Wizardgold

I was just away in England for a few days and it was so useful to have my emails come to me on my iPhone. If my mom had known what her Wifi WEP password was I could have got the emails a lot easier but I was still able to get my emails when I went into Sutton Coldfield to go to the shops. There were a couple of places with open Wifi, one was Starbucks  and the other was a phone shop. very handy indeed.

The reason the email was working so well for me was the use of Mobile Me from Apple. I send all my emails to my mobile me account and they then get sent  direct to my iPhone, its brilliant.

I have just downloaded a couple more apps to play with and I am starting to fill the third pane of apps on the super phone. I got a productivity manager that I have been using as an application on my iMac because I need to organise myself a little better, OK a lot better. Today I have an excuse of not feeling the best due to on set of a head ache and I just could not concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing. I wanted to make another podcast but ended up doing other things and watching the TV. Well it was Children in Need and there were a few strange things to look at, although Terry Wogan is just as irritating as he ever was.

Back to the downloads and I just got an app which lets me use the keyboard on the iPhone in landscape mode. That should be a default feature onthe phone in my opinion. Though I am getting better at typing on the iPhone. I brought in an app which is for keeping track of expenses called QuickBank Lite. Worth trying it out to see how it works. Also got another Twitter program. I do prefer to do my microblogging on Ping.fm though. Extremely useful website for the micro blogging.

I will have to get something to be able to extend the battery life of the phone. Maybe one I can plug into a car 12volt socket would be good. There are things that can be plugged into the phone to extend it also, have to check out the prices.

When I got it this morning it had the older version of the operating system on it and I wondered why I could not load three apps on to it. There was a couple of hundred of mb’s to download to upgrade to the latest version – 2.1 and all went well after that.

I did manage to make it freeze up by trying to do a couple of things with it. I was listening to a podcast and wanted to try out the GPS. Took me about half an hour or more to work out how to get it right again.

Still want to use the Fring app to make a Skype call or better still make a VOIP call for free by using the wifi connection and not have it be a mobile call. Didn’t work when I tried this evening but that could be that the person I tried to call was out or something. Try again tomorrow.

I have to say I am totally besotted with the iPhone. I had read a good bit about the super phone but actually playing with one that belongs to you and trying things out really makes it hit home. It really is an excellent phone. Worth even changing to Telefonica to be able to get one.

I have it connected up to Mobile Me so that I get my emails directly on the phone. That works great and I have been twittering with it also. I expect I will hit the data limit with the plan I have fairly quickly during the month.

When I tried out the GPS program later it worked really well pinpointing when I am exactly on the map. I can see that being really useful when going places. I will be in Birmingham later this week. The place has changed a lot since I lived in the area. I hardly remember some of the street names anymore. I will not be using Google Earth for the iPhone anyway as I have heard it crashes the phone too much.

Tomorrow it is nose back to the grind stone so that I can get making some interviews and recordings for the BravaChat web site. I need to get more Spondicious and Wizardgold podcasts completed also.

Great to get away and have an adventure in France in the Languedoc region of France. Stayed in a place called St. Paul de Fenovillet in a decent little campsite. The weather was bloody cold for the first couple of days and the wind was biting, like it could rip the skin off you. Despite the weather we had a good time visiting the castles of the area.

We rented a caravan and it was big enough that the dog could come to. Dama had a great time too all the time lots of walks in the country side and time with her new owners. As you may know she is a dog rescued from the chop and a previous live of really bad treatment. So nervous for the first months with us and still a bit jumpy but what a huge change from when she got here. I am pleased to see her being more like a normal dog now. The previous owner should be strung up by his wotsits.

The Languedoc region noted for its wine had vineyards whichever way you looked and the colours of autumn added colour to the whole adventure. The vinyards all seemed to have places to for tasting and buying of the wine. I can’t stand wine so no good for me but would be great for the wine buffs though.

