hectic times

"for the love of God" I've cried many times in the last few weeks, which, as an antitheist, shows the lengths of desperation I've been driven to...

To summarise the last few weeks:

The great British summer has rolled on, or rained on, to be more precise. So much so, that it had a bloody good go at raining out Wimbledon! Whilst all that was going on, the flooding was getting to extreme levels, noticeably around Sheffield. Which luckily is nowhere near where I live - but, it is, however, where my Broadband supplier has their network center (including their backup system).

One Thursday morning I'm sitting there trying to do some work when I can't get on the Internet!

Naturally, I assume that things have fallen at my end over so I start disconnecting & re-connecting things to try and diagnose / resolve the problem. 90 mins later and I decide to give up & go & have lunch. After lunch I phone my ISP who told me about the flooding problem. "Oh!" I said, and "Any idea how long it will be out for?". "No idea, the engineers haven't even made it on site yet... due to the flooding!".

So, in the end, it was about 4 hours in total until I was back up an online (which I thought was pretty good). Having said that, for the next week and a bit my Broadband was pretty poor. I'm supposed to be on a 24MB service, which, even with my close location to the exchange, should degrade to 18MB by the time it gets here, but, in reality, I've never seen it above 8MB (haven't had the time to really tweak my settings / firewall to get the best out of it) and, typically, it sits at around 4/5MB. During that soggy 1 1/2 weeks, it dropped, at times, to about 30KB (that's KB not MB), which is worse than the hazy old dial up days at the end of the last century.

Next on the list of life tales was my phone - that's my cool Sony P990i that I've dribbled on about before. I damaged the screen a few weeks ago when it was in my bag and since I have insurance with my phone provider, I figured I'd get it sorted out properly. A week later it turns out that it is 'inefficient to repair" and it needs to be replaced. No problemo I thought, I'll happily have a new handset, but then I get informed that there are no more handsets available as 'they don't make them anymore'.

Say what? Sony was 15 months late in releasing them in the first place (I know, because I was impatiently waiting for it to come out on the market) and now, 9 months later, they're not providing them anymore to the UK (& Europe presumably). In the words of John McEnroe "You can not be serious!".

Meanwhile, the phone dude is on the phone with the insurance people and tells me that I can have any other handset I want (great), but they need to know which model now so they can tie up the paperwork (not so great). 'Holy crap' ('more blasphemy' said Mr Dawkins) I had done no research on where the current smart phone market stood and, in my business life, my phone is an essential part of my operating system (it needs to act as a mobile modem, ideally wireless i.e. Bluetooth or WLAN, for my laptop when I'm on the move - especially downunder).

He tried to talk me into a Blackberry device, but I knew I needed more than that (and it looked like one of those Japanese kids toys, that you need to feed every 20min or it would die). Luckily I had, by sheer fluke, been reading about a hot new phone on the market just the other day. So, after quickly firing off some questions at him about the spec's, I said "I'll have a Nokia N95 thanks!" (Nokia fluff or Wikipedia brief).

So, like that, I had just taken a huge roll of the dice and hoped I was not about to get Steve Irwin'ed by it.

As it turns out, I hit triple gold on this one and the wee handset is an absolute gem. I got it home, dutifully charged it up and started to learn how to work it. It had all the functionality of my old Sony (in a smaller handset) Bluetooth, WLAN, office system, media player, 5MB camera (the picture at the right taken at night the other day. Being a handset with a small lens the quality is poor at night, but I like the pic anyway), DVD quality video camera (I find that hard to believe) and a few other surprises to boot.

Most notable of which was as I was flicking through the manual I spied a page on 'GPS' and I thought 'no way, it must be an attachment you can buy!'. But, low & behold, it does have a GPS receiver on it and integrated maps, so I can use it as a navigational device (although it can take 20mins for the handset to lock onto the satellites. Fair enough though I figure as it is only a wee phone, with plenty of other things to do).

So, all in all, that turned out pretty well.

Now to the real gripe. Having felt sick Saturday last, to the point where I threw up a few times (I really can't remember the last time I actually threw up from 'real' sickness. It must be over a decade at least, I'd say) I had to abort on my plans to go out for the day (I had a n important sporting event to watch and a mates birthday party to go to that night 30 miles south of here). By the evening I was feeling a lot better and decided I'd commence the Vista upgrade (the new operating system from Windows, released in January) for my fairly top end Sony laptop (dual processors, 2GB RAM, which is only 8 months old). How hard could that be I thought to myself?

Well, for the love of fargin' God, what an absolute performance that has been!

I have never dealt with such an absolutely dreadful system in my life. Now get me right, I'm not a basher of Microsoft products. In due course I'll happily get a Mac Powerbook (when finances allow) to supplement my PC / laptops (I've worked on Macs quite a bit and even had a friends laptop for 6 months while he was away overseas), but I harbour nothing particularly for or against either operating system. I don't bang on for either of them - believing that they both have their strengths (& weaknesses) and uses in specific work environments.

I'm a great believer in what ever helps humanity get along and move forward in the best manner, is worthy of hearty applaud and on that front, Bill Gates and his lot have done the best job (i'm talking the 90's here). I've worked in critical environments where there were non-standard systems and everyone had their own protocols and it was downright infuriating, inefficient and, in this case, dangerous. So, what Microsoft did bringing in home computers and standardising operating systems was fantastic and could have saved us a decade if the industry kept muddling around doing their own thing i.e. if there had been 10 main vendors of operating systems.

So fair dues to them for getting us all onto a moderately similar wavelength at that point in time. Having said all of that, after almost 2 weeks with it, the Vista operating system, as it stands, is absolute crap (is that the best the Microsoft development team could come up with in 5 years and a rip of the Mac GUI, Graphical User Interface, to boot)!

I have never had to 'crash' shut down my PC so many times, since the dark days of Windows '98 and its cursed blue screen. Vista is forever dropping connections, drivers or a tonne of other infuriating things.

When I develop web applications I run them on my own computer, simulating how they will run on a real web server and, consequently, on the Internet. I, and most developers, do this to speed up development time and reduce a tonne of other variables that might be causing problems. Normally, applications will work in the blink of any eye on your local computer (localhost) since it is all happening onboard your own computer.

Well, since I've had Vista installed, the speed of my Localhost testing platform has dropped to an absolute crawl. When I even try to open a webpage it will take 8-20 seconds to load a normal page, let alone interact with a database (that is worse than the first ever modem I used back in 1990, which must have been about 9.6KB).

I can not believe it, I have been reduced to doing all my development online and from a personal point of view, am used to starting up my laptop to find that 'this time' my speakers aren't working, it can't connect to the Internet for love nor money, I can't install Vista-approved programs (even bypassing UAC) or a million other things.

*sigh*, I've seriously thought about rolling back to Windows XP, but I just don't have the time to make such a retro step. So, I'll just hang on until they bring out the first service pack which should hopefully sort out a number of these issues.

A word to you all then, if you don't need to install Vista then DON'T! It has been 6 months since they launched it, but I'd give it another 6 months at least and, especially, wait until the bring out the first service pack for the mongrel!