Nixta Sinks

Now why is it that there are so many singularly shit phones out there at the moment? There's probably not one phone on the market that I would actually go out and buy. It's no wonder they have to pretend to give them away. Actually, lots of them they have to pretend to buy off you with the rewards of cash back and so forth.

Fortunately, I don't have to fall foul of that nonsense (which all sounds remarkably like scam after scam - a free rustproofing if you will). Why not? Well, given that I live in America (the land of the shittest phones on the planet, trailing some 4 years behind the next-shittest market, not-Japan, in handset currency) and work in the UK (where I can't really get a contract without doling out great big deposits), I pretty much have to pay the full price for the machinery. The latest ordinary phones (that's discounting PDAs, 3G phones or specialty hibrids) are around 200 to 350 quid.

I recently got a Samsung D500. Let me tell you: after a month or two of usage, the D5 stands for Despicable Dispoable Dunderheaded Design Dungheap, and the two zeros are the marks I give it out of any positive integer you like, but let's say 100 for the sake of argument.

After 2 months the battery life is a day. It saves messages in your draft folder if you close the phone too soon even after telling you that the message has been sent (though the message does end up in both Drafts and Sent Items folders, but without any recipient in Drafts). I've gone at length over the weaknesses of the text entry, but I'll tell you that it certainly cuts back on your texting time and forces you back to the wonders of interpersonal communication using more traditional techniques such as speech. Although there is a workaround to get the phone to vibrate when using a MIDI ringtone, if you choose to use an MP3 one, the phone exhibits its interpretation of quantum physics with either a buzzing or a ringing but certainly not both at the same time and one is never certain if the phone is ringing. I'd much rather it demonstrated an interpretation of Kepler's finer laws and buggered off for a lengthy orbit of the sun, and yes, an orbit almost entirely dissimilar to that of the Earth, before you smart-arses get going. If it were to breathe, it would be a waste of air. The only pleasure I get from it is putting it in my pocket where it's light enough to forget it exists, except when the alarm goes off because you can't set it to just beep or hum. Oh no, it has to sing a fucking irritating infantile Fisher-Price song at you. There are indeed 5 choices of fucking irritating infantile Fisher-Price songs, but for a multimedia phone that plays MP3 and has MP3 and polyphonic ringtones, why do I have to listen to some Ode To Barney?! Oh dear God, it ruins the whole day.

Yes, those Samsung cockheads have cocked it up good and proper. So I thought I might like a Motorola V3. I got one for my wife since she'd been suffering for literally years with a decrepit beaten up old T68i. The thing (T68i) barely functions these days and behaves as if it had been nailed to ones palm, including occasionally the pain that one would expect that to entail. Still, you could text on it better than the Samsung D500, and the T68i is many years older and many years beyond it's sell-by date although those thickos at Carphone Warehouse, Phones4U and pretty much everywhere else are hawking D500s like they're the bees knees.

Yes, I bought one. A shiny new black Samsung D500. I did accept there was a minor risk since I hadn't really found too many reviews, but on paper it looked good, and people were more or less happy with Samsungs. It had a superb screen, much memory, and Samsung cameras have a reputation for taking quality snaps. So I thought to myself "how bad could it really be?" and pushed the point home with "even in the worst case, I have a great new phone that I can text with - so what if the camera takes shit photos?". WRONG! I've learnt my lesson. It's worse than I thought possible in 2005, and probably 2000. When people are losing the will to speak and rely on text more and more in case they have to learn to pronounce words properly or, heaven help them, interactively and within 20 seconds of one-another, and in the right order, I felt mistakenly a text entry system must surely be core to a phone's success.

One of the faults levelled at things like T9 and to a degree iTap is that they require that you know how to spell. When I first read this (from the designer of the new tiny-keyboards, whatever they're called), it struck me as a remarkably insulting statement, but then I realised that there were some words that I wasn't sure how to spell and that Word had been carrying me on for many years now, and furthermore that people really must be as thick and/or uneducated as I generally perceived them to be.

With the high sales and acceptance of the Samsung D500, this has now been proven conclusively and universally. People are thick. Reading forums about the D500 in the hope of finding links to improved firmware or hints and hidden settings that unlock the phone's "secret usable interface", it's clear that even the English speaking members have only the most tenuous affinity to written English. "Dude dis da best fone on market 2day no shit its da bomb it rules better than ne fone beets razrv3 beats treo k700i DA BOMB no shit bye one now". GET FUCKED, arsehole. No wonder you don't find the text system irritating since you give a shit about neither punctuation nor case, and spelling to you is some chick named after the Conservatives.

