Catching up

It has been over six months since I last wrote anything of substance here, and a great many things have changed. There’s been a great many things happen that deserved to be commented on, but I haven’t had the chance. So, this post is an attempt to get The Wolf’s Howl up to speed on the world around us.

First off, me. I’ve moved house – twice. Sold my flat of several years residence and moved in with my girlfriend. But in between, I spent a few weeks lodging with my girlfriend’s brother. The reasons why are long and complicated and I can’t be bothered to go into them, but suffice to say that everything’s all sorted now. However, the whole process meant that I was without my computer for quite some time, hence the lack of content going up here.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been doing couple-y type things: decorating, tidying, clearing out and so on. And then last week, I went out and bought myself a new motorbike:

My new toy

So there’s lot more reasons why I couldn’t get onto the computer. I find, though, that having a life is so much more enjoyable! I’m really not missing the life I used to lead, which mainly consisted of sitting in front of the computer screen looking pale and unhealthy.

Well, that’s brought you up to date on me. What’s happened in the world that’s worth commenting on?

1 In case you haven’t noticed, the UK now has a new coalition government. We finally kicked out the inept Mr Brown who nobody voted for… to replace him with a Conservative / Liberal almalgm that nobody voted for. So far, it’s a little early to tell whether we’ve swapped one bunch of losers for another, but at least there seems to be some honesty about them: “we need to make some heavy cuts to public spending and we’re going to do it.” Only time will tell.

2 A certain Mr Schumacher is back in F1, and seems to be back to his old tricks. His season has not been particularly good – the car isn’t performing like it did last year, and his team mate is consistently out performing him – but that hasn’t stopped him trying to run people off the road like the good old days. I’m sure Damon Hill knows exactly how Reubens Barrichello feels.

3 The natural world seems to be out to get us, with floods in Pakistan and earth slides in China in the last few days. Perhaps it’s Mother Nature’s way of paying us back for all the oil that’s been spilt by BP recently.

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Limbo

It’s been nearly three months since I last posted, but that’s because my offline life is quite involved at the moment and I’m not getting much time to spend in front of a computer. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, so keep checking back. Thanks.

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Nice try, but try again…

Apparently, other stuff was happening in the world last week but everywhere I looked people seemed to be talking about the new Apple iPad. Will you be rushing out to buy one? No, nor me.

The iPad ushers in a ‘new category of device’ for ‘the largest mobile device company in the world’. At least, that’s according to Steve Jobs. Having watched the launch event on the Apple website over the weekend I think what Apple have actually produced is a very pretty looking device that completely fails to deliver anything new, and which over-charges for the ability to do the same old stuff on a different size screen.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t entirely hate it. It does look nice (one thing about Apple is that their current range of products is very nice to look at) and the multi-touch interface that was debuted on the iPhone and iPod Touch is getting better and better. From a using it point of view, I can see the attraction.

But from a useability point of view, it doesn’t appeal at all. Starting at $499, Apple is asking potential customers to shell out the same sort of money that, anywhere else, would get them a netbook or a low-end laptop with all the features and abilities of Windows or Linux to choose from. But from Apple, what your $499 gets you is a large iPod Touch. It can’t even be compared to the iPhone because of the lack of featues; there’s no camera (and I would expect an iSight at the very least) and while you can pay $130 more to have the 3G version – and shell out extra for a data plan – you can’t use it for making calls.

I love my iPod Touch, I use it every day. But it was over-priced. I love my iMac, I use it every day. But it was over-priced. Both of these together cover all my computing needs. There isn’t room for a third device, no matter how much Steve Jobs may say there is. To me, to be successful this device needs to be able to perform all the functions of the two devices it sits between. It can do the iPod Touch stuff fine, but it can’t do the desktop stuff because it doesn’t have a fully-fledged operating system. You can do what Apple want you to do, and that’s it. On a device like the iPod Touch that’s not so bad. On a device like this, it’s a killer.

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