The occasional scrivener

It’s time for my annual summer vacation. Four weeks of… nothing much planned. We did have plans, but they fell through.

There’s plenty to do around the apartment though, and I’m looking forward to that. But I think I need some days to decompress first.

Updates will be even sparser than usual, but I doubt I’ll be able to refrain from posting to Twitter from the phone. So follow me there if you’re obsessively interested in my doings.

Have a great summer!

This old post by Carlo Longino popped up in my vanity feed today, prompting me to revisit my comments on the UK launch of the iPhone last year. It’s interesting to compare and contrast to the situation now.

I can’t help feeling the bloom has come off the iPhone rose.

For me, a quick entertaining read, but about as nourishing as a bag of crisps. I’m broadly in agreement with Jonathan McCalmont’s review.

Kapuścińsky beskriver hur Herodotos Historia följt honom på hans karriär som reporter, från de första trevande stegen i Indien och Kina till hans resor i Afrika och Mellanöstern.

Boken flätar förtjänstfullt samman både bilden av den moderne polske journalisten och hans grekiske inspiratör och i någon mening läromästare. Den är också en bra introduktion till Herodotos verk.

So Telia finally released pricing details for the iPhone 3G and to no-one’s surprise they basically suck.

There’s no flat-rate data plan. If you pay the highest plan (859 SEK/month) you get 1GB free data. Thereafter the daily data cost is capped to 9 SEK.

If you choose the 16GB model and pay the highest plan for 24 months, you’ll pay 21,400 SEK in total (24,000 SEK if you max out your internet 3 days a week).

Cheapest deal in total is the 8GB with cheapest plan in 18 months, 7,880 SEK. The cheapest 16GB is 8,680 SEK.

In contrast, you can buy a fully unlocked 16GB model from Italy for €569 (around 5,150 SEK) and get a plan that’s better for you.

Here’s an Excel file with my calculations.

Thanks to Emil for finding the Italian price!

Update 2008-07-01: Techdirt reports that Rogers in Canada has even worse iPhone deals (I admit I’m too lazy to any CAD to SEK comparisons.) The interesting thing is that people are petitioning Rogers online to be a bit more reasonable, thereby creating a lot of bad publicity for the company.

Update 2008-07-15: Christopher notes that you’re not limited to the ridiculous iMini/iMidi/iMaxi schemes, you can buy the iPhone using any other Telia plan. Prices are here. However, good luck actually finding a phone….

I can’t help but feel that this is a previously rejected novel by Reynolds that’s now been exhumed by his publishers in search of a few extra quid.

It’s a half-baked space opera in the Iain M. Banks vein, ranging over the galaxy and across millions of years. It even has some Banksian foreshadowing, hinting at dark and mysterious secrets to come. But nothing comes of this, and there are plenty of other plot strands that are simply left dangling.

The scene setting is amateur, the plot is ludicrous, and the characters are two-dimensional.

Not recommended.

An alternate-history/alternate-universe CIA novel, where a “sheaf” of the multiverse (the “Real” America) has developed technology to access other, parallell universes with different timelines. Being Americans, they can’t resist spreading their version of freedom, happiness and the American Way to every other universe, whether these universes want it or not.

It’s a fascinating story, well told and suspenseful. It’s slightly marred by explicit exposition and some typographic niggles, and the universe-hopping and toime-travelling becomes a mite confusing near the end, but it’s a very good read.

A rather weird book. It reads like a throwback to the New Wave of SF, all drug-addled and full of weird human-on-alien sex. The unabashed non-hard elements and post-modern leavening of space opera tells us this is more a stylistic exercise. The plot is something to hang language on.

For all this, it’s a pretty exciting read, even if the amoral actions of the main characters tend to put you off. The parts set in our time are well captured, and contain “mundane” details of whacked-out relationships and issues like anorexia.

I’d recommend this if you don’t have to pay for it.

Last week I uninstalled a piece of Microsoft software (SMS management console) which managed to remove a large part of my executables. I tried to restore from a restore point, but predictably, that didn’t work. So I decided to save my files and install Vista.

Big mistake.

From the beginning, I was getting frustrated. My mouse would stop responding. My DVD drive was not recognised, leading to a freeze and crash. The resolution on my second monitor was much worse than in XP. The computer kept auto-logging in to the Administrator account created during installation.

I hung in there for 3 hours. Then I realised that I was losing precious work time struggling with something that was obviously not ready for prime time.

I tried installing SP1, but the computer crashed before I got anywhere.

I’m now installing Windows XP. Maybe by the next version, Microsoft will get it right. For now, this has been a day where I have got very little done. Thanks, Microsoft!

Update: for my sins, I’m making another attempt. We’ll see if that’s another fool’s errand.

Update 2008-06-17: Today’s “progress”.

I’ve been using Bloglines for my feed reading for a long time now. I like the web-based interface, and the mobile version was OK. Lately however I’ve been having issues with the service:

• some feeds simply aren’t shown as updated
• the mobile service used Skweezer to modify external pages, but Skweezer changed something at their end and it stopped working. I sent a bug report, but no response
• the mobile version started defaulting to the desktop version at startup

So I said “fsck it” and switched to Google Reader. It takes some getting used to (I miss being able to get to the next subscribtion in one keypress) and the mobile version is very different, but so far it works OK.

Lesson Bloglines can learn: don’t stop innovating, and listen to your customers.