The iPhone 4. Great "i", shame about the "phone"

Well I've had my Jesus Phone for a couple of weeks now so I've had a chance to properly play with it and use it in the real world.

As a handheld device it's fair to say it pretty much rocks. It's fast, the piddly little keyboard which I thought would be a right nightmare actually works very well. Email and light surfing on 3G are fine and apps are quick to load and run.

However what Apple seem to have forgotten is the primary purpose of a "phone" is to, well, make and receive voice calls and at this I have to say it completely and utterly sucks. Firstly to use the device as a telephone necessitates developing the ability manual dexterity and hand positioning skills of a classical Javanese dancer in order to avoid touching the two bits of antenna in the "apple death grip". Sure you don't have to stand next to someone playing a gamelan when making a call but I can't help thinking thing might help with the hand positioning. Also the whole screen is touch sensitive, which is the point, but Apple seem to have not realised that a person's earlobe works just as well as a finger to hit the mute key during a call. Apparently the iPhone is supposed to have a proximity sensor in it to turn off the screen when it detects your bonce but it seems rather flaky unless you have the phone to your ear in just the right way so we're back to those Javanese dance techniques again... remember to extend that middle finger... here are some people making a call to their bank on their iPhone 4's to pay the gas bill:



The other thing about a mobile phone is that you would expect it to have a reasonable standby and talk time, what with it being a phone and all. Nah, not this phone. I use it as an iPod for about 3 hours a day and I'm lucky that the battery will still be reading above 20% when I get home. I almost feel as though I should be carrying around another phone juts in case I need to make a long phonecall at the end of the day. Unless you know you can definitely hook it up to some external power source at some point during the day you will not be able to make any calls on this fucker after 24 hours.

Oh and for a "it just works" device I've managed to crash mine, twice.

I tell you if I had paid more than 30 quid for this thing I would be absolutely livid.

Amen, or something

As you probably know I have a little hobby called "scambaiting" which involves me answering those Nigerian fraud emails pretending to believe them and then messing with the scanmmer's heads. I have a seperate email account whose address has been seeded in various places from which these scammers harvest their potential victims' email addresses; what we in the trade call a "catcher account"

However this little gem turned up in the catcher account this morning.


|

Endtime Endtime
to Endtime
Re: Beloved,don't leave ur salvation to the future.Reject 666"(read-Bible-Revelation-13-8-18)
6:23 PM (12 hours ago)


To know that hell await sinners and keep silent on the matter would be injustice to mankind.eternal punishment is not a pleasant subject for discussion, but you must know it.hell the destiny of all sinners,who personly reject Christ Jesus in their life time. (read- Math-25-41-46.Rev-20-13-15,21-8.) Repent to day."Bewere of 666"-read-Revelation-13-8-18)9-Says He who has an ear,let him hear.Repent today and save ur life to Christ Jesus.

Salvation is found in no one else for there is no other name under heaven given to man,"you and I"by which we must be save.(read -Act-4-12).A great multitude that no one could count,from every nation,tribe,people and language,standing before the throne and in front of the lamb, "JESUS CHRIST." they were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.and they cried out in a loud voice,salvation belongs to our GOD who sits on the throns and to the lamb,JESUS CHRIST.Say Aman praise and glory and wisdom and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever Aman.(read- Rev-7-9-11).The wages of sin is death,but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus (read- Rom-6-23) save ur life in CHRIST JESUS to day.

And it carries on for page after page after page in the same badly spelt vein.

Doubt he's a scammer but I could not resist dropping him a quick reply:

So as the bible talks about unicorns does it mean unicorns are real? If I believe in Jesus will he let me have a unicorn when I go to heaven?

I'd like a unicorn. Unicorns are cool.

Could I have a lady unicorn as I reckon it would be really great to have sex with a unicorn and I would want a lady one because I'm not gay.

You could use the horn for leverage.

Love and kisses

Learning to love Apple, kinda

OK so I am now the owner of Apple's latest and greatest must have gizmo, the iPhone 4. In fact I have two of the little buggers as I got Mrs Dracunculus one as well.

