politicisation....

So the student are revolting - yes aren't they... boom, boom. But seriously, I am really pleased to see the student up in arms against some of the injustices imposed on them, and Britain, by the firmly Eton/Oxbridge middle-class twits that are forming the backbone(?) of this Thatcherite government.

Government is possible an misnomer, as this would suggest some form of control by this disparate or desperate group of adventurers. One thing's for sure, this crowd don't understand the basics of economics - imagine any business buying 4 billion pounds worth of produce, deciding they don't want it, and then paying someone 200 million pounds to make the problem disappear.

Pretty poor marks for basic arithmetic and business sense..... or will some close friends make a killing (sic)

fire, flood and pestilence...

That was the name of my Christmas... car intercooler almost went on fire (cost a bomb to repair) on Xmas eve at 3.30pm, my neighbours flooded my storage cupboard (several hundred books went to pulp) and I got this dreaded flu-like lurgy that everyone's had (or got).

Having said that, it was a really laid-back Christmas as I didn't have the car to be able to go driving round to family and friends.

And so to work....

chinese curse...?

The one I'm thinking on is 'may you live in interesting times' .

We've just spent a bomb on upgrading servers, new gear in the form of workstations and screens, tablets etc. So what happens?

We've just had a couple of weeks of technology problems. Super duper (hideously) expensive printer decides to throw a wobbly, our new servers didn't want to talk to each other and lastly, our broadband went down with the outage last weekend that hit 500 or so companies all over the UK. So we reconfigured our router, then discovered that the local area workgroups (3 of them) had also lost their settings. Ahh the joys..

All fixed now however, and no clients affected.... but we are looking at a dedicated leased line...

easy eizo...

I was persuaded to try out the new Eizo screens, so I got a 24" one. Very nice... it even senses if you are there and switches off if you aren't....

iPhone -uPhone...

I've talked to 3 people recently that are all getting rid of their iPhones... why?... they're brilliant at doing everything (there's an App for that) except being a phone. Poor reception, tinny voice reproduction etc are starting to piss people off.

Interestingly enough, business people are looking seriously at windows mobile and android phones.

Pourquoi... because 'there's an App for that' has been around a LOT longer for windows than the Mac ones. I've used HTC's and iPaqs for almost 10 years and been using many of these interesting functions - such as restaurant finders, travel planners etc, email etc.

I think Apple will have to look to their laurels when people realise there are many other better options out there - especially with the new samsung phones.

rounded or square...

I'm amazed at how many of the people coming into the industry have narrow minds. The lack of roundness in their education astonishes me. I recently had a placement tell me that they had applied for a high-end job (50k level) and hadn't received a reply. This from someone with NO industry experience. They really thought they were worth that, yet this person couldn't use illustrator or half of the other industry standard programmes.

further gadget thoughts...

I'm a bit unusual, in that, I don't see the use of iPhones. There's an App for that , to me, is quite funny, as most of these 'Apps' have been available for Windows Mobile phone for many years, and in addition, Apple products are notoriously a pain at integrating with PC's and PC software (Outlook?).

However, as per usual, Apple make some pretty slick interfaces for their products, and it is good to see Apple doing something better than some of the Windows interfaces around, with one exception - the HTC 'cube' on my last HTC phone... very nice... Maybe the other windows and android phone manufacturers can get a handle on better UI's...