JoliCloud

So – Jolicloud.  I heard about it in a TechCrunch post a few months ago, and signed up to the alpha/ beta programme, not expecting to hear anything back.  As fortune would have it, the day after my 25 meg broadband got installed, I received my official invitation to try alpha 2b, which I jumped at.  Download the iso, load onto a USB, press ESC during boot on the Eee and it was up and running.  No config required, 1 min later JoliCloud was running on my machine, and after entering my wifi credentials, I was online with Firefox – that’s fast, and I imagine it’d be even faster booting from a full installation on the built-in SSD rather than running live from USB.

Next step – install it over Windows… wish me luck!

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…

The worst of British:

• The 12-year old, foul-mouthed, lager-swilling chavs on 2 of my trains Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
• The delays themselves, and the god-awful coordination of the various workarounds – why they couldn’t have simply laid on a bus to London for the 90% of people following their tortuous route through the bowels of Essex…. Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
• The bitter, freezing cold as we waited on the platforms and at the side of the road Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

The best of British:

• A general sense of polite and determined resignation – a desire to get through it all despite the frequent and frustrating setbacks. I’ve experienced much less severe train delays on Italian railways where the train soon erupts into pandemonium… but no one threw a wobbly today Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
• Care for your fellow man (or woman) – one young lady, teetering on heels and laden down with paper bags, watched her day’s shopping fall to the floor as she squeezed onto the crammed double-decker… and those around her rallied to find alternative bags and to help her get on board, then later off the bus and up the steps at the station Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
• A quiet sense of duty – while the station and railway staff were, when it comes down to it, collectively responsible for the terrible communication and coordination which was the main irritant of the evening, many of them were staying, unpaid, many hours after their shifts ended to make sure the “punters” got home safely. Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

A note should also go out to the Australian girls sitting behind me on the bus, whose incessant commentary at the start of the journey was hilarious. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

All of this said, despite the positive, life-affirming aspects of the day, my next trip to Norfolk will most-definitely be in a hire car. Trains: FAIL.

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 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…

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.

What is it? OK, it’s my new Eee PC. That was clear from the blog post title. This is its story.

Months of research, reading blogs, review sites, magazines… trying to persuade myself not to buy a Netbook. I’d just about persuaded myself that, while I was not going to get one, the one I was least likely not to get would be an Eee 901. In black. 20 gig. I was so set on not getting one I’d wandered all over Tottenham Court Road trying out all the options and despite their awesomeness, resolutely not falling for them not constructing elaborate financial models in my head whereby I wouldn’t have to worry about why I’d splashed cash on a flash laptop the size of my hand.

So everything was going well until I went to a dinner with some friends, and one of them – a young lady of several years’ acquaintance – thought she might show us her new toy. Lo, of course, it was an Eee 901. Like the smell of cigarette smoke to a smoker feebly trying to quit… I was drawn in. 20 mins later I’d free’d up a gig of her main SSD and convinced myself that my fingers were not, in fact, too big for the keyboard.

My girlfriend looked on with some concern, as I was clearly in the inescapable consumer tractor beam.

So, a little over a day later, I owned one. Ah well.

I’ve been to a few Modern Art museums in my time – the SF MoMA isn’t particularly big (not helped by one entire floor being closed for refitting when I visited) but managed to fill a good 2 and a half hours of my day without boring me too much.

The highlights included Navigating the Imagination by the appropriately-named “Jeff Wall” – huge, wall-sized prints of genuinely interesting photos. They reminded me a bit of a Where’s Wally cartoon – the sheer size of the prints and width of the lens means you’re constantly searching for the focal point of the image – in one, your eye searches up and down rows of identical American suburban houses until you finally realise why the photo is entitled “eviction” – there’s a tiny little man being dragged from his home as his neighbours look on in astonishment.

Also memorable was Take Your Time by Olafur Eliasson, which was a series of interactive/ immersive exhibits. It included a room lit with bright orange light, which had the bizarre effect of removing all colour from your vision leaving only contrast, a hole in the wall which turned out to house a series of mirrors giving the impression you and an infinite number of other “you”s were all looking out the side of a building, and an ingenious setup where walking on creaky floorboards disturbed a pool of water which was in turn projected onto the wall – very disorientating and cool.

I had some tasty posh gnocchi and a glass of red wine while sitting outside the front of the museum before embarking on a 5-hour walk in the sunshine around North SF – that was a good day.

There’s a simple solution! However, it’s not where you might expect it to be. Go to Tools> AutoCorrect Options… and then unclick “Automatic layout for inserted objects.” And lo, it will stop bothering you.

“Pah,” I said, “what would I want with a games system anyway?”

A bit of research later, and I was intrigued… 10 shops which had sold out later, and I was HOOKED.  You learn a lot about yourself when things like this unfold.

So my weekends for the last couple of months have been dominated by streams of phone calls to Woolworths, HMVs and random games stores across London in the hope that somewhere had one in stock.  I found that the HMV near work had taken delivery of a couple at some point, and in what was approaching desperation resolved to pop in every day at lunchtime, just in case.

Of course, the only day I took off sick… they received 5 at once, so a very coughy and ill-advised (health-wise) dash along the District Line later I was the proud of a brand new Wii, complete with 2 games, an extra Wii-mote and a memory card.

I’ll be writing more about my thoughts later on this blog, but it’s safe to say that it is a really robust piece of design, and everyone who tried it over the weekend (20+ people) is now thinking about getting one themselves.

Nice one.

You feel the phone vibrate or hear it ring, then pick it up or pull it out of the case, flip the screen around (in the case of my old MDA Pro) to see who’s calling, fumble your way to the “answer” button… and the call’s already gone to answerphone.

Happily, anyone with thumbs can easily change how long the phone rings for before going to answerphone, if you know these nifty GSM codes…

I found these codes here: http://www.mobileshop.org/usertech/gsmcodes.htm. You’ll want to look at the “No Answer” section…

Types of call

You know about voice calls, but there are also fax calls, data calls, ALS (line two) calls and SMS messages. Calls of different types can all have different settings associated, using the relevant “bearer code” as shown in the examples below.

The snags

Some networks don’t support all services, so some GSM codes will fail. Others sometimes seem to use their own interpretation of the GSM codes.

If you are having trouble setting call diversion, try ##002#[SEND] and/or ##004#[SEND] to clear all existing diverts first. You probably have to cancel a ‘no reply’ diversion before you can set another with a different timeout.