The Blog of G

What with all the debacle this week between eircom and Smart Telecom, we’re now in the market for a new voice carrier as we had been a very happy Smart customers for over a year now.

Prior to that we were eircom’s customer for 18 month’s give or take and I’ll be cold in the ground before that every happens again. I got the impression from repeated “technical issues” going unresolved until the regulator, Comreg, stepped in that eircom couldn’t care less about there domestic customers. Strangely, our migration to Smart coincided with a polar change in the quality of service.

Since Smart took over our voice traffic we have not had an issue since, compared to every 2-3 months previously.Unfortunately, Smart could not provide us Broadband so we were in the unusual situation of having our voice services from Smart and our Data from eircom.

Now, I’m not a petty man, really I’m not (ask Elly if you won’t take my word for it ) but from what I have heard reading various articles and blogs this week it would appear that eircom turned off Smarts voice customers ’cause Smart hadn’t paid there bill, then hired 500 hundred new temporary “switcher” staff the same day and I even heard a rumour that eircom had actually refused a payment from Smart. To me this stinks of Anti-competitive behaviour short of sending a masked men with AK-47′s round the smart offices, I can’t actually think of any way it could have abused it’s position more. As a result I will be cancelling my broadband with eircom and seeing as how if I have a land-line I’m paying eircom line rental one way or another That’s gotta go as well.

This leaves me in a rather difficult position, despite living in the greater Dublin area with many broadband providers available to me I have a choice of 3 apparently, once you rule out DSL (cause they need a land line) and satellite (latency is too high for good voice) 2 of these (QBS and Digiweb) are listed on the governments Broadband website. The other, NTL, isn’t listed for some reason.So far we have only confirmed that NTL can provide us service, but the others will be contacted and checked out as well before a final decision is made. As for the voice service well again there are 3 choices, Skype, Blueface and Skytel, actually thanks to Tom Raftery maybe only two.

What’s our holy grail for voice?

Before I get on with our main review I feel I have to mention this keyboard, all I can say is this is a work of art no more no less, I so want one and here’s hoping Santa will be good to me.

 Now back on topic, I have is a simple 128mb flash based unbranded player, hangs round my neck on lariat style headphones and holds little bit more than an hours worth of toonz so only minor overlap on an average workout.

If I’m being honest, I inherited this little guy, from my sweetie last christmas cause someone (ahem) got her a shiny new 6Gb Rio player.

While the 128mb capacity is not wonderful it only takes a couple of minutes to load a different set of songs on it so not a big hassle. I would be lying though if I said the new “clip-on” shuffle hadn’t tempted me when I saw the video of Steve Jobs Launching it, but thanks to not having the cash to drop straight away, I discovered this little iRiver player a few days later and I think I’ll wait for it

Unlike most people in the world today, I don’t swoon over ipods, I think there over priced, have way to many restrictions and well to be honest, I don’t follow the herd mindlesly, if there is a good reason to follow the herd then yes of course follow but to do so blindly is somewhat shortsighted. So the rest of the world can keep bleating on about how great there ipod is even though it’s there third warranty replacement and they had to reformat the thing cause they had to re-install windows and the case scratched within seconds of being removed from packaging.

 

 

So we drove to Cork this afternoon, yup Lucan to Cork on a friday afternoon, the journey can be best described as sauntering, we got checked into our hotel and headed out to try and meet up with a few people although we hadn’t let anyone know we would be about.

So it was about 8pm when we left the hotel. We walked around Cork from MacCurtain st. to “The thirsty Scholar” but no luck meeting any other campers. Ah well, I got to wander around Cork for the first time in over 20 years that I wasn’t there on business and I have to say there was a fantastic “vibe” about the city, maybe it was all the students on the street or the smell of fresh pizza dough in the air but it reminded me of the electricity that was in the air in the Temple bar of the late eighties and early nineties, before it was “improved”

On the way back to the hotel I snapped the picture above with the compact camera. I’m stunned that it even picked up the light but not as stunned as how steady my hand was for a long exposure, especially considering I have had one or two

I can’t wait to get out around this fantastic city with the 5200, I saw some gorgeous pictures just waiting to be taken.

All righty then, well welcome to the first of my weekly features, Wednesday is gadget day!

OK, so a while back I posted a list of gadgets and said that I would be following up with mini reviews of my own personel favourite gadgets, here’s the link to the post.

Anywho, that’s what I’m gonna be doing for the first few of these weekly posts. This week i’m kickin’ it all off with my HP ipaq 6515.

The 6515 is, actually I should say was (a new model has been released), marketed as a mobile communicator, now to be fair it does have a lot of mobile communications type features, but it is primarily a windows based PDA. So it does all the usual PDA type features…

Calendar, Address book, Tasklists, e-mail via sync with outlook or Exchange push, pocket word, pocket excel, adobe acrobat, Media Player (great for podcasts;) some games etc. So before we go any further it’s already a very handy device.

