Archive for June, 2011

Italy is a crazy place. It has some amazing sights but you literally take your life in your hands when you drive on their roads and all their cafes and restaurants close between 12 and 3 for lunch!

On the hole, Italians are very friendly people. That’s technically prejudice, I’ve only met a small section of the Italian population so I can’t really judge them all as friendly but as people don’t seem to mind positive stereotypes (or even negative stereotypes as long as they think they are positive – most Americans are flattered when you call them patriotic, the socially acceptable little brother of racism) though so I’m going to continue with that statement.

Unfortunately, there is a small minority of Italians which are simply ungrateful.

For example, this girl:

Elettra is in the process of moving house, and she didn’t have anywhere to put her rather large keyboard for a week. That’s this one:

Luckily, this good looking hero stepped up, when she asked him if she could store it in his apartment:

You would imagine she would be grateful for that.

So when someone else in the conversation suggested that it would be a great prop for a Jimmy Turtlehouse film, you would think at very least she would laugh along politely.

Of course, this is an entirely hypothetical situation, given I have no contact with the amazing rock star legend that is Jimmy Turtlehouse. But still.

As a consequence, you would presume then that when you come to help actually move the keyboard into your apartment, you won’t be greeted with sentences such as “even if you wanted to use the keyboard for your movies, you can’t, as I’ve got the charger!”

Ungrateful is what it is, ungrateful.

I’ve now had my iPad 2 for around two months. There are probably two words I would use to describe it – magical and revolution.

I would also agree that it sports an unbelievable price tag. It’s a lot of money, especially considering the other tablets which are coming out now. But these tablets are rubbish. It’s like comparing a £150 netbook to my £1,200 MacBook Pro and it’s the same situation – there are really two distinct classes of devices and because they have come out in reasonably similar time frames we find the iPad incredibly expensive. It is expensive, I will say that, but it’s such, such good value for money.

I really can’t think of a device which has changed the way I use technology in such a short period of time.

Comparable events I guess would be when I first began using computers, arguably you can never really top that. And when I first got my iPhone, that was a revolution as I was upgrading from my much loved, but a little featuring lacking k800i so for the first time had mobile internet access, allowing my to surf the web, use Google Maps, Twitter, Facebook and hundreds of other web services on the move.

But equally, the iPad 2 has simply changed the way I use technology. I don’t cart my laptop around any more, I don’t even bring it to work. It acts as a desktop mostly now, sitting on my desk hucked up to my wide screen monitor, and I use my iPad whenever I’m on the move.

I will switch from my laptop to my iPad to check Twitter because the experience is so much better. I no longer have to make a choice between browsing the web and reading emails or relaxing on the sofa, because it’s no longer a hassle to bring my internet device with me. I probably do more web browsing on my iPad than any other device now.

I don’t watch TV on anything other than my iPad now. Beyond the few times when I have it on in the background or we’re collectively watching a film, any time I’m watching TV by myself I will watch it on my iPad. Same for anything I stream off my media server.

It’s the first thing I look at in the morning when I’m checking what today’s weather forecast is and it’s the last thing I look at at night as I do a final check of my emails before getting some sleep. A job traditionally given over to my phone.

I buy most of my books on it via Kindle or iBooks, and do a lot of my reading on there as well. If I have a PDF to read, I’ll send it over to my iPad using Dropbox and read it on there, rather than reading it on my monitor, or printing it.

Finally, sometimes I just sit and gaze at its awesomeness. I mean, the thing is 8.8mm thick! That’s thinner than my iPhone 4, the world’s thinnest smartphone! It’s actually thinner than the tablets used in Star Trek – that means it’s thinner than the futurist Gene Roddenberry imagined tablets would be 300 years in the future. That’s really, really thin!

The point of that last paragraph is that it feels like a real advancement in technology, like the first time you browsed the internet or used a touchscreen.

The batter is a revolution too. It’s quoted as ten hours and you actually do get ten hours, and that is actual active using time – if you just leave it on standby, it will run for about a month.

The change here is that you no longer really need to think about it. Gone are the days when you would turn on a device and wonder if it had enough battery life to do what you wanted. With the iPad, you just turn it on and use it, and there is always enough battery life. You just charge it up, once or twice a week and it doesn’t matter if you leave the house with only 30% battery life because that is three hours of usage still!

In short, the iPad is amazing.

Recently, I felt the need to speak out in support of Sony Ericsson. It’s a big decision – Elina’s recent choice to purchase on of their devices mean she is now barred from ever returning to her home nation. However, given so many of our blog posts are moaning about technology has let us down, I thought I would offer a word of encouragement.

