Biscuits and gravy and other stuff

The last couple of days have been kind of hectic here is gemmaks-ville, hell I didn't even log in here yesterday let alone post, quite a departure from my usual routine, no blogging, no Twittering, in fact I barely even turned this confounded machine on.....What's the world coming too?!

So what's caused this departure, well Wednesday Lisa and Punctuation managed to make it back here for another visit, unfortunately Fletch was away on business so he missed them but the three of us had a lovely afternoon just chattering away happily and being fed a late US breakfast of 'biscuits and gravy', prepared by Lisa who made my kitchen her own, which suited me just fine, she's welcome to it, kitchens and all that cooking palaver just aren't my forte. Amusingly to a Brit, 'biscuits and gravy' include neither biscuits nor gravy, or at least not as we understand them! For those of you who like me had never had this delicacy before, it's kind of a savoury scone with a sausage meat white sauce mix and a fried egg plopped on top...yummy, tho 'Ms picky veggie' here was duty bound to dispense with the sausagy bit! ;o)

Lisa goes back to the U.S today, in fact as I type she is emailing me from LHR's internet booth waiting to board, this is not a good thing. I shall miss her much.

Onto other stuff.

Yesterday was dole queue day again, what can I say, the queue gets tangibly longer each time I am there and the queue-ees resignation that nothing much is going to change anytime soon increases in tandem with the length of the queue. It's almost funny if it wasn't so sad, there are now so many of us squished in there at one time now that what was a fifteen minute wait is now closer to an hour and security staff have been employed to 'manage' the unwieldy snake of individuals winding around and out of the building!

All that said, this week there was a actually a job possibility for me, amusingly as 'one of them'....one of the staff sitting behind the dole queue desks putting the out of work through their paces. I am a little reticent about being in that position from a moral standpoint but I need the work and should I make it through the selection process perhaps I can do my little bit in not condescending to those I find on the opposite side of the desk. Who knows. Like all job applications (and there have been a few) I won't say much here unless I get it, it's all too boring and disheartening to keep on about it.

Oh...and my new phone arrived on the day promised, though as ever it seems is the case there was much kerfuffle in that achievement and mostly it was facilitated by me rather than those who's job it should have been! Pretty funky bit of kit though it is, certainly it is function over design in this case, it's about the size and weight of a small house brick but then it does have more in common with a small computer than a phone so there is adequate payback...or there will be when I finally get to grips with it! ;o)

...and for the few phone geeks who I know read this, a little inside onfo; Apparently the phone I have, the N95 was discontinued and replaced by the N96...but that has been so problematical the 95 has been reintroduced for a while at least....it ain't pretty but it works!

Another one bites the dust!

Can you believe it! the mobile phone saga continues, yet another has keeled over and gone to the great phone landfill in the sky. This is becoming almost comical if it weren't so damned annoying!

The latest in the line of casualties is the Nokia 6600, nifty little thing, if only the firmware were anything like stable, which it wasn't. To be honest the problems began on day one a few weeks back but I decided at that point I would persevere a while...I should have known better, perseverance never pays off where phone operating systems are involved. They either work or they don't and no amount of TLC will persuade them into appropriate behaviour!

So, today again I am sitting in again waiting for a courier to bring forth the next offering from my service provider, having once more spent half a day yesterday pointing out my consumer rights to O2's 'help' desk guys. Really, it shouldn't be like this, it shouldn't have to be a fight, they know the law as well as I do and life would be a whole lot simpler if they would just not try to pull the wool over the consumers eyes!

This time I am going to give the Nokia N95 a try, I can't say it's a phone I would have chosen but it was the best that was on offer, I'm pretty half hearted about it all now and I chose it for one reason only, it was the highest spec/value my contract would allow so if I don't like it, it can go the 'eBay way' and at least I can get top dollar for it.

My old phone might not be all singing and dancing but at least it is stable. Life's to short for all this carry on!

That's it!

Ok...enough already!...the phone is going in the post today and winging it's sad way back to it's originator, I've had enough, life is too short to spend two days fighting a crap operating system!

I'm confounded really as to how an apparently high end piece of kit could have such basic flaws. Ok, I know the more the dev. guys cram into any piece of equipment the morel likelihood there is of problems... but to miss out such basic things as the ability to name a folder strikes me as pretty poor. Yup, it's a fact. The software version in the 6220 allows one to create folders for images, documents etc. but not to name them, in fact not to identify them in any way, the result of which is that one ends up with any number of folders, all completely unidentifiable! Useful eh? I thought it was me but many calls later, some internet research and a visit to a phone geek chap proved it not to be me but the software.

And that was just the start. I won't bore you with the other specifics but suffice to say, I got more than an acceptable number of 'blue screen of death'(ok, they were grey but you know where I'm coming from on this) appearances, it crashed completely more times than anyone could find remotely acceptable and wouldn't restart without much poking and prodding among stuff that Jane Doe shouldn't be expected to have to poke and prod at!

So, I don't know what next, I'm tempted by an iPhone, if for no other reason than it's just so sexy but the decision is on hold for a few days, I'm all phoned out!

On a happier note tho....we have BIG snow forecast as a 93% possibility for Monday so fingers crossed please! :o)

Nasty new phone!

