When did you last have a real break?

This is a personal post – if you’re looking for something technical feel free to move along

I wrote a post recently complaining of writers block. I wrote the post as a way of giving me a kick. It didn’t have the desired effect in the way I hoped it would but it did get me thinking in more general terms.

I mentioned in the post that it wasn’t just blog writing that was suffering, but writing in general. I realised that there was actually more to it than that.

My productivity has also been through the floor. Tasks that I should be getting through easily (personally and professionally) were dragging on and I’d been putting off anything that required extra effort. After a day at work I’d get home and my normal routine is to do something. It doesn’t matter what it was and could be reading, gaming, spending time with Bryony, whatever – the point is it’s doing something with my time at home. Instead my routine was replaced with collapsing on the sofa and channel hopping for the whole evening which is something I rarely do as I usually only watch TV when there is something specifically I want to see (Dr Who being a current example!)

It was only on the run up to some time off work I realised I was burnt out.

I had two weeks off work organised for the start of August and I realised it was the only time I’d taken off all year. I then realised that babies and knee operations aside since the business started the most I’d ever had away from work was a week.

I’m dreadful at booking time off work and if my good wife didn’t give me the occasional reminder I probably wouldn’t have any! It’s not an intentional thing. I’ve usually got so much going on elsewhere I don’t think far enough ahead to next break.  

You do need to switch off some point though and I think I’d gotten to the point where I had nothing left and was “running on empty”.

One thing people talk about is work/life balance and while I know mine needs some improvement I thought I was doing ok.

A typical work day for me looks like this:

Get up between 6am-7am  (depending on how I’ve slept! A topic for another time.)

Arrive at the office between 7am-8am – getting to the office early generally means I get lots done while no-one is around.

Lunch – no fixed time. 99% of the time involves sandwiches at my desk

Leave work between 6pm-6.30pm

This is an average day. For example, If I have a BNI meeting I’m up around 5.30am and on AMITPRO nights I’m not home until much much later.  

That’s actually quite a long day when you write it down, especially since lunch usually means eating sandwiches at my desk. When I think about it there have been particularly busy days where I’ve not moved from my desk at all!

So that’s work – where is the life balance?

On an average day I make sure I’m home to put the children to bed as a minimum. We chat about their day while getting changed, brushing teeth, etc and always read bedtime stories together.

I rarely ever bring work home of an evening and ActiveSync (push email) is actually off on my phone by default. I don’t need it on when I’m in the office so I specifically turn it on during work hours when I’m doing something away from the office. This means I should the evenings to do whatever I want.

Again, just an average. There are some occasions where I do work at home but I do keep it to a minimum.

Weekends are also work free. This is family/personal time. Email rarely gets checked and it’s common for me to leave the office on a Friday and not check it again until Monday morning.

I thought I’d got a reasonable balance. I thought I’d got enough time away from work of an evening and weekend to keep me fresh and make sure I was splitting my time time between the business and my family.

I was wrong

We don’t really switch off properly during those evenings and weekends. Modern working life blurs the lines between where work starts and stops and while I may not be checking email of an evening and weekend that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about stuff I’ve got to do the following day, ideas to flesh out or solutions to problems. In the same way while I’m in the office I’ll be thinking about that dripping tap in the downstairs toilet when I’m supposed to do doing a quote or how much new school uniform is going to cost while I’m looking at a PC that won’t boot.

Both areas of our lives are fighting for attention and you need to make an effort to stop and have some time where you’re not thinking about your work or your home life.

As I mentioned earlier I had two weeks away from work arranged so made sure I used that time as well as I could on relaxing, spending real quality time with my family and taking a proper break.

A week in Center Parcs followed by a couple of days in Wales was just what I needed.

It was great seeing so much of the girls and Bryony for an extended period of time and I came back refreshed.

I am a realist though. My phone wasn’t off the entire two weeks. For a start I’m a geek. I can’t do without my Internet connection – in my work life and my personal life but email stayed off and everyone in the office were told I was only contactable as a totally last resort. Everything else would have to wait.

