Blogging Pubbitch

Well, it's been seven days, and I'm now back from holiday and plugged into the Net again. Looks like it was a big week: IE 8 was released, as was Street View in the UK (finally!), IBM is in talks to buy Sun (for Java and the consultancy revenue it generates, presumably?) and Battlestar Galactica comes to an end (though it's still not available on itunes yet, so no spoilers please!)

Perhaps I should take some time out more frequently?

The Killers? Are they human? Or are they dancers?

I've seen the video. They're human. They're not dancers. Though that coat was once part bird.

Well, I fell off the blogging wagon quite hard. Time to get the ball rolling again. They say the best way to get back into the swing of things is to practice, so let's see if I can manage a post a day for the rest of the week.

Until the weekend.

No point aiming too high!

Now, where to start....

Screw it! I've not got any time to call my own, so I'm not going to add things to my pile with a bunch of New Year Resolutions. Instead, I'm going to create some New Year Reductions: an attempt to reign in the chaos into something saner. So, in no particular order here are my plans:

• Arrange to meet friends to do "something social" once every two weeks, on average. Doesn't matter if it's drinks, cinema, just hanging out playing games on the Wii or something else. The key point here: organise time with my friends.
• Set aside a regular time and duration to work on personal projects.
• Limit email to two sessions of fixed length a day
• Push reading for pleasure into my early morning and evening schedules
• Get fit by riding a bike to work at least three times a week.

Hmmmm.... I could do with some help on that last point. Anyone care to share tips on what sort of bikes it's best to commute in London on, what sort of equipment makes sense and if there's anything that I should know about?

Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope that you're all having a wonderful holiday and enjoying the chance to rest and recover from the stresses and strains that make up the run-up to Christmas itself :)

Da dah dum, da dah dee dah dum.

Just play this at any given moment when you don't know what to say or do. Everyone will be impressed.

Or just hum it. Doesn't work as well, but an order of magnitude funnier.

For no readily apparent reason, I have the Girl from Ipanema stuck in my head. Meh! It could be so much worse. At least it's not Greensleaves.

I think it's fair to say that the iPhone is the best phone I've ever owned, but with the release of the new 2.2 software update, it just got a whole lot better.

I'm away from home right now, and will be for some time, and that means that I've had to make choices about which bits of techy paraphernalia I can bring with me. Unless I'm willing to do myself an injury, I can only really take one laptop on the road with me, and given that I'm here for work, it's the work laptop that came with me. Not, and this is important, my personal laptop.

It's important because I also brought my iPhone with me. Before I left, I synced up as many podcasts as I could, but some of these, especially the news podcasts, go stale pretty quickly. Without being able to connect to my personal laptop, there wasn't a mechanism to download new podcasts, rendering the latter parts of any trip devoid of fresh news.

Aside: I almost said "fresh content", but felt a little of sick at the back of my mouth, and so have skillfully avoided management-speak once again. Hurrah! Now back to the main thrust of this post. Mentally delete this paragraph and append the next one to the end of the last one, please.

No more! With the 2.2 release, I can download new podcasts, either of the set that are already synced with my iPhone or by using the built-in iTunes app on the phone to pick and download new ones. Sure, it would be nicer if this happened automatically, preferably using the same preferences I have on the desktop version of iTunes, but just having the option of downloading something new is a real boon.

Of course, to get this feature, I need to be able to install the 2.2 software update on my iPhone, and this is where Apple have once again done the Right Thing. Although I can't sync the iPhone with anything other than my personal laptop, I can do a software update on any machine running iTunes. It's not the sort of feature that you need on a regular basis, but when you find out it's there, life becomes a little more easy. Finding out that this capability is present brings me to another feature of the iPhone that I like: the ubiquity of the power lead, and the fact it plugs into the USB socket. It's a little roundabout, so please bear with me.

Back in the day, it was virtually impossible to run out of charge on a Nokia phone. Everyone had one, and because of this, everyone had ready access to the charger. Better still, all the phones used the same size connector. Wonderful. And then Nokia changed the size of the connector, and people started buying other makes of phone. Suddenly, it became a lot easier to run out of charge, and I started to have to bring my Nokia charger with me, along with the adapter so I could use it abroad. And a second adapter for my laptop. Or, as I did on a regular basis, you can juggle the foreign plug adaptor, switching to using it to charge the item with the least power as necessary.

Frankly, having a Nokia phone had become a major PITA.

The ideal for me is to be able to take one power adapter and to be able to charge everything from that. Ideally at the same time. The iPhone, the model of convergence in action, allows me to carry one device instead of two to meet my music-listening, phone-calling desires. It uses the same cable to charge and connect to the Mac as the iPod always has, and given the ubiquity of the iPod, that means that this particular lead is easy to get hold of. Because it plugs into the USB socket of my laptop (or, indeed, any machine) it's possible to charge that and the lappie from the same adapter. As a quirk, when you plug an iPod into a machine, iTunes often starts up, and will tell you about any new updates that might be present for the shiny piece of Appleness you've just plugged into the Intel designed port.

I'm sure that there are other goodies to do with the iPhone that make it indispensable --- the mail client, with its ability to access emails even when offline, has saved me a whole host of grief, and my wife and I now no longer bother to know where we're going actually is until well after we leave the house thanks to the combination of GPS, Google Maps and access to JourneyPlanner --- but the universality of access to the ability to charge the device, coupled with the ability to get new podcasts, means that the iPhone meets all my traveling needs for now.

It would be nice to be able to tether my laptop to its 3G connection sometimes....

Just a quick post to say that I'm back in Sydney and will be here until the middle of next month. Ish. It's good to be back.

Update: I'm still a terrible surfer.