Lessons learned

OK so now my mums been on my case calling me sexist because apparently her phone can do stuff too. Not that I was ever aware of it because she's never used any of the stuff it can do (apart from filling the memory so full of photos that she had to delete them...downloading them is obviously a bit advanced)but I have been firmly told that it's a very good phone. I'd tell you what type it was but if I asked I'd probably be told 'it's a nice black one' or something like that. Girls, phones, I'm back to the original argument, anything more than text is wasted.

What's in a name?
Anyhow the phone blog for the week is done. This is the other blog. The one about the non smoker. One thing that did occur to me though is a complete opportunity missed. See between the car and the phone I've been having to use forums a bit recently. A lot of these forums don't want to share unless you create a log in. Rather than give them true details I've been using TQuittin.

When I first went to set up a blog about giving up smoking I was all concerned about being anonymous. Rather than give google my real email etc I tried to create a new email address. However as I was doing this through blogger rather than gmail I first created a web address. Tryingtoquitsmokingwithchampix was apparently already taken so I became tquittinwithchampix as suggested by the automatic site thing. So when I had to create an email google actually suggested tquittin.

Now sometimes when things want me to sign up I use tquittin as my log in. I even abbreviate it to TQ but a lot of sites wont accept less than three letters as being a valid name. In these instances I've gone for Tquit as a user name. Don't ask me why it's never occurred to me before but wouldn't Fquit have been so much more fun? Even FQ seems slightly wrong. You might have to say it a few times before you get it. Fquit, fquit fquit. See?

Car
Things have gone deadly quiet on the car front. I suspect this may be good. We were at the stage where I'd accepted a half price service but had asked about the cost of a replacement wheel. That wasn't Friday past but the Friday before. They got back to me the same day to say the service was reserved and that they'd get back to me with prices and answers to another couple of questions. Nothing since. Could it possibly be that he's gone on holiday????? How upset will he be when I copy in his MD querying why I've received no further contact? This wheel could still be mine.

Home
How many of you live somewhere that tourists love but you have never done any of the tourist stuff? I remember being quite stunned last year when we had visitors to our work over from India for about four weeks. At weekends they did stuff like visit London. That's about 600 miles away. For me you'd need a day to drive down, maybe three days to stay and a day to drive back up. Nope, these guys went down on Friday after work and were back at work on Monday. Their cameras suggested that they'd seen all of London. Next weekend they were off to the highlands.

In Britain you are rarely more than 50 miles from the coast and the whole country is about 850 miles from end to end. We forget that in other countries it's possible to live more than 850 miles from the sea. Subsequently we view any distance over about 50 miles as being a road trip.

Anyhow it's not even distance that made me ask about living somewhere tourists love. This week as a reward for a job well done a few of us took a boat trip along the river Clyde from Glasgow city centre to a shopping centre called Braehead. There really hasn't ever been a time I couldn't have done this. It's cheap and you could almost squeeze it into a lunch hour yet, not only I,but all the others had never been on the river that runs through the city. The picture is a picture of the river clyde as it looks in the evening.

It made me think. If someone was to visit and wanted to see the city that I love and call home, would I even be the best person to show them round? The trip was great but then ended with TGI Fridays and boring corporate food that is just about OK. I spend so much of my time, in common with others, getting out of the city that I've forgotten how beautiful it can be to just stay there.

The challenge to you all. Think about how you would show a stranger your place and then do it yourself.

More phones and nonsense next week.

Oh by the way...what about the brushed alluminium background for the blog? I was just experimenting to see what could be done so it will probably change but let me know what you think.

FQuit......

Mayhem returns to the cities streets

First up I have to tell you that my wife gave me a row this week. She went to catch up with the blog on Monday to see if there was anything that I was sharing with the world but not with her and, lo and behold, found that all I had blogged about was my bloody iPhone (as she affectionately calls it).

I'm going to be very general here and use some stereotyping. Women love mobile phones. There can't be too many gadgets that my wife craves more than I do but the phone is definitely up there. She even quite likes the house phone (though she'd probably deny it) where you would have to nag me before I'd use it to call the fire brigade during a fire and even then they'd have to ask very specific questions or I'd somehow relay the message wrongly (So I'm told). Some women even like the iPhone. Sleek lines and a look that makes you not too ashamed to carry it about in the handbag. The thing is, it appears to me, that women like phones for precisely the purpose for which they were originally designed, a phone.

In a woman's world it would appear that a great phone must be able to do two things: Phone and text (so they can send friends a text to say 'call me' and their friends can text back 'OK' before they call). If a phone has a camera it's considered high spec and if it has an MP3 well....That must be what they mean by ultra mobiles.

