On holiday and incommunicado

Holidays.

Just as everyone has gone back to school and work, we decided to take a week's holiday away from it all.  To be fair the other half had planned it some weeks ago and we've been really looking forward to it.

We are in North Norfolk, and there's been plenty of sun, sea and sand which has made the first day or so of our holiday just perfect.  It's just nice not having to do anything but what you want, and this is even better because we haven't had a real holiday for more years than I can remember.

What's also good, in a strange kind of way, is that there's very poor mobile network coverage and hence using the internet requires effort which means that we're not online all the time attending to 'urgent' requests from colleagues.  It means that urgent requests really need to be urgent to get through at all, and they can safely be ignored if they're not urgent enough…  

It's actually quite shocking that my preferred network (O2) for my main phone and Three for mobile internet have absolutely *no* coverage where I'm staying.  The only networks with coverage are Vodafone and Orange.  This forced me to get a cheap Pay and Go Vodafone SIM just to stay in touch with the world, and use the other half's Vodafone 3G dongle (which actually only connects at GPRS speed as there's no 3G at all around here) for internet,

When it works, it works ok, and the sobering thought is that not that many years ago, we were all using speeds much slower than GPRS from home on our fixed phone lines and were quite happy with that.  I'm speaking of 56k dialup modems, of course and it's staggering how we managed in those days - and it's not that many years ago.

Well, that's all I'm going to risk writing now, must get back to holidaying and enjoying the local beers (Wherry is quite a nice pint).

I am not an iSheep, I'm a free man

I've been meaning to write some stuff about Apple products, why I like them and the two different types of Apple Mac users. So here we go, I hope it'll shed some light on the subject and why I don't consider myself (and many others who started using Macs or iPhones in the last few years) as iSheep.

I'll start with my own perspective on the subject. For many years I worked in IT in a University Computer Centre and had to deal with users of many systems, including DOS, Windows, Unix and Apple Mac. For most of my career, I managed Unix systems, and used DOS and Windows machines on my desktop quite happily. I saw Mac users as a little weird, cliquey and narrow minded who'd use nothing but Macs because they were best, were pretty and did their work.

Now these people were arts or media based and to be fair, most applications in these fields were only written for Macs. Nonetheless, I saw these people very much as to what these days would be described as iSheep, always utterly and completely devoted to Macs, despite the fact that the machines then did tend to be unreliable, slow and very quirky. I tried to use the machines several times, but really found them too odd and the fact that you couldn't connect them easily to standard networks, filestores et al made me leave them alone.

Then about six years ago, maybe seven, I can't quite recall, Apple's strategy towards operating systems changed and with OSX it introduced the standard and highly reliable Unix system at its heart. It had a pretty graphical interface on top of that which was also more intuitive and usable so I started to have a look and got myself a Mac for the office to see if I could work with it again. And I found it a totally different animal. If there was a problem I couldn't fix by pointing and clicking, I could open a 'command shell' and type in a Unix command and make it do what I wanted it to do.

And because it was a Unix system and my main job was managing Unix servers, it made life very easy having a system on your desk on which you could test server applications without mucking about with the server and annoying users. From around then I used Windows and Macs on an almost equal basis.

Then the next big thing happened; Apple decided to make all their machines Intel based, rather than the quirky (though it was pretty advanced and good for its time) PowerPC architecture. What this meant was the it was possible to run Windows on the same hardware, thus meaning that you could have one computer that ran both systems and rather than owning two machines you could just have one and run your Windows programs on one part and your Mac programs on the other... Or even with some clever software at the same time!!

This was the real turning point which made Macs a really viable choice for normal people. You could buy a basic Macbook for not much more than a high end Windows laptop and these 'basic' machines were dual core processors with large amounts of RAM and hard drive.

I bought my first iMac in Summer 2006 and as my ancient Toshiba laptop was nearing the end of its useful life bought a Macbook in the Autumn of that year. So I now have two nearly 4 year old machines which are still my main productivity tools. With Windows machines you would be thinking of changing them around now for the latest. With mine, I've got the latest MacOSX, oodles of free (and paid for) software and the whole thing still runs as fast as ever. Must admit I did increase RAM in one and Hard Drive on the other, and that was a marginal cost.

Moving onto phones, I bought an iPhone to replace my brilliant Nokia N95 quite simply because it does everything I want a phone to do and is effectively a small pocket computer where I can even manage remote systems easily from wherever I may be. And it does have the best and most responsive touch screen of any mobile I've played with.

So what this piece is saying is that I, and many other 'new Mac' users (rather hate that term, as it's reminiscent of 'New Labour') choose their products not due to some iSheep desire to buy it just because it's a Mac, but because it's the best fit for what we want it to do and does the job easily and well.

But what of the old pre OSX users of Macs? Well some of them hated the new system because it wasn't the same as the old and also hated the fact that others who weren't in the 'Mac Clique' were starting to use 'their' systems. They also found the new capabilities too confusing and retreated into their shells.

Others welcomed the new systems and remained iSheep, believing that anything Mac is good and anything not Mac is bad. And they wouldn't acknowledge the faults that some of the devices or systems had (cf iPhone 4 signal problems, issues in too quickly released versions of the OS etc)

People now use Macs (and iPhones) who would never have dreamed about using them in the past. But they (and I include myself here) also use other systems when necessary if they are a better fit and don't have a 'religious' zeal for only using Macs.