Now, back to the Motorola V3, I'm sorely tempted to get one because my wife's did answer every single complaint I had about the Samsung, but introduced a couple of its own. The GUI was a little gaudy and complex, and there were no shortcuts to the main menu items (the number keys, for example, make great candidates as shortcuts for a 3 by 3 graphical menu, wouldn't you say? Oi! Motorola! Wake up!). Most crippling though was the 5Mb memory limit compared to the D500's 80Mb, but then again the Motorola couldn't take video footage. Yerwot?! Yes, you read it right - no video camera. Well, there's a video version available now for an extra 15 quid or so street price, but there's no mention of it on the Motorola site and so no official specs on whether it has more memory.

That said, it is a sweet phone, with proper ring and vibrate, and a sensible text entry system that actually helps you to choose the word you want with simple things like always starting text entry in the same mode you choose to use, and switching to capital letters quickly or picking up a mistyped word and giving you alternatives to look at. Yes, it's a fine phone. Light, thin, could be slightly smaller, but fully loaded. Still, I can't justify another 250 quid on that right now when I haven't been tortured long enough by my D500. If anyone wants one, I'll flog it to you cheap, but honestly it's probably not worth your while unless you just want it for taking photos and looking cool, and even then I think it probably only looks cool to wankers.

I hereby sincerely apologise to my wife for putting up a link to her company's website before the site was ready. Apparently I don't know what I was thinking, other than the fact that no-one actually reads my blog and so I felt no-one would have got there. Still, it was the wrong thing to do and it's been taken down. It'll be back when it's good and ready, and only then.

Everyone knows that Australia is a joke country. It's far too beautiful, the weather is far too good, they're far too good at sport, they are far too good humoured for the hangovers their level of boozing would induce in mere mortals, have the most inhospitable combination of deadly weather and creatures anywhere, have far too much fun and are far too arrogant (the net effect of which is that we meet far too many of their stupid people).

However, it would appear that their auditing procedures involve them noticing a vast and sudden rise in the number of drug dealers in the infant and toddler community. Those poor dogs. What a waste of good tail chasing and bone digging time.

...And into the banal.

You wouldn't believe it, but I've been refraining from writing on account of a serious lack of time. Many would consider that a pathetic excuse. I would be one of them. Nonetheless, it remains the truth and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise into an early and particularly messy grave.

I'd say it's been about 8 years since I've been this busy. 8 and a half. Back in August 1996 I probably had my last spate of working hard, in Denver, in a crappy single-storey red-brick corporate haven belonging to Ross Perot's evil EDS empire. They insisted then that I wear a suit, even though hour by hour I was making less than a McDonald's chipshifter. Did you know that at EDS the rule is that you must wear your suit jacket if ever you leave your cubicle? Obviously there was little chance of enforcing that with the likes of myself, Bill Peden (cue Goldfinger music) and Phil Penn in our midst. Add to that a phsychotic named James Battle who once chased another psychotic named Sean Flannery around the office for reasons photocopied (and Sean only survived by locking himself in a very robust toilet for 20 minutes, his life really was a stake there), an Adelaide native named Tolly (Australian for turd) Nairn and a diminutive muscle-clad Popeye-lookalike blonde (again psychotic, and certifiably so) by the name of Lansell who bragged about having some old hag waiting for him on his bike-route home for a daily root before he had a good go at his wife, and you'll soon understand why EDS locked the door to the rest of the building and only allowed us access to conference rooms whilst closely escorted by their own mid-west drones. By the way I compromised with a rotation between my three velvet suits (red, blue, and pin-striped black).

At that time I often worked 30 hour shifts. From time to time I'd throw in a 36 hourer, a brief 4 hour sleep and another 8 hours. Not quite like studying medecine, but the unrewarding nature of the work more than made up for that. Sustenance consisted of Denny's and pizza. Entertainment of Denny's and pizza. Sleep of fitful twists and turns to the accompaniment of a litany of memallocs and pointer dereferences, followed by dreams of Denny's and pizza.