However, I made one small adjustment that had the biggest impact.

I turned my “out of office” auto-reply on.

I’ve never turned it on before. Normally if an email comes in when I’ve been on holiday I’d either reply to it or delegate it to someone in the office.

This isn’t really switching off from work is it!

One of the main reasons I never use out of office is that I feel uneasy with email automatically responding for me. Susanne wrote a very good piece about it recently, she said

Having led a life in sales, I have always loved receiving out of office messages – they are typically a wealth of information such as mobile and landline numbers, job titles, and correct spellings of names that I can access should I be looking for ways to get a foot in the door to your business. You tell me that Janice Jones is in charge in your absence and hey presto, I have another contact to add into my CRM system… very useful if I’m being told I have to have at least 2-3 contacts per company on file.

And if I’m a spammer, well, all I need is your out of office to kick in and I know you’re there. Which suits me fine since I can sell on my data to someone else knowing that your email address is live. Maybe in this instance it would have been better to have not activated your out of office in the first place?

People always look me like I’m a lunatic when I say I consider out of office messages a security risk. What Susanne said feeds into that for me and have a look at some of the results of this search. I’ve always been sufficiently paranoid to leave them off.

However, I bit the bullet and made use of the out of office feature and it worked exactly as it should. I received several emails that didn’t need my specific attention. The auto responder let that person know I was away and they got their problem sorted by someone else in my absence.

I’ve been back in the office a couple of weeks now and I can report I’m feeling much better about things. Writing has come back to me (if you’re still here after the length of this it won’t be a surprise!) and the inclination to plonk myself in front of garbage TV has gone. I’ve gotten into some bad habits during my “rut” but I’ll get those kicked into touch soon enough.

I hadn’t placed enough value on taking a real break.

I was at a Comptia meeting recently and we were all invited to suggest a idea for “best practice”. Something we’ve done to improve our business.

Jat Mann from PC Pal simply said “take a holiday” – he told me afterwards he was joking as he couldn’t think of a suggestion but it’s no surprise that after the voting his suggestion came second!

Rob Franklln from JPT Solutions also wrote a post called “Downtime is good” which is about taking a break. Rob talks about making use of his network so that he can have that downtime.

It’s not just me then!

So after all that waffling my message in short is.

You can get more done by stopping once in a while.

Whether that’s taking two weeks off or getting away from your desk and having a proper lunch break it’s worth doing. 

Tony Sale–Thank You-RIP

It was my birthday on Saturday and in true geek style I decided the perfect way to spend my day would be to pay a visit to Bletchley Park.

This blog post was intended to be all about my visit but unfortunately I heard some bad news this morning so that’s on hold.

Tony Sale passed away on 30th August 2011 at 80 years of age.

He was the responsible for the rebuild of Colossus, the first modern computer and if it had not been for his efforts details of Colossus would have been long forgotten as it disappeared after the second world war. The rebuild project was a huge accomplishment and is even more impressive when you consider how little documentation was left behind. He was also a major driving force behind the work in getting Bletchley Park to where it is today and held roles such as Secretary of the Bletchley Park Trust and Museums Director.

I was fortunate enough to meet Tony on my first visit to Bletchley Park and he was a perfect gentlemen and happy to spend time chatting about Colossus and Bletchley Park.

Tony had his own website www.codesandciphers.org.uk which is a mine of information about everything Tony was involved in and it’s worth taking the time to have a look as it covers a variety of topics including details of how Colossus was used to break the Lorenz cipher, the Colossus rebuild and videos of some the talks Tony gave at the National Museum of Computing.

Details of Tony’s life are well documented elsewhere on the Internet so I’ll just finish by saying

Thank you Tony.

Every visit I make to Bletchley Park is better than the last and I’m grateful of the contribution you’ve made to the history of computing in this country.

Weight Loss For Geeks

Last time I talked about my recovery from my knee surgery I mentioned I thought I’d gained about a stone in weight.

