Nixta Sinks

Beep bleep vroooom

Now I simply know this must be old news, but I want one. Sadly, I'm not about to pay £50 for it.

I might know a few people who would, but to put things into perspective, if you know someone who's going to Japan then for just twice as much you could get yourself a Sony PSP Value Pack... Oh well. It's like that moment you wake up and realise that a packet of normal carrots costs 30p and those organic ones cost £3.80 and you only get half as much. Those fucking bastard Machievallian supermarkets.

I'm sure this has been posted before somewhere (How It Happened, or YBNBY perhaps?), but I've a sneaky suspicion it might not have and that Angus McDougal put me on to it, but checking out the recent entries (I didn't realise they were still going), this one tickled my fancy. Or did something like that. Check out the site - it's a corker.

While I sat in the pub with some exquisite company, finishing off a bottle of wine (sadly Australian, but what can one expect from a pub) two "geezers" sat down at the sofa on the opposite side of the table from us. One was Asian or Sub-Asian, the other Mongoloid and barely even that (his eyes were perhaps too far apart and intimidated by too large a forehead for them to allow his mouth but breathing function). The Sub-Asian commenced a conversational engagement in a surprisingly erudite manner over what was evidently (from his companion) his consequent beer of the afternoon on the matter, no less, of dubiously purloined Amex cards and their inveterately dishonest use in Florida, his subsequent rage (fortunately by now subsided) at their declination at the ticket desk for flights to Rio (where I understand there was some manner of Car Ni Vaal), his younger successful New York based sister's intervention to rescue him from the jaws of debtors, and the topic of his unfortunate be-acned cousin who played guineapig to various concoctions of an 80-year-old Nobel winning father, chemist, uncle and rave afficionado whence came the quote of the day, if not the weekend:

I don't know what his E was like but his shampoo was just terrible.

This exchange took no more time than the consumption of one beer each from the Mongoloid corner, at which point they thankfully and fortunately left us to our devices and the bill.

I'm beginning to soften a little on the Samsung D500 - after all it's not the phone's fault it was designed by backwoodsmen or backwardsmen. In general it performs admirably and I'm most pleased with it. It feels good against the face (I am already using it as a pillow) and, as I mentioned in my comments, looks like one of those obnoxious ugly new BMWs when parked on the table next to a packet of fags and a glass of shit red wine. Frankly, that's the mood that the picture on the packaging seems to be attempting to drop one into, and so good job, packaging people.

I had a minor epiphany this afternoon whilst retyping my umpteenth lower-case start to a sentence. Just like Word's auto-complete irks me because it encourages me to forget how to spell, Ericsson's very convenient T9's auto-capitalisaion drives me to laziness when it comes to capitalisational correctness. I am of course trying to convince myself of some reason the Samsung is superior (since I hate to know I'm regressing as time goes on), but it's not an entirely fatuous argument and the silver lining soothes healthily my earlier rage. I must become more careful as I type, though I still believe that since I don't look at the screen or keyboard as I type on a computer, I also feel I shouldn't really have to retype a whole mis-chosen T9 option when it could be selected and I could be dropped right back into the list. I'm working on that corner of my rage cage...

This company used to be Schlumberger

In the interest of sharing my identity with one and all, and with making the job of identity thieves even simpler and more publicly pointless (not to mention continuing a theme), here's my Atos Origin identity card.

Needless to say, it raises a few eyebrows around the place. It is yet to get me into the very secure System Test 2 room, but it does gain me entry to the Product Support room (a small inner-sanctum enclave which requires buzzing in, buzzing out, and signing of forms for visitors, for which I had to fill in no end of forms with my last 5 years' addresses and my speeding tickets declared). Sadly (or thankfully) not many, if any, at work read Nixtasinks.

Yes it's true. I now work for product support. I thought it would entail answering the phone and asking people if they had pulled their privates out of the CD ROM drive, and that no, RAM had nothing to do with ramming and they should clean their mouse immediately, but apparently IBM have been paid to do that. Instead they filter out the pap and we get mostly real calls. I'm quite impressed in general with a) how well the software seems to be working now that it's gone live and b) how detailed and informed the calls are in general. Also, it seems to mean that I have to go through and fix code where it's broken, which would be not too bad if we could look at the error logs. As it is, I have to use my magic wand and pixie dust. Seems to work quite well.

