Rants and comments on lifestyle, virtuality, software engineering and other worthy issues
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I am just back from ENASE 2009 in Milan, Italy. The good thing for a Spaniard like me about travelling to Italy is that you get to taste yummy Italian food. And you get to see beautiful landscapes and monuments. And you get to practice your Italian. Oh, and yes. The iPhone.
See, I think it’s pathetic that Apple sells the iPhone in Spain exclusively through Telefonica, one of the carriers here, so that you either sign up with Telefonica, pay them outrageous fees and sign in blood that you won’t leave them before two years… or you, well, get yourself a cheap imitator of the iPhone.
I have been a customer of Vodafone for ages, and I am not going to switch carriers now. And, if I switch carriers, it will not be to join Telefonica. I am resonably happy with Vodafone; as happy as one can be in a vampiric relationship with a carrier, that is. The only thing that I was missing was an iPhone.
Continue reading ‘Apple and Vodafone work together in Spain’
What’s worse than being a victim of the rip-off fees of airport wi-fi internet access?
No wi-fi internet access at all.
Indeed, today I realised that Santiago de Compostela airport totally lacks internet connectivity for passengers. Not a single hot spot. Nothing. Nil. Nada.
In fact, I asked at an information counter and the lady there seemed a bit embarrassed when she said “no, there is none”. She added “I am sorry”, which, being this country what it is, means an awful lot.
I know, Santiago is not a big airport. But it has regular international flights and it’s the largest of Galicia. I can’t believe that kubi or some of the other usual wi-fi vampires haven’t yet colonised this place. Are you listening? I am willing to pay 4 € for 30 minutes!
I got my new iPod today. Apple received my broken one in the morning and shipped a new one that same afternoon. After a full synch with iTunes, it’s up and running again.
Linda was right: they have delivered. 
I am sad.
The other day I was on the bus watching a TED talk video on my iPod Touch when, out of the blue, the screen went white. Well, not exactly white. It started displaying some weird kind of horizontal white stripes that made things really hard to see or read. It looked milky.
So I dived into the web and engaged Apple’s customer service. In a couple of days they sent a UPS return package for me to send them my iPod. I am expected to live without it for a few days (I hope it’s not longer than that!) until they fix it.
How did I manage to survive before?
Yesterday Isabel and I spent the day in Begonte, a lovely area in the province of Lugo where you can still find oak tree forests and sometimes, if you are lucky, sight the odd nuthatch. This is what Begonte looks like in mid-winter.
Oak Tree Forest in Begonte
River Mill in Begonte
Of course, I took my TomTom GO 930 with us. After much toying and fiddling with the settings, we have settled down on a voice named “Marta”. Isabel likes “Ken”, an aussie guy that sounds serious enough as to drive you off a cliff if need be, but Marta is still our most usual trip companion. And metonymy has led us to personify the navigation device and call it ”Marta” as well.
I have just read “Addressing Information Overload in Corporate Email: The Economics of User Attention”, a white paper by The Radicati Group. Their motivation makes a lot of sense: we receive a lot of email these days, and there is not way to quickly tell the wheat from the chaff in your inbox. The “urgent” or “low priority” flags are often overused or not used at all, so they means little. And even for those who use them consistently, they only give you three levels of importance.
Once you remove all the marketing babble, what these guys propose a continuous scale to grade the importance of an email. The sender states how important an email is in a scale from 0 (zero) to potentially infinite, and the sender sees it when she received the email. It’s easy to sort your inbox on the importance column and prioritise emails with higher importance values.
I know, I know. There is the issue that email importance is modelled as a currency. Every time you compose a new email and state how important it is (using an importance unit called Serios), your “balance” is reduced accordingly. For example, if I send an email valued in 20 Serios, my Serios balance is reduced by 20. Since my balance is finite, I must think twice before allocating very high importance values to an email.
I have just unpackaged my new TomTom GO 930. What a pretty little thing. It works great, but, overall, what most impressed me is the top quality of its manufacturing. It feels solid and sturdy, sleek and beautiful in your hand.
Awesome.
My Nokia 6288 has been acting up for some time now. It resets randomly a few times a day, which is quite annoying if you happen to be in the middle of a conversation or typing a text message.
So, when Vodafone came up with the BlackBerry Storm, I thought I would have a look at it. It starts at 19 € if you sign up for the top flat rate voice and data contract, which may be a bit over the top for me. But I am still willing to pay a bit more for the machine if I like it. What I would really like to own is an iPhone, but there are two reasons why I can’t: first, only Telefónica sells the iPhone in Spain, and I will not enter into business with Telefónica under any circumstances (well, maybe I would if my life and the life of my loved ones’ were depending on it); secondly, my colleague Sara Atán owns one and she says it’s got a few glitches and functionality shortcomings that I am not ready to live with. So, no iPhone for me. Shame. It’s pretty. So Apple.
