The Life and Times of Neil

So I find myself in a hotel bar in Bahrain for reasons I won’t go into (mainly because it’s very dull!) My phone has a non-Bahrain SIM in it, (it’s also not a UK SIM) so I am doing a “local” roam (it’s a GCC SIM and Bahrain is another GCC member), so you could liken it to roaming in the EU on an EU SIM. The point I am trying to get to (you must excuse me – I have just had proper alcohol for the first time since January!) is a compareison of how cheap things are outside of the UK and the EU. I have just sent a text message to another mobile in the country my mobile is from, an it has cost me around 10 pence! (Would be less if President Brown wasn’t screwing up the economy!) A 2 minute call, also to a mobile in the country my mobile is from cost me around 20 pence; so about 10 pence a minute. I should also mention that my phone is a pay-as-you-go plan. I’m lucky to get calls that cheaply even within the UK on my UK PAYG phone!

I only mention the GCC/EU comparison because one of the few good things the EU has managed is to lower the cost of EU roaming; but this shows it’s still expensive compared to other parts of the world.

Anyway, I have just had a very tasty, properly cooked steak (of which more in a later post). All I need to do now is decide if I stay where I am, or pop across the courtyard to one of the hotel’s other venues which has some Belarusian thing. Think it threatens ballet, but the women are far from your stereotypical Russian shot-putters (yes, I know Russia isn’t Belarus, but it’s close enough!)

Posted March 24, 2010 Comments(0)

So it finally happened… I have bought my first Apple product. Given the amount of travel I am likely to be doing over the next few years (clocked up nearly 9000 miles in August alone, 10000 if you add in associated car journeys) I decided to get myself an MP3, and in the end I opted for the iPod Touch (2nd generation, 32GB: Now superceded by the 3rd Gen, 64GB, the gits!)

Now first impressions are good. It’s shiny, for starters. The interface works quite nicely with fingers, which is new to me having come from the touchscreen world of Windows Mobile smart-phones with a stylus. The UI is clean and straightforward, and integration with iTunes works quite nicely. Sound quality is good, and I’m tempted to saying that since switching from Windows Media Player to iTunes when listening to music on the computer the audio quality from iTunes is much better. The iTunes App Store has software for almost every need you might have. So no complaints so far.

However, as you start to use the device, you start to notice more little “issues” with it. One of the common grips with the iTouch is that to do a major version upgrade the OS you have to pay, whereas on the iPhone (they use the same base OS) the upgrades are free. Minor upgrades don’t cost on either device (at the moment).

But if you do decide to upgrade, be warned… When I first got my iTouch it came with version 2.x of the OS. Given some of the new bits they’ve unlocked with version 3 I decided to part with the 5.99GBP to upgrade. Thankfully, this all went smoothly and I got my new OS with a minimum of fuss all ready for my August leave from work. After I got back to <foreign place> I was informed there was an update from 3.0 to 3.1.1 so I decided to go ahead and get the upgrade done. Now the upgrade file is pretty big; nearly 300MB. Where I currently live/work is a Muslim country, and so we’re deep into Ramadan. For some reason, the internet has suddenly started working a lot slower than normal, and I often find my connection drops out – the joys of using a 3G mobile dongle for internet. Normally, these drops would be a minor irritation. Thankfully, 9am in a morning seems to be a fairly reliable time to grab some internet, so did the upgrade first thing. Download didn’t take too long, so all looked good. So plug in the iTouch and the upgrade starts.

The first thing that iTunes does is to verify the upgrade file with Apple. Wise idea on the face of it to ensure the file hasn’t got corrupted in transit. However, as it does this the attached iTouch Windows drivers are updated and the device is put into upgrade mode. You may not think this would be a problem, except my internet chose this moment to drop out for a minute or 2. Sadly, this meant that iTunes was unable to verify the upgrade file. Now you would hope that in this situation you’d either get a chance to retry, or to press on anyway and hope that the download is good. Not Apple! I got an error message which only gave me an acknowledgement button. Pressing this took me back to iTunes with the iTouch still sat in upgrade mode. What do you do now? There’s no obvious menu option to restart the upgrade, the iTouch is unresponsive to any button presses to try and turn it off, the Apple website and iTunes help give no answers on what to do. Oh f**k… I now have a very shiny, but very expensive, paperweight!

