woowoowoo – Page 27 – photos, fly fishing, food, maps & cycling

OVI store – a competitor?

Nokia today launched it’s OVI store, an attempt by the company to jump on the tidal wave of success that is the Apple Store (along with about a half a dozen other imitators). Many industry pundits are touting it as some sort of competitor, but I’m afraid that’s an uphill battle, and one they’re never going to win – not by a long shot!

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and the success of OVI store should not be judged against Apple’s App Store, instead the success of OVI store should be judged on how well it serves the market that is Nokia mobile phones… a group of hardware far more diverse than anything Apple has to deal with!

Being a Nokia owner myself (can’t afford an iPhone and detest the G1 hardware!), I hopped onto this new store for a look around. Nice simple interface, quickly got me browsing apps that suit my hardware – applause for the use of html/css instead of flash – obviously this is driven by the need to work on the browser in their phones, but a nice touch anyway.

Unfortunately, it all fell apart when I saw the prices! Who are they kidding? A game like Touch Physics on the iPhone costs $3.99 and gives hours of gorgeous, fluid gameplay. Games on my Nokia feel pathetic by comparison, yet on OVI store I’m being asked to fork over between $6.60 and $12 for crummy games that bore me after 5 minutes! Then there’s some ‘City Guide’ travel apps which are (probably not) selling for over $30! They want $16 for a twitter client?!? You have got to be joking!! Who is making these pricing decisions?

Lonely Planet city guides at least represent fair value at $8. Weirdly, this compares favourably to the same guide on the App Store, which can be had for $18.99. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the distinctly poorer user experience offered by Nokia’s hardware… who knows?

commbank goes mobile

netbank mobile home I don’t know exactly when they released this, but the Commonwealth bank have just gone mobile with both a mobile and an iPhone app. I’ve just had a poke around the site on my nokia 6120 and it’s excellent. Does everything I need smoothly and easily – they deserve a big thumbs up. If there are problems, I haven’t spotted them yet.

Updated…

OK – in the office now, and have had a shot on the iPod Touch. There’s good and bad, first the bad.

A link on the commbank home page points to: Netbank via your mobile, which is an entirely flash driven page. If you have an iPhone/iPod, this is a complete dead end. There is no way around it. EPIC FAIL!

If you are lucky, you will realise that there is a direct route at: http://www.netbank.com.au/mobile/, which seems to be a ‘sniffer’ that redirects you to the appropriate mobile version. If you are on an iPod or iPhone, the site is excellent – smooth and seamless, however no more functionality than the mobile phone version, just the gloss you expect from an ‘i’ site.

a meal to remember

It’s evening now, but I’m still slightly stunned by the lunch I ate today.

We received an impromptu invitation to a first brithday ‘celebration’ lunch for Shanghai Ling’s new premises – it was a set menu, but we were told not to expect anything we’d seen on the menu before. Sure enough, there was a menu, but no-one took an order, so we wondered if that huge list of dishes was coming to our table… well, they did!

I can’t remember all of them, but this was a degustation menu with a difference:

Starting with a Melon, Dried Shrimp, Egg and Char Grilled Pork soup. Light, tasty and delicious… a perfect start to the meal.
Chinese toast: a slightly sweet dough lightly fried – it looked like a tiny loaf of bread.

Then there were the mains:

Scallops wrapped in Nori, served with a tangy light mornay sauce and tender flowerets of Broccoli and Cherry Tomatoes. This sounds like a weird melange of flavours, but it was sensational! My favourite.
Prawns marinated in LongJing tea. These looked so simple on the plate, no visible sauce at all, but the flavour explosion of the tea had everyone on the table exclaiming as they tasted them.
Steamed Chicken with Caramelised Onions: just a superb combination.
Mushrooms with Bok Choi: a blend of the fresh and crisp green with dark, saucy, sumptuous chinese mushrooms.
Mushroom caps stuffed with prawn and fish paste, smothered in a silky ginger sauce.
Quail egg and Chinese sausage wrapped in a rice noodle.
Braised pork spare rib. A favourite, but perfectly executed.
Blue Grenadier in a grape bunch shape. A crisp fried fish, this was probably my least favourite, but still good nonetheless.
Stir fried Amaranth with garlic. This is one fragrant vegetable!
Sea Cucumber, Mushroom and Char Grilled Pork in a claypot. A real suprise: the sauce accompanying this was amazing. Bear in mind what we had just eaten, this was the last dish, you’d expect it to be hard to make an impression… oh, how sublime!

Finished off with a fruit platter – phew!

Well, we’ve known Ling for years and enjoyed the food cooked by her husband Mi Kun Wen on many occasions, but this one will stand out for a while to come.

you meet aldi best people…

‘scuse the awful pun, but the other day, I was alerted (by treadly) to the fact that Aldi had an upcoming sale which included some cycling gear. I am a keen commuter cyclist – that is, I cycle to work – on the weekends, I do occasionally do a bit of urban cruising, but I am not a ‘serious’ cyclist in the lycra sense. The Aldi catalogue displayed a number of items which promised to make my cycling warmer and drier, so at 8:50am I was waiting outside the store with a dozen or so others to try and grab my bargain.

