Dom Davis (The Blog)

I’ve been waiting for the release of Skyrim for about a year now. It’s the fifth in a series of computer role play games that I’ve been playing for years now and is panning out to be the best by quite a long way. Sadly my usual gaming machine is at the office and my laptop just isn’t up to the task of a big modern game like that so I’ve got the PS3 version. Playing on the console has the upside of not having to by new kit to play it but does have the downside that I need to share the television that the console is plugged into with The Zozo which means I can’t play the desired 18-20 hours per day that I’d otherwise aim for. That said, The Zozo is being good about letting me play so I’ve got a few hours game play under my belt. I can see it keeping me happy for a good many months, if not years.

I actually have two copies of Skyrim as I made the mistake of pre-ordering it from play.com. I had figured that it would get dispatched early (it was) and arrive on Friday ready for me to play (it didn’t). Since I didn’t know if it was going to arrive late, or just not at all, I also reserved a copy at Argos. This means I knew there was a copy of the game waiting for me without me having to actually by two copies unless I really had to. Sadly I really had to and I ended up walking to Argos to get my reserved copy. When the play.com copy comes (still not here) I’ll simply send it straight back for my money back.

Morrisons was heaving last night. There were queues at all the checkouts, people were getting in my way and it seems it was also morons night.

Let’s take exhibit A: A lady who has decided she is going to buy a Bag For Life™, places it n the conveyor and the proceeds to pile (quite literally by scooping out of her basket) her shopping on top of it. It doesn’t take a huge leap of mental agility to realise you need the bag first at the other end of the checkout. My decision that she was going to be a nightmare was borne out by the fact she hadn’t finished shopping either. No, she was there with her family and had obviously decided that the queues were too long so she would dump what they had at the checkout and “claim a place” while her family finished the shopping. One. Item. At. A. Time.

In supermarkets the shortest queue isn’t always the quickest and, lacking the option of shooting this lady¹, I jumped queues to one where they’d actually finished shopping and looked like they would be able to pack said shopping in a reasonable time.

Sure enough my queue moved at a nice pace and, after a time², two women who were obviously friends joined the queue behind me. They proceeded to unload their shopping and, when done, the lady furthest back leant over and took my “Next Customer Please” thing and put it at the end of the conveyor. I thought this was a bit odd but said nothing and replaced it with another “Next Customer Please” thing which the lady then proceeded to pick up…

Music stopped, headphones out of ears, finest “seriously, what the fuck?” face applied and pointed towards the lady who was mid way through telling her friend that she would never buy reduced baked goods but broke off long enough to lamely state that it was her friends shopping. I just took the thing for her, put it back in its rightful place and corrected her with “No, that’s my shopping!”

I didn’t add that they were also my baked goods and the doughnuts are always reduced at that time of night, to be honest, I was quite taken aback, it’s not like there were lots of piles of shopping in the queue ahead of me and she saw her friend unload her basket so how she thought I managed to cordon off her stuff when I was already there with my shopping I do not know.

By now it was my turn at the checkout so I moved to the packing end and proceeded to do just that. Once packed I paid and, as I picked my bag up, noticed something was missing. I looked back and there was my box of serial, with the “Next Customer Please” thing in front of it. When I had put it back it was definitely behind the box of cereal so it would appear it got moved again. I hadn’t paid for it and I couldn’t be arsed arguing so I just left it and headed home wondering why so members of the population seem to posses a brain.

¹ Execution style: blindfolded, hands cuffed behind the back, pistol to the back of the head.

²You may want to keep using more³

³Sorry, Combichrist sample jumped into my head (“After a time, you may want to keep using more”). Brain Bypass from the album What The F^^k Is Wrong With You, Google it, it’s totally bizarre and very informative about cocaine and cocaine abuse⁴

⁴“cocaine abuse is when ongoing cocaine use leads to problems being around others” – just Google it. Incidentally the phrase “What’s wrong?” always starts Psy Storm by Decoded Feedback (on the album Combustion) off in my head. It samples THX 1138⁵ quite heavily.

