This Ordinary Life

I hate downtime. This is mainly because I have realized that I am generally so inefficient at doing thing that I am forever behind. Behind on paying bills, behind on pre-planning holidays, behind on my reading, the list goes on and on. But I have discovered that sensible multi-tasking is the key to getting at least some of things done that I feel I am missing out on.

This has been made possible by the magic of the Ipod and podcasting. Now whenever I am cycling to work, walking into town or traveling, I listen to podcasts and language courses (well, I am a bit behind on the language courses). You may think that riding a bike and listening to a podcast is dangerous, but unless you are blasting your ears out, I don’t consider it any more dangerous that listening to the radio while driving.

Since listening to podcasts my slightly repetitious commute and mundane tube journeys have become a joy and I can actually feel myself getting more edjumacted. Today while on my 20km (45min) cycle training I learned about Mexican Indians using solar powered lights and how Pakastans recent military coup has cause the international telephone links to crash. What will I possible do with all this information?

Here are some of my favourite podcasts:

60 Minutes – great interviews

Business Week – general business news

Buzz Out Loud from CNET – the latest from the world of technology and computing

Harvard Business School IdeaCast – generally mind altering

Newsweek on Air – great interviews and global stories

PRI’s the World: Technology – BBC supported and very interesting

Die Tageschau des Ersten Deutschen Fernsehen – Germany’s version of BBC 6 o’clock news

Winecast – straight from Minnestoa, a great podcast on wine

If you don't have an Ipod, don't fret. Most modern mobile phones have music playing capabilities. I use my SonyEricsson K800i to play podcasts over its external speaker making even my shower time productive.

Happy edjumaction!

Posted by this ordinary life at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My company, in line with most companies nowadays, dishes out Blackberries to all their employees. I must admit I do like the convenience of having my inbox in my pocket, but the frustrations of the 8700 and limitations the Blackberry email system as a whole often outweigh the benefits.

The 8700 is a chunky little unit with a reasonable colour screen. It is quite heavy so it can only really live in a jacket or trouser front pocket (I prefer my mobile inboxes slimmer so they can fit in a shirt pocket). Battery life is good with it lasting about 3-4 days on a single charge under regular use. It also functions as a phone, but this drastically reduces the battery life. There is no multimedia functionality.

The interface is where things start to fall down. Using a click wheel you navigate menus with a spin and click. There is a full QWERTY keyboard with other common symbols as secondary functions of the keys. The keys are just big enough for thumb typing, but it would be a pain for anyone with sausage fingers. Be careful when typing as you can easily end up in the phone interface or elsewhere, so this isn't for you if you type essays on the go. Not to mention it doesn't have predictive text or spell checking functionality.

Most frustrating is the limited built in memory (64MB) and lack of expansion slot, which becomes particularly painful if your Blackberry ever crashes. Mine did during a Date/Time update patch where a JVM 101 error occurred. Not sure what this error means, but to me it meant that I had to get a replacement Blackberry. The problem is that when you get a replacement and it is synced with the Blackberry Server for the first time, it only syncs mail from that point forward. I am told this is to preserve memory as the text of every emails is actually download to the unit's local memory. In my case, it meant that I could only access older emails from my desk. No very convenient when I was on the go and had clients asking me about emails from a month ago. I hope that the people at RIM were smart enough to address this issue in the more recent models such as the "Pearl" and 8800?

Despite thes shortcomings, there are a few of things that you can do to make the 8700 much more enjoyable. Plus you get the joy of circumventing your company's IT usage policy regarding instant messangers. Power to the people for beating the system.

First, download GTalk for the Blackberry. This can be download via the Blackberry Internet Browser on http://mobile.blackberry.com. My company bans all instant messengers, but for some reason GTalk on the Blackberry still functions. Messaging on the Blackberry is great and keeps you in touch with all your Google-enabled brethren.

Second, download GMaps for the Blackberry. This again can be accessed from the http://mobile.blackberry.com. Although a bit data heavy (not a problem if your company is paying), this puts the power of Google Maps in the palm of your hand. It has helped me find my way through London's back streets on a number of occasions.

There are several other downloads on the Blackberry mobile website like Texas Hold'em, guaranteeing your entertainment.

All in all, the Blackberry 8700 is a good basic little unit, but is under threat from the new Blackberry killers (I particularly like the Treo 650). If Blackberry's latest units aren't an improvement on the 8700, even RIM's software monopoly won't be enough to preserve market dominance.