Take note of that – a dozen or so others – this was no ‘door buster’ crowd. Brunswick folk don’t go in for that stuff anyway and judging by the body language I wasn’t the only one for whom this was a novel experience. The doors opened and there was no rush or rudeness, just an orderly stroll to the aisle with the goods. Unfortunately, that was where the rudeness began…

I’m not familiar with this type of thing, but a couple who obviously were, had pushed their trolley on an angle into the short, narrow aisle – deliberately blocking access to others from one end, while they occupied the other end and simply grabbed armfuls of garments and loaded them into the trolley. Frustratingly, they didn’t seem that interested in the rack of garments I was after, but they blocked me out nonetheless. I was able to get what I wanted by reaching through the rack from the other side of the shelving, but plenty of other folk were frustrated.

Anyway – I got a few things – about $30 worth. They all seem to be quite good quality, each one of them would normally cost more than $30 alone, so I can’t complain about the value.

As I was walking out I passed the couple with the trolley – they’d finally finished their ‘frenzy’ and were taking stock. One said to the other: “What are these?”, to which the other replied “I dunno – you put them in!”. Yep, that’s right, they didn’t even know what they were getting off the racks! – all they were interested in was stacking as much into the trolley as they could – they were now picking over it to decide whether they really wanted it… just amazing. Not that there is any law against it – you might take a couple of sizes of trousers to the fitting rooms, just to make sure you get the one you want – these people were simply taking that process to it’s extreme.

No point lowering myself to their level and getting pushy about it, but maybe, if there’s a next time, and I find myself blocked by these two shopping guerillas… I might just pull out the phone and take a video, so you can all enjoy the fun!

Flame wars…

It has been a tragic week in Victoria. Tears well up and my throat tightens when I listen to, or read of the trauma that people have been through. It’s heartening to see so many people pull together in times of greatest need. If you haven’t already – do get over to the Red Cross website and make a donation.

Of course, even before the fires have even been extinguished and the cleanup begins, the recriminations have started. The finger will be pointed at government, authorities, even the CFA – there are no winners. It must be disheartening for those involved to see the energies wasted in bickering.

For totally unmatched levels of pathetic, warped, lunacy though, it’s hard to go past the proclamation by the leader of a fundamentalist church that this was the work of Satan, in retribution for Victoria’s passing of progressive abortion laws.

I don’t believe in god, but I do know many believers are good, well-meaning people. Pastor Nalliah and his views are another thing entirely. Curious that, as a vehement anti Islamist, his tirade brings to mind the recent publicity surrounding a radical Muslim cleric’s comments. Both are completely out of touch with society, sensibility and, needless to say, the basic teachings of their religions.

Most muslims backed quickly away from Samir Abu Hamza’s comments. Peter Costello and John Howard have, in the past been enthusiastic supporters of Pastor Nalliah – I see reports that Peter is disowning his former friend. I wonder what excuse Johnny would have come up with if we’d still cared about anything he said?

hot, ain’t it?

All of south eastern Australia is bracing for another day of 40°+, it’s not uncommon to have one or two days in a row, but four!?! I always remember the hot weather never started until school went back, but this is a bit over the top!

Thankfully, just two years back we installed air conditioning – we went for the evaporative style, partly because they allow you to keep the house open with a breeze, but mostly because they consume relatively little power. Still, we feel guilt. The evaporative units do use another precious resource: water. Not a great deal, but I think it’s enough to make Target 155 a little difficult.

Along with the traditional heatwave comes the record power consumption, which is yet another worry – I certainly hope we don’t end up with a blackout. It’s apparently due to load, not lack of capacity, but it always makes me wonder… these days that place the greatest load on the power grid would also be just brilliant for generating solar power. You’d think there would be some synergy there.

I have a better idea though – I think I should go back on holiday at Wilsons Prom where it climbed to just 20° at 5pm today. Take me back!

Women’s Semi Final, Australian Open 1992

Every January when the Australian Open Tennis is on, I fondly remember back to 1992 when, working for XPress Group, I was lucky enough to be handed a Press Pass and a Nikon F2 camera fitted with a new Kodak DCS-1 back. The camera, in turn, was connected to a ‘luggable’ hard disk with (B+W CRT!) preview function that stored, from memory, about 120 images at 2048px along the longest edge. The hard disk could also accept a keyboard and voiceband modem that allowed images to be sent to news photo repositories and syndicated worldwide within … well, within an hour or so! It was amazing technology for the time – bear in mind that the Mosaic browser wasn’t released for another 15 months!

If you look at this photo, you’ll see some pretty massive compression artefacts as well as a wild colour balance issue (that purple is supposed to be royal blue!), but the product was aimed at the fast turnaround press environment (believe me, you couldn’t afford this kit at home!), and given the low resolutions involved and the fact that no newspapers were printed in colour, these technical issues were not big obstacles.