Eventually, some other web forums gave the hint of disconnecting the iTouch and holding in the power and home buttons to force the device to power off.  Turning it back on leaves you at the first screen you ever see on the iTouch: the one where it asks you to connect it to a computer with iTunes. Doing this thankfully launches a recovery mode which restores the iTouch to the default settings, thankfully installing the new OS in the process. I was then able to recover the settings from the backups that iTunes does when it Syncs the device, followed by a lengthy process of reinstalling all your apps and then copying all your music, videos, etc from the computer back onto the iTouch.

So thanks to some very poor error handling from Apple, what should have been a 10 minute process probably took closer to 2 hours. Surely it can’t be that hard to add a routine that allows the user to try and re-verify the download, or at least hold off from doing the Windows driver update and putting the iTouch into upgrade mode until the download has been verified??? If you are going to do an upgrade of the OS on one of these devices, it may be worth giving the Download Only option a try and work out how to do the actual upgrade later when your internet is being more reliable!

The other major issue I have with Apple is what seems to be a “we know best”/nanny-state attitude. When shipped, the 2nd generation iTouch came with a bluetooth chip inside, but under version 2 of the OS this chip was unavailable. One of the upgrades in version 3 is the activation of the bluetooth chip.

However, it seems Apple have decided to make this available only for pairing with bluetooth headsets. From what I hear, Apple’s opinion is that bluetooth is insecure and dangerous. To be honest, I don’t really care. I rarely have bluetooth turned on anyway. And if you think it’s that dangerous, surely a better option would be to make the user aware of this when they attempt to enable it so it’s their decision, and their own fault if they do something stupid. (I could rant here about how we’re too nice to idiots these days and how we should be encouraging Darwinism, not holding it back with laws and legal decisions supporting a lack of common sense, but I’ll save that for another day!) But what this means is that I am unable to do things that would be useful like copy my contacts and calendar from my Windows Mobile smart-phone, or pair up my bluetooth GPS receiver for the location service (this would have been really useful when I was trying to find a friend’s house in the UK and managed to get confused by the street doing a loop from the main road!)  I can only hope that Apple see the light, or crumble to user pressure (I’m not the only one harbouring these grudges); but can anyone think of a time that Apple have done either of these things?

Well, we can live in hope. After all, the iTouch itself is a great little device; it would just be nice if Apple would start putting a little usability before “Oooh, pretty!” and the prevention of the natural process of Darwinism.

Posted September 13, 2009 Comments(2)

Ok, so recently I’ve had to do a few trips back to my spiritual home of Blackpool. Part of this ritual involves the M6 between junctions 38 and 33 or 32 (depends on exactly where am visiting).

Generally speaking, I don’t like driving, but the M6 is, generally speaking, fairly pleasant. It’s a 3-lane stretch of motorway with good long stretches between junctions, generally free flowing and has some lovely scenery. It does experience hideous weather sometimes (windscreen wipers on “Apocalyptic Doom” speed, headlights on, rear fog lights on, 40mph and can still see barely 10m in front of you!) but I can’t really grumble about people on that occasions. In fact, people were being sensible for a change.

Anyway, I digress… As I said above, this stretch of M6 is 3-lanes in each direction. Common sense, and general teaching tells us that we stay in the left-hand lane, moving across lanes in order to overtake slower moving vehicles. This is certainly how I was taught and how I drive, and it works nicely.

However, there is a minority of drivers out there who think differently… These are the centre lane hogs. Imagine the motorway is quiet: the dead of night and there’s no-one else ahead of you for miles. You’re holding a nice 70mph on the left-hand lane. Suddenly, you notice a car slowly catching you from behind… Slowly. They always seem to do about 75mph, these centre lane hogs. Eventually, they pass you. Ahead of you and behind you, there’s no-one else on the road. As you’re thinking about other road users as well as yourself you expect them to pull over into the left-hand lane ahead of you. But no… They stay in the middle lane.