⁵Early George Lucas film. It’s very bizarre.

Given my problems with Siri I decided to head to Temple and speak to someone about it. So, out with phone, Apple Store app, book appointment with genius at 12:20 (gives me the 20 minutes I need to get there), job done. The app even puts the appointment in my calendar.

At 12:20 I’m sat at the genius bar in the Chappelfield Temple showing the genius why problem. He instantly admits defeat, but, asks if he can pop out the back to consult ‘The Book’. I’ve no idea if ‘The Book’ is a real book, a folder full of paper, an online resource or just a really geeky person who works there with a vaguely amusing nickname. I’d like to think that if it were an online resource they’d have access to it front of house, but then that’s just one of the vagaries of the Apple Store.

A couple of minutes later and my genius returns, freshly boned up on the issue. The problem, he hypothesised, was to do with nicknames. The Zozo is in my contacts using her proper name, i.e. Zoe Davis, however, very few people call her Zoe so I’ve got her marked down with a nickname of Zo, which is how most people refer to her. Siri, it seems, uses both the relationship field for my contact and the nickname field to determin who my wife is. When you tell Siri “Zoe is my wife” it sets the relationship field and then tries to set the nickname to “My Wife”. Being well behaved it won’t overwrite an existing nickname which resulted in it getting confused on my phone. Deleting the nickname “Zo” and replacing with “My Wife” fixed the issue.

I’m not sure why Siri needs to do this. You’ve got the spouse field and surely it’s not hard to program it to use that field for “my wife”, “my husband”, “my partner”, “my other half” and “my spouse” to simply look up that field. You could even get slightly clever and code for people trying to fool the system by only including people marked as a spouse that had either no title, an ambiguous title or a gender specific title when doing the lookup.

I’m now learning how to talk to Siri properly as “text my wife, say ‘On my way home. Can you put the chicken in the oven please? Love you!’” was rendered as “On my was home can you put the chicken in the oven please have you”. I’m also going to have to get used to changing person when talking. Saying “Text my wife and tell her I love her” results in a text to my wife saying “I love her” which, rather than earning brownie points, is likely to be the basis for a long and protracted argument starting with the immortal line of “So who is she then?” and going rapidly downhill from there.

There’s a few things I’d like to see Siri do. “Check my email” tells me how many unread emails I have, but won’t read them to me. I’m not sure it’ll read texts either. I’d love to have it reading emails and having me reply without having to take the phone out of my pocket. I’d also like to be able to tweet things which, given the deep integration of twitter into iOS5 you’d think would be easy. I’d also like full Facebook integration. It’s still in beta so those things may come

One of the big features of the iPhone 4S is Siri, the voice enabled personal assistant. Siri understands natural language, so the marketing goes, and you can use it to perform a number of functions on the iPhone. Sounds great, and from the videos and reports I’ve seen it works great too. So what about in practice with my voice?

Well let’s start with actually using Siri: I can either press and hold the home button on the phone, press and hold the home button on my headphones or hold the unlocked phone to my ear. I then speak my request… which has me running into my first hurdle; I just feel like a complete twonk talking to my phone and saying “Text my wife, say ‘Do we need anything from the shops’”. Nope, I’ll be getting the phone out and typing that thank you very much.

Next up comes how well it actually works. At home last night I started playing with Siri and seeing how well it did things.

“Zoe is my wife”
“Would you like me to add Mrs Zoe Davis as your wife?”
“Yes”
“OK, I’ve added that relationship”
My wife’s contact details are then shown from my address book.

So far so good.

“Text my wife, say ‘testing’”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know who your wife is”

WTF?

“Who is my wife?”
“I do not who who Mrs Zoe Davis is”

???

Repeated fiddling with my contacts and setting my spouse manually didn’t seem to have any effect. Not good. Still, I guess I can just say “Text Zoe”, not as good, but at least it works.

What about reminders? I need to look for my old iPhone 3 so I can box it and get it ready to go to its next home.

