Finally it’s here and I’m typing this post on my phone and do you know what it’s pretty damn good. They don’t seem to have compromised on functionality to cram things in to the interface and hooking it up to a self hosted blog is a snap.

They’ve even done a very nice job of integrating safari into the client to show a live preview of your post. Only drawbacks I’ve spotted so far is that any photos added to a post just get dropped to the bottom rather than being able to insert them as you go and you don’t seem to be able to add links to posts which is a pretty major omission.

On that note, below is a little sign I spotted at kings cross that made me smile.

 So, at least 21 people are sadder than me, which is a start!

 Over the next hour, I got chatting with some of the other people in the queue, including a couple of magicians who were practicing their sleight of hand coin tricks. The O2 staff were really good, keeping everyone jollied along, handing out free water and keeping everyone up to date with progress. A nice camaraderie began to develop.

The store only had around 10 16GB iPhones which disappeared almost instantly so a few people peeled off as they didn’t want to settle for an 8GB. By about 8.20 I was in the store and sat down while the very friendly assistant took my details, filled out paperwork and took copies of my ID….at which point the O2 credit checking system fell on it’s arse.

 A little disappointing given their experience earlier in the week with the online store, given the decision to open almost all the stores at 8.02am, it was hardly going to be a surprise that the online credit checking service was going to get a sudden hammering.

So, i’ve “bought” an iPhone, pending the credit check. But I can’t actually get my mitts on it until they’ve run the check and given me a call. Which realistically means this evening. I can’t really fault the on the ground staff. Just a shame the infrastructure didn’t live up to it!

Since I last looked (and apologies if this is old news) they’ve launched a new beta version with a much more comprehensive interface. It makes it much quicker to browse through programmes with a more TV guide like approach. They’ve also made it easier to find multiple episodes of the same programme and group them together. But best of all, it certainly seems like you have to wade through a lot less daytime dreck like Doctors and Flog It! to get to the good stuff.

But as with most software, more choice brings more confusion and the array of new ways to slice and dice the data is, at first at least, quite arresting. Not so bad for me, but I can see my mum, who’s only just getting to grips with the whole TV over IP thing getting a bit of a surprise next time she logs in.

But the thing that really made me smile, and that I really hope is a deft little nod to Spinal Tap from the developers is that the volume control when streaming a programme, goes up to 11. That’s one louder. Marvellous.

Fortunately I was already seated, but I did a double take when the guard announced the reason for the overcrowding.

Not, as i’d assumed a broken down train. Instead, trains between York and Doncaster were not running due to a “Cable Theft“, which as excuses go, is a pretty good one.

Much as we may, pardon the pun, rail against the high prices of train tickets in the UK, which are now verging on the obscene. But, you have to have some sympathy from the operators when even the parts of the network they can keep in good repair then get stolen like the lead from church rooftops.

What struck me though, is that Tesco as arguably the most sophisticated profiler and user of Direct Marketing in the business uses variable printing for it’s quarterly clubcard mailer.

What does this mean? Well, you receive a nice blue and red leaflet where about two thirds of the black printed text on it has been tailored to you. Offers you might like, your personal details, the address, a cheery greeting like “Dear Mr xxxx”.

So given that the Tesco supercomputer knows i’m a bloke and probably, given the level of their knowledge base, a single bloke with a predilection for cashew nuts.  Why did the front of the leaflet say (in black variable print no less), “Inside, great vouchers to pull out and put in your purse.”

The only guy with a purse that comes readily to mind is Tinky Winky, substitute the word wallet and it wouldn’t have jarred nearly so much.

At first it was just carrier pre-selection, I thought it might add some spice to our relationship, but soon I realised it was more than that. All you did was take…and I have so much less to give.

But seriously…

About 4 months ago I finally left BT and decided to start getting my line rental, broadband and calls from a different supplier. Financially, paying &pound11 a month for a line I only used for ADSL, along with £23 for the DSL service (it was an old old Pipex package) while getting my calls through TalkTalk was becoming untenable.

So I switched, to TalkTalk for the lot, at just over £16 a month, it represented a pretty decent saving. Now, I know that TalkTalk aren’t the best of suppliers. In fact their customer service is regularly slated. But, given that i’d phoned the other suppliers less than 3 times in the past 6 years I figured I could cope. Sadly, the by all accounts excellent O2 broadband wasn’t available in my area at the time.

Apart from one slightly painful off-script conversation with the TalkTalk offshore call centre it was all pretty smooth and has been fine ever since…

Apart from one thing, BT won’t leave me alone.

I’ve closed my account and severed all ties. Which has sent their Direct Marketing department into overdrive. Now, I work in advertising and we sometimes use DM (not often!) so it would be hypocritical of me to blindly rant against DM as a concept.

BT, however now send me a letter at least once a month if not more often, in a variety of different sizes and shapes all telling me how useless my new supplier is, and how I’d be much happier with them, and that they’d be more than happy to welcome me back with open arms.

The tone of voice is slightly condescending suggesting that, aw shucks, we all make mistakes. It’s as if they’ve hired Michael Sophocles from The Apprentice to do their marketing, with his by turns, bullish, hectoring and the finally pathetic wheedling as an approach.

I’ve had partners that were less needy, BT are like the nasty ex who sits in the corner of the local bar sniping sotto-voce that your new partner has an ugly nose, and you could have been so happy together.

So, BT, let go, move on. We’re both different people now. I wish you every happiness…just not with me.

These things are like hens teeth at the moment in the UK, extremely hard to find, with all of the online retailers almost constantly out of stock and generally whenever they do get a delivery only having enough to satisfy their ever growing lists of backorders. A tip off over at the eeeuser forums had suggested that Toys R Us had a fairly reliable supply and following calls to some other suppliers who were quoting late March delivery at the earliest, I figured what the hell and put in a pre-order.