Took photos of the castles visited and I have a bundle of shots of an old shed in a vinyard next to a railway track. The shots are one set which will be a panoramic view and the other group will be a panoramic HDR. The sky was dramatic with dark clouds and white clouds set off with deep evening blue heading towards a sunset. I had to work quickly to capture the available light.

I will add the photos to my Flickr account during the next couple of days. I have to go into Girona on Monday to get the iPhone, so there will be some time devoted to playing with that. While I was away the vodofone transferred the number over to Movistar but I couldn’t get into the shop to pick up the iPhone and to activate the number with Movistar. Always the way these things happen, would have been nice to get the phone today but the shops were all closed due to a national holiday.

Look out for the photos to appear soon.

They say the iPhone is available here in Spain is a joke. They won’t let me order one and they don’t know when they will have more in the shop. The best she could do was to say that I would have to visit the shop daily in case there was delivery. I live 35 km away from the shop so that is not really on.

The way things are going I will be giving up on the idea as I will not have the cash to be able to get one. There are other things I need to get and will take precidence if I need them for business.

I have been hankering after an iPhone since they supposedly became available here in Spain but on Monday I was in touch with the local Telefonica store and they said they had a long list of people that wanted to buy and still no iPhones to sell. Seems the Yanks are keeping the iPhone to themselves instead of selling in all the world markets that they said they would sell them. 22 countries -  my arse!!

On my day off I went to the nearby techno store to look for a few things and ended up spending my some of the budget on other items, seems like I might have to wait longer even for the iPhone as I don’t have an unlimited supply of cash for things technical. I was on the look out for an external hard disk like the Iomega 500 GB one I have to back up with Leopard’s Time Machine. I think that having only one back up is like not really having a back up at all. What happens if the 500GB disk fails? Sods law dictates that is when something else happens and you have a need of the back up that is no longer there. A second back up makes things secure and also can be done by a different method to extra sure. So the plan is to use Carbon Copy Cloner, to make a disk image.

Anyway I saw a 1 Terrabyte hard disk of the same make and it was for the same price as I bought the 500GB less than 8 months ago. Pretty amazing I thought, it was a no brainer decision to buy it. There were two models and the one with the larger box that has a fan in it was 100 Euro and the smaller box was 130. The drive with the fan is a little noisy but I don’t intend to run it all the time, just when doing the weekly back ups with CCC or maybe with Super Duper

Then on top of buying that I had to get something to be able to listen to the iPod in the car. The cassette adapter I had been using gave up on me. I could have bought another of those but got tempted by a new radio which I now have to fit in the car. It has a USB connector which maybe I can plug in a pen drive or the iPod and even has a slot for a SSD card memory stick. Now where did I put my pliers and screw driver ??

They have no iPhones for sale and don’t know when they will have them in. The rest of the world can buy an iPhone but not here in Spain.

The best the assistant could manage was some details of the price. It seems I can get one for 129 Euro if I get a 2 year contract paying at least 20€ per month on calls and 15€ on data.

Completely useless here in Spain with marketing and selling. They have a whole network of shops and can’t get them in stock.

Totolally disappointed with Telefonica

I started work at 8am and it was going well enough until the guy working with me got himself sacked for stupidity. Easy done – making silly mistakes and getting caught out. So when I was supposed to have 2 hours for lunch I only got 1 hour and that was not enough.

I was able to see online that there was information on the Movistar site about the 3G iPhone but no chance to do anything about it. I would have liked to get inside a shop and see if there were any iPhones in the shop. Managed to get home 7pm after 10 hours of working during the day and I am fit for nothing. I considered looking in a shop on the way home but tiredness had set in and due to the traffic at that time plust it being Friday when all of Girona and Barcelona descend upon the town, I have no wish to find the nearest iPhone shop. I think it may have to wait until Monday.

Mind you that depends on whether I can get away with us being one man down at the camp site in the reception

Other news today dissapointed me was the discontinuation of my favourite Betfair betting software BinarySoft BDI. Excellent software and great for trading. I was thinking about getting a subscription to it at the start of the Premiership. No chance of that now.