My Life on the Net

It’s been a long few hours around the world as people everywhere attempt to sign into MobileMe, sign up for their new iPhones or getting their current iPhones and iPods updated to the latest firmware… and I’m stuck there with them.

Thankfully, I’m not waiting in line anywhere as I don’t have the money to update to an iPhone.  I’m one of those iPod Touch owners who have already got and PURCHASED applications for their iPod and each time I click ‘Update’ I can’t get the current firmware.

As you can see, I’ve been having problems getting my firmware updated all day.

The past twenty four hours have been hell for Apple as their MobileMe service was released–now operating in both mac and windows–the Apple servers were bombarded with requests, and hours wasted for people trying to use the service for their work around the world.

It’s been worse for the people who have the money to afford iPhone 3Gs as registration servers around the world have been broken down until 3.35pm UTC, causing people the frustration of having to sort it out at home later on.

As someone thinking of making a new Apple purchase for his birthday, I’m having a little bit of a problem with the idea that they’re such good people to go to.  The idea of Apple as a brilliant company who cannot do wrong has been seriously broken the past two days as mostly all of their services have been crushed to rubble.  That’s sad… because I love them so very much.

The sad thing is that I know one thing about Apple fanatics, just like I–are very forgiving.  While it will be in the news all next week, we’ll forget about the fiasco.  Not many people realise there were bad problems of people trying to activate their original iPhones last year.

After all the things that happened today, I’m happy that I’m no longer thinking of getting an iPhone 3G.  When MacWorld came along I was calculating costs and thoughts on purchasing, how much I’d have to sell and work in order to afford the phone and contract.  However, I see no problem when the new firmware finally becomes available for the original iPhone to purchase a second-hand model for use with a current (and cheaper) contract that I have.

I just hope that Apple remember this fiasco, and the owners of these new products don’t take it lightly.  It’s their fault, and although we like them so very much, you can still tell them off every once in a while…

If you thought that I, geek extraordinaire, would miss the WWDC you’d be greatly mistaken. I even fine tuned my computer setup for extreme visibility - IRC chats detailing the show and chats about it’s products were on one screen, social media sites on another and on my laptop stood Leo Laporte getting a live feed of the conference and discussing it on TWiT Live.

What can I say, I love Apple.

Before the conference I was thinking that I wouldn’t get an iPhone. My current phone works well, the only downside is the music player lacks any real help.  That’s why I have an iPod Touch to keep me going… and I’ve loved it.

But when I got the text message through detailing the iPhone’s 8GB price through twitter I went speechless. £99! My iPod cost more than that!  That’s when I thought… it’s time to upgrade.

While £99 is a extremely cheap price for anything as high quality as Apple tech, I see what they’re doing. Apple does get a lot of money from the contracts of the iPhone and a contract of £35 a month is fairly steep when somebody like myself spends only £3.63 a month on 600 minutes and 500 texts (cashback baby! [so technically I'm paying £30... what of it?])

Despite having no real connection to the Reality Distortion Field, I began making calculations… Ok.. o2 have a set contract of 18 months for £35 per month.. that’s… £630!  For the same deal (but without internet) I have to only pay £65!  It’s a shocking difference for a student life and made me consider how much owning another piece of Apple tech is really worth it and would a job over the summer fuel my habit.

However, o2 have been extremely smart in my opinion by offering a pay-as-you-go offering of the iPhone (but no pricing as of yet). Since I am already part of the great o2 network–I could still get my iPhone and yet have the good deals offered by e2save.com (The web browsing bolt on costs £7.50 a month - so I hope it’s still worth it).

Something tells me that on July 11 the iPhone (either the contract or pay-as-you-go version) is going to be extremely hard to come by in the UK.  However, since my birthday is only 11 days afterwards I have to tell my family that if they all came together to buy this for me… I’d love ‘em. [hint hint]

The majority of us all have webcams. Most people’s are built into their laptops, while others remain discarded into the drawer next to the drawing pins and highlighters.

So many years ago I remember people’s desire for video chat in EVERYTHING. We even invented video phones to get our face-to-face chat — 3G phones as well as landline that enabled us to feel more connected to the person we were talking to. The Internet also gave us that fix–iChat, Skype, MSN, Yahoo, all the major chat clients offered the feature and once you went through all of the loops you managed to get a chat through.

