When I pay for my shopping at a staffed checkout in Tesco, I don’t have to tell the checkout operator what kind of card I’m using, be it a debit or credit card, etc. I stick my card in the chip and pin machine, enter my pin, and the rest is handled by the clever wizardry inside the little grey box.
Category: Misc
Pet hates
I haven’t posted for a few months, not because I have nothing to talk about, but because I don’t have a loyal readership who wait with baited breath for daily–or even hourly–updates on what’s happening in my world. I suspect the vast majority of people who stumble upon my journal are looking for something else, and probably have better things to do than read about something a complete stranger saw/thought/discovered/etc. Indeed, I often have better things to do than write about what I saw/thought/discovered/etc.
HTC Desire, Android 2.2 and MMS
Without going into boring details, I have replaced my trusty (but failing) Sony Ericsson W995 with a new phone. The W995 was a marvellous beast, with a lovely feel to it, but it had simply become too unreliable.
I have replaced it with an HTC Desire. It has a lovely big touch screen, which is a joy to use (a relief after having had very bad experiences with an LG Viewty), has built-in GPS, and synchronises with Outlook via HTC Sync like a dream. It has enabled me to ditch my HP iPaq, which was relatively large, had battery life of only a few hours, and needed a separate GPS receiver (oh, and a separate phone if you wanted to make calls).
All in all I’m very happy with the new phone. It runs on the Android operating system; I had heard a lot of good things about Android, and a lot of bad things about Windows Mobile 7, which probably influenced my decision. I probably would have chosen the Microsoft route otherwise.
However, after upgrading to Android 2.2 (known as Froyo) the HTC Desire stopped sending MMS messages (though to be honest, I don’t know that this didn’t happen before the upgrade).
The measure of customer service
Once in a while you realise you have a need for a Miscellaneous Arbitrary Item that you don’t possess, and wish to obtain one quickly, for (almost) immediate use.
The other day I experienced this phenomenon, and in my case the Miscellaneous Arbitrary Item was a tape measure. While in abundance in our hose, spring-loaded retractable tape measures with 2m stand-outs are not exactly the nicest thing to hold against one’s delicate torso while measuring one’s chest size for a new suit, for example. Their laminated fibreglass construction and reinforced design are counterproductive when it comes to measuring anything but a straight line.
Knowing there’s a branch of Boots reasonably close to home, I quickly searched boots.com for ‘tape measure’. Nothing. How about ‘tape’? Thirty results, none of which provide a measuring facility. Strange. A few clicks, and I arrived at the Boots weight management page – surely a tape measure here. And success – partially. An image of a woman measuring herself using exactly the kind of thing I am looking to buy!
But where could I buy it? After what must have been seconds of staring at the page for a clue, and then a few more seconds performing the same website searches as before (just in case it was user error), I decided to email customer services.
EA’s Spore alienates non-US gamers
I’m a huge fan of the SimCity series of games, having cut my teeth on SimCity on the BBC Micro. I wasn’t particularly good at it (being around 11 or 12 years old) until around 4-5 years later, in 1993, I started playing SimCity 2000 on the Atari ST, at which point the gameplay became isometric as opposed to top-down.
Anyway, that’s all largely irrelevant. I bought, with no small amount of trepidation I might add, SimCity Societies when it was released in 2007, and thought it was ok – so long as you don’t expect it to be a proper SimCty game. SimCity 4 was the last proper SimCity game, released in 2003.
Then in 2008 came Spore, in the same simulation vein as the SimCity and The Sims series. Again, an ok game – until you get immersed in it, and then you realise it’s brilliant. But that brilliance isn’t matched by EA’s apparent commitment to customer care.