There appears to be little or no recognition for the fact that many of today's phones rival the PC in everything but memory capacity. It's my SatNav, my newspaper, my Internet, my email. It has train times and a dictionary and encyclopedia and thesaurus. It's a calculator, spirit level, ruler, unit converter, for gods sake it can even translate several languages. Mine has games, TV (live and recorded), notes, still camera, video camera and oh by the way....Great phone, text and about 300 mp3s. At the moment I'm spending a considerable amount of time hacking into it so that it can maybe even do more and will have a way cooler screen. Anyway I can hardly break the computer when I'm spending all my time trying to screw up the phone. Enough said....

So on this blog I wont mention the phone.

This blogs title may give you the clue that today all of the schools where I live returned after their summer break. Some started yesterday but today was the biggy. Like most of those kids, I assume, I wish their holidays lasted longer. I can put up with small crowds of them hanging around the park drinking cider and looking bored. It's so much better than hordes of them packed in to a school and looking dangerous.

My real reason for wishing their holidays lasted longer however is the trouble they cause on my journey to work. Parents on the school run must be the biggest scourge to normal traffic known. Forget roadworks and speed cameras and traffic lights. They fade into insignificance when dealing with the distracted lane control of a parent trying to stop three kids in the back seat fighting. The 4x4s and people carriers parked three abreast with their hazards blinking whilst half the city comes to a standstill to watch the kiddie winks disembark.

Today I was behind the slowest Suzuki ever made. Quite a nice one as well but way slow. Trundling along at between 24-26 miles per hour in a 30 zone at rush hour. Not bothered by the traffic snarling up behind, let's face it, completely unaware that there was traffic behind. I swear I heard a green light trying to speed them up. 'Come on, it said, I can't stay green forever you know. If you could just get up to thirty you'd make it before I changed. Look it's more than my jobs worth, it continued, but as it's you I'll hang on for another couple of seconds but you better hurry. Nope! OK then I'm afraid I'll have to turn red and hold all the other motorists up for another five minutes'. And so five or six of us who would have made not only that light but the next six waited till the Suzuki was ready to move slowly on.

To be fair work wasn't worth the rushing for this morning anyway. There's a delay in a system that I'm about to deliver training for so I've went from frantic rush to casual, Suzuki like, saunter for a week until things catch up. Doesn't mean they don't appreciate my being on time though parents.

I'm sure I also told you that I've been offered a half price service for my car. I've also been told that they'll change one of my other wheels that has started to oxidise but they still haven't caved in to the front wheel. My tack now has been to enquire about the cost of the front wheel and whether (out of warranty now) they will still honour their original offer of paying half that cost. If the answer to that is yea then I'm going to try and trade the value of my half a service against the wheel. I've probably got no chance but I'll keep pushing them. I can live with it if they end up giving in because they think I'm an arse.

Aside from that there isn't much to tell. There are berries on the trees and the maples are even beginning to shed a bit so I think autumn is fast approaching. Unfortunately the garden is still growing so last week was spent cutting grass and trimming the hedge. Hopefully only one or two more goes at that before it gives up for winter.

Anyway, stuff to do... Need to go and play with my phone. It will be the subject of another update within the next few days once I've finished what I'm messing around with so I'll apologise in advance.

In the meantime

Don't quit quitting you quitters

T

Jail break IOS 4.02 withRedsn0w

For the second time in just a few weeks really I am putting up a quick blog to the jail breaking community for iPhones before my normal weekly blog. Apologies to those with no interest in the phone.


This week I did a stupid thing. Fortunately for me on this occasion I got away with it.

As I was reading on Redmond Pie that a new version of iPhone software was coming on to the market I was also being asked by iTunes if I wanted to downoad only or download and install. I selected download only but, as I did so, Redmond Pie confirmed that for iPhone 3g the original Redsn0w jailbreak would still work. Given that it worked so well when ios4.01 turned up hot on the heals of ios 4 I took them at their word.

Don't update

How many times in life do I need to be told, never buy the newest thing until you know that it works? Is that the first generation of a car that your driving? Does it have any problems that have been sorted out on newer models? Did you really pay £400 for that camera just before SLRs became the rage? Does windows mobile really beat iPhone?

I felt quite smug as the jailbreak was applied. I may have the old iPhone but mine would be up to date and jail broken. If the iPhone 4 brigade (who have waited months only to get a jailbreak and then have it shut down)think they are cool. Who's cool now with their 3g? The jailbreak worked. As I understand it it will work with 3g and below and iPod touch 2gs and below but for god sake check that info before you do it. The jailbreak did work but, because I was so far ahead of the game on this one Cydia etc weren't up to date. In other words I was jail broken but had very few of the real advantages. It's taken three days for everything to get caught up but now my phone is comfortably back to where it was.