Losing weight is never something I’ve really had to worry about before. Despite having a predominantly desk based job for most of my working life my weight has always stayed pretty constant.

Growing up I’d always figured I was one of those lucky ones that could eat whatever they wanted without fear of gaining a pound or two. Turns out this was very naive of me. It’s mostly down to exercise.

In basic terms we all pretty much know if we consume more calories than the body needs it will store the excess as fat.

It’s no secret I love to play football and up until my mid-twenties this was two or three times a week as a minimum. As I’ve gotten older there have been various factors that have reduced the amount of times I play in any given week (children, work, etc) and over the years my weight had gone up some but nothing to worry about. Once that stopped altogether because of my injury the pounds have piled on at a faster rate. Turns out all that football was what kept my weight in check!

So in preparation for the new football season and the on-going recovery of my knee I’ve been running and cycling to get my fitness levels ready for pre-season. Pre-season training is hard enough at the best of times so I wanted to give myself a head start!

I hadn’t given any thought to losing the weight I’d gained. My initial expectations were that all the extra exercise I’d be doing would take care of it by the time the season started. However, after a conversion with some friends on Twitter I was inspired to put a little more thought into it.

Considering the stereotype of people who work in IT (see the image above!) it’s amazing how much technology can help with fitness and weight loss so I thought I’d list some of things I’ve been using.

Tracking

Myfitnesspal is where I started. There are lots of similar websites but this is the one I was pointed at and it works just fine for me. The idea is simple. Enter your height, weight, age and a goal (i.e lose one pound a week) and the website gives you a calorie goal for the day. You then track all the food you eat and the exercise you do. This is basically calorie counting. If you stay under your calorie goal you’ll lose weight! Adding some exercise will give you some more calories to work with. I actually added an extra mile to a run as in the mood for pizza!

The site has a massive database of food which in my experience matches up with the nutritional information you get on most food packaging. The site is of a Facebook style in that you have a profile and you can update your status with thoughts that other friends can comment on. Activity on the site also updates your status and friends can offer words of encouragement.

This has been really great for motivation as it helps to keep you from feeling isolated. There is a very strong community around the site and there are various forums where people can ask for advice or share success stories.

Finally there are also mobile phone apps to help with tracking food and exercise. This particular site has support for Windows Phone which has been great for me!

Running and Cycling Routes

Gmap – Pedometer.

I love this site as it’s so simple. It’s a Google Maps mashup that allows you to plot running and cycling routes. Once you create a route it creates a unique URL so you can refer back to it as needed.

Again there are lots of other websites that do similar things. Some of them come with companion apps that use the GPS in your phone to track the distance you cover and how quickly you complete the route as well as sharing with friends. Runkeeper is an example and I’ll be taking a look at that more closely as I’ve recently purchased a sports armband for my phone. If you have an iPhone/iPod and are willing to invest some money the Nike+ system is very slick.

That said gmap was the first mapping tool I found and it’s really simple and quick to use hence why I’m mentioning it here.

Heart Rate monitor.

The only thing about using a tracking website such as myfitnesspal is that it can only guess at how many calories you burn during a particular exercise. Everyone is different and perform certain exercises at different intensities so any figures you use are only a best guess. You can get around this by using a heart rate monitor. I managed to get a cheap chest strap and watch in a sale in a local sports shop. I’m still getting to grips with it but the two work in tandem and give you various stats such as your average/max heart rate and calories expended. As you’d expect there is a very wide range of these!

Apps

There lots of apps that will work with your smartphone to help with exercise and weight loss. Other than myfitnesspal and runkeeper I’m not using any at the moment but I wanted to mention and give an example of how your phone can help exercise.

One thing that people always worry about when starting to exercise is actually starting! If you want to start running but haven’t done any for years the thought of trying to run even a small distance is very daunting.

There are tons of apps for just about every platform around for the “couch to five k” concept. The idea here is that you follow a set program where you start at short distances and gradually build up to five kilometres. The apps help as they will tell you when to run, jog or walk via voice prompts or making your phone vibrate.