Lets go a little further, there is a camera and GPS receiver built in. The camera is a fairly run of the mill 1.2 mega pixel affair with similar quality to the majority of camera phones available so it’s only really usefull for the odd emergency snap.

The GPS receiver on the other hand is fantastic, it’s just a shame that Hewlett Packard don’t include Ireland when they promise maps for all major western european countries Although to be fair until fairly recently even google couldn’t get good maps for Ireand out of OSI, so lets not be to hard on HP. Anyway, my route planning requirements have been looked after fairly well by “Via Michelin” which draws from the same data as google maps.

Until recently that satisfied my GPS needs but as I’m getting more in to my photo walks I’m gonna need something that gives me a tracklog which is where Megolith comes in. While it won’t do route planning I can use screen shots from google earth as my maps more on that once testing has been completed

News just in thanks to Stalltheball.com it would appear that I should have a look at this new AA Navigator Software, it would appear from what’s been said here that it’s got some great maps for Ireland included.

Okay so I’ve covered the PDA, Camera and GPS. I haven’t mentioned the bluetooth capabilities, I use this for 2 things, firstly my “hands free” connection in the car and secondly I can share my Media Centre’s Internet connection with my PDA enabling me to use the mobile IE app to web surf from anywhere in the house or garden at home (even the smallest room, newspapers are so 20th century) yes, web browsing on a pda can be frustrating as it reformats the page you are looking at in order to make it fit on the 240×240 display, however with things like “news rivers” and “yomoblog” becoming more widespread It’s certainly becoming more useful and less frustrating almost daily.

The last feature of this unit to mention is the GSM phone with GPRS and EDGE connectivity. The GPRS is something I only use occasionally as I’m usually not to far away from a web connection of some sort that I can use to sync to or share. On the other hand if I was using more public transport then that’s a different story, I’m sure it would get more use to pass the time.

The mobile phone feature set is fairly basic it calls people, it receives inbound calls and it sends and recieves text messages, with one exception, the contacts list, it’s synced to your outlook address book so every contact you have is on your phone, if your using Exchange push then you have access to the entire domains contact list, what more could you want from a phone? Well reliability is the only concern I have on that front, now bear in mind I’m not a huge mobile phone user and if you are then I cannot recommend this unit as it has problems about once a month where it simply stops sending or receiving calls and a soft reset is the only way to resolve the problem. Big deal you might think but you’ll only know there’s a problem when you go to make a call, who knows how many calls you might have missed in the meantime.

As for the size/weight well it’s not one for the shirt pocket, jacket pocket yes. A better idea though is to get one of the many beltclip cases that are available, that’s where mine lives quite happily most of the time.

Now for some pictures

Ok the first Picture showsa you the front complete with mini keyboard, which works surprisingly well once you adjust to it. and the othe shows the rear of the unit in it’s case, nice of the case manufacturer to leave openings for the camera and speaker.

The left side of the unit showing (from left to right) it’s IR port, the Camera Shutter/memo recorder button and the volume slider.

The right hand side showing (left to Right) mini-SD card slot and the normal SD card slot, Stuffed with 2Gb card. [homer] mmmmmmmmm Storage [/homer]

And for our final shot some nudity

Just to give you a size comparison but also to show what 12 months of daily use and abuse has done to it. Answer very little apart from the fingerprints

Woot! My Sweetie got back from her business trip on saturday, finally. God I missed her, not just because she is the light in an otherwise bleak existence but also because she was carrying my “newsed” laptop home with her from the US, where it had been delivered to a friend of ours (Thanks Harold) after winning the ebay auction.
I am now the proud owner of a Sony Vaio PCG-N505VE possibly the most perfect laptop ever assembled! It’s small, compact, light, retro enough to have cred, while recent enough to do most of what I want and stylish enough to give even the mightiest of Apple fanboy’s Powerbook a run for its money and all this despite being a Sony product.

This isn’t my first post to be written on it, but it is the first to be published. The first post written should be available on friday as part of my new series of regular features, but more on that in another post.

There were a couple of things that “the old girl” needed, so a new battery is on order (first one to make a wise crack about Sony laptop batteries gets a slap ) until that’s delivered I’m tied to the wall socket, even though I did manage to pick up a wireless card for it, in of all places, Tesco. Boy was that a surprise a reasonable brand (Buffalo) for just a smidge under €40 while the local PC World’s most cost effective option was €70!

Now I could wax lyrical for days about the evil, profiteering of IT retailers but I never I’d see the day when a grocery chain would out do an IT retailer at their own game, tis a sad sad day for IT retailers everywhere…