This time however, I have resigned myself to having no life. In addition I get paid by the hour, and at a rather pleasant rate. I'm also too old to pull the all-nighter and will readily use my age as an excuse. Nonetheless I'm looking forward to my first day out of the office in the last 14 tomorrow and hope to do something more constructive than just getting up in time for the cup final. Who am I kidding? Pah! I'm a slob. A lazy slob at that and one too easily inclined to deluding myself that tomorrow is just another day and I can go to the gym then. It is most likely that I won't leave the house until dinner and in the meantime will have worked on my encroaching gut as no other. Many have in the past likened me in appearance to Peter Cook, which comparison I accept with humility and hubris, but these days I look like Mr. Cook in his ailing years as his paunch made the most of the latest humorous t-shirt and provided a little more side against which to keep wedged his stack of newspapers as he smoked his way down the street to his local.

Anyway, to take a short story, prolong it tediously, and then cut it short as if by way of a favour to you, pathetic reader, the point is that I've been more busy than I care to think about and I've not made the time to write in this pit of bile (or bilious pit if you're into your efficiency of words bullshit). It's taken me a good 10 minutes to pour out this crap and I should have been in bed 3 hours ago, but so dearly do I hold you all to my heart (except of course you fuckers that piss me off and berate my ramblings) that I feel I must explain, in my long-winded and dull-as-dogshit way why I haven't written anything.

Quite unrelated to that, in recent years I have had the odd idea come to me, at moments most inconvenient, that will change and help me take over the world. I doubt many others see them that way themselves, and everyone's entitled to their opinion. Most people however are thick so I don't listen to them and, to quote a close and dear mental Scot, I "batter on regardless". This latest idea however is a pretty good one and I'll not tell you what it is, but I'll say that it's dragged me back to contemplating what I would call a company if I were to start one. An Empire, I like to think of it. Topical moment here: Alan Michael Sugar (or Martin or Mark or whatever the fuck his middle name is) was fortunate enough to be able to use Amstrad - a pretty good name when it comes to staying power. Nixta won't cut it. Nixta Inc? Nixtinc? Cathcart Research? Furness Enterprises? BOOOORING. I mean, Nixta means Wanker to most English speakers, let alone the Wops. I'm not interested in something crap like Linkspoint (what a name! why did I ever work for them?). Furthermore I don't mean to be tied down to a single technology or even merely to technology. I want to market pre-drowned puppies and Panda Porn (though a couple of zoos have now adopted that with success greater even than I had ever imagined possible - for fuck's sake I had worked it into a stupid little skit - it was never meant to work). I need to introduce the world to e-sults and twoletters.com. Silent car alarms, the self-cleaning arse and more.

I'm still thinking what my company should be called. I still like Spazzowizz, but that's only going to be the telemarketing sales side of things for flogging spit in a bottle along with a tub of "elbow" grease for cleaning your tabletop "like Grandma used to clean your face" (who wouldn't buy a product with one's grandma endorsing it?). No. My empire must have a much better name. Virgin's been taken. Cripple won't work. Hitler ruined Hebatron Inc. for everyone, and in this ever shrinking world pretty much any word means wanker or cunt in some language or another. Suggestions are most welcome, but keep them clean and provide proof that they're not an expletive in at least 3 different countries... Oh, and go to bed. Pissing hell, it's just got light outside. I'm going out to Regent's Park for a moment to shout incoherently at the rising sun.

I'll come back. After two requests in one day from vastly different incontinents on vastly different continents, I'll grace you with my bollocks again. Not literally, unless you want me to, and even then I reserve the right to withold them. Actually, there's pretty much no chance at all that any of you miserable lot will be literally graced by my bollocks, though you might get grazed by my belligerence and disgraced by my bullshit, and rightly so.

Oh, the world is a much much poorer place since I last soiled these pages with anything other than a complaint about how little respect this site got from my peers (that's you, you turdchewers), but I shall do my best to make amends (not that you in any way deserve it) and in the meantime if you feel the need to send me pecuniary tributes please do so via

Toothless Jake
The Charlotte Street Hotel
(Somewhere by the terrace)
Charlotte Street
London
W1N 1FU

He's the googly-eyed leperous one breathing bubonic plague from behind a stack of old Big Issues. I exchange his takings for half-smoked cigarettes and a lick of my ashtray once a week. He hasn't long to live, the little shit.

Although I'm sorely tempted to continue blogging here, it's not on the cards at the moment, even after what might be my very first piece of comment spam...

You're going to have to try much harder than that, my pretties.

I've got soooo many things you're all missing out on that you should be reading about. So many things. You foools! Pathetic ignorant fools! Put that in your wiped out memory sticks and smoke it.