Dom Davis (The Blog)

Today The Zozo, Po and I are in Crew Green, Wales. It’s only just Wales, but it’s Wales nonetheless. Tomorrow we need to be in Thursford, Norfolk. That’s 200 miles away, or four and a quarter hours drive. Or at least it would be if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s going to be snow. Lots of it.

I have two weapons to deploy here. The first is simply setting off early. If we get back in good time we’ll just go home first. The second weapon is satnav with live traffic updates.

The live traffic updates is something I pay a subscription fee for but it is well worth it. It receives updates on the traffic conditions for your journey and plans alternative routes round problem areas. For example, yesterday the A14 was moving very slowly. The satnav informed us it could save 16 minutes taking an alternative route and off we went, skirting round the jam. I’m hoping that it will earn it’s money and stop us from bring stranded anywhere.

Just in case there’s also blankets in the car and we’ll stock up with provisions.

Technology is a marvellous thing. 10 years ago my mobile phone could do voice and SMS. If did so on a two line monochrome LCD display with chunky big pixels.

Today my mobile phone can, completely wirelessly, log onto a secure network from anywhere in the country that has phone signal and remotely log into and control my computer in a completely different part of the country, or indeed world. This is done on an ultra high resolution full colour touchscreen display. It can so this while playing tunes from a vast library stored in it’s memory and allowing me to seamlessly switch back to my game when I’m done. This is just one of a million functions it can perform.

…

Technology is a bitch. 10 years ago if work contacted me in the morning (assuming they even could as I was often underground on the tube) all I could do is offer a ‘few top of my head’ suggestions and tell them I’d fix it when I got in. Entertainment was via a newspaper but at least it was free

Today, when work contact me in the morning, it interrupts my game and involves me spending more of my precious data allowance logging in remotely and trying to fix the problem on a screen that’s 6 times smaller than my screen at work and also has to double as mouse and keyboard (effectively making it 12 times smaller during input).

So after reading about, and getting excited about¹ the release of iOS 4.2 for my iPhone I promptly went home and forgot all about it. I was reminded this morning by Goron after reading his Facebook status² and thought it would be a fantastic idea to update my phone before heading to work.

Heading upstairs I booted up the big mac, kicked off the update and headed to the shower³. Shaved and showered I headed back into the bedroom to get dressed and check on the progress. Still downloading. Hmmm…

Dressed and with 8 minutes to go on the download I headed downstairs to pack my bag, say goodbye to my wife⁴ and generally finish getting ready for work. Back upstairs… updating firmware with a slowly updating progress bar. Oh, and an alert for it being bin day.

Bins emptied and put out I headed back upstairs. Still updating firmware. Well that’s OK, I still have, oooh, 45 seconds before I need to go. Hmmm…

Coat on. Bag ready, 1 minute past leaving time⁵. Still updating firmware, but very nearly done…

…nearly…

…done. Restarting phone. Great… Hurry up! I’m now 2 minutes late and missing the train is awkward… Hmmm, another progress bar. Now what? At least this one is going faster…

3 minutes late, progress bar is gone… syncing? You’ve just sunk! [sic] Come on, come on, comeoncomeoncomeon! …Done!

Grab phone, shout goodbyes to The Zozo, run out of door, sprint to station, jump on train with about 60 seconds to spare.

So what does iOS 4.2 give me over 4.1? Not sure really. Nothing that I’m going to use before I get home tonight. So why did I nearly make myself miss the train to install it? See point 1 below

¹ Hello, geek
² See point 1, and yes, my friends have geek tendencies.
³ Yes, geeks shower. You’re confusing us with the socially awkward Nerd. Very different beast.
⁴ See. Geek, not nerd.
⁵ No, I couldn’t just leave without my phone. See point 1.

When the iPhone first came out over here o2, who were the only carrier selling the phone, had a special iPhone tariff with an unlimited data plan. Unlike most unlimited data plans the iPhone one really was unlimited. Not unlimited within the boundaries of a fair use policy, not unlimited up to a fixed hard limit; true unlimited means unlimited all you can eat data usage. They made quite a big thing of this. Of course back then there wasn’t much the iPhone could do to hurt o2s data networks. It was web browsing, email and a little bit of YouTube on 3G networks and wifi.

