Technology ... at last

Our updated technology is finally here

Following yesterday's disappointment, the Engineer came today and we finally have our shiny new Sky+ system. It was rather galling since he was here for a total of about 20 minutes, including checking the alignment on the dish. After all that waiting, it was so quick and simple. We're now looking forward to all the whizzy things that it can do.

Boo ... new technology failure

After MONTHS of waiting, our new Sky+ box was not delivered today

I reserved the box back at the start of July. Due to the strange system that Sky use, you have to wait to actually be allowed to order it (I think it's a way of making it look like they're not totally rubbish that doesn't really work). Last month I was told I could order it, and today was the earliest they could install it. Not what I would call great customer service

We had the usual thing of an appointment any time between 8am and 1pm, so I dutifully waited in to make sure I didn't miss the engineer when he arrived. At 11:30, Sky rang to say that they wouldn't be coming because the engineer had rung in sick.

Whereas I do understand that you can't predict sickness and there isn't much you can do about it at short notice, what I don't understand is why it took them until 11:30 to call me. That was 3.5 hours after the Engineer should have been working. It just adds another instance of dreadful customer service that we seem to have to put up with because there is only one company that we can use to get anything like a decent TV service.

July: Still got a job!

Settling into the working life again

I now enjoy a much longer and more troublesome commute into work than before, combined with the interesting deployment processes of a large, cumbersome, company. This has combined to keep me very busy over the last month or so.

I have to say that it's good to be working, doing something constructive and learning about some different (if not exactly useful) technology. It's not so good to have to contend with the M25 every day - but we can't have everything.

With our newfound wealth, we went away for a weekend this month to an interesting, if not entirely successful, hotel. We had a (long planned) birthday celebration and we had several weekends of recovering from the rigours of the week. We're even contemplating a real holiday.

Vista and the art of going to the lavatory

Hoorah!

After my dispondancy of yesterday, today is all fresh and new and technology is my friend again. Having downloaded numerous updates from Parallels and spent about an hour refactoring the virtual machine, Parallels now runs the 4OD player in Vista, hosted under OS-X.

I am quietly hopeful that this means I can get the video onto the telly, since it was very easy to get OS-X onto it yesterday (perhaps I'm being stupidly optimistic). Still not sure what the problem really was, but a good old driver update has done the buisness.

Shame it wasn't the same for the NVidia drivers for Vista, which are the latest ones, but still fail to drive the S-video output.

Technology

As is often the case with these things - it should be so simple.

I meant to record a programme on Channel 4 a couple of weeks ago, but for various reasons forgot. Never mind, I thought, I can use the 4OD catch up service - the on-demand video streaming service that has now entered the realms of reality and is free.

But, I thought, watching it on the PC screen is a bit rubbish, lets watch it on the proper telly. So I toddled off an purchased a lovely adapter from my local Apple reseller (for my equally lovely MacBook Pro) and set about plugging it all in to the telly to watch in glorious, old-fashioned, CRT-vision. But NO, Windows on my Mac refuses to accept that I have anything plugged in to the DVI port and gets into a bit of a tizz when you ask it to use the external display port. Whereas, OS-X works wonderfully without a whimper, but, of course, Channel 4 OD is not available for the Mac (for reasons which seem steeped in ineptitude and stupidity).
Ah-ha, I thought, time for Parallels, but alas no. Whereas iPlayer works fine under Vista in Parallels, for some reason the 4OD player does not.

So, I'm left at the end of a very frustrating afternoon with little chance of actually making it work. I shall spend some time in the next few days searching the forums and hope that there is some magic cure for this, but I generally feel that the PC (i.e. Windows, and more specifically NVidia) has let me down again. The platform itself and the people who develop for it always make too many assumptions, which is why it end up in things just not working properly. With a bit more care and thought, things like this just wouldn't happen and, other than putting armies of support people out of business, the world would be a much happier and better place.

Paranoid Android

The first mobile phone based on Google's Android has just been announced.

The T-Mobile G1, made by HTC has gained a lot of attention in the press with all sorts of journalists clammering to fiddle with the thing and pass verdict.