Coming soon, my prototype Blunkett ID card, if I can remember where I put it.

8 feet up a pole, what do you find?

I've never seen these before, no doubt as a result of my childhood spent staring at my feet, and at those shorter than me (there were a lot of those around, and not just my big-nosed chums either). In fact, just the other day as an exercise I decided to walk around New York and look upwards from time to time. Those old fire-escapes and facades in Soho are phenomenal. I must thank CoolNina for inspiring in me that upward glance (though of course she grew up looking upwards most of the time for the same reasons I looked downwards).

These Equestrain Crossing buttons were accompanied of course by suitable cross-walk lights, and were posted some 8 feet in the air. I've just noticed that someone has pressed the button - but I swear there were no horses around. Some straw-laden poo on the floor, but no horses.

This of course is the first photo posted online from my new phone. Having lived in America for so long, I'm unaccustomed to MMS so I consider it a great achievement to be able to e-mail a photo from my phone. What use though, is a 1.3 Megapixel Camera if you can't e-mail more than 200kb and if the phone doesn't allow you to create a scaled down copy for e-mail? Really. Again, that might be something I'm missing in the interface somewhere.

I'm just checking e-mail from my phone now. First time I've been able to do that too. Lord only knows what my phone bill will be at the end of the month. Oh. E-mail server access error. Hmm. That settles that then. I probably don't even have POP3 running, shitty service that it is. And I don't want my e-mail on my phone anyway. Still, at least I can send. Best of all scenarios.

I tend to keep my gadgets flowing in at a modest rate compared to some, some others, and then indeed more others, but of late I've had the pleasure of purchasing a few things. The most recent and what has prompted me to write this right now, is my Samsung D500. Looking at photos of it online at the suggestion of MiniMo, I wasn't too impressed. It seemed nerdy and chunky compared with the delightful Motorola V3 which I had until then been contemplating, though frankly I don't think I'd consider many other phones on the market right now. It almost strikes me that phones were smaller a couple of years back. Perhaps the downwards progression in size has just stalled and that's what's bothering me.

Anycrap. Verdict on the Samsung D500? Bells and Whistles. Absolute: 70%. Relative: 95%.

Don't get me wrong - it's a sweet looking phone - it feels good in the hand (to start with), and when you turn it on you're blown away by the screen. Simply fantastic. The specifications are awesome. 80Mb RAM, 262K colour TFT screen, Polyphonic/MP3 ringtones, etc. Oh, don't forget the 1.3 Megapixel camera *with* flash. All very good, and better than most phones out there at the moment (nearly all the phonts I know about anyway). The Bluetooth implementation is great. I was able to browse my (Rob's) old Z600 phone and pick up all the photos and even a less irritating MIDI ringtone from it (what the fuck are Samsung thinking - there's not a single usable ringtone on there, unless you're some 15-year-old babychav). Shame I couldn't browse the phone book and just pull it all over - I had to do that one by one, not having a bluetooth thing for my PC.

What pisses me off about this phone? Text entry. You can't fucking type effectively or efficiently. I've just come from Ericsson's T9 on the Z600 and Samsung's festering T9 sucks hairy balls. Here are things Samsung doesn't do:

• Remember that I like typing my fucking messages using T9 - it defaults to la-di-da multitap.
• Realise that if I delete to a capital letter, I want the letter I type in its place to be a captial letter.
• Allow me to revisit a word that came out wrong earlier in the message and apply T9 to it again. I have to delete the whole bastard and retype it. Now that really pisses me off.
• Allow me to have vibrate and ring at the same time so that I don't have to not notice the phone vibrating for 10 seconds before it starts to make a noise. Come on Samsung. It's just one more option on your ring settings menu. Sort it out.
  

I don't know about you, but I don't look at the screen or sometimes even the phone while I'm typing texts, and I'm arsed if I'm going to remember that I have to explicitly select "then" over "them" before I press space or I have to type the whole thing again. What a crock of shit. With the Z600, you place the cursor to the right of the word and click left. It selects the word and you have all your T9 options.