The official line from all the jail breaking communities is hold your fire. ios4.02 Is simply an update that prevents nasty folk from hacking your iPhone using an exploit that was discovered by the jail breakers. The jail breakers needed a way to load software onto the phone and found one. In doing so it exposed the fact that there was a way that nasty people could do the same but for bad reasons. Given that iPhone hold bank details etc this was not good. Believe it or not the jailbreak community, realising the potential problem, had a fix out at the start of the week and have upgraded that to a proper patch for all phone variants before apple got to market with their solution.

So why did I update and why are so many people hopping from foot to foot waiting to hear when they can update? Simple, you can't fall behind with this stuff. Even as you read this there's software being created that will only work on ios4.02. Apple probably have a team working on a release for ios 4.03 whilst another team will be designing some major changes that will be called ios5. You need to be up to date.


Testers Required


To some extent it's really the jailbreak communities own fault. Apple should be paying these guys. The dev-team (jail breakers) are way ahead of apple in what they want their phones to do. The dev-team create apps that push the functionality of the phone to the limits. Sometimes they push beyond the limits and phones slow down or batteries drain too fast but none of us complain. If a development isn't what it should be delete it. IOS4 delivered folders. Jail breakers already had those. IOS 4 delivered multitasking. Jail broken phones had been doing that with varying success for at least a year. As before Jail broken phones had customisable lock screens and wallpaper. 3g and lower had already had video and camera zoom was taken for granted. All of these things had been available and were working with the jail breakers long before apple caught up. A suspicious person might think Apple monitored this activity with a keen eye to see what would be the popularity and impact on performance before packging them up into ios4.

A genius in the community known as Comex has pretty much launched a working flash application. IPhone has been stongly criticised for not having this and was even taken to court over an advert because of this. Apple was told to stop saying it's phones could access 'all of the internet, because without flash it could only access parts. You need it for a lot of movie and animation formats.

What Comex has launched is not yet perfect and he or she will probably work tirelessly until they get it perfect. Within 3-6 months of the the jail breakers launching Apple will probably package it and launch to the world. The jail breakers seem to be apples own research and development lab. And folk like me have no objection to being the lab rats. My 3g is almost equal to an iPhone 4 with the exception of memory. In terms of hardware it will fall behind but for the moment it's doing pretty well.


Jailbreaking also gives users applications that neither apple or the phone providers want you to have. I may not be able to use Frash on my 3g but one thing that I do use is MY3G. A fantastic little piece of software that can only be used on a jailbroken phone. What it does is makes your phone believe it has a wifi connection when it actually only has 3g. As a result your phone will attempt to do things like stream live tv when normally it would say that this could only be done through wifi. It doesn't actually increase the 3g signal but sometimes the signal is strong enough and the phone is just refusing because of data capacities.

DIY

Don't update
Given that I got my phone in May and have now jail broken it for about the fourth time I'm getting a bit pissed off. It's not difficult to jailbreak but jail breaking and then reapplying all your settings takes time and is annoying. For this reason I'm thinking about researching my own jailbreak. At the moment I'm not too sure what that means but I'm planning to find out. I'm not a programmer so I'm not talking about creating a jailbreak like the guys do with new functions and everything. I'm thinking much more simple. Is there a quick, button click, way of upgrading your phone and keeping all the programs and settings that you got from your jailbreak? A way of being on the newest version but maintaining functionality until the real geniuses at the dev-team work their magic.

The dev-team solution would always be better but this would offer a fix that would give them the breathing space to do their stuff. I know people would use that. Can I figure out how to do it? At the moment certainly not. If I do do it will anyone be interested? Maybe. Problem is I'll then need folk to test it as well because I'm stuck with my 3g till 2012.

This could become extreme jail breaking....

Stay hooked

T

What's in a name?

Just when you wonder if you're the only one left reading the site, you log in, and find that someone new has decided to add this site to their follow list.

Hi p_cj and welcome to the world of quitting smoking and mobile phones and whatever else comes up. P_cj.....It's an unusual name. I'm going to take a leap here and say it's possibly a shortened version of something and not even a real name. Get me...Like the priest called me T when he christened me and all my mail is addressed to Mr Quittin. Nope my name came out of an unhappy accident when setting up my blogger account and it just stuck. Poet!!! Sure there's a story to that name? Zoe? I think that actually might be Zoe's name you know. Thing is, I can't help it, I like to wonder about these things. Anyhow welcome to the site P (if I may be so informal as to abbreviate your abbreviation).

Another idea I had for finding out about folk was to ask what World cup team they supported. Then It occurred to me that, for many, that just wouldn't work. I'm supporting Spain. I live in the UK but, as anyone will tell you, those of us from the UK that don't live in England don't support England (actually I would quite like to see them do well but, don't say I said so). Poet is in Canada. Canada doesn't have a team and the average Canadian wouldn't, I don't think, support USA.