Now regulars will know that I'm not mad keen on Steve Job's toys (see my comments on the iPad down the page a bit) and Apple fanbois like this one deserve setting on fire, stomping on and then setting on fire again just to be sure. However a couple of weeks ago I was, much to my surprise, given an 8Gb iTouch as a "thank you" gift from my gaffer at work for all the stuff I did in Honkers which was rather nice. Now I liked my little nano iPod and just saw this as a bit of an upgrade but the more I played with it, got it all working with the wi-fi, added a few apps that I actually use including a very nice graphical calculator that does matrices and calculus the more I liked it. So much so that I thought, "this is good, all it needs is to be online all the time, kind of like a phone" and as I was thinking that Orange my mobile provider rang up and said "Hello Mr Dragon, phone upgrade time again, what would you like?" and I said "iPhone please". And then they told me if I hung on for a week I could have the nice shiny new one when it was released.

So the day after all the sad fucks had queued up for hours to get their Apple heroin the nice man from DHL brought me a couple right to my door and I didn't have to queue up for anything. Nor did I have to pay through the nose as they went onto my 30 quid a month package which has 10 hours of calls and as much text messages and internet as I can eat and they only cost me 32 quid a pop, oh and the contract period is 12 months. The advantages of Orange still thinking I'm a business I guess :-)

So what's it like. Well it's rather nice. The screen display is to die for, brilliantly clear with text incredibly crisp. Sure you would not want to read War and Peace on the thing but for a bit of light surfing it's excellent. There was a but of a brown smudge on the bottom left of the screen (which Peter Ibbotson tweeted back at me was the glue curing or the blood of one of the suicide vicitms from the Foxconn factory where they make the phone, something like that) but it seems to have gone now. Its also very quick and smooth and the pinchy, grabby, wave it in the air like you don't care user interface becomes quite natural quite quickly. I didn't seem to have a problem with the signal dissapearing either but then living in the middle of the swamps as I do I barely get a GPRS signal at the best of times so today in town is going to be the true test of that.

The downsides as far as I can tell are just the normal ones you get with any Apple product and the reasons I don't own any Mac type products. First you have to use iTunes which is just about the suckiest piece of software in the Western Spiral Arm and you can do with it only what Steve Fecking Jobs says you can. Want to add words to the spell checker... no, can't do that. Want to set your ringtone to Kraftwerk's "Computer Love" which you have loaded up... no, can't do that either. How about using it as a portable hard drive? Nope, sorry. Want to write your own little app for it... oh do sod off, look buy "iCrap" from the hideously overpriced app store, we know what's best for you, little person.

Now if I could do all those things on my piddly little Sony Ericcson i910 how come I can't on your box Steve?

Still those niggles aside, I do rather like it and it can stay. I'd say get one if you can on a good tariff where you don't have to pay that much and you're due a phone upgrade anyway but if you go and pay 600 odd quid for one you need your bumps read.

Enough with the world cup already

Look I know there's a footy match on round at Nelson Mandela's old gaff at the moment but does every single fucking product I use have to jump on the sodding bandwagon? I mean my cornflakes at breakfast have "A feast of football" splattered all over the packaging with some bollocks about winning a shin-pad if I send in three packet tops. If I want a few pringles to nibble on when flicking through the TV channels to find something not soccer related I now have to open a packet of "Pringoooooals" and there's world-cup themed sandwiches in the staff canteen.

Honestly I am expecting to sit down on the loo only to see Wayne Fucking Rooney's gurning fizzog leering at me as it's been printed on the bog roll.