“Remind me to find my phone on saturday”
“I’m sorry Dom, I do not have a number for you”

Er….

“New reminder for Saturday”
“Ok, I’m setting up a new reminder for Saturday, what would you like it to say?”
“Find my phone”
“OK, I’ve set that up for 9am on Saturday”
“Change time of reminder to 11am”
“I’m sorry, I can’t change the time of the reminder”

Great…

“what is the stock price for Barclays?”
“The stock price for Berkley closed at £230″
“What’s is the stick price for BAR Clays?”
“The stock price for Barclays PLC is £180.50″

Close, except the stock price is 180.5p, oops.

Voice controls for iPod playback are still there, but I really don’t see the point. Compare and contrast:

*Press and hold button* “Play” *Pause while the command is processed* “Playing”

With

*Click button once* (With headphones)
*Doubleclick home button* *Press play* (With the phone in my hand)

OK, I can tell it to play a specific track, artist or play list but since I can’t pronounce half the artists I listen to how the hell is Siri going to cope?

I can see it being useful for quick reminders (much more so when the API is released and it’s integrated with things like my shopping list program) and possibly while driving… except it needs a 3G signal when on the move and I live in Norfolk.

As a final note, I was going to dictate this using Siri, but sadly it translates my saying Siri as “silly” and I figured the amount of correcting would be too much to bother with. I should also point out the responses are from memory so they may not be quite word perfect.

I awoke this morning to a slight nip in the air from the open window. A nip that bought the promise of winter. A nip that gave credence to The Zozos claims of snow next week. I was all prepare to wax lyrical about the death of the wasps in the roof and the slow, freezing fate that awaited them; but instead I must talk iPhones.

On the 14th of this month I become obsolete. With twice the processing power and seven times the graphical power the iPhone 4S is going to overshadow my trusty iPhone 4 and make me lust over one. It’s happened before. When the iPhone 3GS came out I was locked into a contract with my old 3G and the cost to buy myself out and get the next iteration of shiny was just too much. I was forced to skip an iteration and wait for the 4. It was a dark time.

I’d rather assumed the same would happen this time. I fact I was praying for an iPhone 4S rather than a 5 as I was sure I’d be unable to join in with this iteration and would have to wait until the next. It seems I should have been careful what I wished for. Unlike previous models it’s been over a year between the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S and this leaves me with a dilemma. You see, 6 months after the 4S comes out I go out of contract and can upgrade. But I then don’t know how kong it is until the iPhone 5 and how long I’d be tied to the 4S before I could upgrade. The 4S is faster shiny, the 5 will be faster and new shiny, an important distinction. This calls for careful checking of the various contracts and tactical upgrading. It also means trying to suppress my inherent need to buy shiny things the instant they come out. Not easy when the limitations to me getting them are lifted 2 days before the winterval religibreak.

I should probably also point out that if I get a 4S on a 12 month contract and they release the 5 midway through next year I will have to buy new toys simply so I can throw them out of the pram. Perhaps buying one outright and getting a cheaper monthly deal will be the way forward.

Recently they have made the self service checkouts at Morissons less annoying. How? By shutting then up. Previously it would be:

“Do you have your own bag?”
“Please put your bag in the bagging area”
“Please scan a barcode or select an item”
*beep*
“Please place the item in the bag”
“Please scan a barcode or select an item”
*beep*
“Please place the item in the bag”
“Please scan a barcode or select an item”
*beep*
“Please place the item in the bag”

And so on and so forth, usually with the odd “Please wait, an assistant is coming” thrown in for good measure. There are four self service tills so it was a cacophony of requests to scan or place items.

Thankfully someone has decided we’re all reasonably au fait with the whole scanning and packing thing and we can work it out for ourselves without the incessant prompting, just the pertinent instructions at the start and the end of the process. For those who really don’t get it there is still the assistant.

For various reasons I have a number of accounts with my bank, including two current accounts. One of these is used daily, has money in it and has a large overdraft facility. The other one is used rarely, has very little money in it and has a very small overdraft facility. It’s also tied to to Sony playstation account.

