When your mother is on the phone discussing her sister’s medical condition, “jelly-like” is not a phrase you want to overhear.
But anyway, today was my first official driving lesson. I did well – for my first lesson. Unfortunately in my head I was ready to pass. Dammit there is so much crap you have to learn to do – and you have to do your learning while travelling at speed. I lurched in the space of an hour from being fairly confident behind a wheel to feeling like a monkey astronaut. I mean it’s crazy; you’re sailing along while turning a wheel in a circular motion, moving your feet up and down, and looking into mirrors. I’m dizzy just thinking about it.
Oh, that turned out to be what was wrong with my mother’s sister – dizzy spells. It was her legs that felt like jelly. Cool; I have an actual giddy aunt.
Don't worry, it only looks like a racist caricature
Brendan Howlin has soberly explained that they looked at all the options and reached the conclusion that burning the senior bondholders would not be worth the consequent costs. This is sensible.
It is not however what they promised, and it’s not why we voted for them.
If not this way, then how are we going to punish the speculators, the people who drove house prices into the idiosphere and turned a healthy growing economy into molten radioactive waste? It seems we are not going to punish these people. We are in fact going to reward them.
The blog software automatically suggests illustrations, and sometimes I just go with the most inexplicable thing it comes up with. I mean, a boat on a fish. What the hell does that have to do with bank stress testing?
So the reason they won’t burn the foreign banks that over-served the Irish industry is the hope that they’ll lend us more in the future. Isn’t that a lot like alcoholics always making sure to pay the bar tab, even as the children go hungry? Credit is what we got too much of.
But to cheer us up, we are to get two ‘universal pillar’ banks. I do like that; we should have more financial institutions that sound like they’re out of pre-Christian mythology. A Department of the Great Sky Serpent, maybe a Unicorn Interest Rate. In fact it sounds a lot better than the names we have for them now, BoI and ABBoI. The new banks should actually be called Universal Pillar 1 and Universal Pillar 2. No wait, Alpha and Omega. “I save with Universal Pillar Omega.” Surely that will restore confidence in the Irish banking sector.
But I don’t really get the idea behind stress-testing the banks. They are already dysfunctional, loss-making, unable to keep their doors open without State and ECB constantly pumping in raw cash. In what way exactly could that get worse?
The drawing to the right could use a little explanation. No, it doesn’t actually make any sense. Yes, that is a pink rabbit staring at the sun for absolutely no apparent reason. It’s just a random doodle, and it has to be admitted, a pretty crappy one.
What distinguishes it is the fact that I just drew it on my phone. I can’t quite believe it; to get a pen-like line like this on any electronic device would be impressive enough. Yet even a first attempt compares well to drawings on this blog done with a high quality graphics tablet.
But to be able to do that on a device I can carry around in my pocket – a device I can also use to edit and publish the drawing to the web, and make phone calls sometimes, well to me it’s a dream come true.
Oh God. Been playing with this thing¹ all day long, and most of the night. Got less than four hours’ sleep. Excuse me please if I’m writing little and making sense even less.
Did you see there’s going to be a new Agatha Christie film? What makes this one different is that the woman playing Jane Marple is in her thirties rather than her sixties. Perhaps we’re going to be treated to the first Miss Marple nude scene.
There’s a phrase I never thought I’d be saying.
Ha! Poor cat. That must’ve been a shock. Since the weather got warm, I’ve been opening the window in the attic room where I sleep. She’s taken to coming up here and using it as her cat flap. She hops onto the bed first, then leaps through.
It was cold tonight.
From now on, I will always recognise the sound of a cat attempting to jump through a closed window.
This is *not* the best phone ever. This one is hideous.
These are my first faltering steps, but I am blogging now on a hanheld device. It’s tricky, it has to be said.The tiny screen I can handle, but the microscopic keyboard with weird layout will take some getting used to.
That though could be said of anything from the latest iPhone to the cheapest Symbian or Android device. This one, in my opinion, is the greatest smartphone ever made – indeed, that perhaps ever will be made. Seriously.
But that’s all I can tell you right now. Partly of course to keep you guessing that bit longer.
Recently a friend asked me for advice on choosing a phone. It was hideously difficult – I don’t think it’s ever been harder to pick a phone than it is now. I miss the days when you couldn’t go wrong with a Nokia.
My first ever phone was a Motorola M3688, which was as charming as it was inept. Its sole apparent advance over Motorola’s previous model: It had a flip to cover the keys. It didn’t fold in half, you understand. It just had a plastic bit to cover its big rubbery buttons that you had to flip down if you wanted to dial. It served no clear purpose whatsoever, but that was the sort of design frippery that wowed us at the turn of the century. I can’t be sure now, but I think it may have swayed me to choose this one over the splendid Nokia 5110. A lesson to designers and marketers everywhere: shit sells.