Or I can just look at my map from google analytics. The green areas represent the continents where my visitors have come from in the last month. The darker the green the more frequent the visits. Problem is that it highlights a whole continent when someone visits. I had one visit from someone in Moscow last month however, flatteringly, the map makes it look like I've cracked the market for the whole of Russia. I like that map. It is a bit misleading though. The darkest shade of green is 107 visitors from the UK. But when it comes to the lighter shades it gets harder to distinguish. Ireland sent 14 visitors while Russia sent 1 yet they look pretty evenly matched on the Map.

It also occurs to me that I'm 128 days off the smoking. What I can tell you at this stage is how it feels. I've had a bit of a summer cold this week which included a chesty cough. God I do not miss the good old days when I coughed like that every morning. I'm scared to say this in case I jinx it but...it's two weeks since I had a proper quitzit. I so hope I've beet those wee bastards. I think the clear weather might be helping my skin. My quiet hope is that once they are gone they won't come back.

It is no longer tough not to smoke. It doesn't gnaw away at my every waking thought. It does still surprise me though that I do miss it. Why? If I could just figure out why I miss it I could finally put to rest any shadow of the smoker I was. I don't miss the cough. I don't actually miss the taste anymore although I did for a long time. I don't miss the smell. (It's not that I ever loved the smell but, for a long time after I quit, the smell of smoke triggered a reaction and made me want to smoke. So many non smokers get the opposite but I was actually drawn to the smell. I'm not offended by it now but it doesn't have any effect on me). Nope it must be the drug itself. There's a certain state of mind, a certain feeling that's almost but not quite there anymore.

Imagine you could only ever have decaffeinated coffee or alcohol free lager . The taste and smell are available but the 'sensation' is gone. Is that what it is? Is that why people smoke? I think the thing is though...When it's gone it's gone. I actually don't think that having a cigarette now would bring it back.

For those of you trying at this moment to quit. Take all the help you can get and quit. The advantages far out weigh the disadvantages. But there will be some of you out there like me who will have to accept that, Thirty years of self harm, doesn't just go away over night.

Until next time.....

T

Would you Adam & Eve it-I've taken the Apple

For the international readers, 'Adam and Eve it' is what's known as Cockney rhyming slang for 'Believe it', i.e. 'Would you believe it-I've taken the Apple'. Phew glad that's out of the way. Here in the UK we have some funny customs that seem normal till you try to explain them.

Anyway what the hell am I on about? Well I'm not on about smoking because I don't do that now. What I am on about is mobile phones. Yep some folk are quite happy with phones that can make phone calls and possibly send and receive texts. Add on a camera and it's enough to make some folk faint.

Me!!! Well I always wanted more. I bought a PC when they were expensive and no-one could understand what you would do with it. I had a calculator in Primary school. That was long enough ago that most of the other kids parents didn't have one and hadn't seen one. Lucky this isn't a dating site because I don't think I'm really selling myself here. The point is I always wanted gadgets. I didn't necessarily know what they did or why but I wanted them. When I was watching space 1999 I wasn't enthralled by the whole 'other worldliness of it all'. I wanted to know what the machine with all the lights and dials did. I would have bought a toaster if it had a graphic equaliser or decent digital display. So when it came to phones I always had the cutting edge one.

I fell for the ultra mobiles hook line and sinker. I even stuck with it and learned how to text using a stylus and a version of my own hand writing. Even the true geeks gave up on that but I didn't. BUT, I never got the whole Apple vibe. My samsung MP3 player had a 20gb hard drive before your computer had a 20gb hard drive. What's more I could download what I wanted and not be stuck with Itunes. My computer could sync with anything and if I wanted software (not from shops if you know what I mean) I only had to persevere and I'd get it. I once boasted that 'the only legal piece of software on my pc was the software I used to download illegal software'.

But now I've given in. My HTC was a damned fine phone in millions of ways and I actually wanted it to be better than an I phone. I wanted windows mobile to out do apple. The phone was capable of it. I even think windows might have won but then android and symbian make the non Ipod market to diluted so developers can't concentrate on one thing. So now I have an apple Iphone.

If you get one, be prepared. This doesn't work straight out of the box. You NEED to have Itunes on your PC and an Istore account (with your bank details loaded) or you can't even switch it on (you could but there'd be no point). Remind yourself how to 'Pair' your wifi with your broadband because you'll want to do that. Figure out how to copy all your contacts because you need a new Sim card. Make sure you have a free usb port on your pc because they don't like extension cables or external USB ports. I took a morning off to wait for the delivery. Then I ended up getting it from the depot the night before. It took all that night and my morning off to get the damn thing up to speed.

That said...It's pretty bloody good once you get it figured out. Oh and there are some naughty people who've cracked a way of installing stuff without going through Itunes. I could grow to like this.

I wonder if there's an app that could stop you smoking?

Speak later

T