And finally, I'd like to share a gripe from a friend who works at the French bank, BNP Paribas, whose gripe I am sure is shared by the masses. People use Blackberrys when they are out of the office and primarily in the evenings and weekends. Therefore, having a Helpdesk open weekdays between the hours of 9am and 5pm is about as smart as voting Nicolas Sarkozy as president...

Posted by this ordinary life at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Trains in the UK have come a long way in the last 10 years. The days where you had to reach out the window and grab the outside handle to open the door (only God knows why people couldn't be trusted to have handles inside the train) and trains that were so slow that a horse and carriage way a better way to travel are almost a thing of the past (Silverlink to Birmingham is particularly slow).

At least with the introduction of Virgin Trains' Pendolino (trains with tilting technology that was supposedly invented in the UK, sold cheaply to Italians and then brought back to the UK at great expense in the form of the Pendalino), journey times to Manchester have been reduced to a little over 2 hours down from over 3.

This has changed the face of traveling to regional cities from London and put these route only 10 years behind equivalent route on the Continent. However, one thing is definitely still in the Dark Ages on these routes, mobile communications.

I have been told that this is the result of the train traveling too fast for the phone to switch cells without loosing reception and also that there is no on-train support infrastructure to compensate for the patching network coverage outside of main cities and in tunnels. I am also told that Virgin Trains has just applied a new reflective coating to their windows that not only reflects light, but also mobile phone waves.

It's amazing that as a part of the privatisation and franchising of train routes, which occurred in the last 10 years, and the advent of a digital age there wasn’t some requirement to ensure that people were connected with the outside world while on the train.

I estimate that the UK must loose at least a few million hours of productivity a year as a result of people's inability to work seemlessly on the train. Not to mention the stress involved (I have almost blown a gasket trying to have a business call on at least a number of occasions).

My advice to the government is to force train operators to install the required infrastructure on at least the main route (London to Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds as a minimum). This will not only lead to an increase in train use for business (who wouldn't take the train if it was like being in a mobile office?), but also put the UK in line with the leading countries in Europe (there are pay phones on trains in Germany).

Posted by this ordinary life at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I haven't been doing this blogging this for long at all, but I am already thinking about way to make it easier and how to be part of the the next big thing.

In my opinion I can do both through audio podcasting, but I'll only start doing this if I can raise enough cash through this blog. Yes, cheap German b@stard... or you could say a very cunning market researcher!

I reckon that I need approximately £200 to get me started (mic, software, etc). At my current rate of ad revenue, this would take approximately 10 years to raise.

To help me raise this a bit quicker, I need you to:

1. Recommend this blog to your friends (or enemies)
2. Visit often

In return for this, I will share with you:

1. More interesting "ponderings" and quirks from my life
2. Rants and complaints about the UK and other injustices to society
3. Tips on how to do more with less - the principle of "Frugality"

I also promise to proofread my entries before positing them as I do have a higher than fifth grade edupacation, edjumacation, erm... brains...

Your support of this blog is greatly appreciated and doesn't cost you a dime!

Posted by this ordinary life at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, here's another story to add to the growing list of people who had problems with Apple's 7.0 release of Itunes.

I recently was uploading some music to my ipod when itunes informed me that some of the files could not be uploaded due to the fact that the Itunes version I was using was too old. Odd comment considering I was using the latest version pre-7.0. Being someone who likes to be up-to-date software wise and having been pleasantly bemused with the previous upgrades to Itunes, I proceeded to download 7.0 straight from Apple's servers.

At first things appeared to be going fine, my 8mb ADSL whipped the set-up file down the telephone line and I was then prompted to run the set-up file. I proceeded to do this, which recall clearly as it was telling me about this great new Artwork download service.

Let me break here to briefly ponder about this Artwork download service. Firstly, Apple tells me that they take information about my entire music library, match it to the appropriate artwork and make a note of the songs that didn't have artwork. As I never got to run Itunes 7.0 (rest of my story to follow shortly), I don't know if this is something that you can turn on and off. Why would I want to do that, well, in case you hadn't noticed this very subtle invasion of your privacy that could lead to your listening habits being used for targeted marketing or that you may be accused of piracy by not having bothered to download the artwork when you ripped your personal collection. Now that I have ranted about Apple's privacy invasion tactics (please correct me if I have misinterpretted Apple's intentions here), let me continue my story...

Well, once Itunes had installed the 7.0 version, it proceeded to analyse my entire library. Now I run my music library off a network hard drive to save space on my puny laptop hard drive, which can lead to some network lag or delays, but even after going out and coming back 3 hours later, Itunes still wasn't finished analysing my library.

Being slightly fed up, I decided to abort the process and let it run over night. However, when I tried to do this my system was suddenly unresponsive. No amount of clicking, crtl + alt + del' ing made any difference. Finally, I decided to do a hard reboot and start my system over.