Well, gulp, this has been a very long diatribe, sorry if it went on a bit and I hope it's explained the points I set out to explain.... or at least shed a light on them.

Thank you for reading.

So many blog sites

So here I am not having written here for around 8 months wondering whether I should look at another of the many free blog sites available. tumblr looks interesting. But it makes me wonder as to why there are so many of these....

Surely the inline adverts can't make Google et al that much money? Maybe they do.

Or maybe they're trying to tempt us onto 'premium services' (are there any for blogger?)

Or are they just here providing a 'service' to the internet community... yeah of course!

Banks and Simpler Overdrafts

I'm not going to mention the name of the bank in case they're watching... well not just yet anyway, but here's a story about blatant profiteering hiding behind simplifications to a current account. It is a scandal and needs to be stamped on from day 1.

OK, this bank has written to all its current account customers explaining new 'simpler' arrangements for their current account.

• They no longer offer interest on the account (it was a paltry 0.1% anyway)
• They will no longer be charging interest on overdrafts..... Too good to be true, yes, instead they will be charging a flat rate of £1 per day for every day you are overdrawn (up to £1000 for an arranged overdraft)

At first sight it may seem reasonable, losing interest and only being charged £1 per day for an overdraft. But look at it more closely.

Assume for example you go £30 overdrawn, and it's a week before payday, so you have say 6 days when you're overdrawn by £30. Following it so far?

With the new 'simpler' system, you'll be charged £6. Now using simple maths, this is 20% of the amount you were overdrawn... for just 6 days overdrawn. Now this is interest of 20%, for 6 days which gives you an APR (annual percentage rate) of around 4000% !!

Now if say you overdraw by around £200, for 4 days, you'll be charged £4, which is around 2% or an annual rate of more than 200%. Still very bad.

Previously, you'd be charged interest on the amount overdrawn for that number of days, which at worst would be 2% monthly or about 0.1% per day.

Work it out for yourself.... it's a massive increase disguised as a 'simplification' to the account.

And they will probably get away with this, because most people bin letters from the bank and even if they read them, they may be fooled into thinking this is a good deal. And then other banks will follow suit and we will all suffer because there'll be no one to switch to.

What can we do about it? Well, read all letters from your bank, and if they have any schemes like this, tell them you aren't having it and get ready to change your bank. And drop me a note and let me know.

I may reveal which bank this is in due course, probably best by showing a copy of the letter I received.

But not tonight.

Postscript to last post

Can't get the hang of inserting images in this blogger, so sorry if the previous post insulted your artistic sensibilities. This composer really is pants, or I'm just getting too tired to use it properly, after all it is nearly 0130 UK time.. I think I'll stick to boring text - can't be arsed to type in html.

We've had a holday

Before anyone says, 'but you're on a perpetual holiday', I'll just smile sweetly and knowingly...

We took a trip a couple of weeks back, up to East Anglia (Colchester to be precise) to get away from the hustle and bustle of radio presenting and to kind of mark the end of summer and start of Autumn. We stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights and just enjoyed some 'us' time. Eating out, not having to wash up and going to places we wouldn't normally go.

For me, one highlight was a visit to Colchester Zoo, which is in the middle of nowhere, is big with plenty of space and has the most amazing and quite happy looking animals, like this fellow.

The food there was good value and there was plenty to see. We spent about 6 hours and still hadn't seen everything. Unlike my last visit to the Zoo in London which was done in less than 2 hours and you needed a mortgage to get a cup of coffee and a small slice of cake. The animals were mixed up in some cases, like in their natural habitat, for example, Zebras with Giraffes, Ostriches and a Rhino. Of course our friend on the right wasn't mixed with the above as the collection wouldn't last 5 minutes!

If you'd like to see all the pictures I took at the zoo, you can go here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/geoffrogers/sets/72157622423620937/

Back home now, certainly have felt refreshed and have been enjoying my radio shows even more. My birthday's up and coming soon, so looking forward to having plenty of alcohol and curry.... (Talking of food, had the hottest hot Pepperoni pizza tonight from the Pizza place near the radio station, it was dee-lic-ious)

Currently watching an old 'Mock the Week' on 'Dave', and thinking about bed.

Music on your Computer ... and iTunes 9.0

Like many people, I have a lot of music on my computer, and my iPod, either downloaded from places like iTunes store, Amazon.co.uk, etc, or ripped from my own albums. Again like a lot of people there are several in our house with computers and so it was good to see that Apple decided to make sharing of these files at home much easier with their release of the latest iTunes software.

It was also good, several months ago, to see them and other online suppliers move from DRM protected music, which is limited to playing on a limited number of machines, often requiring software peculiar to the systems it's run on, to DRM free music which basically means that you can put your songs on whatever machine or player you own and use them as you please - obviously for personal use only!

What's confused me with iTunes 9 is that it limits the number of computers that you can share with to 5. Now this presumably makes sense for films for example, which still have DRM embedded, but virtually all music downloaded these days is free of such controls so why the limit of 5? It remains perfectly possible to transfer these non DRMmed files from one machine to another by other means, so why is there this limit placed on the easy sharing via iTunes?

Perhaps it's a limitation of having to cater for DRMmed films and will be addressed later - if anyone in the know at Apple is reading this, would be interested to hear your comments.

Other than that it's becoming much cheaper to download music legally, but they could still do with reducing prices... and of course make much more obscure stuff easily available. I know many people who still download 'illegal' files simply because they can't find the songs or artists they want on legal sites!