Dom Davis (The Blog)

So let’s give you an idea of what it’s like to live with my brain and show you what I have to deal with on an almost constant basis. This morning, as I disembarked from the train at Norwich station I thought to myself “Thursday!”, as one does when gearing oneself up for the working day ahead.

This thought rolled around for a while before dislodging some random factoid regarding the naming of the week days and was replaced with “Thor’s Day”, that is, the day named after the Norse god Thor. For some reason this factoid irritated me. “Why”, I thought to myself, “why does Thor get a day?”

At this point a flood of tangential thoughts ensued. Half remembered details of Norse mythology were marshalled in defence of the name; the fact that other gods, such as Freya were also given days; and simply that the week days were named long ago which means their roots had lost much of their meaning, and is also evident in the degradation in pronunciation and spelling. What stood out for me in this cacophony of internal monolog was that Thor had a big hammer. This quickly joined forces with the notion that he was probably over compensating for something and simply added to my ire over his having a day named after him; logic and evidence be damned.

From there is was but a short hop to deciding that I too should have a day. After all, I am the third most important person I know (after Willow and The Zozo) and, since there are 7 days in every week I should easily get a look in. Me, being me, voiced my concern over Thor having his own day, his overcompensating the hammer and my demands for my own day on Facebook. It was here that I first named the day and saw it written down: Domsday.

Upon seeing Domsday I was instantly reminded of “doomsday” and, noting how Thursday was in fact a derivation of Thor’s Day I wondered if my own day might similarly suffer from a deviation from the initial spelling. Could it not be, I surmised, that Doomsday was derived from Dom’s Day and that I already had a day?

Further examination of this postulation had me thinking that not for me some common or garden, run-of-the-mill weekday that was simply churned out once every 7 days with more significance placed upon things happening on the day than the day itself. No, I had the most important of days: I had the last day. After my day there are no more days. Ever.

This addendum to my train of though, and initial complaint was posted as a comment to my Facebook status. In order that I might drive home the victory that I had achieved of one of the more senior Norse gods I felt it necessary to end the missive, in capital letters: IN YOUR FACE, THOR!

While my initial irritation was not with her, and while I did not explicitly state it, it should also be noted that my train of thought also bested Freya, another god. Having, as I had, gained the better of two gods, albeit rather old ones who, in the case of Thor at least, are not really actively worshiped any more, in the space of time it took me to disembark the train, negotiate the ticket barrier and exit the station, I was able to replace the annoyance I had felt with a feeling of jubilation and triumph which placed a smile in my face and a spring in my step.

And so it is that I headed to work, completely and happily oblivious to the fact that my daydreaming and bizarre thought processes had caused me to forget to send my usual morning text to The Zozo wishing her a good day and expressing my love for her, usually via the shorthand notation of x’s for kisses. This failure of memory on my part allowed me to unwittingly clutch defeat from the jaws of victory without even knowing it.

As such the moral of the story is this: do not take on the gods, no matter how old or minor in today’s pantheon, you will lose. #LFMF

Despite being a Tuesday yesterday was technically a Monday. And not just any Monday. It’s the first Monday of the year. The granddaddy of them all. The one that tells you that you have to claw your way through yet another year of Monday’s, each and every one of them out to get you.

Being a Tuesday That Was Really A Monday and being upset about not being able to foist a full week of work on us after informing us that Christmas Is Over, Monday took it upon itself to really get stuck in by giving me the gift of hard drive failure. In my laptop. The computer I now use at home since my big computer is at work. That computer I now do all my photography and freelance work on. Cock!

Thankfully this is not quite the end of the world. Short term I have my iPad for day to day use (which has pretty much replaced the laptop for much of my computing activity at home) and, push comes to shove I can either stay late at work to do stuff on my big machine, or steal The Zozos laptop and use that. I may even be able to coax enough life out of the drive to copy stuff off it before it fails completely.

Longer term there is a complete set of backups. Much of my stuff now lives in the cloud and so will simply sync automatically onto whatever computer I tell it too. The rest lives on an external hard drive which was last attached to the machine the last time I had it on. So my data is safe.

The problem is more one of cost. The period between Christmas and March is a phenomenally expensive one, what with Christmas, most of the birthdays in my family, service charges on my flat, the need to purchase a new rail card, accountants fees and the pound of flesh HMRC invariably wants (or, on good years, the accountants fees are covered by the rebate). Much as I’d love a shiny new, high speed solid state disk in my laptop it’s not something that’s going to happen without dipping into the savings. Sadly, nor is simply buying a replacement hard drive. It doesn’t help that disk prices have skyrocketed due to flooding in Thailand. While I’m sure the accountant can write off the cost of the disk against freelance earnings that’s not until next year, which doesn’t help with the needing the disk now.

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.

There was a blog post yesterday, despite evidence to the contrary, and a controversial one at that. It simply didn’t survive long enough to actually get posted. My iPad, which is now the principle method of blogging, only has wifi and I can’t post on the move. What i do instead is compose the entry, then publish it when I get in the office. While this is great in theory there is one element of it that fails to work in practice: should the blogging application crash, or be told to shut down by iOS then the post appears to be lost. What I shall try today is hitting e publish button, watching it fail miserably and hoping that it will still be on the failed publish queue when I get in to the office so I can republish for your edification and delight. As a precaution I shall also be cutting and pasting the post into my trusty notebook app for recovery should my plan fail.

The good news is that is would appear that the new tariffs for the iPhone 4S, which I will hopefully be getting soon, are both cheaper than my current iPhone tariff and include tethering so I can hok my iPad to my iPhone and publish in the move. That’s the theory at least.

While we’re on the subject of fondleslabs its the release of iOS 5 today which is very exciting. I’m not sure if I’ll have to wait until tonight before it’s available but rest assured I shall be upgrading all my iDevices pretty sharpish. iCloud is also arriving soon (new iTunes to support that) and there’s lots of excitement in the land of Apple. That said it may be time for me to bite the bullet and upgrade my main computer from Snow Leopard to Lion. I’m still not convinced with Lion whereas I am still very happy with Snow Leopard (there’s a certain irony that Snow leopards are my favourite cat while lions are my least favourite) but time, tide and Apple wait for no man and to not upgrade is to fall behind.