This is my Sony Ericsson k800i. It’s battered, every corner is chipped off, the infrared censor has come off the side completely and now there is a little creator where it used to be, the quick keys have been totally scrubbed of paint and you have to ram the joystick as hard as you can every now and then to get it working again.

But it still works, and this phone is now five years old.

I’m not sure I have anything other piece of technology that is equally as old and equally as used. It’s still my alarm every morning despite the fact I have since upgraded my phone three times and am now sporting my very, very much loved iPhone 4.

Phones, computers, laptops and many other gadgets have come and gone and it’s not like I buy cheap. My MacBook Pro is now starting to feel it’s age despite its £1,200 price tag and not yet having reached its second birthday.

As such, it really is a credit to Sony Ericsson that they can build a phone that can put up with the punishment I give it and still be in usable order after such a long period.

Of course, Twitter isn’t always informed opinion.

Last Saturday the EDL held a protest in Dewsbury. Although, the first I knew about it, was when a bunch of their supporters came running past my window in the centre of Leeds. Luckily, as I explained last week, Twitter soon had be clued up what was going on.

I spent a bit of time watching the Twitter updates, with both sides tweeting live, and had to giggle a bit when a guy named Ged Robinson kept asking them what was the point in doing protest events when a much better way to engage would be to talk to the moderate Muslims.

This may be a good point, but there is a certain level if irony with someone spending a large amount of their time engaging in the futile activity of trying to put a rational argument to people who will never accept such points, telling them their efforts are futile.

The police were soon hot on the trail however and within a few minutes, there were half a dozen police vans parked outside my house.

After the HSoWY meeting last Thursday, we headed towards The George for a few drinks. Unfortunately (or should I saw fortunately) The George was closed. So we headed on to Millenium Square, to hit the Cuthbert Brodrick.

While I will admit that it was a little nosier than I was expecting, we soon found a nice quite place to sit down outside. And the advantage of going to Cuthbert was the drinks were both cheap and varied.

Not to mention that when I ordered my ham, egg and chips, it cost £2.10. £2.10! You probably couldn’t make it that cheap just based on buying the raw ingredients, let alone the labour costs which could come to 20 times that once I had gone to the shops, cooked it and cleaned up.

There really is no justification for disliking ‘Spoons.

At last Thursday’s Humanist Society of West Yorkshire meeting, Brian Layfield and Mark Edon presented a talk on Creationism.

Brian is a long time member of HSoWY but also father of Steven Layfield, a well known creationist who is now head of Science at Emmanuel College. Mark is secretary of the British Centre for Science Education (BCSE for short) and has previously spoken at both Skeptics and A-Soc.

On Wednesday, I received a letter from the company that runs my car park.

It stated that some permit holders where parking there on a Sunday even though their permit did not entitle them to and if this continued, they would get their parking enforcement company to start issuing tickets.

Now, I have no idea if they sent this to everyone or not, but I do know that I am pretty much the only person who parks there on a Sunday. So I can’t help but feeling a little bit victimised by this.

Apparently, even though I have been parking there for two years now without any problems even after explaining to them when I first signed up I would be there all the time, the standard permit I have only covers Monday to Saturday and if you want to park there on a Sunday, you have to pay extra.

This is despite the fact that all council car parks are free on a Sunday and nobody parks there anyway so it isn’t like they need the space.

You could of course argue that this is just a company trying to pull as much cash as it can from every available orifice but pragmatically, it’s just them being wankers. They make virtually no money out of having this separate pay extra policy because no permit holders park their on a Sunday anyway, so the only person they are getting extra money out of is me. Their price gouging brings them little reward, but plenty of angry blogging.

Last Sunday saw the June meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. This month’s meeting saw a very elaborate array of discussions with topics ranging from The moral landscape and global politics to exactly how you should cook extra thick steak. Big thanks to Gijsbert for his excellent news round up as usual.

At around 4pm this afternoon, dozens of people, some wearing St George’s Crosses came running past my window, followed by a few dozen police officers and half a dozen police vans. There are still seven police vans a police car parked outside my house.

What was going on?

Well, my first guess was that there was some kind of EDL protest happening.

Unfortunately, traditional news outlets can’t keep up. There is nothing on the BBC Leeds website, nor the Yorkshire Post website. There never is.

The one place you could find out what was going on however, was Twitter. A quick search for the words “EDL” showed my a long series of posts about the group having a demo in Dewsbury today, next to the train station, they had then moved to Leeds and were now running around the city centre.

I could even confirm most of these details on West Yorkshire Police‘s official Twitter account.

That’s the great thing about Twitter. You’re right – nobody does give a fuck when Lily Allen puts the kettle on and tweets about it, but when it comes to breaking news, Twitter really is bringing something special to the game.