To my horror, clicking noises started eminating from my laptop and Windows wouldn't boot up. The computer kept saying that it couldn't find the operating system. I, of course, knew that the operating system was on the hard drive, but something had gone horribly wrong and the hard drive was shot.

Now a quick complement to the folks at Toshiba... As my laptop was still under warranty, Toshiba were quick to pick it up and are in the process replacing the hard drive. I was half expecting them to refute my warranty claim, but the were quite happy to give some good customer service.

Finally, a word of warning.... make sure that you always make backups of important data and verify them. I assumed that this wizzy programme Memeo that I was using was doing this for me, but of course it didn't. I am hoping a good friend can help me recover some of the data from the defunct hard drive (which Toshiba is kindly loaning back to me for a deposit of £230). But next time, I am going to make at least 2 backups, one on my network hard drive and the other on a DVD.

Posted by this ordinary life at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The advent of digital photography has done something amazing for cupboards across the globe. You remember those boxes of holiday snapshots that just lay there waiting to be put into albums or the hours that you spent vetting, selecting the best ones and then lovingling (painstakingly?) pasting them into albums, don't you?

Well, digital photography has revolutionised that process by moving those boxes from your cupboards onto harddrives and CDs/DVDs. It has also resulted in an explosion in the number of pictures people take. As people no longer have to wait for photos to be develop or, for that matter, pay for them to be developed, they have gone crazy. Why worry about composition or setting up the right shot when you can take ten and then delete the unsuitable ones.

While this may have enabled even the amateur photography to get at least one decent shot out of every ten taken, it has left flashes burnt on innumerable retinas and hard disks jammed with images. It actually may have made people cherish snapshots of special events and holiday moments less, because they are so easy to create and require very little effort.

Well, you could spend money on programes like Adobe's Photo Album and other similar commercial programmes or you could try it with inferior freeware versions to try an make some order out of the jumble mess of phots on your hard drive to give you photo collections a bit more value. However, Google in it's quest for domination of the world of digital and online organisation has come up with a solution that I think almost every digital photographer (from the basic to intermediate) will love.

The programme is called Picasa and can be downloaded free from the internet. It has a simple interface that allows you to organise your pictures into albums (linked to a folder structure on your hard drive). I have about 2000 photos on my hard drive and was able to organise them in an evening. You can give each image a tag that contains details of the images name, date it was taken, location and even a short commentry. The software breathes new life into old photos as your can easily print, run slide shows, burn them to CDs/DVDs and, probably the most powerful feature of the software, interface with either Outlook or an online email system (e.g. Gmail) and send photos directly from the system to your friends. It takes care of the formatting and you just provide the address and message. Mothers around the globe rejoice as now it is easier than ever for you backpacking son/daugter living in London to send home images of their lives.

I have recommended this to a number of friends that have either just moved to digital photography or who have stacks of unsorted photos on their computer. Amazingly, every single one has come back with a positive review of the software and with a new zest for capturing the moment on film.

If you aren't familiar with Google's Picasa yet, I recommend you go out and try it. If you aren't impressed, let me know as I imagine you will be in the minority and your feedback is likely to be invaluable to Google. Let's hope that Google don't mess it up by trying to convince us all to store our images on Google's own servers or to share our albums via the Internet....

Posted by this ordinary life at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, the Ipod and other MP3 players have been with us for a number of years now. These devices have really revolutionised our lives by enabling you to take your music collection on the go.

But it would be interesting to know if most people are using these to tune out or to tune in? What do I mean by this, you may ask. Well, it you think about it people use music to pass the time or to relax. Actually, amongst the most common uses would be to fill dead time, time on the tube (commutting), to block out background noise or just to have background noise when your home alone. But does this dead time need to be filled with "nothing''?

Now don't get me wrong listening to music is great, but I simply thing that people are overlooking the educational capability of the Ipod. There are a wealth of audio books, lectures, language course and news programmes that are available, which enable a person to turn dead time into productive educational time. I actually also find listening to interviews very relaxing and a long audio book is a great companion when on a long run that may take a couple of hours. I ran my first half-marathon listening to Stephen Covey's 7 Habits and suprised myself when the 21kms were behind me. Also the other day on 60 Minutes I learned about how Starbucks came to greatness or the basis for the Colbert Report (one of the greatest comedy shows out at the moment).

Now many free Podcasts are easily available via Apple's Itunes, but you will have to do a bit more hunting to find lectures and language courses. Most of these are also free, but sometimes you may need to invest in buying a few.