But does it live up to the hype - well, in short, no. That's not surprising though. The hardware is pretty much a standard smartphone - that they've been conservative is no surprise - it's pretty standard in the computer industry to take what’s there and fiddle with it, not to reinvent. One must remember that the software is designed to run on lots of platforms, so the first ones will be very standard. That the software looks very much like other handhelds is a bit more of a disappointment, but one has to remember that the UI is just a small part of the whole - the actual functionality is much more important. The simple truth is that its going to take time before we see if Android is really going to live up to all its been hailed as.

I think the phone would have fared better before the advent of the iPhone and all the lookalikes. That really has changed the map for handheld communications devices. The touchscreen interface looks clunky, the keyboard looks old fashioned and the UI just looks too much like Vista.

But it will be what the developers do with the platform that will be important in the months to come. Can it really carve out a niche in the smartphone market (a market which is ever-expanding) and can the right products be envisaged and realised using this open-source base. That will be the real test for Android - and if it fails, it will be quietly discarded as yet another high hope that didn't quite reach the bar.

Autumn comes to us all

We had occasion to visit a sheltered housing development at the weekend.

I won't go into the detail because it's rather personal, but a number of things struck me, especially when speaking to some of the residents.

I was profoundly impressed with the strength and courage exhibited. It can't be easy to accept that, as time goes on, you can become less able to cope on your own and sometimes need help from others, and yet these people had. The development itself was rather good and saw itself as a safety net rather than an integral part of the residents lives - this allowed them to go on living their lives in the fullest way possible for as long as possible and there is a certain dignity in that. But the services are there if and when needed and there is a warden on duty for emergencies.

Perhaps the only slightly disquieting thing was that the housing development was situated behind a nursing home, which did rather give a stark reminder of how things could end up for the residents, but it also enabled them to be very flexible in the levels of support provided.

But to concentrate on the services provided by the care organisation would be to miss a big part of what these things are supposed to be about. Community is a key concept which came up time and again. The residents could and did organise their own clubs, went around to each others houses for coffee or even just waved to each other from the door, but it transforms an otherwise isolating existance into one where sharing and involvement play a valuable part. They have the best of both worlds, the privacy of their own homes and the community of the communal gardens and proximity to others. Not unlike the rest of us.

As someone who works for a company which provides technology for just such developments, it struck me how simple some of the needs were and how technology should never be the focus of the solution, but can sometimes be assistive in its delivery. Simple needs and simple solutions.

The elderly aren't another species or foreigners or a different generation. We don't wake up one day elderly. We edge up to it whilst looking in the other direction and suddenly are faced with the reality of being there.

The Big Blue

The Red Sea is an ever receding memory as we return from our holiday to the normal world.

I have to say that all-in-all our diving exploits were a total success. I don’t know what it is about lobbing a big metal tank on your back, bunging a hosepipe in your mouth and jumping into large, fish-filled expanses of water, but I do seem to enjoy it enormously.

Of course, we were a little concerned about the other people we’d be sharing a boat with, since I’ve seen a number of instances where compressed air seems to have had very detrimental effects on the personality and social skills of divers, but we needn’t have feared since they were a great bunch, even if one had a penchant for diving in a dressing gown and there seemed to be an ongoing competition to dive in each other’s clothing – I kid you not.

The flight over was even more dreadful that I was expecting – what sort of airline charges you for food and then runs out of it? – and of course we were late. They also managed to tell us the wrong local time, so we spent the first day rather confused as everything seemed to be happening at the wrong times. But the boat was great, the diving was great and the food was great.

I had the usual technology hassles – my GPS crashed and wouldn’t turn off until the battery went flat, but luckily the dive sites are all on a map, so I should be able to plot our sites – which was the whole idea. My dive gear had a few hiccups and I broke a bit off at one point – although it actually seems to work better without it. The new underwater camera worked a treat, however.

Herself enjoyed it far more than she (or I) thought she would and we’re even talking about doing another one next year.

I shall be assembling the photos and writing some text in more detail, for those that are interested.

I also came back to find I have an interview on Thursday. Neat.

Gear crisis

Following my last post about the need for dive gear, this has been a traumatic day.

Having honed my selection of new gear down to a few choices, I decided the time had also come to get a new battery fitted to my dive computer - well, in face the time was about a year ago as I found out when we went away diving and my computer didn't work. So, off I toddled to the local dive shop (toddling being a fine method of travel in my neck of the woods).

