ignorant and insular

I'm booking a car for next week when I'm in the US. While filling out the form they tell me that it's crucial for me to give them a phone number and there's an option to enter a US phone number or a european one. I clicked on european, only to be presented with this:



Poor old switzerland, but I'm really glad that they included mexico and canada.

the plunge

So I've finally taken the plunge, albeit by proxy; there is now a mac in the house. I was quite intrigued about the setup process on the mac since I've never used, let alone set one up before, so we sat down together for the grand opening.



Just as we turned on the mac and clicked the first setup option I got a call for PC help from my brother with in law who recently bought a new laptop running XP. Thankfully windows has really nice remote assistance options which allowed me to take control and sort the problem out. The problem was that when you get a new machine running windows it never just has windows on it. It has windows plus some custom sound management drivers, plus custom sound software, plus custom cd burning software, not forgetting the custom wireless, network and bluetooth configuration applications, also with the sponsored chat client installed, with the appropriate ads and of course the 5 different links to trouble shooting and help documents and also including custom drivers for the mouse, trackpad or touchpad, plus some floaty desktop widget to control some of the custom stuff, plus a custom firewall, plus some spyware and adware controls, plus the laptop maintenance utilities, display configuration utils and finally of course a custom power management interface. The problem with all of that is that absolutely none of it is needed, because they all come with windows. (Additionally, in the case of my brother in law's laptop, there was so much crap on there that the apps actually conflicted with each other). In fact, not only do they come with windows, but the guys at microsoft spent much more time thinking about how it should look and work, the guys that wrote the software were better and they all got paid more for it. So why oh why do I need to spend hours of my time removing a load of crap from a computer that never needed to be there in the first place, then patching up the holes? Because microsoft don't sell the hardware.

By the time I had finished with my mass uninstalling session support request to make the brand new laptop bearable, not only had my absolutely non-tech savvy wife who had never used a mac before finished the mac setup and created her user account, she had also connected to the wireless network, transferred her contacts from her phone to her mac address book with bluetooth, synched iCal with her google calendar, setup up her desktop preferences (screensaver, dock prefs, region stuff etc) and she also had enough time to spare to take a few snaps with the built in camera and play with all of the apps that came with the machine while all the time squealing with pleasure at the nice little features that she experimented with and they just worked. Yesterday was a good day for the mac and a bad one for the pc.

Mac vs PC, 1:0

retro art

This is really pretty cool - donkey kong mural made out of post-it notes.

The UCSC engineering faculty had ten people and 14,000 post-it notes lying around, with five hours to kill. What did they do? What ANYONE would/should have in the same situation: they made an enormous Donkey Kong mural that must be pushing 40-feet tall.

comparative perceptions

As you will soon be aware (assuming you read the next post) or are already aware (if you've already read it, though I find that unlikely) I have a new phone.

What I hadn't previously mentioned is that my wife decided to get a new phone on the same day. She is much less stalwart than I am about her choice in phones so has a greater choice at her disposal. She settled on the KRZR K1. Although I would never have chosen it for myself, I quite like it. It's small, but heavy which makes it feel metallic and solid, rather than overweight and cumbersome.

When I was looking at it on the table next to my old 6310i I realised that in actual fact, aside from being narrower, it is the same height and (surprisingly) the same thickness. The thing was though, it looked quite a lot smaller. This got me onto how we look at devices and how we determine whether we think they are large or small.



Courtesy of sizeasy, the above image shows the top down view of the comparative sizes of the 3 phones. Since within 0.5mm they are the same height, I chose this as the most representative view.

I came to the conclusion that expectations entirely define perception of size. I don't expect phones to be thin, so my phone, although it's the widest by far, to me seems small. Dimensionally the nokia is indeed closest to a standard house brick which has the relative dimensions 100 x 45.3 x 28.1. The KRZR to me seems narrow but thick. Since it is only a whisker narrower than the nokia I presume this perception comes from the fact that it's thinner, but at the same time my perception of it being thick comes from the fact that I see it as a small phone, but it's thicker than a phone that I consider to be small-ish.

I think I've failed miserable in translating my thoughts into my blog, so I'm going to quit before I can get any further behind.

here comes a new challenger!

Is there any hope for me? LG and Motorola would have to improve their software dramatically, ericsson would need to make slight design improvements and slight software improvements and nokia need to either use the right software on the nice phones or improve their designs. In short, no - there is no hope.

It turns out that I was wrong. There is hope, and it comes from a mobile phone manufacturer that I had completely forgotten about - Samsung.




I went into the shop on Friday to whinge a little more about the lack of phones that interest me and noticed a slim black samsung on the rack. I asked the guy behind the counter if I could play with a real one. I played with it for about 15 minutes and I found it ok. It was presented well and didn't have some of the major deficiencies that I found with other software. Also style wise the phone is pretty, it's slim, has a nice screen and is quad band.

After getting home I checked out some reviews and they were positive. I went into another store to get a better price and was warned that it's no ericsson or nokia with its battery life which I found frustrating, but not too off putting. So long story short, I decided to buy it and see.

Having played with it for 3 days now I have some opinions. Although I could now go on for hours about all the things I dislike about it, I have to attribute that to my nature. The truth is that deep down I do like it even though there are some things that I need to get used to.