Now; this may not sound too bad. And in that situation it’s perhaps not. The main problem is when they stick to this idea on slightly busier roads. So let’s turn out attention to the more usual scenario. Once again, you’re in the left-hand lane holding a nice steady 70mph, but there’s a lorry up ahead which you are going to need to overtake. You check your mirrors, and there is one car behind you. He’s in the centre lane, of course. You can see he is gaining on you, doing 75mph as they always do. You also notice the right-hand lane is empty, and there is no other traffic behind either of you. Realising this means there is enough road for all 3 of you you signal your intention to move to the right, and then do so. You’re expecting the driver behind you to move over into the right-hand lane to overtake you.

WRONG!

Instead, the driver maintains his 75mph until he is almost up your exhaust pipe. He then sits there, following you much closer than the 2 seconds we were all taught as drivers. You maintain your 70mph, now overtaking the lorry. You get a safe distance in front of the lorry and decide it’s now safe to move back over to the left-hand lane; so you signal. Immediately you can tell the vehicle behind is starting to speed up; forcing you to move over quicker than you may have planned (Yes… How many drivers think the person in front is really going to move over as soon as their rear bumper has passed the front bumper of whatever they’re overtaking, and at an 89degree angle??? I will move over when *I* think it is safe and at an angle *I* think is safe… You can wait!) And now, the centre lane hog who has had to slow down to follow you speeds off into the distance, still in the centre lane.

Look, if you really want to travel at 75mph, don’t let me stop you… This is what the good Yeadon (ok, maybe not him personally, but he’s the only road design-related person I can think of, and lives/lived near Blackpool) gave us the 3rd lane for. Why don’t you use it?

Of course, the 2nd place the centre lane hog becomes a hazard (possibly more so than above) is that they are so eager to obtain their deity-given right to be in that lane when they join the motorway that many of them don’t even consider looking to see what is already there. I’m thinking about *YOU* who nearly cut me up on the M6 on my last journey! And of course, when they want to leave the motorway, who is it who causes all the phantom traffic jams… The centre lane hog who won’t give up that lane until the junction off-slip is about to stop cutting across whatever is in the left-hand lane to get off the motorway, causing much slamming on of brakes.

If any of you out there are centre lane hogs, please feel free to try and justify your actions. I hear there is a school of thought that says that the centre lane is the safest place to be as you have 2 lanes to dive into in an emergency. However, I’d counter this by pointing out you (generally speaking – it is a legal requirement for a motorway, as I understand it) have a hard shoulder next to the left-hand lane to use. In fact, if you suffered a blow-out or engine cut-out, the left-hand lane is probably the best place to be as you can easily get onto the hard shoulder without having to cut across other traffic. And if you’re looking well ahead of you and thinking further ahead than your front bumper, you should be able to spot potential dangers (I admit not all are pre-emptable) and take appropriate precautions.

Anyway, spleen vented! I have more trips to Blackpool to come, so I shall be mounting the roof cannon once it arrives, ready to punish the centre lane hogs!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Posted October 18, 2008 Comments(0)

Well, CAMRA wasn’t too bad tonight. Fairly productive, albeit with the usual 3 discussions happening at once, and dragged on a bit.

What is it that makes meetings so boring? I suppose it all comes down to the average attention span. I recall being told my a lecturer at university that the average attention span is around 22 minutes. Have you ever known a meeting last less than 22 minutes? They are rare; and I’ve been to a lot of meetings! But at the same time, if you keep breaking up the meeting for a 5-minute break every 20-25 minutes, you disrupt the flow; especially if a lengthy discussion is required.

Is there an alternative or some method of making meetings seem more, dare I say it, fun? I’m sure whoever works it out will become a very rich b’stard!

Anyway, it is getting late, I have the joyous drive up the A1(M) to do in the morning to work. It’s foggy and cold, so it’ll probably bring out the idiots in the morning; but I’ll save that rant for another night!

Posted February 19, 2008 Comments(0)