Some of my favourites include:

- Podcasts: CBS News 60 Minutes, Buzz Out Loud by Cnet, Newsweek on Air, Winecast (entertaining Minnesota guy talking about wine), The Ricky Gervais Show (comedy), Nobody Likes Onions (comedy), triple j's Hack Daily (Australian radio)

- Language courses: Anything by Pimsleur

- Lectures: Anything by The Teaching Company

The next time you grab your Ipod to kill some time, think about using it expand your mind (love that saying).

Posted by this ordinary life at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a new craze sweeping across London again, self-scancheck-outs. This is where you, the customer, do all the work from scanning your items to bagging your groceries. This leads not only to a reduction in how long you have to stand in the queue, but also in how the number of staff and the level of education that the supermarket has to employ.

I have come across them in both Marks and Spencers on Bishopsgate and the Tesco at Liverpool St Station and have mixed feelings about them.

When I attempted to use the system at the Marks and Spencers it turned out to be horrendously cumbersome with the system constantly accusing me of putting things into my bag with out scanning them. It was the closest I have come to to being accused of shoplifting in years. The system kept saying "Unexpected item in bagging area, please remove". Luckily, it was just a glitch and my record as a law abiding citizen was preserved. Payment was, however, quick and secure with Chip and PIN in place.

Now my experience at Tesco was much better. The system recognised my "Law Abiding Citizen" status and allowed me to process my items without a hitch. However, it was at the payment stage that I discovered that the system did have one fundamental flaw. When paying by card, it doesn't ask for neither a signature nor PIN. This made for an extremely quick payment process, but also a fraudsters "wet dream". I hope that Tesco rectify this security flaw soon or there may be droves of overweight fraudsters filing class action suits against Tesco because they made stealing food too easy.

So based on these experiences, how do I feel about these self-service check-outs. I must admit that they do make for a quick and relatively easy shopping experience. However, I do miss that banter that you have with the people working at the check-out. Plus it would be a shame if people were no longer subjected to the "Pricecheck on Condoms, Vagasile, etc" embarassment. Finally and on a more serious note, it won't do much for the level of education of those working in Supermarkets as they will no longer even be required to speak (there is a computer that tells you which check-out till to go to) or count money.

That's progress, I guess...

Posted by this ordinary life at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you don't want to spend your evening in a seedy Japanese Karaoke club or in front of a drunken hoard and don't want to spend the earth, you can now enjoy the highs and lows that is Karaoke in the comfort of your own home.

Gone are the days of rickety tape casette based units with cumbersome sheets of lyrics and here are the days of slick onscreen lyrics overlaid on actual music videos.

Sony has actually recognised that the way to enhance value of the still wide spread PS2 is to innovate. SingStar does this by using a nifty little adapter that plugs into the units USB port and connects two microphones. It's great that the cords are long enough to ensure that the singer's eyesight isn't strained from standing two feet from the television.

Currently avialable are 150 songs across most singable genres of music. Each version has 30 songs and the versions currently avialable are:

- 80's with great hits like Jefferson Starship's 'We Built This City' and Survivor's 'Eye of the Tiger'
- Rock which is great for the guys with Gwen Stefani's 'What You Waiting For?' and The Killers' 'Somebody Told Me'
- Popworld with Fountains of Wayne's 'Stacy's Mom' and Hoobastank's 'The Reason'
- Party with Destiny's Child's 'Survivor' and Maroon5's 'This Love'
- The original game with Village People's 'YMCA' and Ricky Martin's 'Livin' La Vida Loca'

Soon they will also be releasing a new version called 'Anthems'.

There is definitely some great songs here, but it is important to note that although there are all the big names, they have not always included their best and most well known songs. Despite this there is more than enough to keep you going for hours with minimal disappointment.

The game also keeps you entertained because it scores you for "how well" you sing. This may sound scary at the onset, but even the most tone deaf person should be able to do reasonably well on the "Easy" setting as it only listens for the intervals between notes and not the exact note you should be singing. The game then rates you anything from "Tone Deaf" to "Lead Singer" to "Super Star" depending on your score.

Combine this with the functionality to sing duets or battle each other via singing, it really does deliver and will make your home a party zone.

Personally, I recommend combining a night of SingStar with cocktails. I hosted a SingStar night last night and combined it with steins of beer and caprihina's. It went down a treat.

Lastly, SingStar is really quite affordable with games costing about £15 - 20 each and the starter pack ca. £30. I found the best prices in the UK on HMV.com.

It would be great to hear your experiences with SingStar as I think it can bring out the singer in all of us, but sadly won't make all of us a singer.

Posted by this ordinary life at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)