our new house... Most unexpectedly of all though, I've found I have some affection for plants. We had a kind donation from Matt, of a chilli plant. James and I now seem to be giving it lots of love and attention. He's called Maynard, and he gets very happy in the day time, but then looks a bit sad at night time. Sunshine makes him happy. Oh the life of a plant. We haven't got any chillies yet, but we're hopeful. When we move I'd quite like to start growing several vegetables. Plants are fun!
Saturday 24th May 2008
Song: Marie Digby - Fool
I feel I never really have anything to say on here anymore. I sort of feel like the age of the personal home page is over. It's all about MyFace these days. Everyone needs a MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut, etc page in order to be cool.
I've also been thinking (slightly contrary to what I was just saying) about redoing this site. I was looking last night at Facebook's developers APIs, as I thought I was able to pull my photos off of my profile and have them displayed on an external site. My plan was to have a nice way of putting photos on this site (without having to make a whole gallery app). Also more importantly keeping them on Facebook, as like I was just saying, that's where most people are going to see them.
In other news, I finally installed Ubuntu after everyone was raving so much about it. My experience with it so far has been that it's absolutely rubbish. Firefox crashes every 30 seconds, this can be made even more frequent if you load any page with Flash on (which is most pages these days). I also can't set my homepage in Firefox, it just puts it back. Compiz still crashes every now and again, and the other day my screen saver just stopped working. Sometimes my digital camera doesn't auto mount... But sometimes it does. Yesterday James tried installing Kubuntu as he wanted to play with KDE, except that X didn't load properly and his screens just had some random coloured lines on it. So falling back to the console, I did some poking about and the xorg.conf file was lacking in everything except the device names, and I ended up having to manually install the proprietary nvidia drivers (which some people don't wish to use on principle). Once these were installed I then had to run nvidia-xconfig or something and then that wrote a valid xorg.conf. If 2008 is year of Linux the desktop, then my grandma better get to learning how to administer Linux from a console.
This new frustration with my computer has been making me seriously consider getting a Mac for my main computer. I know people are bored of me rattling on about how great it is, but I really think that of the Unixes, it's got by far the loveliest and most stable interface. It's not without flaw by any means, but the flaws are generally silly little UI inconsistencies as opposed to stuff randomly not mounting and Flash killing my browser one in every nine attempts (assuming it stays open long enough for me to get to YouTube that is).
What else have I done lately? Oh I spoke to Vodafone to modify my phone contract a bit. They got an extra £5/month out of me, but I've over doubled my free talky minutes, and I now have "unlimited" GPRS data, which I'm quite pleased with. Sadly however Vodafone seem to have the least lenient and most clearly defined limit on their "unlimited" service. It's basically just 500mb per month. I don't like all this "fair use" crap, I wish they would just be upfront with it. I am entitled to 500mb of data per month, and if I go over that I should expect to be charged for it. It's quite simple.
Brooklands FM (not actually on FM at the moment) is alive and seems to be going quite well. I popped over there earlier to see how things were going, and to catch some live music. It was quite interesting actually. There was one 19 y/old guy who was very good on a technical level. He'd clearly been practicing his scales for many years. He wasn't however really fitting in with the general style of music being played. What did capture my attention a bit more was an older gentleman with a glorious sounding guitar who was doing some sort of Jazz thing. Later there was a flautist women from Canada. She performed a truly lovely cover of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" which did sound lovely on her flute. We were then treated to an unexpected duet with this jazz man and the flute lady. They had apparently only met an hour earlier, but when they started playing together you'd be forgiven for thinking they'd known each other for years. It was very well done and sounded ver professional. I was impressed.
As ever, over the last few days I've been thinking of lots of things to write about and it's all escaped me now I'm actually here and writing it. Oh well. I'm sure you're all on MySpace anyway.