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JoliCloud is an alternative operating system (OS) for netbook PCs like Asus’ Eee PC, which are small in every way – small processors, small bodies, small memory… and as a result are the perfect thing to throw into a bag and have with you at all times.  In the past they’ve struggled with Windows (small screen size, small storage, particularly in the earlier models) and also with Linux (not enough focus on making the installation and maintenance seamless and simple for the average user), but a new wave of OS’ are on the horizon which will make them a lot more practical to use. (more…)

As I relax on the sofa, with the oil radiator thawing out my frozen toes and a large glass of Glenfiddich in my hand, I reflect on an evening misspent.

A journey from the Norfolk coast to London, which should have taken around 3 hours, 2 trains and 1 tube, took around 6 hours, 4 trains, 1 bus and a very long tube. The root causes were A: rail replacement work by Network Rail and B: an unexpected overhead line fault somewhere near Chelmsford.

However, tonight will be remembered as a sample of both the best and the worst of British… (more…)

I came upon this scene in the kitchen yesterday, after a morning of working frenetically on another ambitious work project I could only blame myself for getting into.

Note that I’m “cheating” – I’m not using my nice sealed pots of self-ground coffee, I’m using these very tasty Arrabica ESE pods from Gaggia which are like compressed teabags, and pop into the filter holder with a special adaptor: they’re essentially just a block of espresso grind coffee. I bought several hundred of these in bulk direct from Gaggia, so we’ve got to get through a few before we emigrate to Australia!

Anyway… 4 coffees in a morning (the foil packets are empty)? So good, it’s got to be bad for me. <twitch>

I’ve been a user of King of Shaves shaving, um, products for a long time – I’ve enjoyed watching a small British company take some leaves torn out of the P&G manual and apply them verbatim… and actually succeed. I’ve just discovered Will King’s blog , which I might follow for a bit, though at the moment it’s a lot of promotional material for this newfangled razor…

I said “succeed”, but I have no idea of their financial performance… I guess the fact they’ve been around for a long time, constantly launching new products, and that they’ve just moved into essentially an adjacency is indicative of success…

Anyway. They’ve done a great job of basically taking the same shaving gel ingredients and rearranging them into products with different collections of complex acronyms (micro-magnetically-enhanced (MME) etc) which each get their own place on the shelf… until choosing to buy King of Shaves gel in Boots means trawling through 6 or more tubes, trying to decide whether the combination of activated menthol and sensitive skin or hyperbolic destressers and irradiated skin is better.

So having been a fan for a while, I was childishly excited to see a bus stop advert for their new razor, the painfully-named “Azor” (so called because its head sort-of forms an “A” shape, and clearly someone thought it was very clever). It assumed the knowing position of being “better, cheaper and different” as I remember… clearly taking a dig at the incumbent market leaders Gillette and Wilkinson Sword. Woo, I thought: I too can be different, like all the other people who get this (r)azor.

So I bought one. For a royal £5.00 or so, I got the handle plus three extra Endurium blades.

It was somewhat disappointingly made of a slighty tacky plastic… an off-white, like the inside of cheap Asian electrical products, with black bits (again, not quite as black as you’d expect) but still a pretty cool, innovative shape that fair made my follicles quake in fear. It had interesting and clever-looking plastic extensions to the top and bottom of the 4 blades, one of which looks like that moisturising stuff most razors have, and the other of which was just a bit of bendy plastic. No hygeinic blade cover like my Wilkinson Sword blades… which makes me want to wash it very thoroughly after chucking it in my wash bag.

To cut the story short, how good was it?

For 95% of my face and neck region (I’m sure those in the trade have a name for that… my neckvirons or my facebourhood, maybe) it was REALLY good. It felt a bit like dragging a freshly-sharpened scythe over my features… something about the shape and the way it makes you move your hand makes it really glide well. It was all going very well, and I was excited to show off my freshly-shawn gob to the general public, when I came across the Azor’s fatal flaw, at least on my mouth terrain.

All those fancy design decisions, particularly to include those wide flanges above and below the blades, added up to something which was essentually designed to leave you a 5mm moustache just below your nose. Try as I might, including half-stuffing the thing up a nostril, I couldn’t shave that bit. Maybe my hair grows too close to my nose? Maybe it’s all the rage to have a tiny, slightly crap pencil moustache to knit into your nasal hair… but more likely they noticed this flaw late in the design process, and had to live with it.

So now I use the Azor for most of my face (hell, I spent a whole fiver on it and I’ve got loads more blades to use up) and then a “proper” razor from one of the established brands for that elusive pencil moustache it’s chosen to leave me. Maybe I’ve missed something; I really wanted this to be an amazing razor; but it’s a bit stupid to have to take two razors in the washbag when I go away for the weekend…

So, having completed a U-turn on deciding not to buy an netbook, I found myself on a mission to part with the cash as soon as possible.

A few options presented themselves – not least popping down to Tottenham Court Road to buy it in person. However, 10 phone calls later, and it was clear that that wasn’t going to work. Google searches revealed site after site with tempting promises of the cheapest postage and the best price… but all of which ended with bare shelves and weak assurances of stock within 2 weeks.

Then… PC World came to the rescue, or so I thought. While their website was out of stock, their new (as I found, VERY new) Collect@Store service allowed me to reserve an item and pick it up an hour later in store. Genius! High Street Kensington had one in stock, it’s just down the road… so I ordered and headed off, barely able to contain my excitement.

Thence the queuing began. 20 mins in, I got bored and went for lunch for an hour. Wandered past – 6 people in the queue again. Wandered off for a bit. Came back – 3 people in queue. Set myself a target of 25 mins queuing max. After 25 mins, expanded that by 1 minute, about 10 times… bit like how I deal with my alarm clock in the mornings.

Finally – the front of the queue, and payment time. Assistant chirpy, had an Eee PC himself, assured me that there was one in stock… and sent me to the front of the store to give my receipt to the security guards… good lord. 15 mins later, and the security guard had found me a completely different model, and decided to draw upon his non-existent understanding of the product to try to convince me that it was in fact the right one.

Failing, inevitably, I had the pleasure of watching the other security guard inexplicably (and inconsistently) searching other members of staff as they left the store (undermined entirely by him wandering off for 5 mins at a time to turn off alarms around the store as a stream of staff, presumably laden down with USB keys and whatever else the crème of the Dixon Stores Group’s employee base spent their day dreaming about. Finally, the conclusion was that they didn’t have one in stock at all, and I had to queue again to get my money back.

Bloody waste of time.

Long story cut short, I was desperate enough to try the same thing with the Fulham branch the following night, and, aside from the 25 minute wait while they retrieved the correct model from the store room (of course, the one they had “ready” for me wasn’t the colour I ordered) things went smoothly. I even had the pleasure of explaining to the assistant what it was he’d dug out for me.

And that’s how I came to be the owner of (this) Eee PC.