While I didn’t use an app I followed my own informal method and I built up from running one mile to three miles and I recently completed a five mile route and I can certainly see how having a virtual jogging mate can help!

The Internet

Ok this is a little broad but like most geeks I want to know as much as possible about something I’m interested in and the Internet provides a vast amount of resources on exercise and nutrition. I’ve learnt more about BRM, BMI, VO2MAX and the like than I really need to know! You can find fitness programs, workout videos and as much detail about how the human body works than you can handle!

The only downside is sometimes there is too much information and there is so much conflicting information about what does and doesn’t work it can be difficult trying to figure out what you should believe.

In Summary

There are lots of gadgets and tools available to help get fit or lose weight. You can even buy a set of scales that automatically tracks your weight via wi-fi! I can report using the things I’ve mentioned above has worked for me and other than the heart rate monitor, which is a luxury – I would have been fine without it, the whole thing has cost me nothing. 

MyFitnessPal reports that I’ve been using the site for 70 days and in that time I’ve lost 16 pounds. That’s also taking into account a two week break I had for a holiday where I put some of that back on I’m so pretty pleased with it. 

So what did I actually do?

Diet – I didn’t make any drastic changes in terms of what I eat but did change the amount. It was only though tracking the calories that I realised how much I eat and how certain foods can have an effect. At the moment breakfast from a well known fast food chain is pretty much half of my calorie goal for the day!

Exercise – I started off with a bit of cycling to get me back into the exercise habit but since then my exercise has pretty much consisted of running.

I run pretty much every day where possible as I can do a couple of miles in 12-15 minutes. This means it’s easy to fit it in before or after work. On days where I’ve got a little more time I’ll stretch it out to three miles (and more recently I’ve completed that five mile run which I’ll start to throw into the mix)

Motivation – Unfortunately all this talk of technology can’t escape the fact you have to actually execute this yourself. This isn’t easy and no-one else can do it for you but the things I’ve mentioned are really good support tools to keep you on track.

I’ll be honest and say I still hate running. This obviously becomes much easier if you enjoy the exercise you’re doing and lots of people do get the “fitness bug” once they start to see results. Luckily I do get this with football. I love doing that so coming back from training or a game totally shattered is fine – I just can’t do that every day!

I’ve only touched on some of the things that are available if you’re serious about changing your body. Do you have any tips or tools you’ve used yourself? Comment welcome below

Andrews and Arnold–Deaf Accessibility Done Correctly

Just a quick one I wanted to share.

I frequently moan on my blog (and in person if we’re being honest!) about how Deaf accessibility, especially when it comes to technology isn’t something that’s taken into account often enough so it’s nice to be able to praise someone when they do get it right.

Andrews and Arnold are a UK based ISP whose name regularly comes up in newsgroups and at user group meetings.

I was checking out their website today when I saw this.

That’s something I don’t see very often. A specific note for deaf customers with details on how they can get in touch with the organisation in a variety of ways (even via IRC and usenet!)

I’m sure you’ll agree this is a good thing but what I really like about this is that it wasn’t tucked away on some obscure corner of their site.

It’s on the front page of their site

The contacts page also has email addresses, SMS numbers, and links to their twitter account.

I’m not an Andrews and Arnold customer so can’t comment on the quality of their broadband or their customer service but it’s great to see some extra effort being made.

The simple act of contacting a company is major headache in our household. Many companies, especially large ones won’t correspond via email and SMS is just not an option for them which means if Mrs P has a query about something (let’s say her mobile phone bill) how do we do this?

It usually involves me calling them which isn’t easy as we’re both at work during the day and then we have a song and dance with customer services because I’m not the account holder. Sometimes they’ll speak to me and I have to relay info to Bryony and sometimes they flat out refuse. This means the whole thing becomes long winded and far more stressful than it needs to be.

And this is just the short version of how it usually works!

So well done Andrews and Arnold – I hope more companies follow your lead.

What do you do about writers block?

Genuine question!