I've had said dive computer for many years and it's never needed a battery, so I didn't really know what to expect in terms of price. I do, however, know what I didn't expect and that was the healthy sum of £140 being required. This seems rather excessive, but apparently it's all very complicated and time consuming and you basically don't have any choice (you can't do it yourself because you need to replace the seals to make it water and pressure proof again). Add to this the fact that I needed a new screen protector and was also thinking of getting a nice computer interface for it that I'd seen on eBay and we're rapidly heading in the direction of 200 quid. The worst part of it being it's not new or shiny, just the same old computer I've had for years (albeit in an improved state of actually functioning).

Just as I was pondering all this, Carl in the dive shop informed me that instead of shelling out all this cash, I could, instead, shell out even more and upgrade to a suitably shiny new computer - with whizzy new features like microbubbles and IRDA interface. I did ponder this for several hours before ringing him back and going ahead with the new-for-old option.

So these events have put rather a dent in the budget for new kit - amounting to basically the cost of a new BCD. So I've made the hard decision to keep my existing kit - with all its weighty joy and instead just get a couple of new spangly things to celebrate our forthcoming trip. Bit of a change of tack, but then I didn't expect to be getting a new computer.

We have also agreed to book the hol - even though herself hasn't officially been granted the holiday yet. I shall (hopefully) be doing this in the very near future.

In need of gear

We have been contemplating holidays recently.

Due to a variety of reasons, we find ourselves with only one week to go away and the need to do something engaging, rather than just relaxing. This makes me immediately think of Scuba diving.

As soon as I start contemplating diving, I remember that after last year I vowed to buy some new gear, as the kit I have now is rather heavy and although works well, is difficult to get onto a plane to go anywhere. So I've been forced to search the internet for new and shiny diving equipment whilst working out just how much my current stuff is worth on eBay.

There is, as always, an awful lot of kit out there to be purchased and its not always obvious which is the best choice. I had some very definite goals when I bought my original set and although it does do what I wanted, there are a number of notable flaws - the weight of the whole thing being the most obvious.

It's interesting to note that technology has not really moved on a huge amount in the 5 years since I last researched such things. There are all kinds of technical breakthroughs, but nothing really big has changed at all. Even dive computers have simply been tweaked and enhanced rather than being dramatically overhauled. I think this is probably partly due to the natural conservitism that occurs when equipment is responsible for your life - quite reasonable really.

So, I'm starting to think that I won't get anything better, but it will be considerably lighter. I also want to keep things as simple as I can, since there is a tendancy to just bolt more and more kit on and end up looking like some kind of demented cyberman. I guess in this respect my own goals have changed since I am considerably more experienced now and have learnt (often the hard way) which things are important and which aren't.

It always strikes me as an irony that a sport such as diving, in which the goal is to be close to a whole different form of nature in a relaxing and tranquil environment needs so much stuff to actually achieve that. But then, maybe that's part of what I like about it.

Clueless

Despite my resolution at the begining of the week, the past three days have been the normal techno-hell.

The following facts have come to my attention during the last few days:

1. Our IT support sub-contractors are clueless
2. Whoever configured the routers in the office is clueless
3. Whoever cancelled the wrong ADSL line is clueless
4. I am clueless (for leaving my laptop power supply in the office and losing an hour going to get it)
5. Surprisingly, our ISP appears to have support staff with more than one clue to rub together

So, I've had to sort it all out myself and finally have some picture of the things that have been going wrong.

On a positive note, our electronics sub-contractors are now talking to one another and have vowed to sort out the mess they created, I actually found a job worth chasing and it's Friday and I'm off to the pub tonight.

Technological turmoil

It's a new week and I've decided it's going to be a better one.

The last couple of weeks have seen me immersed in various technical disasters, both at work and home. I don't want any of that nonsense this week - I want to get back to doing proper stuff and having something (half) decent to write in here.

My Mobile Me mail started working on Saturday night (suspiciously soon after I sent them a snot-o-gram), my iPhone is therefore all working correctly, as is the computer AND the servers at work.

So, time to actually use the technology, rather than just fix it.