You've Got Red On You

Doing my civil duty here to protect the general public from lawsuits. It seems that no-one is allowed to use "the colour red" any more as it appears to be owned by the Royal Mail.

Free Cinema

Off to see Dragonball Evolution this morning. Great scheme run by Showcase Cinemas. Throughout the school summer holidays they do free screenings on Wednesday mornings at 10am. Only entry "fee" is a book review by the children....so my three boys have done a book review each and we all get in for nothing.

Not my choice of film, but it's free. This season they are also showing Monsters v Aliens, Kung Fu Panda, Bolt and Night At The Museum 2.

Book review forms and details are on their website at www.showcasecinemas.co.uk/

UPDATE: It was rubbish.

Can someone please tell me......

....WHY I thought it was a good idea to (a) start a blog and (b) why I then started to detail my complete history of mobile phones? I have done four parts and still haven't finished and it's driving me half-batty trying to recall them all and in what order and why I sold each one!

My mobile history....pt4

As far as I was aware, I had done with "normal" phones. The last Nokia (the 6260) had convinced me for good that smartphones were the way to go so off it went to Ebay and the hunt was on for the perfect smartphone.

The hunt ended quite quickly as back then, there really weren't many options. I ended up buying an Orange SPV C500 (same as a Imate SP3). Candybar design, nice big 240x320 screen and Windows Mobile. I really, really ought to have loved this phone. It felt great in the hand and the screen was lovely. I fell in love with the way the OS worked - if I wanted to call someone or text them or anything, I started typing their name on the keypad and it found the person and gave me options.

It's how I have liked my phones to work ever since. It took me a while to realise the difference between how phones had forced me to work before: decide I want to text someone, I first had to write the text and then decide who to send it to. Bit picky, but I liked it the other way round and Windows Mobile let me do that.

But damn! Was it slow? It froze all the time, it needed re-booting three times each day and just in general use it crawled....ten seconds to open a menu!

So - having already got in unlocked from Orange (I have stuck with T-Mobile through all of this - probably one of their most loyal customers!), I proceeded to re-flash the firmware (upgrade the software in the phone) to a non-networked one, so it didn't say "Orange" when you switched it on and got rid of all their crappy menus. Then did the sugar-cube trick which cleaned up the outside and all of a sudden I had a shiny, network-free phone.

Ebay time.

I decided that I needed a touchscreen again. And Windows Mobile. So I talked very nicely to T-Mobile (remember - I am one of their best customers!) and upgraded early and landed myself a black MDA Compact.

NOW I was happy. It was shorter than the previous phone, no thicker, and a bit wider but it had a great screen. And it was a touchscreen. So I had better games.

Oh - yes it was faster, but overall it did nothing more than the C500. But I loved it all the same and kept it for almost a year (a record for me!).

But temptation came....Jay at work had an O2 version of the T-Mobile Vario - THAT had a keyboard AND a touchscreen. A lovely sliding-out keyboard no less. Somehow I managed to convince myself to sell the Compact to Stuart (who's "Boggy's Blog" never gets updated) and found myself a T-Mobile Vario.

What to say about that? It was the same as the Compact but had a keyboard. A bad keyboard that was impossible to type on really. And when the keyboard slid out the screen was supposed to rotate.....well it did. Eventually. It was also twice as thick, three times as heavy and uglier than Mrs Ugly's ugly sister on ugly night.

I cried for my Compact but Stuart was never going to let me have it back. So within a week I was Ebay-bound again and......WOW!!! There was a NEW Compact! The Compact II. The same size and shape as my old Compact but better! I had to have it!

I got it! It was shite. It was slow. S-l-o-w. They put a new version of Windows Mobile in it but forgot to upgrade the processor or the memory. I was getting used to crying now. Right then I promised myself that I would buy NO MORE WINDOWS PHONES!

How long did THAT last?

Rat Infestation

Can't tell from this pic, but this is either Charlie or Mike. They're twins and their brother is a bit bigger and white and dark brown....he's called Oscar.

I do have three boys....

....and before anyone complains that I only have pictures of Tommy, here's one with Joe and Will as well:

(Picture taken by Alex Foord at www.alexfoordphotography.com)

Tommy went to the farm....

Maybe this should be a caption competition....

My mobile history....pt3

After the T610, I started getting more adventurous with my phones. I wanted them to DO more, to email, to play movies, games, make the tea, etc. My next phone is one that is still very dear to my heart: the Palm Treo 600.

A full QWERTY keyboard, a big screen (a whopping 160x160 pixels!), a camera, mp3 player, email, and more. And additional software was available - hundreds and hundreds of PalmOS games and applications!

It felt good too - like it was solid. Solid metal - it weighed more than my desk phone and the aerial made it awkward in the pocket, but it didn't feel like it'd ever break.

And it didn't.

Well - apart from the speaker going all fuzzy on me. But that was easy to fix with some tin foil and a no.6 Torx screwdriver.

But the lure of Nokia-land was calling me. I'd resisted for a long, long time (though had endured Nokia phones issued by various employers - we don't talk about those beasts here) but in 2004 they had something new. Something shiny. With a flip. And a twist.