And what's got everyone's knickers in a bunch? Well everyone who gives a shit about watching the spectacle of a bunch of overpaid tossers kicking a ball about anyway. That would be the "vuvuzela" which is the Xhosa word for "wank-trumpet" apparently. I can see how folk might be a tad irritated by said "instrument" as quite by accident I caught the last 10 minutes of Rooney and his friends being held to a one-all draw by a nation to whom footy ranks around the same level of interest as competitive scrabble or morris dancing. It took a minute to work out what was wrong with the sound as all I could hear was a swarm of angry bees doing a simultaneous B-flat fart, ah - that would be your knuckle-dragging football fan embracing the "cultural diversity of the Rainbow Nation" and honking his plastic wank-trumpet. I found I wanted to ram the bloody things flare end first up their collective arses within about 90 seconds so what the hell it must be like listening to it for 90 minutes I hate to think.

And can you imagine being in the stadium itself? I read the noise level of these things is 113dB which, to give you an idea, is the peak sound pressure of my 16" chainsaw when it's at full chat. I fully expect our wandering fans to come back from SA and walk straight into the nearest hospital to get treated for deafness.

Maybe they could pick up some retro-viral drugs to handle the HIV they picked up off the local good-time girls whilst "On tour".

Gardening with rifles.

Hello dear readers... oh hand on I just had a look at my webstats, let's make that "Hello dear reader and the rest of you who land here after typing "scaly dragon porn" into Google with your left hand because your right hand is otherwise engaged."

Bit of a blogging hiatus over the last couple of weeks as I was on holiday after the HK debacle and before that was too busy telling anyone at work what a complete and utter clusterfuck the HK operation was to get any blogging done. Anyway back now and with concrete poured, greenhouse erected, raised beds made and a whole load of other "grow it yourself" stuff done.

However I'm not entirely sure I'm going about this latest "save the planet grow your own food it tastes better and is good for you" thing that seems to be going on at the moment. Sure all those things might be true but it's so far cost me a small fucking fortune to even get going. Tomatoes, peppers and chillies all need to be grown more or less indoors so that's 180 quid for the sand, cement and gravel, 200 quid for a cement mixer (I have lots of concrete to make later on so I splurged on a new one) then 800 quid for a wood greenhouse because the aluminium ones are crap so all in with pots, compost and the all important little sticks that say what each plant is I've spent the best part of 1300 quid on this so far which would buy a hell of a lot of chillies I reckon.

Yes I know I could have done things cheaper. We did make a start with a cheapie plastic "greenhouse" which was basically thick plastic over a flimsy frame which is getting results but it (a) is dropping to bits already with one part of the "door" held together with bulldog clips after the zip broke and (b) looks dreadful.

The beds were a bit cheaper - just 80 quid for some timber and a bit of my time to screw it all together and 20 quids worth of timber treatment. We're only going to use these for stuff like lettuice and expensive veg like white onions though as living in the middle of a swamp where the predominant industry is growing things I can pick up a 25kg sack of maris pipers for under a tenner and that lasts us most of the winter so sod growing my own spuds.

Oh and the chickens... wow we get free eggs and they are much better than the shop bought ones. And the chickens themselves were cheap as we got ex battery hens so it was just a fiver each as a donation to some hen-hugging charity and they are cheap to feed. Ah but they need a house to live in - I got a plastic one as when I costed the timber to make a traditional henhouse the plastic one came in about the same price. And then living in the middle of a swamp as you do as soon as you get chickens you end up with rats.

So now I have a shiny new air rifle to deal with the rat issue. Got a reasonably priced 200 quid one from China (so now Blackpowder is not talking to me because I got a girly gun rather than a proper one) and there is something quite theraputic about sitting on your deck in the evening blasting away at the furry little bastards and at 15 metres even a crap shot like me can hardly miss and they just go "squeek" and fall over (apart from the one I had to finish off with a brick as I fluffed the headshot) but yet another expense I could have done without.

So there you are, self sufficiency and growing your own food. I would not recommend it unless you already have a very well paid job. But you do get to kill rats with a gun.

We are flying home

Ah the sweet taste of business class lounge wine, especially when one has sweet talked the lounge dragons at Cathay's Pier into letting you into their very nice lounge and not BA's crappy little one stuffed out by the cargo sheds.

