Day2Day

If you have my email address down as being anything @hawkida.com, please DELETE IT. I do not fully monitor the address and a lot of stuff sent to it gets automatically forwarded to the spam bucket and possibly deleted unseen. This is NOT a valid way to contact me.

My phone contract is up soon so I'm looking around for an upgrade.

And I'm failing to find one.

What I want out of a phone is this:

- Qwerty keyboard (a REAL keyboard, not an on-screen one)
- Touch screen
- Not running Windows
- Faster than GPRS connection
- Full internet connection, not a walled garden, and at a reasonable inclusive price rather than charged by the downloaded meg
- Can do ebooks on a screen big enough to accommodate a reasonable amount of text

Nice to have:

- Running PalmOS
- Expandable with new programmes and a reasonable number of progs to choose from
- Wifi

I think what I want is the Treo 750p, except I need a GSM phone and that was only ever developed for CDMA and the US market. I "upgraded" to a phone running Windows and didn't get on with it. I found it counter intuitive finding some of the menu options and, worse, it would regularly crash without any indication that it had done so. To get it running again, I'd have to reboot it, sometimes by removing the battery, at which point I'd find over 24 hours of missed calls and texts.

I quite like the new Palm 500v but it's running Windows, it's only available on Vodafone who don't have an all-in web package, and the screen isn't a touch screen.

I like the iPhone more than I expected to, but it fails on having no keyboard or ebook software and also on costing a bloody fortune.

The Nokia N95 looks lovely, is available as an upgrade from T-Mobile who I'm already with and getting a reasonable contract deal from, but there is NO WAY I'm going back from a Qwerty keyboard to tapping out urls and emails on a number pad.

So is there anything that fulfills my wants? My Treo 650 is lovely, but it's showing its age. I'd like more internal memory, a faster connection to the net, and maybe a better quality camera. Oh, and I'd like it to download photo messages - supposedly it's capable but in practise it repeatedly tells me "download did not complete" and a week later I get a T-mobile weblink to look at the message on a computer.

Can you make it to Broadcasting House by 7.15pm tonight? Do you want to see The Museum of Curiosity* being recorded? If so text me - I unexpectedly have a spare ticket

* A brand new panel show hosted by legendary producer John Lloyd ad stand up comedian and Buzzcocks regular, Bill Bailey

Would passengers note there is a bag on the platform, I can't quite see the coach it is near - it is halfway down the train, maybe coach D or C. If it is yours please put it on board as the last thing you want to do is leave it here. Again, please have a check that the luggage on the platform is not yours.

[pause]

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your guard speaking again. Apparantly it is the train driver's bag, he has just gone to the toilet.

Listening to Radio 4 is probably bad for my blood pressure.

Presenters: stop saying "of course" when you're adding extra information regarding a story or a person! If it's so obvious it's worth adding "of course" then it's probably too obvious to mention. And when I don't know the stuff that follows the "of course" it makes me feel like you're patronising me and that doesn't really encourage me to keep listening.

I know half the country says "PIN number" but NEWSREADERS? On Radio 4? Shame on you.

Stop telling me I can podcast BBC content. I bloody can't*. Podcasting is what YOU do, I subscribe to your podcast. I can't podcast your content any more than I can broadcast it and nobody goes around telling me to "Broadcast the chart show on Sunday!".

And then there are the phrases that they keep using because the whole world does, but they're STUPID phrases:

"Organic produce" should not be a subset of produce. Fruit and veg and meat are not minerals, they are organic. Who let them steal the word and redefine it to be a subset of what it used to define... that's not going to cause any confusion, is it?

"Identity theft" is not theft! You can't steal an identity outside of SF. If you start with an identity, it doesn't go away because someone else is claiming to be you. It's identity spoofing, or fraud or something, it's not a bloody theft!

And similarly, the details of millions of benefit recipients have NOT been lost, they've been compromised. They've still got the originals, haven't they? ... haven't they?


*Although I'm happy to have a job that means I currently *am* part of that process.

Pictures accompany this entry: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkida/195008918/

"What's this weird stuff under my foot?" I wondered as I stepped into the kitchen. Granted, we haven't swept the floor in a couple of weeks but they felt like incredibly big crumbs and they were right in the middle of the floor. I stepped closer to the counter to find that there were even more of them there, so I stepped back and switched on the light. My original plan had been to wander to the fridge, grab a cold drink and go back to the living room without touching the light, but now I was curious.

All over the floor were tiny little chunks of clear and black glass, almost cuboid in shape, like safety glass is. At first I thought that somehow one of our glass placemats had been swept off the table and shattered but it would have to be a very large one. So what else could shower glass all over the kitchen? I looked up.

"Um. How come our oven door has exploded?" I asked Tobes, carefully stepping back off the chunks of glass, reasoning that bare feet weren't a good plan for the kitchen.

We heard nothing, saw nothing. An hour ago the cooker was intact. It hasn't been used in two days. For some reason, though, it's simply exploded everywhere this evening. I guess it must be the hot weather but it's a mystery. If it had happened in the day I could understand it better - light could have been concentrated through the patio door onto the oven door causing a magnifying glass effect during the day. That, I suppose, would have the potential to make glass explode. Maybe. But it was dark and in a room with nobody in it to disturb anything and it just spontaneously threw glass everywhere. That's a bit dangerous, really, innit?

So now we have to figure out how to get that fixed, what it will cost, and whether the contents insurance is worth invoking. Hey... maybe it's under warranty. Time to dig through paperwork tomorrow. *sigh*

I put SSX Tricky on and played it really badly for a while before giving up again. I've got it running while I go through emails but I was very impressed with the following quote from it that came out during the demo.

"Just like I planned it! Only... bad."

This morning the train was extremely packed, for some reason. I arrived at the station later than I'd have liked, too. My bike currently has a slow puncture and the front tyre needs reinflating about once a week. Actually, what it really needs is a new inner tube because the valve has something wrong with it that makes it really difficult to attach the bike pump in such a way that will let air into the tyre. I've been meaning to get a decent foot pump to make this whole thing easier but haven't quite found time so the bike is out of action until I remember to set aside an hour to fight with the bicycle pump.

So I walked and arrived in plenty of time for the train, but not enough time to place myself at the front of the crowd waiting to get on. The only options once I got on were to stand or to sit in the smoking carriage.

I should have stood. I have a vaguely sore throat and I stink. I find it quite annoying that so much space is given over to smokers on the train, too. The carriage I was in was approximately 20% full of seated people, the rest of the train was packed. Clearly there isn't much of a call for the smoking carriage so why inconvenience so many other people?

Well, it's not a great start to the week, and this is the first five day week I'll have done in ages (should have been last week, if I'd not been ill) so expect grumpiness.

I had beans on toast. Two slices of toast and a whole tin of beans. I think that constitutes a meal - it's certainly the closest I've come to a meal this week, anyway. I'm eating again. Yay!

All right, who's with the funny text messages, huh?

Chances are I ought to know but since most of my phonelist isn't on my current phone you are currently anonymous. Own up or I post the number for prank calls.

(But I laughed, in case you wondered.)