Fast forward a few years and the iPhone can now play live TV over the airwaves. People have even been tethering their laptops to them (even though they’re not supposed to, naughty people!). The result is that o2 were finding that some people were abusing the unlimited means unlimited contracts rather more than they were meant to. Of course, being a phone company they have one or two tricks up their sleeve.

“Want a shiny new iPhone 4? Don’t want to pay full price? No matter, here is a nice, subsidised phone with a shiny new 18 month contract and limited data plan.”

And that was that. My choices where keep my £25/month iPhone simplicity contract with it’s unlimited data plan which, under the terms of the contract, cold easily get written out at any time, and pay something like £600 for a phone. Or I could give o2 £35/month, give up my unlimited data and pay nearer £200. It doesn’t rake a marks genius to work out the best option here. (Not getting an iPhone 4 was not an option. This is me we’re talking about.)

o2 did soften the blow. For the first few months they were giving an introductory offer when we could still have unlimited data, but after that it’s onto the capped tariffs we go.

A few days ago I got a text stating that my freebie unlimited period was over. I would now be capped at 500Mb/month and please could I restart my phone. o2 were quick to assure me that they would let me know if I hit 80% of my data allowance and kindly let me know I could buy a bigger allowance for more money. I was then informed that last month I’d used less than half my allowance.

This last nugget of information was not quite as useful as they might have thought given I also spent half the month in Borneo with my data connection turned off (the kind offer of £6/Mb in roaming charges wasn’t to my taste).

With absolutely no idea how much data I’m ingesting I’ll be spending this month being a bit frugal and checking my usage on the website. Next month I’ll remember to reset the usage monitor on the phone

So, what with stag dos, weddings, honeymoons, general laziness and a myriad of other excuses I’ve not been to the gym since September. Add to that a high sugar, high fat diet and I’ve been getting steadily wider. I did mean to start rectifying this last week, even going so far as to walk to the gym only to find my membership had expired. Unlike pretty much most gyms in this country, my gym doesn’t need 4 years notice to cancel a perpetual direct debit. You pay upfront for 6 months. If you want more you pay again after 6 months. Simples If only it was a tiny bit cheaper…

Anyway, last week I had to go for checkup with the urology unit in Norwich which, among other things, involved weighing me. Now, I only accept weighing from the gym scales as, regardless of how accurate they are, I’ll get similar readings for similar weights and I’m wearing the same clothes each time. Even so, and bearing in mind I was fully clothed, resplendent with jumper, the result was scary. That was it, come Saturday diets and exercise regimes start again!

Previously I’ve been using a collection of apps to track calories and exercise, all offline. Goron, over at soapyfrog has been using My Fitness Pal for similar reasons and has been extolling it’s virtues. Given it was free I thought I’d give it a go and, as a result, have a public profile for you to peek at if you care. Whether I stick with that app or return to my old one very much depends on the food database.

The good news, however, is that, according to the gym scales, the damage of the past 2 months isn’t as bad as feared. I’m a stone over my ideal weight but I can loose that quick enough.

The Zozo does not like being woken up with nasty blaring or beeping sounds in the morning. Normally we use her alarm which manages to play about 5 seconds of whatever radio station it’s tuned to before she turns it off. Away from home the job of alarm falls on my iPhone that, normally, plays the crickets alarm sound which, as the name suggests, is the gentle sound of crickets chirping.

This plan works fine… in England. The night before our early morning treetop canopy walk (5:45am alarm) lying in our lodge in the middle of the rainforest with the sounds of the forest all turned up to 11 a thought occurred to me: how am I going to hear my crickets alarm sound over the noise of, picking a sound at random, all the crickets? Clearly a different alarm sound was needed. Thankfully there are many sounds to choose from and a suitable alternative was found. 5:45am happened and we were rewarded with gibbons

I did try to record the nighttime sounds using my phone. If the recording did them any justice, and if I can work out how to get them off the phone and onto here I’ll post them. I may even post the video of gibbons The Zozo took.

Borneo, the Menanggul river, a tributary of the Kinabatungan river and over two hours by fast boat from Sandakan. We’re gently motoring upstream in a small boat, just me, The Zozo, our guide and the driver. To our left a troupe of short tailed macaques gather up their young and disappear into the rainforest. Proboscis monkeys clamber about in the trees to our right. A kingfisher sits on a branch, surveying the river. Ahead a massive fresh water crocodile glides through the water. The only sounds are those of the forest and the gentle put-put-put of our outboard engine.

