For those not in the know a Segway can be best described as being the horse-less carriage version of the chariots they round around in, in Ben Hur. It sounds freaky but it’s great fun, I suggest you try one at the first opportunity.
Sadly I didn’t manage to get a picture of myself on one, scooting around Bermuda on our Segway tour but let me tell you I want one.
Just thought you’d like to know.
Three weeks ago today I queued up outside Carphone Warehouse at a ridiculous time in the morning, coffee in hand, to collect my shiny new 16GB iPhone 3G.
The doors opened at 08:02 and we all filed in to dutifully hand over our £159 to pick up our iPhones. If only it were that easy.
The queue outside was tolerable, good natured chatter and coffee make things tolerable, it was when I got inside that the pain began. O2’s systems crashed almost immediately leaving me unable to have either a credit check or a proof of address check.
All of this lead to me standing in the shop for over three hours while they repeatedly tried to verify that I lived where I said I did and that I’d be able to pay the bills.
I got it though, obviously, and I’ve been using it for the past three weeks. I have a number of observations about it.
I’d never really fancied the first iPhone, I don’t like to be an early adopter of consumer electronics they’re normally bug ridden or prototypes in need of refinement (Nintendo DS?). So I generally wait for version 2.0 or 3.0 wherever possible, that’s what I did here.
There are lots of pros and cons to owning an iPhone though.
Pros
Cons
That’s a lot of negative points but I still think it’s the best phone I’ve ever owned. Aside perhaps from the battery life none of the points raised are particularly unfixable and I’m certain that they will be fixed at some point in a firmware update.
The battery life is the biggest stickler though, it’s just too poor to be acceptable. If I watch a movie on my way to work (a journey of twenty five minutes) I’m down to about 70% battery life by the time I get to work. If I make a couple of phone calls during the day, maybe browse a few websites and send some tweets, by three o’clock I’m out of juice.
That really is unacceptable.
My old Nokia 6021 last about two weeks on standby admittedly they’re very different beasts but I still expect more than three hours talk time or a days standby from a phone.
All in all though I standby my love for the iPhone, it is an amazing piece of technology that ten years ago would have been impossible. I can just about overlook the battery life issues with careful placement of chargers and all the really cool stuff it does makes up for it.
Roll on firmware 2.1. That will be the true test of Apple’s commitment to the cell phone market.
From the best PlayStation 2 game ever made, Ico, comes this beautiful track Castle In The Mist.
Whether you’re a gamer or not you should own this game. It’s actually worth buying a PlayStation 2 just to play it.
Its mixture of puzzling, platforming and action is perfect, the setting is beautiful and the gameplay is evenly balanced. Oh, yeah and the music is perfect.
I remember my first play through with Kate, it was a great joint experience, me at the controls and Kate helping me solve the puzzles. Ah, the good old days!
In the 1980’s if you wanted to film your friends cavorting around (not like that, pervert) then you’d need to carry the slick kit and caboodle pictured on the left.
Of course now here in the brave new 21st century hip young gun-slingers like me carry camcorders like the one on the right.
If only my grandfather was around to see these amazing advances in technology.
Yet again Twitter manages to subvert its inherent coolness.
Not only was it down for a good few hours this afternoon but it now appears to have lost 22 hours worth of tweets.
Gah!
Sell to Google. Do it now. You know they’ll buy you. Sell!
Really, for fuck’s sake. Sell to Google already.
You Twitter boys provide a great service but you’re fucking it up. Come on, get with it! Google could do wonders with the Twitter brand and you’d never have to work again!
Am I the only person this makes sense to?
Those three things are a heady combo when you’re twelve. The kid in this video obviously has them all in abundance.
It’s really quite cute the fact that the info for the video says:
everything in this video is made out of card board
Bless. What a helpful lad he is for pointing that out! It almost makes up for his attrocious and oh so twelve-year-old’s-mind username of fartbuttface.
I’m really glad YouTube didn’t exist when I was eleven, otherwise the whole world would right now be pissing themselves at the sight of my low rent Thunderbirds clone, Rescue 11. I had a headquarters and everything.
Well I say that, my bed had a headboard on which I stuck a label I’d written Rescue 11 on but to me that was a headquarters.
I swear I have not felt as tired and run down as I do right now.
I’ve had a busy weekend, in fairness I’ve had a busy few weeks, actually let’s be honest I’ve had a fucking nightmare couple of months.
I’m shattered, I’m going to have an early night, maybe have an early start tomorrow.
In cool news the new iPhone is out on Friday, will definitely be scoping out the queues on my way to work and if they’re small enough I will probably pop in and buy one.