Now, if you recall, Sony had their servers hacked quite conclusively a few months back and handed out customer details for tens of thousands of people. Including, it would seem, me. I say this because I received an automated call from my bank on Friday afternoon regarding suspicious transaction on the card. A quick chat with a customer services person later and we’ve established my card is being fraudulently used.

The good news is that only £10 was actually spent. There were a load if auths for £1, but they’re not going anywhere now. The bank has refunded my money, the card us cancelled and a new one on order. Could have been a lot worse.

The £10 itself was used to buy a mobile phone top up. I like to believe that the mobile company will be able to deactivate the phone it was used on, but I suspect that is wishful thinking. If I were in power the phone would have been identified, located and a cruise missile would be heading towards it at this very moment. Sometimes not having your own intelligence service and military is very annoying.

The biggest problem I have with Amazon is it’s so damn easy to buy stuff. I’m already registered so there’s no faffing and it’s just a question of search, locate, buy now. Then comes the waiting which puts a disconnect between the buying and receiving, something that I hate. Then there’s the anticipation, is it what I hope it is, or is it two right shoes, neither in the style I’ve ordered (which has actually happened, although the vendor in question was most apologetic and sorted full refunds)?

With the loss of my unlimited data plan for the iPhone, ban on headphones at work and irregular club visits my source of finding new music has shifted away from last.fm and back to buying obscure compilations in the hope of finding some gems. I was made aware of one such compilation recently via Facebook and purchased it from, surprise surprise, Amazon (yes, yes, I know, optical media, how quaint, but it’s not on iTunes so one has to improvise).

My triple CD box set, including such delightful gems as Suicide Comando’s “Die Mother@&£%er, Die” (in this context the Die is the English ‘die’ not the German ‘the’), arrived yesterday. I wasted no time in ripping the packaging open and feeding CD 1 into iTunes. Minutes later and CD 2 was also ripped. The third CD, however, prompted a warning. Did I want to overwrite existing songs? Hmm, now I know I have some of these tracks already, but as part of different albums, surely it’s not going to complain about that? A quick look at my music library showed I did, indeed, have that CD on my machine. Assuming I’d messed up and started at CD 3 I put CD 1 into the drive. Same warning. So I took a look at the two CDs left in the box to see if I’d got them muddled. There was CD 2 and… CD 2. Well that explains it. Minutes later and the whole lot is back in it’s original packaging with a returns label on it. A replacement should be with me tomorrow. Hopefully, this time, with 1 CD 2 and a separate CD 3.

Morrisons sells grapes in ziplock bags. I guess the idea is it’s easy to reseal them once they’re opened. A little too easy it would seem as I saw one guy open up two bags, transfer much of the contents of one to the other, reseal them and walk off with a now bulging bag a grapes, leaving a rather skinny bag on the shelf. From the looks of things this wasn’t the first time he’d done it either. And it’s not like it was a behoodied yoof either. This guy was in his 50′s, if not 60′s. Makes you wonder what other little scams people have and how much of it goes on.

On Saturday The Zozo and I are off to Peterborough to visit the largest Kiddiecare in the universe*. These people have everything from the tiniest little gloves for babies hands to prams to cots to scanning rooms, delivery suites and off the shelf, pre born babies**. We are in the market for a pram so will be glad to find the widest selection of Silver Cross prams anywhere*** along with car seats, free fitting of said car seats and the ability to see if the prams actually fit in your car. Also on the list is a state of the art nappy bin and any other cool things I see. It’s going to be fun. And expensive. Very expensive.

Because the products and services sprawl over three floors and because it’s 2 hours drive away we’ll be making a day of it. What is a little worrying is that we both seem more excited about this day trip than our holiday the week afterwards :S

*Claim may not be true. Geographical area where size supremacy is held may be smaller than stated.

**Product line may have been exaggerated.

***Anywhere being an undefined geographical area that may or may not be larger than the store itself