My last post on here was June 22nd and the last one before that was May 23rd. I had gotten into a nice rhythm with posting after wanting to be a bit more consistent in 2011.

However, at the end of May I was writing up a book review and had a really hard time trying to explain the book. The words just weren’t there and since then I’ve found it really hard to write ANYTHING. By that I mean blog posts, emails, proposals, meeting requests, service tickets. As soon as I open the editor I just go blank. My twitter usage has been up and down too and generally anything I add on their at the moment is in response to something else.

The problem isn’t inspiration, I’ve had plenty of ideas and I’ve started lots of things, restarted and then given up. For example, my “first week with Windows Phone” post will now more than likely be called “my first month with Windows Phone” ! That should have been an easy one!

I mentioned it on Twitter and had a couple of suggestions.

First was to create a structure and then fill in the details. That could be a title for each section or just a bullet list of points you want to cover. It’s a really good way of writing but unfortunately that’s generally how I write all my blog posts normally.

Second was to just write. Get it onto the page and you can turn it into something more meaningful afterwards. Also a good idea and in part it’s the only real point of this post.

I’m just writing something, anything and getting it finished.

I’m kind of brute forcing my brain in an attempt to get over whatever hurdle it is I have in front of me at the moment.

Fingers crossed it works! I’ve got to do something about it not just for the sake of this blog but for getting me back on track. You’ll notice the AMITPRO blog and anything that goes with it has gone quiet at the moment too (apologies to anyone who is a member if I haven’t done something you’re waiting on yet – I’m trying!)

Now I’ve written four hundred words and given myself some therapy in public I’ll throw it open to comment – what do you when you hit a wall like this?

Word 2010–Double Sided Printing Option Missing

I’m failing at blogging big time at the moment. I’ve had several ideas for posts recently but I seem to start them and can’t finish them.

Anyway, this one seemed to write itself so hopefully it’ll be a bit of a kick start!

I took a call earlier in the week as someone wanted to print on both sides of the page while using Word 2010.

This is what she was expecting to see in the print options.

As you can see there are options to flip on either the long edge or the short edge.

This is what she was seeing instead.

My first thought was that the duplex option hadn’t been enabled on the printer driver but this wasn’t the case. Clicking through to the printer properties allowed the user to choose double sided printing which came out as expected.

I’d like to say I could take the credit for figuring this out but a search helped me out.

I found this thread on a Microsoft support forum which detailed the same problem.

It suggested the cause was down to a missing DLL

c:\windows\system32\prntvpt.dll

It was indeed not the system.

I upgraded the .NET framework on the PC to version 4 but this still didn’t solve the problem

The thread suggested two other options,

1) Uninstall .Net Framework and reinstall.

2) Copy the dll from another PC.

I went for option 2.

I found a PC that was on the same .NET version, copied the DLL and ran the following from a command prompt

REGSVR32 c:\windows\system32\prntvpt.dll

I reopened Word 2010 and the double sided options reappeared.

This was a Windows XP system but I’m pretty sure the same thing would apply for Vista/Windows 7.

Book Review–Password Incorrect

This was the first book in a while I didn’t actually like, hence the brevity as it wasn’t all that memorable either!

I rarely give up on a book once I’ve started it properly because I like to give it every chance – some books redeem themselves after an iffy start this wasn’t one of them. I didn’t give up on it but I came very close!

The book is a selection of very short stories all based around a technology theme.

My issue was that too many of the stories made little sense. Many of them were actually too short.

It actually got reasonable reviews on GoodReads but this one wasn’t for me.

It’s possible I just didn’t get the humour as the write-up said it was “tech absurd”.

It’s another creative commons book so if you want to check it yourself it’s available here.

Disappearing Desktop Shortcuts on Windows 7

Had a bit of weird support query I wanted to blog about in case I need it again, it helps anyway else or for further comment!

Client called as she’d setup some shortcuts on her desktop to some files she uses on a regular basis and they had disappeared.