That was a boring post wasn’t it?
In the words of Adam West, get a tan.
Twitter is really, really cool and I love using it but that fucking whale suspended by birdies is doing my head in.
Every single time I tweet from my laptop it’s almost guaranteed that at some point I’m going to see this picture.
What makes all of this worse of course is the serene expression on it’s face, like it couldn’t give a shit, what are they trying to say? Are they calling us oblivious whales? If they are what does that even mean?
Secondly judging by the shape of their, what can only be described as childish, drawing of the whale (let’s call him Blimpy) it’s looks like it’s supposed to be a sperm whale. Now, according to Wikipedia sperm whales are around twenty metres long, that makes those birds just shy of two meters long each. What the fuck kind of birds are they supposed to be?
Thirdly regardless of what kind of bird they are, they deserve a slap. Four of them are flying left and four of them are flying right. How’s that supposed to help exactly? At least get a grip and all fly in the same direction! Flying like that’s just going to spin Blimpy round and round, and probably make him heave planktony sick at the end of it.
Of course in their defence they can’t organise themselves because they can’t communicate properly. Like the dim witted, two metre, monstrosities they are, they’re trying to support Blimpy’s harness with their beaks! This can’t be the best way to hold on to a creature that weighs in excess of 50,000 kg, it’s surely a bit much to expect each bird to lift 6,000 kg with just their beak? A harness of sorts for each bird would make far more sense.
It’s no wonder Twitter’s down so much. If they can’t even get their outage splash page thought through a bit, what hope do we have of a reliable service?
Fair enough I can’t really see how they are able to provide the service they do gratis but even so if their goal is to some day make money from it, they need to ensure that it’s reliable. Of course I have my suspicions that they’re probably just biding their time waiting to be bought by Google.
Tony Blews popped up an interesting post yesterday about a new game everyone can play, Your Debut Album!
Being the type of sucker that enjoys this sort of thing I went along and had a go. Anyway to cut a boring story short, here’s what I got, by the way you should read the rules before you look at all this otherwise it’ll mean fuck all!
My random Wikipedia entry was about the Susi Earnshaw Theatre School.
My random quote turned out to be.
It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
From J. K. Rowling and her interminable book Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets.
And my photo was this delightful piece of pop art.
So after a bit of crafty Photoshopping I came up with this!
Nifty, huh?
This is too cool for fucking school. No shit if I had £600 to drop right now, I’d be dropping it ona Tenori-On. Look at this.
That my friends is a Tenori-On, a brand new type of instrument created by two Japanese dudes, Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori. Its original design came about as part of Iwai’s desire to build an electronic instrument of true beauty. By jove, I think he’s got it!
If you watch this video too, you’ll see one of its cooler features.
Those two ladies’ (The Tenorions) Tenori-Ons are playing in sync, their both playing little bits and bobs on each of them and the units are tying in with each other to keep it harmonious. How cool?
I can’t believe I missed this when it came out two years ago! Isn’t the future fantastic?
Read this. Carefully.
Not tricky is it? ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. …’, it’s not like anyone’s trying to catch people out is it?
It states clearly at the beginning of every Star Wars film (even the shit ones, I-III and VI for the record) that this movie isn’t set in the future.
But it’s got spaceships in it? No! Shut up, fuck off, look, listen. It is set in the past, a long time ago.
But it’s got robots and stuff? And? So has the Toyota factory in Derby and that’s not from the future. What part of this is difficult?
But people shoot each other with lasers? Aaaargh! Look it says in bright blue fucking letters at the start of the film: A. Long. Time. Ago. End of story.
Yet still people insist on describing Star Wars (any of them, they’re not fussy) as a futuristic film, or a fanciful futuristic romp, or whatever.
Look at these reviews for further proof of people not paying attention:
Ken Tucker - New York Metro
“…his [Lucas’] lurchingly thought-out rendering of futuristic politics prevents the entire series from achieving the greatness to which it aspires.”
Jonathan Young - Theosophical Society Of America
“Because the Star Wars stories are set in the future on fictional planets, we are able to get beyond the naturalism of most movies.”
Sean Axmaker - Amazon.com
“Luke faces the black-clad villain Darth Vader (David Prowse, voice of James Earl Jones) in a futuristic sword fight.”
Oh, and for the record the ellipsis at the end of the sentence? There should be four dots, seemingly the first one acts as a full stop. There should also be an extra space between the first dot and the ellipsis, but hey, if no one’s reading it anyway. …
They’re making a Bill Hicks biopic! Seemingly Russell Crowe is in the frame to play him. Seems an odd choice to me.
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