Well, the new phone arrived yesterday, or rather I had to go and pick it up, o2 having for the first time in history managed to make a next day delivery, just when I didn't want them too....and it's nasty!

Well that might be something of an overstatement but thus far I can't say I'm impressed. This is not an item that displays Nokia's usual build quality, in fact this model, the 6220, is more reminiscent of a child's toy rather than a high end, 'smartphone' piece of technology! Add to that, thus far, the much heralded, Symbian operating system leaves a lot to be desired in my humble opinion with the result that I spent much of yesterday fighting it....with not much success.

To be fair I am not an expert but I am usually pretty good with phones, hell, I managed to circumnavigate Nokia's own software at length to convert certain files to a csv. format and load them successfully when nothing that was supposed to work actually did but the whole thing is just so convoluted and protracted that it's simply a pain.

Perhaps it's the old familiarity thing, my last phone uses a different o/s but I don't think so. I can forgive the build quality if the function is good but by last night it was back in it's box ready to be returned! This morning however I have woken with new geeky vigour, maybe I will give it one more go, damn, why did I 'restore factory settings', but if it doesn't shape up fast back it will go, despite there being nothing else I want on the market right now.....I would rather stick with the one I have!

Excuse the mess!

I've spent better part of the last twenty four hours fighting with this blog's code in an endeavour to change it from HTML to XML, don't ask me why, probably just because it's there to be done!

Anyway, along the way and for a day or two to come you may notice it appear to fall apart here and there, my apologies, normal service will be resumed shortly, I'm almost there. In theory it's not hard, in practice it isn't really either but in my usual picky nature there are some bits and pieces that I want 'just so', no one else will likely ever notice but I will and until I have cracked them all the fiddling will likely continue for a few days.

One things for sure, while most of me loves all this faffing and it has the ability to swallow up a whole day into something that feels more like just an hour or two, right now I think if I get one more 'this can't be parsed' error message I might just be tempted throw this machine out of my third floor window!

So, as the title says, if you arrive here and it looks like a tornado has just passed through...please excuse the mess, I'm working on it!


*P.S. Should anyone out there know how to get Haloscan and Blogger commenting systems into the XML together please let me know, it was easy in HTML, not so it appears now! Hell, I don't even use Haloscan comments anymore but I just can't bear to let all the old ones disappear into the ether, again, it's just me, no one else reads them but occasionally I still do!

Decisions, decisions!

It's that time of year again, one of my favourites, the one where I can kid myself I am getting something for nothing though of course in reality I am not, instead I am merely paying through the nose by more nefarious marketing routes to fulfil my insatiable gadget obsession!

January is the month my mobile phone contract is due for renewal, the down side is of course that it requires a good deal of haggling each time to negotiate a suitable contract (it's amazing what you can get out of these companies if you put your mind to it) the upside though and the bit that outweighs all other aspects is that I get to choose a brand new shiny handset, a new toy to amuse me and fiddle with, oh the delight!

Of course, I get to this point, a week before I can claim my new piece of technological heaven, and I have never actually made the decision as to exactly which model of gorgeous gadget to choose. As ever I have perused at length the spec. for just about everything on the market and as ever I come to the same partial decision, it has to be substance over style (hey, you can't fiddle with 'style' or connect to the internet suitably fast) and it has to be Nokia, I can navigate a Nokia blindfold and I'm too set in my ways to learn another system to that degree of second nature!

So, all that remains is the final decision, an N95, the N96, though to pay a sum upfront which this model requires is usually against my self imposed phone acquisition rules, or the 6220, which is actually small enough for my little thumbs to race over with the necessary speeds and dexterity!

Hey....this is important stuff don't you know! ;o)

Decisions, decisions!

Nokia nightmare!

If I learn nothing else in life I should learn to adhere to the principle of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'....specifically where Nokia is concerned!

I have been here countless times before but I never learn that when Nokia persistently harass me to update my phone's firmware.... it's just not going to be a good idea. I know it's not going to be a good idea, I have proven it to myself more times than I care to remember but the promise of the however unlikely possibility that a new firmware version might just include a new feature I can't possibly live without, is just too much to resist! This time I didn't even have any negative 'issues' with the version already running but even that couldn't dissuade me from falling into the Nokia trap!

One would like to think that a company with the size and market presence of Nokia would employ developers that could develop? I know I am being grossly naive in this preconception but I am ever stupid hopeful that just once a firmware version will actually manage to flash it's way happily and efficiently onto my phone and work!

Of course not, my naivety knows no bounds and so again this morning I have spent two hours, and I hasten to add after following Nokia's own instructions to the letter, not only trying to recover my phone back to it's original state after Nokia utterly annihilated it but this time also having to recover my laptop back to some semblance of it's former self!!!

I suppose I should really consider myself lucky, at least I did eventually manage to persuade it into recovery after umpteen attempts and some serious frustration. Yes, this is a good and lucky thing I promise you...... some previous efforts at this malarkey over the years have been known to render the receiving handset completely useless and fit only for a landfill site somewhere!


*On a more positive and completely unrelated note....I get to hook up with Lisa and Ian again tomorrow :o))