I wasn’t sure where they’d gone, maybe she’d deleted them by mistake, so put it down to one of those things and we re-created them and left it at that.

She called me about a week later with the same problem. We re-created the shortcuts again and I setup auditing on the PC to track file deletes from the desktop.

She called back about a week later with the same thing.

After I’d setup auditing I went away and did some more research and found this Microsoft support article,

Desktop shortcuts disappear in Windows 7 (KB 978980)

Basically there is a “System Maintenance Troubleshooter” task that runs periodically and one of the areas of maintenance is to tidy up broken desktop shortcuts (a shortcut whose target doesn’t exist). If it finds more than four broken shortcuts on the desktop it deletes them all.

The thing is as far as I could tell they weren’t broken shortcuts – the missing shortcuts all pointed to files on the network but they were all accessible, she uses them on a daily basis!

The annoying thing about this is the “workaround” provided by the support article.

Method 1 – Keep the number of broken shortcuts to four or less

Method 2 – Disable the System maintenance troubleshooter

Click Start and then click Control Panel

Under System and Security click Find and Fix Problems

On the left navigation pane click Change Settings

Set Computer Maintenance to Off

As far as I can tell the shortcuts aren’t broken so how can I keep them to less then four!

Disabling system maintenance is something I’m not inclined to do either.

So what to do instead?

One option is to follow the details in this post.

The system maintenance tasks are basically powershell scripts stored in c:\windows\Diagnostics\Scheduled\Maintenance

The scripts are viewable and after tweaking the permissions to allow you to edit them you can make any changes you like.

The article suggests deleting a section of the code so that it will always return an empty list of broken shortcuts hence there will be nothing to delete.

My preference is to change the parameter on the threshold for broken shortcuts as it’s a little less drastic than chopping code out.

if(-not([String]::IsNullOrEmpty($brokenDesktopShortcuts) -and [String]::IsNullOrEmpty($brokenStartupShortcuts)) -and (((Get-ListLength $brokenDesktopShortcuts) + (Get-ListLength $brokenStartupShortcuts)) -gt 100))
{

The bit in bold was 4 originally.

The comments in the article have similar suggestions including a batch file you can use to do the whole thing for you.

My only concern about this is that the scripts could be changed in a future service pack or software update and you’d end up with the same problem.

I also don’t understand why the System Maintenance Troubleshooter has no configurable options other than “On/Off”.

I haven’t actually implemented this for the customer as I provided my own couple of workarounds to try.

The first is that if you create a folder on the desktop and put the shortcuts in there the problem goes away entirely – it’s an extra click so again this isn’t always desirable.

The second is that since this Windows 7 why not make use of the “Jump Lists” feature – it’s designed exactly with this scenario in mind!

I ran through jump lists and she was very pleased with that as it was easier than having to navigate to the desktop to find the shortcuts.

Anyone else come across this? Any other suggestions for something I’m missing.

Mobile Phone Decisions

I had a moan recently about my current mobile phone, a HTC Touch 2 running Windows Mobile 6.5 and that I was counting the days until contract renewal.

Well that day has finally come which has meant I’ve had a decision to make about what handset I’m going to be using over the next 18-24 months.

In a lot of ways though it’s not really about the handset, more the platform.

So I’ll get it out of the way.

I’m going with Windows Phone 7. Specifically a Samsung Omnia 7 (because this is the only Windows Phone 7 I could get with network we’re using!)

I wanted to cover the other platforms and why I didn’t go for them first though.

Blackberry

Never really a contender to be honest – I don’t really “get” the attraction. Seven or eight years ago maybe when the concept of push email was still pretty new and they were the only ones doing decent business handsets but nowadays if I use Exchange for my email then just about every handset you’d consider for business supports ActiveSync. I know you have the option of more control over the devices from a management perspective but in my business we’ve only got a couple of handsets so it’s not a huge need. Having to install BES Express isn’t my idea of fun either, though I’m going to have to anyway as my business partner went for a Blackberry Torch 9800!

