Stuart's Weblog

This Christmas, I received a single video-gaming related item: Prince or Persia, on the Xbox 360. Actually, I can’t remember the last game I bought for the Wii… it may have been Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Why this (not so) sudden apathy for the saviour of the games console? Because after a dream start to a console which has stratospherically exceeded even their own expectations (and perhaps herein lie the seeds of the problem), Nintendo have failed to capitalise on their lead at almost every juncture.

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I don’t have to most successfully history of predicting what Apple might do next – but then, who does?

There’s an interesting discussion on MacRumors about newly-leaked photos (allegedly) showing more details of the machines which will be announced this Tuesday.

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Read all about it

(Additionally, the Contact links from their Support Forum return an ASP error page, as does attempting to post any topic whose text includes an apostrophe! Colour me highly unimpressed…)

… or why I vow never to build a PC ever again

Having last built a new desktop computer (I do have an ever expanding collection of MiniITX servers, but these don’t count ) in about 2003, I decided that it was high time to the 256Mb Athlon 1800+ to something more recent: I was finding that I wasn’t updating my Gentoo Linux installation on the basis that I’d be replacing it in the near future, and I really wanted to play a few more interesting games such as Bioshock.

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Gareth has an iPod Touch, which he’s just updated to firmware 2.0 (at even more cost – and that he’s not best pleased about…), which adds many of the iPhone’s location-aware services. The Touch, of course, lacks any 3G/GSM circuitry and bluetooth – leaving only WiFi for position acquisition. Even though my name-server at home doesn’t contain any geographic records, his Touch was able to instantly plot the specific location we were.
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Cambridge has one Apple Store (in the seemingly Bioshock-inspired Grand Arcade), one O₂ shop, and two Carphone Warehouses.

Having decided that it’s finally time to replace my venerable Motorola RAZR V3, and never having been to an Apple product launch before* (albeit one at a local store) I decided to try my luck at the Apple Store itself – which turned out to have been a good idea for all of the wrong reasons…

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Perhaps WordPress has become slower in recent releases, perhaps I’ve broken something by running a non-prelinked system – but in any case, running this blog from my trustworthy SGI O2 was just getting too slow.

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So this morning at about 7:30am, O₂ sent out an email to what is probably millions of punters (judging by the fact that their pre-orders site has crashed and burned) with the headline:

iPhone 3G is here and its free*

Anyone spot the problem with this?

Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about this:

ITS, it’s or its can mean:

• “its”, the possessive adjective and possessive pronoun form of the personal pronoun it
• “it’s”, a contraction of “it is” or “it has”
• The “It’s” man, a man with torn clothes and unkempt beard who appeared at the beginning of episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus

It comes to something when a corporation the size of O₂ can’t even be bothered (or doesn’t have the knowledge – a more worrying conclusion) to get basic grammar and punctuation correct on what is unquestionably its biggest launch of the year.

Time was, you bought a new Nintendo game and got a code with it, which you entered into a Nintendo website and got points in return. Never mind that anything worth buying with these points sold out immediately (the used to give away Gameboy Players for the GameCube, and certain NDS games) – people were generally happy. Or, at least, not gnashing their teeth in frustration.

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With the rumoured (hopefully) imminent launch of new MacBook Pro models, I thought I’m commit to blog a collection of thoughts I have about how Apple could improve it, how much I’d like to see them make the suggested change, and how likely I think it is that they’ll do so…

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