First it was Fake Steve Jobs, now it’s Real Dan Lyons.
A frustrated Dan Lyons told me this afternoon that he is hanging up his personal blog at RealDanLyons.com after his Newsweek bosses made him yank a blog post where Lyons (rightfully) called Yahoo’s PR staff “lying sacks of shit.”
Did anyone at Newsweek actually read Fake Steve? Those viciously funny barbs were the main attraction of the blog.
Google adds video and voice to gMail chat. There’s still quite a feature lag to Skype or Yahoo Messenger.
That was the second one but I don’t think I will be buying another. I liked the fact that it was pocketable but the lack of a keyboard was ultimately too annoying to be really loved. Not since the Psion 5mx of the 1990’s have I used a machine that was both pocketable and had a tiny keyboard that I was able to touch-type on after a little adjustment and training. It seems that I am not the only to have missed it. On many forums that address the topics of Ultra Mobile Notebooks, netbooks, MIDs or PDAs, there is a constant chatter of users who long for an updated device that could match the ergonomics or the Psions or the Journada. Why don’t designers at Asus or Dell or HP listen to that demand?
That was the reason for the initial success of the first eee pc from Asus but it didn’t go far enough. It’s still too big. But, with the curent choices of what is available on the market, the newer version with the longer lasting battery maybe the best choice.
I’m a late adopter when it comes to using the internet on a phone. This has mainly come about due to the dearth of services that were available, my reluctance to commit to any type of contract and I wanted to get away from being online when I am away from the office or my apartment. However, now that I do a weekly commute and the fact that the train services I use don’t have any wireless services meant that I was out of touch for long spells on Mondays and Fridays. That was annoying when it meant being out of the loop while news was breaking on Monday or social plans were being made on Friday. This all came to a head when I needed a new phone and after a terrible experiment with an Lg, I found a review of the nokia 6220 classic on youtube that suggested it had the features of the N82 but without the huge pricetag. I got it and I got a kick out of using features like GPS, google maps, twitter, etc. However, the frequency and cost of topping up my credit was a problem. I went into t-mobile in Munich and they offered me a priceplan of 10 Euro a month but I had to commit to a contract. Since then, I haven’t looked back. My costs have good down, my train journeys are not so boring and now I’ve written my first blog post on the phone. Have a nice weekend.
Beautiful simulation of the amount of air traffic that happens every day throughout the world.
With all of the stories of financial meltdown, recession, depression and economic disaster, it’s important to remember that for almost 2 billion people in the world life is much worse. I came across this fascinating video of Dean Kamen via an article in the New York Times where he describes how he has turned to solving the two main problems facing the world’s poorest people, clean water and energy.
So my Dell Latitude D620 screen died yesterday. The first thing I did was look through my emails where I could find the order information hoping that I had indeed taken out the 3 or 4 year warranty rather than the default one year. Thankfully that was the case.
I logged onto Dell Ireland support chat and started describing my problem to an agent there. At one point, she recommended that I needed another power adapter. WTF? Her final diagnosis was that I had a memory card problem. It was obvious she was just going through some script and at the end, the solution was obvious, send an engineer to where I was working. However, when I informed her that I was working in Switzerland, she told me that she could not organise an engineer from Ireland. I would have to call Dell Switzerland myself.
After trying to logon to chat with the Dell Switzerland support site, I decided to call the help line. After going through the many options to get to Latitude support, I got a guy on the line who was able to speak English. What was impressive about his approach was that he was didn’t follow a script. He quickly looked through the chat log of the interaction that I had with Dell Ireland and disagreed with the diagnosis. I did a couple of different tests and he seemed to be going through possible causes of the problem in his head. It seemed that I was listening to a technical Dr. House going through symptoms in his head and trying to work out a diagnosis. Finally, he said that he would send a technician on Thursday to physically look at the notebook. Here’s hoping my normal laptop is back tomorrow.
Telemegaphone promises that your voice will be carried over the fjords of Norway by calling a number that is hooked to the loudspeaker powered by wind turbines. However, if the weather is especially calm, there may not be enough power make your announcement heard.
According to A Very Short List where I got the tip, it will only continue until September 6, the start of deer hunting season.
Out in the pub last night, the subject of classic tv comedies came up. I thought this is a particularly great episode of the IT Crowd.
The IT Crowd – Series 2 – Episode 1 – Work Outing 1/3
Valleywag has a funny story about a Google employee who used Street View to propose to his girlfriend. Basically he knew when the Street car taking the photographs of the street would be coming around to his house and arranged a sign that the car would see. Impressive.