Android

You’re spoilt for choice in terms of handsets when it comes to an Android based device. Google have to be applauded for getting a platform out there that can be considered a serious contender as an iPhone alternative when people like Microsoft and Nokia were dragging their heels. Having seen some really nice Android devices, under other circumstances I’d have gone for one. There is also a growing library of applications though it’s un-moderated nature means there have been a couple of security scares recently. 

iPhone

We all know what the iPhone is right?

Apple deserve a lot of respect for turning the mobile phone market on it’s head. When people use the term SmartPhone most people instantly think you’re talking about the Apple variety. Laying down the law to the mobile networks can’t have been easy either. No phone I’ve ever owned has had a software update despite them being available as in the past you were at the mercy of the networks who very obviously weren’t that bothered.

The large number of useful apps as well as ActiveSync support mean this has been a very capable business phone and I know plenty who swear by it.

This will come as a surprise to people that know me but the iPhone actually came in a close second. One day I might actually write a blog post about my aversion for everything Apple but for the sake of brevity what put me off this time around was the price. I actually managed to keep the same contract term, reduced the amount we pay each month and get “free” devices. This wouldn’t have happened if we’d gone for iPhones. The monthly price would have gone up and we’d have paid for the devices (and I’m sure we’d have gone to a 24 month contract)

So what actually brought me so close to going with the iPhone– in short apps.

Lots of mobile software developers target iPhone first, then they may go for Android/Blackberry/Whatever.

In some ways it felt if wanted to take advantage of the growing list of apps – and there are some really good ones – then I’d need an iPhone. Which isn’t really enough to be honest. I’m doing quite ok without tons of apps at the moment so I’ll be quite fine with whatever is available. The rest of the package isn’t appealing enough for me to change my mind about my Apple aversion.

Windows Phone 7 

So I went with Windows Phone 7. I’ve seen quite a few of them recently and I’m interested in the change of direction Microsoft have taken since Windows Mobile 6.5.

The live tiles look good and the office integration is very appealing  as well as the ability to make use of Xbox Live.

I’ll be honest Microsoft are in the last chance saloon for me when it comes to mobile. I moved from Windows Mobile 6.1 to 6.5 when I could have tried something new and was bitterly disappointed.

I’m not sure if I’ve said this before but I find it really hard to get excited about mobile phones because of being tied into a contract. As result I only really think about it once a year and in more recent times once every 18 months.

The decision has been made now though and I’ll have my shiny new Samsung on Monday.

A review of that will follow in the coming days!

What phone are you using? Are you happy with it? Will you be switching next time around?

Book Review – Eastern Standard Tribe

Another Cory Doctorow book!

This book was another that I’d actually got on my Amazon wish list before I realised it has also been released under a creative commons license.

It took me quite a while to get into this. I read the first half of the book with a frown on my face as I just didn’t get the underlying premise. The main theme of the book is based around groups of people living and working around a specific time zone, regardless of their geographic location. What’s the point in that you may ask but if you think about the modern world we conduct lots of relationships online.

People always come together because of shared interests and the World Wide Web has allowed us to interact with groups with similar tastes all across the world. The only downside with this is that we all live in different time zones. If one of your best friends lives on the other side of the world how can you maintain that friendship if one of you is always asleep?

So by living by the same time zone, regardless of where you are in the world this obstacle is easily overcome. There are obviously practical problems that go with this which the book looks into as well.

Once I’d got my head around this concept the first half of the book that I’d read made a lot more sense. I’m not sure if the story was specifically intended to work like this or if it was just me being a little slow on the uptake.

Anyway, the rest of the story – the main character Art is living in London but is part of the Eastern Standard Tribe. All is well in Arts life until he accidently hits a woman from Los Angeles called Linda, with his car. This throws the two together and they quickly become inseparable. They both have their own baggage however and through some double crossing Art ends up in a psychiatric ward!

As I said earlier it took me a while to get into and while I didn’t enjoy it as much as the other two Cory Doctorow’s I’ve read recently it was smart enough to hold my attention.