Status-Q

Just back from an exhausting whirlwind tour of the States. Meetings all over the place, many at short notice.

London – Atlanta – Seattle – San Francisco – Portland – Seattle – L.A. – Cincinatti – London
in one week. Admittedly, my knowledge of Cincinatti only covers gates B10-B23, but it was still a lot to squeeze in. We were lugging heavy demo kit around with us as well.

Quite apart from the exertion, I don’t like travelling that way. Some of those cities I know well, but for others this was my first visit, and it seems somehow disrespectful to be in Atlanta, with all its history, or Portland, with its mountains and coastlines, and see nothing more than a conference center or airport hotel.

I’ll have to go back. In the meantime, it’s good to be home.

[Original Link] When you’ve been running a blog for a few years, one of the advantages is that if you don’t have anything particularly inspiring to say, you can point back to how interesting your life was a couple of years ago.

This is a perfectly respectable process, I think; most media indulge in it in some shape or form – replaying golden oldies, running “Where are they now?” articles, etc

But I wasn’t saying anything very interesting two years ago, either, so this post is about something I found amusing then. A friend of John Naughton’s made some notes on an EasyJet flight. John put them on his blog, and I pointed to them on mine. Perhaps my nostalgia is getting a little too vicarious!

Yesterday, my father (in England) called my father-in-law (in the US) to thank him for his part in keeping Britain free 60 years ago. I’m ashamed that it never occurred to me to do the same.

May those of us who are so ready to criticise what America has done since Vietnam never forget what it did beforehand.

[Original Link] Robert Cringeley says he’s found a major disruptive technology. It’s a $70 wireless router. But that’s not all… Thanks to John for the link

[Original Link] Apple’s iTunes Music Store is selling over 3 million songs a week. And it’s still only open to people with a US credit card…

[Original Link] Jakob Nielsen was talking about .NET taking over the world because it would enable micro-payments.

[Original Link]

I love this picture from John’s blog:

For anyone who, like me, has been typing ‘reset nokia 6600’ into Google…

I like my 6600, but the software does have occasional glitches. Something happened on mine which stopped it syncing reliably with my Mac using iSync, so I wanted to try and restore it to its pristine out-of-the-box state. There are lots of tips out there on the web about how to do this – see here for example – but the most thorough format I’ve found so far can be achieved by going to Tools/Settings/Phone/General and choosing ‘Orig. Phone Settings’.

Still doesn’t delete everything, though… let’s see if it works…

Bother. No. Still crashes.

Follow-up, some months later: I eventually solved this by installing FExplorer and using it to delete all sorts of files I didn’t recognize. Somebody had pointed out that the Backup utility built into the Nokia was dying with the same AppArcServerThread error, and when I had deleted enough files to make that work, sure enough, iSync was working again.

[Original Link] As Government advisors call for curbs on Caesarean sections, two mothers defend the procedure in this interesting (and somewhat amusing) article.

A catalogue that came through the door the other day is advertising the Palm Zire handheld.

“Grab the indispensable Zire 21 handheld from palmOne – it’s got as much personality as you have!”

I think I object to that…!