Behind and to my right a new sound joins in. A frog. Quickly I turn, camera in hand to see the source. The sound is clear, close by. Hopefully I’ll be able to find and photograph the creature, add it to the ever growing list of new and wonderful animals now captured on my camera. The sound is familiar. I’ve heard it before. Recently in fact. But where? I rack my brains. That day alone I’d spent hours in two completely different patches of primary rainforest, but that had been primates more than amphibians. Was it the night viewing we did at our resort a few days before? No, we didn’t see any frogs and it seems too long ago. I heard this sound much more recently. Today in fact…

…in the car to the jetty. It was the guides mobile phone ringtone. Middle of the bloody rainforest. No mains electricity, no mains water, no roads, but there’s mobile signal. Of course the 100m tall red and white coms tower festooned with mobile masts, satellite dishes and microwave uplinks a few kilometres downstream would be the source of that. There was a road to that.

I’m not sure what upset me the most, the fact that you travel for miles to experience the wilds of the rain forest, to get up close with nature and some bastard had erected a ruddy great tower so they could easily communicate with the teams who where happily cutting down the rainforest and replacing it with palm oil plantations; or the fact that out here, in a developing country, in the middle of nowhere you could get a better mobile signal than I get at home. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was a full 3G coverage area.

The new version of wordpress for my phone is doing my head in. Before I could bounce in and out of the app happily gathering links, lyrics, and other useless shit to scatter among my posts, but not any more. The new ‘autosave’ feature means that rather than coming back to my post in the exact state I left it I now come back to it in the state it was in the last autosave. Or blank, as was my experience just now. It’s buggy, crashes, doesn’t do what it used to do and is generally making blogging on the move a pain rather than just a bit fiddly. You lot are now 3 posts down. Sorry.

You know those days where you’re just flat? Today is one of those days, or at least this afternoon is. I blame it entirely on the fact that this morning was a bit of a shock to me, I’ve had two massive anti-climaxes at work over the past two days, I’m going away in just over a week and, frankly, I can’t be arsed with being in work at the moment. Not the worlds best attitudes, I know, but we all have days like that.

It didn’t help that someone has dicked about with the network at work which means I’ve had to take my iPhone off it and leave it on the mobile network for it to work¹. That said it has helped with one of the solutions used to lift me from my funk. I was sat flicking through my music collection in that ‘nothing really hits the spot’ frame of mind which results in about 4 seconds of a song getting played before you hit next… next… next… next…

Sod it.

My phone wasn’t on the office WiFi so getting and downloading some new music wasn’t going to hurt anyone, and I’ve been thinking it was time for new tunes for a while now. Time to investigate Solitary Experiments in a ‘buy and download a couple of the highest rated albums and see what we think’ type way. A mixed bag thus far, although the good tracks are fitting my mood nicely and helping lift it a little. I’ll give it all a good listen over the next few days and sort the wheat from the chaff.

Anyway, all this will be a moot point shortly as my future wife² and I are going out for dinner tonight which is guaranteed to lift the mood. Just need to get home first.

¹ And by ‘work’ I really mean download my email because the same network change means it’s not working on my laptop.
² 9 days baby, we’re into single digits!

Twitter is something that I’ve been playing with on and off since it started. My first foray into Twitter was somewhat curtailed by the fact that it was constantly being swamped and the servers were forever down, or unable to cope with the load. Recently I’ve rejoined Twitter more as a consumer than a producer. I’m read @stephenfry among others and post the odd comment. For me Twitter occupies an odd space. Unlike many I don’t put my Facebook statuses on twitter, mainly because Twitter is much less private. What vaguely interesting stuff I have to say tends to go up here so Twitter gets forgotten about with the odd sarcastic comment punted out towards it.

In a bid to increase my Twitter usage (and possibly the number of followers I have) I’ve included my Twitter feed on the right hand side (assuming you’re viewing the full fat version of the site, if you’re reading this via RSS or on an iPhone you’ll be missing out, if you still can’t see it then look lower, it’s under the tag cloud ). I’ve also installed an app on my iPhone that allows me to tweet the current track I’m listening too. Given I’m not going to tweet every track (as that would get old for everyone rather fast) it will make a good barometer for what sort of mood I’m in.

Anyway, feel free to read… or not