In my entire life I have had a total of two video chats. One was in 2002, to relatives in Greece. Secondly, I had a small conversation with my aunt after I moved to Dundee. Any other time was either a massive failure (thank you, internet) or a one-way video conference.

However, I have voice chats all of the time. I talk to friends in Edinburgh weekly as well as using Skype to connect to family and friends across the globe. Why not video?

Well, there’s a few reasons:-

• What’s the point?
• It hogs my bandwidth!
• I don’t have a webcam.

What’s the point? Well, it lets people see who you really are. You might have met your friends on the net, but it doesn’t mean you have to remain as an avatar. You can almost truly connect, as video chat gives a more natural experience as you’re able to relate to people’s body movements and actions. You can even show things off to each other–such as family items or miscellaneous geekery!

It hogs my bandwidth! Well, that makes sense. But it’s not as big as you might thing. Anyone with a 512Mb connection or higher should be ok with having an video conference.

I don’t have a webcam. Well, that didn’t stop me. If you want, you can use an ordinary DV Camcorder–but it doesn’t cost much for a new webcam these days. My webcam, that only cost me £5 ($10), offers high quality images and even night vision.

Ok, rant over.

Sometimes I just don’t understand you two. You are both selling eBook readers to people in the US, and only the US? Did you do your fact-finding before trying to produce a product?

Sure, you’re one of the cheapest places to buy tech - but is it the best market. No offense to the yanks, but it would seem that the stereotype of the standard person of the States as someone who pigs out on junk food and watches T.V. twelve hours a day isn’t the perfect image to sell reading devices too.

However, the stereotype of the standard Briton, and more relatively English - is that of a person who owns too many of books and knows the entire collection of Shakespeare off by heart. So why no love? Even a Scottish person like me, although I don’t wear a kilt everyday (though that seems like it’d be kinda cool if we did) make some of the best literature in the world.

I remember playing about with various methods of reading eBooks when I was a lot more interested in reading. I hate carrying books around me but I always had a few things I carried with me each time I went out in my early teens. My iPod and my HP iPaq h1930 PDA. Each one is capable of reading text in a variety of methods, but nothing seemed to feel… right. The back-light was a major concern - I wanted to read books for more than a couple of hours - something I couldn’t do too well on a PDA - and I wanted to read them on a book-size-ish screen, something that seemed impossible in 2002 without some massive battery pack or an AC adaptor connected at all times - and I definitely wasn’t going to retrofit one of those Game Boy magnifying devices onto my iPod.

I doubt I’m the only one who would be at least interested in buying one of your readers. I almost bought a Sony Reader on my way back home from New York during the summer, something I wish I did now. I have full and free access to eBooks of quite a lot of the course books I need for the coming years, and the cost of the print versions of these textbooks are very comparable to the price of a Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle - so what would be better for me? Should I keep 10,000 pages of literature for my course taking up my so very limited space, or can I replace it with something that’s only half-an-inch thick?

You set your release dates soon, because I’m bored waiting.

I’m taking some inspiration from Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write…

1. When you start to think that 12 hours a day is a minimum requirement to be on your computer.
2. If you find that you have more friends online than you do offline. Keep a balance.
3. All of your twitter followers know everything about your daily habits, including each and every time you go to the bathroom.
4. You order all of your food, movies and sort out all of your bills online and never leave the house.
5. The furthest you’ve walked in the past few days is to the refrigerator.
6. When you see anything out of the ordinary in the outside world, you twitter it.
7. If you don’t blog for a few days, you get emails from your readers wondering if everything is ok.
8. Your ISP calls you daily to inform you that you’re running out of bandwidth for this month.
9. You find your sleep pattern is tuned to a different time zone, just like mine is now to CET.
10. When you start to make websites to fill in the blanks of the web, just because it’s bothering you.
11. If you have more domain names than you can count or remember.
12. You have to wear earplugs to drone out the souns of the fans you have installed on your multiple computers
13. When you have triple the amount of screens than you have computers (although that has been a dream of mine for quite a while)
14. Sleep is something you wish you had more of, but you feel that if you miss the latest story on the front page of digg before the server crashes then it’s not worth seeing.
15. If you travel, you need to check in advance to see if your hotel provides free wifi - and if not, you rebook.

We know of hype, of the marketing and the sales of the season.  We know that we should be careful not to become obsessed with these things.  If we did, just imagine what could happen… Terrors on the street, people pushing each other on the pavement - trying to get the last present that they ‘must have’ due to it’s price of only £29.99.   Oops, did I just recite holiday buying?