So the Treo went on Ebay and along came the Nokia 6260. It was a smartphone - Symbian S60 and it had a flip screen that twisted. It needed to because it had no external screen so no way to see who was calling you unless you lept the phone flipped and twisted. Then the screen would get knackered and would also need to be twisted round again if you wanted to make a call or text. Or anything really.

The flip was floppy. The keys were bad. The screen was poor. I hated it.

It went on Ebay very, very quickly.

And then I started on Windows Mobile devices. And there were many, all with various problems - most were slow, all were prone to freezing and needing a re-boot. But there were many and I can't even recall what order I had them in now....

Do I like Pink Floyd?

If someone asks me to name my favourite band I will always answer “Pink Floyd” without hesitation. But I am starting to think that maybe I don’t like them as a band....I think I just like Roger Waters. And then, just the “concept” albums.

This realisation struck while watching David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall on Sky Arts this evening.....when I noticed that everything NOT from The Wall, Wish You Were Here, Animals, Dark Side of the Moon or The Final Cut was boring, repetitive and just, well, whiney.

I tried listening to Floyd albums after the split...and they just didn’t grab me like the one’s above did. But I did find myself listening to Waters’ solo stuff (The Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking, Radio C.H.A.O.S and Amused to Death) and Hitch-Hiking is still one of my all-time favourite albums.

So there it is. I’ve said it, so now I need to go and change my Facebook profile and remove Pink Floyd from my favourite artists.....and add Roger Waters instead. Problem is – no-one know’s who he is.

My mobile history....pt2

I can't remember why I did it, but I eventually retired my Panasonic and moved to a Siemens S35i.....I have no idea why because it was one of the worst phones I have ever owned. Which is odd because the opinions on GSMarena seems to be mostly positive. Oh well - each to their own.

I have nothing else to say about this phone.

But I loved my next phone....

I was in Milton Keynes one sunny day, supposed to have been selling something - may have been air conditioning at the time. Anyway, I was hungry and headed to Tesco but passed a Phone4U outlet....or didn't pass it. I ended up inside it, signed up to T-Mobile on a twelve month contract and walking out with a shiny, brand new, silver, Motorola T720....my first colour screen phone!

The very best thing about this phone was the menu system - everything could be set to my liking....what items showed on the standby screen, what order the menu items were in, shortcut buttons and everything.

I loved this little beast but....the screen was poor. Very poor. Fine in the dark but daylight, room lights, candles, everything made the screen totally unreadable. It had to go.

I didn't learn....my next phone suffered the very same problem (maybe it was screen technology at the time) but the Sony Ericsson T610 was a delight to hold and play with. Small and perfectly formed. But again, take it outside and the screen was just hopeless. It did have a camera though....

My mobile history....pt1

One of those "Social Scene" things popped up on Facebook the other day - "Five Cell Phones I've Had" - and it got me thinking.

I have now gone through so many different phones, and my memory is so bad, that I can't actually recall many of them. But thought I'd have a go anyway.

My first was a Mercury/One2One M300:

I remember paying £15 per month for this and about £100 up front. The sim card was full-size (a whole credit card that slotted into the bottom of the phone) and it had a two line display. No texting as far as I can remember, no vibrate, no email, no games, no nothing. But I was cool because I had a mobile phone.

I was also skint because I had a mobile phone. Eventually it got cut off. Phone was boxed up and sold at Cash Converters if I remember correctly.

My next phone was some time later - an Ericsson (before they were Sony Ericsson) GA628. One line of text, stubby little aerial and a huge battery. But I was cool again - I hit the credit card and got a slimline battery for it....it was sexy.

The blue keyboard surround was changeable - I had the blue one and a red one, but best of all, I had a black one. I loved that phone.

I also found a great add-on. At the time I used a Palm PDA and with the right cable I could conenct the GA628 to the Palm and ...... get email on the move! In 1998! Of course, it was at 9,600bps and text only and stupidly expensive, but I was a mobile executive!

But then.....Panasonic made a phone which VIBRATED! No more embarrasing ring tones. No more questions from the wife about who was calling me. I had to have one. I ended up with the Panasonic G600.

Multi line display!
Vibration!
SMS!

That was it - the BIG upgrade....to get vibration and multi-line display and, I think, the first phone I had that would send and receive text messages. I didn't KNOW anyone else to send a text message to though. If I recall, I don't think I ever actually sent a text message.

Easy To Be Understood

Sugama = Easy To Be Understood

Back to self-employment?

The more I look for another job, the harder it seems to be. With six of my last five employers going bankrupt or closing down on me, it's hardly may fault that I have changed jobs every six months for the past couple of years.

But that doesn't look good to prospective employers and agencies, so my CV isn't getting me any interviews.

That leaves me one other option - go back to self-employment. I did it a couple of years back....spent two years working for local companies doing IT support, web site design and some marketing.

Today I have registered a new domain name (www.sugama.co.uk - it means "easy to be understood") and will be gunning for web design, IT support and also some business mobile phone contracts.....

Wedding Guest Tommy

Tommy is so cool....he's six and his class staged a "wedding" for their Religious Education lesson. A little girl and a litte boy pretended to get married and all the others were "guests".

They had a little reception and a first dance and everything.