It was massive by modern standards. Nowadays I keep my phone in my front left pocket. If I did that with the M3688 it looked like I was pleased to see everybody. Despite the mass though, they were vulnerable. If you dropped one, it flew into pieces. Though admittedly once you reassembled it it usually worked again. (They were less resistant to moisture; in the end I lost mine to submersion.)
After this it was Nokias all the way, or almost. The great 5110 (stolen), followed by what I consider to be one of the most aesthetically pleasing phones ever, the 3210, which also brought predictive texting (also stolen). This was followed by the 3310; though a lot less appealing in looks this introduced a raft of great features like vibrating alert (still have, still works).
But then I took a wrong turn, and bought a Sony Ericsson – the V600i. Now I am possibly being unfair; the problem with swapping between Nokias and Sony Ericssons is that they are so similar. It is the tiny differences in key layouts and so on that you will find too irritating to bear. But on the whole this wasn’t a very successful phone. Every plus had its concomitant minus. It was very attractive and impressively compact, but the keys were too small and – stupidly – glossy to use comfortably. It was my first camera phone, but at 1.3 megapixel resolution it was barely worth having. It was a 3G phone – the first affordable one on the market – but its tiny screen, weak camera and hopelessly basic browser meant there was really nothing you could do with that fast data.
Vodafone seemed to think they could get us streaming video – to 1.8″ screens. My devious plan, in the days when 3G or even GPRS data modems were still expensive business toys, was to hook it up to my laptop to feed my Internet addiction when I couldn’t get Wi-Fi. But I hadn’t done the research; though it could get 3G data, and though it had a data transfer cable to connect it to a PC, it couldn’t share the connection over the cable. Dumb bastard. (Still have, though I can’t find charger.)
My first actual smartphone was a Nokia N70. It ran the Symbian operating system, and could do real smartphone stuff like syncing contacts and calendars. I know, not impressive in this age of apps, but a huge leap still. At last it could be used as a tethered data modem, but 3G modems with much better data pricing were now coming out so there was little point. (Stolen – though only after it had been retired to spare phone status.)
And it was a good enough camera phone to get me hooked on the spontaneous kind of photography the things allow; soon I wanted a better one. The 5 megapixel Nokia 6220 Classic was that, plus it added GPS to the mix and finally made Web on a phone comfortable. In almost every respect this phone was really an N82, one of Nokia’s top models, squeezed into a smaller and (visibly) cheaper package. The only real sacrifice was Wi-Fi. In brief, a good mid-range smartphone at a great price.
And thus, irrelevant.
The dinosaur metaphor is irresistible. The landscape they once ruled has changed suddenly and utterly. The comet of course was the iPhone, and Nokia are left blinking and wondering what the cold white stuff falling from the sky is. Compile a list of the ten best-loved phones today, and there might not be a single Nokia on it. It isn’t that they got worse. I would argue in fact that Nokia still make the best phones, as phones. Their problem is that a lot of people don’t want phones any more. They want repurposable social connectivity stroke mobile media Swiss army… things. What are they even? The phone is evolving, and it’s not yet clear into what. Nokia certainly didn’t seem to know.
The woman in my life is asleep beside me. She’s had a long day. First working all Saturday until late, then a bus journey of three hours. To see me. I feel privileged; spoiled even.
It’s been a very full day. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to write much. Later I hope to fill you in on the further travails of the Very Sick Computer. Also, I have an announcement to make: I know which is the best phone.
Hint: It probably isn’t what you think is the best phone. But I hope to write a guide to help you choose the right one for your needs and desires.
The woman in my life is asleep beside me. She’s had a long day. First working all Saturday until late, then a bus journey of three hours. To see me. I feel privileged; spoiled even.
It’s been a very full day. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to write much. Later I hope to fill you in on the further travails of the Very Sick Computer. Also, I have an announcement to make: I know which is the best phone.
Hint: It probably isn’t what you think is the best phone. But I hope to write a guide to help you choose the right one for your needs and desires.
Investors to sue Financial Regulator for recklessly letting them do whatever they wanted to do.
“An organisation representing property investors and developers is to take a class action in the High Court against the Government, the Financial Regulator and the banks over their roles in the collapse of the property market.” ~ The Times again.
I’d be all for suing the banks. If we weren’t all liable for their debts now, making it just a little self-defeating. But how do property investors get to sue them? These were the ones trying to make money out of house prices magically going up forever. The only people they should have a right to sue are their parents, for breeding them too stupid to breathe and tie their shoes at the same time.
Ah, because the banks lent recklessly. True – though this does overlook the fact that the people they were lending recklessly too were the property investors who were borrowing recklessly. It’s the alcoholic’s justification: they didn’t drink too much. They were over-served.
Having destroyed our economy with their bare-bollocked, dribble-soaked avarice, property speculators have decided that they were the real victims here. So once we’ve finished selling our hospitals to pay off foreign banks, they want whatever’s left.
At what point does it become legal to hunt these people down with dogs?