So, having finally got my mitts on one, what do I think? It rocks! It’s a fully featured laptop (pretty much the only thing missing is an optical drive) in a tiny package. While it will never be a desktop replacement, it’s perfect for chucking in a bag for a train journey or to take away for a couple of days. Also, unlike pretty much every other laptop i’ve ever used, the charger is the size of a mobile phone one. So you don’t end up with and ultra small laptop and a sodding great power brick to carry around!

I very quickly decided that the bundled xandros linux while pleasant enough was a bit to Janet and John to make the cut in the long term and plumped to install eeeXubuntu (a tweaked version of Xubuntu for the eee)

Installation was pretty simple, download a live CD, boot from it on my desktop machine and run a script to create a bootable image of the CD on a USB stick.

That stick was then in turn used to boot the eee, and a click of the install icon on the desktop started off the installation process. Having done a bit of reading up i’d worked out that I didn’t really want to use a swap partition, having upgraded the eee to 2GB of RAM, not using swap saves wear on the SSD Flash drive. So instead I opted for one big 4GB partition, this caused the installer to error fairly unhelpfully, but eventually I worked out that the installer needs some free space left for some reason during install, so setup a 3Gb partition instead. (Later, once fully installed I used gParted to resize the partition to just under 4Gb.

Once installed there’s a few tweaks you can install to get things working perfectly and generally soup things up a little, the eeXubuntu wiki details them all. The best though is Compiz Fusion, which does the whizzy desktop window effects, everyone i’ve shown it to has really been impressed by it, it’s also damn useful for managing multiple windows on the eee’s smallscreen.

Speaking of which I had worried that the 800×480 screen would be a little too small, but so far it’s been ok. With the addition of a mini theme in firefox to make best use of the space you can watch youtube vids just fine and most sites render capably in the space.

Getting fusesmb working reliably to mount some shares on my Windows XP desktop PC was a bit tricky, but I got there in the end, I also found a neat little script which runs when the wifi connects, checks if the connection is to my home wifi network and if it is, then it mounts the shares, if not it doesn’t.

So overall, i’m loving the eee, some minor niggles like not being able to hibernate it (2Gb of RAM requires 2GB of free disk space to hibernate) but shutdown and bootup is still speedy enough for that not to be a massive problem.

Interestingly though, while the eee may sell a lot of units to people who’ve never used linux before, I doubt many of them will venture beyond Xandros, getting it working just right in Xubuntu still required quite a bit of effort (and I’m no linux wizard) but I guess that can only get better with time.

The only depressing thing about that is that it means they’re likely to sell a lot more eee’s with XP installed, and I doubt (though haven’t tested) that it will be nearly as fast a little machine under XP.

Over the past two years, i’ve spent A LOT of time zipping up and down the east coast of the UK on the train to meetings in either London or Slough. One thing that’s made it more bearable has been GNER (and more recently National Express East Coast’s) wifi service.

For those who haven’t experienced it, each carriage is fitted with an access point, which is in turn connected to an satellite modem and an array of GSM modems. All that connectivity is then aggregated together to offer a pretty much unbroken connection throughout the journey.

Back in the days before GNER lost the franchise it cost about £7.99 for 2 hours or £9.99 for 24 hours, which was just about justifiable if travelling on business and meant you could crack on with dealing with email and other work while on the move. You also got access free in first class, which made paying £25 for dinner in the restaurant car on the way home an even more attractive option.

Since the move over to National Express East Coast, they’ve made it free to all passengers, which while wonderfully egalitarian, has made the service considerably poorer. Now that everyone can get online for free, the speed has dropped like a stone and it seems a lot less reliable than it once was.  

However, in their favour, the support line are excellent. On a few occasions the system has gone down, a quick phone call and they’ve either remotely rebooted the server or otherwise solved the problem. They even call you straight back if you get cut off using the caller ID from your mobile phone.

However, the support line has never been particularly well publicised, so should you ever need it, here it is: 0845 1254455

On the Wednesday before last, while walking back from the office to collect my car, I was knocked down while crossing the road. I say knocked down, in fact when the car hit me I went flying into the air, hit and smashed the windscreen, bounced off it landing on the bonnet leaving a nice dent, then rolled off onto the tarmac.

A few seconds later, I was standing up and the driver and I were trading, “are you OK’s?” and “Sorry about your car. Sorry about your leg!” and a kind passer by then offered me a lift to the hospital two minutes up the road as by that time my leg was really beginning to ache.

I hobbled into the Emergency Department and registered, then sat there for 20 mins or so until a nurse triaged me, then waited another 40 mins to be seen by another nurse who took my vitals and gave me some painkillers. Another hour or so and I was seen by a Doctor, who was excellent and judged that i’d not broken anything but most likely sprained some ligaments in my right knee and sustained a lot of bruising and swelling. Another 40 mins or so and it was off for 3 x-rays and after another short wait a couple of minutes chat with the Doctor and three different kinds of painkillers to take home with me.

In all, the treatment and the staff were excellent, the only downside was the hanging around for 4 hours to get it, with not so much as a book to or leaflet to while away the time.  There was one poem on the wall, supplied by some kind of public art project, which was thematically based around a peacock which was screaming and wailing, blood was involved. Just the kind of cheery fare you need when you’re waiting to have your injuries assessed!

So, what i’m really interested in knowing, should I have any American readers is how much that little lot would have cost had I pitched up at an ER in America. We’re talking assesment by a nurse, a consult with a doctor, 3 X-Rays and a weeks supply of 3 different painkillers to take home.

Here in the UK, under the NHS I may have had to wait 4 hours to get it, but it didn’t cost me a penny (other than my taxes of course!)