Now, there is another mind.  This mind only purchases from one store, hail to one ruler - and I used to be one of them.  They only expect the best, nothing can be faulty.  The Apple generation.

Today, my fellow faithful!  I have brought another into our world, and his name be Michael Fitzgerald! He shall wear his cloak of perfection and purchase his first ever iPod. This may be a small step, but soon we shall use the Reality Distortion Field against him, and within months bend his mind to purchase a mac!

Let it be!

How insane would it be if your entire flat starts to play MMORPGs on the same day?

That’s what seems to have happened at my flat in Dundee this week where five out of six people in my flat have started to play World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI and even Guild Wars.

Most think of it as an addiction, but is it a virus? It’s slowly spreading throughout the complex - the only survivor quarantined in his room and back at Elgin for the weekend.

I seem to have been trapped in three different camps. I started last year in WoW and played it for a few months - I loved it, but neither had the time or the money to support the habit. Because of that, in August I started Guild Wars (which has no subscription fees, btw) and enjoyed it. But, with half the flat on WoW and the other on FFXI - I went out and bought it this evening.. I’m turning into a MMORPG addict! Well, for the next month.

If i’m still alive by the end of the month, we’ll see what happens…

So, today is my eighteenth birthday. Whoah. Eighteen. The cusp of adulthood.

It’s an odd feeling that my rights as a human being have changed since today. Technically, I’m now an adult. I can drink in pubs, be treated just like any adult in court and most of all… I can watch eighteen rated movies in the cinema! YEAH!

It’s been a great day today, although I had no plans for what to do. I got a load of presents as well.  The day before, my aunt and uncle bought me an iPod 5G. Whoah. Never expected that.  Today, I’ve managed to get a lot too… I got eighteen presents from my sister - ranging from presents that joked about to useful and helpful presents.  And of course, from the parents, a bottle of Jack and a butt load of money (£180). Oh, and not to forget… £20 from my Aunty Issy, who lives down in Shipley - near Leeds - and who I’m seeing again on Friday.

Now all I’m thinking is… shall I go down to the pub with the old man tonight?

No, not Google’s Summer of Code, my summer of code! Not only web development (of which I want to learn a few more languages a bit better), but building Coca apps too, fused with Applescript when needed.

I love the idea of the facade of Artificial Intelligence. Not one single teenage student, or any other human at this time, has managed to create a true form of Artificial Intelligence - and don’t worry, I know I won’t be able to. But voice feedback is something I love about OS X, and although the voices are a bit rubbish it does prove useful.

I remember the laughs I used to have with the voice features of OS X, mainly by saying “Computer, tell me a joke” or “Computer, what time is it?”, and conveniently get a response seconds later.

But how about extending that a little further? That’s what I’d love to do. Specifically, I’d like to set an automated wakeup feature of which I could have a little conversation before I go to bed and when I get up.

This is what I was thinking.

You’d set 2 user configurable variables. One for your name, and one for the computer. At default (if I make it publicly available, or if I ever finish it) it will simply be ‘Sir’ and ‘Computer’. But of course, in terms of my current macintosh it would be ‘Craig’ and ‘Eve’, or ‘Sephy’ in September (mmm… macbook…)

A simple alarm activation sequence would be as follows:

“Goodnight Eve”
“Goodnight Craig. Would you like me to wake you up in the morning?”
“Yes please”
“When would you like to be woken up?”
“7AM”
“So that’s 7 AM?”
“Yeah”
“Ok. Goodnight. I’ll see you in the morning”

How awesome would that be.. Pretty awesome.

But it would even better in the morning:

“Good morning Craig”
“Good morning Eve”
“I just thought I’d tell you that it is 9AM, it’s cloudy, average temperature is about 12 degrees celcius and you have 2 new emails.
“Thank you Eve”
“Would you like me to play you some music to wake you up?”
“Yes please”
“Anything in particular?”
“Not really”
“Ok, I’ll just play something random”

Now, this isn’t just a few hours of coding.. Oh no.. It’s a hell load of work and there’s a reason that’s my main project in the SUMMER of code. There’s loads of problems which will hurt me from the start:

But imagine the end result - it would be a behemoth of applications, and although a little gimmicky it’d be fun and easy to use - and would be a lot better than the beep beep of a standard alarm clock. I’d keep it plugin friendly, open source and best of all… FREE!! (Well, donationware)

So, good idea or bad idea?