Spelling a new word - you have to scroll through all the bad options before you can get to the Spell item. It's not really a scroll. It's a one-way trip through the dictionary. When you reach the last item, you can press spell, or you can press Next again and go back to the beginning and can't spell again. FUCK ME DUDLEY! And I can't find a way to edit the dictionary, though to be fair it took me a year to realise I could do that on the T600.

Now. If I am at the start of a message or after a full-stop and a space, or even after a colon, you might expect that the next thing I'd want is a capital letter. Not Samsung. They do you the courtesy of putting you into a new message with the first charater to be capitalised, but you start typing and then realise the bastards didn't put you in T9 so you have to delete to the start and begin again. Only now the cursor isn't a capital letter, so you have to go back to the start again and replace the first letter. Oooooh! It makes me want to cry because it ruins such a great phone.

I sincerely hope I'm missing something here because this text entry method is retarded.

Calling someone is similarly a frustration of the good and the bad. You type in a couple of letters, scroll to them, and pick their name. Now, by default I always call this chap's mobile? Is that selected. Mmmmm. No. I have to then scroll to it and click the green send button. Why can't I click the OK button to call them? I've used it to navigate this far. Now I have to switch to another button or else I end up editing the bloody thing. Pile-o-shite. I'll get used to that though, but the lack of a default number is something of a bastard.

Also, there's bugger all games and goodies on it, and no data cable by default. That's what I liked about the Motorola V3 package - all inclusive. Again, I can fix all that, but for the price of the bloody phone they could chuck in a CD and a 5 quid cable. Honestly.

I imagine that some of these things are merely my inexperience in the Samsung world. I shall see with time. If anyone has any tricks with working with Samsung phones, please let me know. I eagerly await enlightenment.

My next gadget was an iPod shuffle. It said "buy me" so I did. What's to say? Nothing. It does what it says. I had some teething problems where all the songs disappeared from it, but that hasn't happened since day 2, and my confidence is slowly returning that I can trust it with my data. Makes a damned useful pen-drive too, if you have an exposed USB port - doesn't always fit in the alcove-positioned USB ports of some desktop PCs. Cheaper than buying a 1Gb pen drive from PC World anyway. Those overpriced rip-off artists.

Up yours, I'm going to see how I can make my phone actually make me aware that someone's calling.

Caught in mine, female form will turn the head. The frequency and consistency of this automated response caused consternation until it became clear that others drop their trousers at much lesser (aethetically) stimuli.

Keeps my neck fit, but does it qualify for disability benefit?

Thanks to the old goat, old bean, tomorrow night's guest of honour at dinner, and old gun-wielding fart Renos for the banner (oh, and one little sketch by Henri, currently topical at the RA). Where would we be without tits on canvas?

Here we have a lovely site dedicated to the sale of bikinis. The only problem is that really they seem to be making a great deal of money off a very small amount of fabric and generally I wouldn't condone such massive markups in material. However, if you manage to avoid the section on the men's bikinis one (as a red-blooded male or the butch dyke) might begin to enjoy some of this... Perhaps this is going too far? Nah - you ain't seen nothin' yet (the furry model is just WRONG!). And of course, my favourite, if only for the camera angles. Bikini shop? Yes. Porn? Yes. Not Safe For Work? Correct (I should have said that earlier, I suppose - oh well, free boobs for all!).

Rest assured for those interested in purchasing such a thing/thong (again, there are severe camel-toe issues with that one), but who are afraid of having their most delicate of parts violently tugged at by a massive strip of recently cooled wax on the end of what could if you're unfortunate be an untalented and angry beauty "consultant" who's had a hard day and just wants to go home NOW, that there is a solution. Yes, Tartley, no longer do you need to play russian roulette with a rusty Gilette. Behold, the Pubic Area Shaver! Tartley, it's even used by your brainbox feminist sister, Nina. The testiclemonials speak for themselves (now at last wives can suck balls in the total safety of their own home). I leave you with this sales pitch for the Personal Shaver (they seem to be in the midst of renaming the product for WalMart):

It is the only razor of any kind that will not "bite" your vagina [or] testicles...