The ash seems to have dissipated and all things being equal I should be back in dear old Blighty at 5am tomorrow in time for bacon butties and a shower in the arrivals lounge.

I even managed to wangle a front upstairs berth on the plane, so first dibs at the food and not getting disturbed by people going to the bog whilst you're at 38000 feet over Kazakhstan.

Only piddly thing is I keep doing such a good job pulling their arses out of the fire whilst I'm here that the project manager, over a couple of beers between work and airport tonight practically begged me to come over for three or four weeks.

Don't know how Mrs Dracunculus will take that.... oh shit hang on she reads this blog. I'm screwed!*



*(only joking Mrs D... we'll chat when you're back from the Land of the Pharaohs.)

Ashes... all is ashes

Better sodding not be. OK the situation is this: I need the 6pm BA flight to HKG to leave tonight as it will become the plane leaving tomorrow evening for home. Now just in case I have had the company travel people get me a backup plan which involves holding a reservation on an Air France flight to CDG in case Heathrow gets "ashed in" as it were.

But they can only hold the flight until close of business today, by which time I don't know if the planes have taken off yet.

So around midnight Hong Kong time I have to make a call to issue or cancel.

Who said international business travel was all comfy lounges and fully reclining seats.

(which is generally is by the way)

Playing with new toys

Well I didn't mean to get one but I seem to have ended up with an iPad. Let's just say that I went into an electronics store In Kowloon to get a camcorder and came out with Apple's latest must have gismo. My logic in this is that as it isn't available in the uk just yet and as I got it effectively vat free I can try it out and sell it when I get back and maybe even make a small profit.

Present indications are that on balance I might shove it on ebay sooner rather than later. Ok so the screen display is amazingly clear and safari is a pretty decent browser and the control interface is nice and slick but, well to be honest its nothing that special. As the app store won't let me sign up as I have the temerity to live in the UK you're stuck with what is basically a clever portable web browsing tablet. The screen based keyboard is ok enough for one finger typing blog posts and email but you would not want to do any serious writing on it and at 16gig you aren't going to be storing that much on it. Basically, what we have here is an overgrown itouch that you can't load apps onto.

Now where's my proper laptop, I need to log onto ebay

Moss?

We does not have it.

In fact it's rather a dull room really. Just another corporate hotel. However it's comfy, everything works and it has broadband (for 10 quid a day mind you, but the company is paying) and the shower is enormous.

As I mentioned earlier the hotel itself is in Kowloon, which is on the mainland opposite Hong Kong island. It's rather, different, this side of the water. Whereas HK Island is more upmarket, swanky boutiques, office skyscrapers and old colonial government buildings this side is a bit more edgy and probably the "real" Hong Kong. Slightly tatty apartment blocks, everything hemmed in, tiny streets, shops of every kind all mixed up from little tailors shops¹ and Chinese fast food joints to swanky bars, shops selling seriously high-end camera gear and a place that is basically a giant walk-in humidor selling Cuban cigars (we will be going back there on Monday for some Partagas No. 2 I think). I actually prefer it to the island side to be honest.

The only downside is the constant hassle I get as a gweilo from the touts... "Sir you want buy fake rolex", "Suit we sell cheap cheap!", "Lap dancy club sir, you come in now?", "Meester Dragon you want nice lady dragon? Wings go flap flap love you long time!"

I'm not entirely sure what the protocol is here. Do you just ignore them? Say you are not interested? Set them on fire?

I've been going for option number three so far but I just got a message from the Hong King Fire and Civil Defence people to please try the other options as they need to give their staff a break.






¹ Bespoke suits in silk/cashmere for $2200 (about 200 quid) with a spare pair of trousers thrown in ... I go to pick mine up tomorrow.

Kowloon 3am.

Been awake for the last hour as jet-lag plays funny tricks on my sleep patterns. However it was worth it to flip the lappy on and see that Gordon the Gorgon is gone.

Ding dong the witch is dead :-)

Now let's pack him off to The Hague and have him tried for war crimes.