My task was to get the ‘real’ press photographers interested in it and teach them how to use it if they were interested. It was a great tool, probably the biggest issue was the shutter delay. You really had to fire in anticipation – about half a second ahead, otherwise you missed your moment.

In the end, a photo I took of Jim Courier holding aloft the cup was posted on the ‘wire’ and was picked up by the Canberra Times, appearing on the back page the next day – the first digital photograph to appear in any Australian Newspaper.

My highilight, though, was Monica Seles – one of the most fiercely determined women I’ve ever seen. Great fun.

meet dora

Cats at our house have a good time of it. This little scrap – about 8 weeks old – came home from the Lort Smith animal hospital last Monday to join our little family. They say cats always land on their feet… she definitely has.

Viv, the incumbent, has been like a saint. He doesn’t pretend to like her yet, but he’s very patient and hasn’t torn her to bits for playing with his tail 😉

seams I’ve been let down

Three flat tyres in the last month! You start to curse people who leave broken glass on the road. Since I started spending a bit more on my tyres, the problem has almost vanished – in fact, apart from the most recent three, I think I’ve only had two others in the past year, so it’s really not a major problem.

However, am I blaming the wrong people? I don’t keep records of this stuff, but at least three of my punctures in 2008 were not due to something sharp, but were the seams of the tube splitting. The last one was particularly annoying – an otherwise pristine BBB tube – only a few months old. I’m a bit more forgiving when a well patched old warrior gives way at the stitching, but this one had no excuses.

I don’t pump my tyres ridiculously hard or do anything else that might aggravate the problem – Is it just me, or are others finding the quality of tubes becoming an issue?

never buy lexmark again – ever!

My advice to anyone considering a new printer. Choose a Canon, or an HP, or a Fuji Xerox – anything except a Lexmark!

About 12 months ago, I bought a new colour laser printer, a Lexmark C500n, having had a gutfull of expensive inkjets with drivers that don’t get updated. I wanted to get a postscript mono printer, but family pressures for colour, and what seemed like an excellent deal from Lexmark, swayed me.

Since Leopard (OSX 10.5) was installed on a laptop at home, however, we’ve been having trouble. Investigations led me to realise that the driver is not compatible with Leopard, so I asked Lexmark for an update on when we might see a compatible driver. I got this response:

Thank you for contacting Lexmark Email Support.

In reply to your email, I am sorry to say but Lexmark C500n is a host based printer. Unfortunately, Lexmark has no plans to develop the Mac compatible driver for this printer. You can use Mac 10.4 compatible driver to run this printer on Mac Leopard. However, if it does not work then there is no other driver available to install this printer. I apologize for the inconvenience cuased to you in this regard.

Inconvenience!?! The printer cost me $400 and I’ve spent about $300 on toner… that’s quite an inconvenience, and a copy and paste apology just isn’t goint to cut it! Especially when you can still go to the Lexmark website to research the printer with the accompanying details: “Apple Macintosh Operating Systems Supported Apple Mac OS X Apple Mac OS 9.x”. Funny, I’d swear I’m using Mac OSX! This is plain old lying.

They seem to have found the resources to write a Vista driver, are there any windows users out there who want to buy a barely used printer?

there is sanity after all…

It’s quite natural to find stories/jokes/etc. about your own profession amusing. Those engaged in law enforcement all have their favourite cop show. Teachers just love Teachers and the priceless Gormsby. I got plenty of laughs out The IT Crowd.

In true IT fashion though, my favourite piece of work that really tells my life like it is, is a blog.
Tales from Redesignland is just brilliant, and although the author claims to be from a university in California, I am sure they have a secret webcam trained on my desk to capture all the insanity that goes on there.

This latest episode is just too much. I’m starting to get paranoid.

GMC bankrupt! is anyone surprised?

I suppose I have to admit when I first heard reports that General Motors and Ford in the US were close to bankruptcy I was a little surprised. Not surprised that such high profile examples of the US capitalist dream had gone radically sour, but surprised that the management of these corporations didn’t seem to have seen this coming.

Back in the 70s (yes, thirty three years ago!) when the world experienced its first ‘oil shock’, great gains were made towards more efficient vehicles, but once cars reached the goals set by legislation, the manufacturers stopped trying. Instead of continuing to create more efficient cars, gains in technology went towards speed and features.

In the past 10 or so years, the writing on the wall has been getting larger and larger. People still need cars, they still want to buy them, but they’re less and less interested in the stuff being offered by the big manufacturers.

It’s another non-surprise, because I think we’re at a time where the running costs are a greater proportion of the total cost of ownership than they have been at any time in the history of the car. No small consideration when you’re buying a car.

So, should governments be ‘bailing out’ the car makers in these straitened times? Maybe, maybe not, but if they do (and it seems they are), it should be to turn the antiquated concept of the car around and mould it into something appropriate to the next era. Not more of the same thanks.