Farewell Sony-Ericsson, Hello iMate

Posted: Sat 18 February, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

About a year ago I upgraded my phone to the Sony-Ericsson K700i phone, which has in general served me pretty well. It’s had little things that annoy me – for instance, the keypad is utter crap for quick/easy typing of text-messages, and is a pain in the arse when it comes to words it decides it doesn’t know.

Anyway, come the end of the month it’s going to be time to upgrade/change phone again, and this time I’m heading off to the even geekier end of the market. In fact, the uber-geeky mini XDA, also known as the iMate K-JAM – god knows who comes up with the stupid names, but there we go.

I’ve been thinking about this upgrade for a while, because there’s a lot of stuff I simply don’t give a sod about when it comes to phones. I don’t care if it takes photos – I’m carrying a bloody 8megapixel digital SLR around with me, I don’t need a 1.3Megapixel camera, let’s be honest. I don’t care if it can play MP3s, videos, or whatever – again, I’ve a decent MP3 player (although the new U10 from iRiver looks interesting) and I’ve got the PSP too, so I don’t really need to watch anything on the mobile.

However, I do a fair amount of browsing etc., and at the end of the day, well, I’m a techie. So the XDA looks like it might sort out most of the things I need from a phone. Be interesting to see how the keyboard shapes up though…

Great Big Bundles of Crap

Posted: Fri 17 February, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Work-related | 1 Comment »

Further to the earlier post, this week has really not been good.

There’s been a lot of changes over the last month or so at work, and this week hasn’t been any different. Unfortunately, it’s also left me feeling deeply demotivated and flat, which has made it hard for me to get going on anything all week.

At the moment no-one seems to know quite what’s going on. Simon and myself have been “re-tasked” (their phrase, not mine) from doing the social network stuff I’ve been doing since June, and Simon’s been doing since October, because now it’s no longer a high priority. The fact that the company was supposed to be launching a product backed up by a website community is now irrelevant – the product has taken a retrograde step to fix older buggier code and “reassure” the user community that the product is good. Which, frankly, at the moment it isn’t. But the social network website is now low priority in comparison to the e-commerce side that’s run by our American colleagues. (And I’m using that word in its loosest possible context)

So yes, at the moment that’s nine months of my work being reduced to low man on the totem, and we’re all left to wait and see what’ll happen. The new CEO is away on holiday for another two weeks, and in that time a lot of changes seem to be happening, assumedly with his acceptance/blessing. We’ll see what develops from all this, but it has to be said that right now, happy is not a word being used to describe this workplace…

Implosion

Posted: Fri 17 February, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Thoughts, Work-related | Leave a comment »

With the way work’s been over the last couple of weeks, I’m seriously debating writing a page on my “business” site that details the way things have gone, and continue to go.

As things stand, it looks like we’ll have work through ’til August/September, but currently no-one’s letting on what’ll happen. I just don’t want to get to that time, start looking for other jobs, and have to keep on explaining why it’s all gone tits-up. Of course, I could be entirely wrong, things could improve again and go back to the original optimistic plan. But for now, well, I’m certainly considering the best ways to back up what I do, what I’ve done, and how to sort out the future prospects.

Title-wise, well, at the moment there’s so much politics and bullshit going on behind the scenes, I think I’d have to call the page “The implosion of a business”.

We’ll see.

Stats

Posted: Thu 16 February, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™ | 3 Comments »

Writing yesterday about Measure Map, I suddenly realised I hadn’t dumped a full stats analysis on here in ages – in fact, since August, and d4d™’s third birthday. Quite scary in itself, the way time flies past and so on.

So overnight last night (hey, 3.5 years of logfiles takes some analysing!) I did a full report, and it’s visible here. It makes for pretty interesting reading, but the main bullet points are :

  • 8,331,621 total hits since 3rd April 2002
  • 3,883,922 pages viewed in that time
  • 1,055,503 total visitors
  • an average of 732 visitors per day
  • 46.82 GB of data moved

Not bad for a little puny old blog, eh?

PIN

Posted: Thu 16 February, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness | 2 Comments »

I can’t find the exact list, so I’m going to run this one from memory. Anyway, yesterday’s Times newspaper had a list of the most popular (and thus least secure, most easily guessable) PIN numbers that people choose. In a lot of ways it was really scary how unoriginal people are. In order, they were…

  1. 1234
  2. 4567
  3. 6789
  4. 9876
  5. 2000
  6. 1966
  7. 1999
  8. 1379
  9. 0070
  10. 1402

Apparently, 1966 is memorable for being England winning the world cup, 0070 is used a lot by people thinking of James Bond etc. (bit dubious about that one, myself), 1379 is the corners of the keypad, and 1999 is the year Manchester United won the triple.

But the sheer number of people who use “1234” is quite gobsmacking. I guess it’s the same breed of gimp that uses “Password” for their password – of, if they’re feeling inventive, “Secret”.

More to the point, we’ve had PINs now for at least twenty years – I suppose I don’t really understand how people can still get in a flap about remembering a four-figure number. I should, because I found out recently that my father actually writes all his down in his bloody diary – for which he copped an epic amount of flak from both me and Herself – but there we go.

Personally, I’ve never had a problem remembering PINs. I’ve got at least four different PINs for different things, phone banking, cards, SIM PIN and so on, and never have a problem. Mind you, I also have a nasty habit of remembering my Switch numbers too, which just amply demonstrates that actually I need to get out more.

And did yesterday’s predicted Chip-and-PIN chaos actually happen? Did it fuckaslike. Yet another piece of epic “Milennium Bug” hysteria.

Book List

Posted: Thu 16 February, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™ | Leave a comment »

It’s no use – I was really good at listing the books I’d read last year, but for some reason I just can’t get into it this year at all.

So, for now at least, I’ve deleted the section. Hey Ho.

Validation pt.2

Posted: Wed 15 February, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™, Geeky | Leave a comment »

A quick thanks to Pete, who pointed out that I’d got something on this page that was breaking the “XHTML1.0 Transitional” validation.

All is fixed now – just a pesky border tag on one link. No idea how it got there, either. Ah well.

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