Gadgets, Web Design, Punk Rock & Jesus

I’ve had 3.5 days in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress (MWC) reporting for PocketGPSWorld and Wired4iPhone. It was great but owing to easyJet’s failure to get my boss over there from Gatwick I was rather busy! Needless to say I’m knackered and my calves are killing me… It’s been less than 12 months since I covered CeBIT for PocketGPSWorld but my mind had clearly removed from it’s memory how much hard work these things are! We have, in the past, been accused of ’swanning about wasting company money’ by some slightly deranged forum users – I really do wish it WAS as simple as gliding around like a swan!

But anyway, short blog as I’m tired…! Have a good weekend!

On Saturday I called to a Tesco Local while Mrs-MaFt and Mini-Mrs-MaFt were at dancing class. We didn’t need much -  just a newspaper, some cat food and some sweets for the kids. When I got to the till the till operator – hang on… till OPERATOR?! Glorified name or what?! How hard is it to ‘operate’ a till?! Scan – Beep – Scan – Beep – Card – PIN – Kerching! Anyway, I digress, the ‘valued Tesco employee’ then asked if I was “stocking up for tonight’s snow”. Hang on, I was buying a newspaper, some cat food and some sweets – just one of each item. This is NOT stocking up! To me, stocking up implies buying a lot of each item, not just one!

More to the point, do I actually LOOK like someone who lives off of cat food and sweets?

There’s one thing that I hate more than anything else. Well, actually there are loads of things that I hate but for the sake of a simplified blog post there’s just the one!

What is it that gets me wound up so much?! You may be able to guess from the title and, no, it’s not Rhianna (although chart music does feature in my full list) it’s people who insist on wearing umbrellas at the slightest drop of rain. Come on, we live in England, we should be used to a bit of rain; a lot of rain perhaps. Your hair and clothes will dry and God was clever enough to make your skin waterproof.

Read more

I would dearly love to show you some video from Monday’s Green Day gig at Sheffield Arena however my iPhone was stolen and was last ’seen’ in Liverpool, near Kensington Gardens…

On Sunday night my car was broken into as well. Nothing was taken but it did mean I had to pay for a replacement window and the hassle involved.

Read more

Those who follow me on Twitter will already be aware of my antics this past Saturday afternoon. Me and Mini-MaFt went geocaching – now if you don’t know what it is then check out the geocaching website but, put simply, it is a GPS/SatNav-based treasure hunt. You get a set of coordinates from the website along with a title and a clue and you have to find the ‘treasure’. Groundspeak, the company behind the geocaching website, recently released an iPhone app which links to the geocaching website allowing you to find local caches, see the hints and read other peoples reports on how they got on.

Armed with my iPhone, a couple of goodies (you can leave items for other geocachers in some of the larger caches or do swaps for items already in the box) and a thick coat (it was blowing a gale, but at least the rain had stopped); me and Mini-MaFt headed out across the field towards our local alpacca farm for our first ever cache. Read more

I got an email today from the wonderful CCL Computers (that sounds more sarcastic than it actually is – they are a great company!) as a hard drive I bought from them failed during it’s warranty period. The drive turned out to be discontinued and so I was asked to find a suitable replacement around a similar price, which I did, and replied to their email.

This morning I had this in my inbox:

Hello MaFt

Thank you for your reply.

Your order xxxxxxxxx has now been amended for the HDD0133. All been well will be despatched this evening for delivery on Monday/Tuesday of next week.  Could you please ensure that they will be someone their too accept and sign for the goods.

If you require any further help or assistance please do not hesitate too contact us back by return of mail.

Kind Regards
::name removed::
CCL Returns Department.

There are, technically, no spelling mistakes in there; so well done in that sense! However, I count 5 grammatical errors where the wrong word has been used. For someone speaking on behalf of a big company you’d think they would at least try and give a good impression!

I honestly wouldn’t normally nit-pick to this degree but 5 errors in such a short email did make me laugh!

NB: I started writing this aaaaaaages ago – sorry for the delay in posting it!

I had the pleasure of receiving Guest Passes for Leeds Festival for this past weekend. Due to family / home stuff I was only able to make it for one day – thankfully I picked the one day of the weekend when it stayed dry! I set off about half an hour later than planned to go pick up my mate, Shaun, from Wrose. However, I thought it would be a wise move to phone him to confirm his house number and road – I knew roughly where he lived but wasn’t 100% certain. It’s a good job really as I’d completely forgotten that he moved house about 4 months ago to Pudsey…

So, anyway, we finally got there after a mix up between J45 on the M1 and J45 on the A1(M) and after exchanging out tickets for the wrist bands headed through to the guest area. Wow, flushing toilets and picnic benches to sit at! Needless to say we were impressed! The first band wasn’t on until 12 so we wandered around the site to get our bearings. It didn’t take too long so we both decided to buy a new belt each from the bargain bucket at one of the stalls and grab some money from the cash machine to pay for them…

Read more

Working for/with PocketGPSWorld.com has it’s perks: various satnav’s, navigation software, new devices & gadgets, best speed camera database and, erm, ahem, random days off to go to theme parks….! I’ve got a few navigation apps on my iPhone and thought a trip to Pleasure Island, Cleethorpes would be a good time to give them a proper road test. To be honest I’m still not fully convinced that the iPhone is the right platform for navigation software (I much prefer Windows Mobile or (my limited use of) Google Android for these types of things) and so I took my ‘normal’ TomTom with me too.

We were running a bit late yesterday morning so I used the TomTom on the way down as it was easier to set up quickly – I couldn’t find my iPhone holder and charger right there and then! For the return journey, however, I planned on using a mixture of Sygic, CoPilot and iGO to get us home safely. First up was CoPilot which loaded nice and quickly but then seemed to crash on the main menu along with a bit of a graphical glitch. No problems I thought, kill the app and start it up again! Then the fun began, CoPilot decided to hang on the splash screen and just would not load. Next up I tried iGO which, too, hung on the splash screen – not the best of starts… Finally I gave Sygic a shot, fearing the worst and preparing the TomTom for a return trip. My fears were not compounded as Sygic started up and ran with no issues. Later on I gave iGO another shot and it was fine but then when I tried CoPilot it still hung on the splash screen. I actually think the initial problem with iGO was due to memory issues as I tried loading it as soon as CoPilot had crashed out on me.

Anyway, my point being, had I only had CoPilot with me I would have been rather stuck. The only way to reinstall it is to remove it from the iPhone then reinstall it via iTunes on the PC – now, if I had been away for a week or two and that happened…! Thankfully today I had a back up (I actually considered taking only the iPhone). I find I have started to rely on technology a little too much and I may have to dig out my old paper map as a contingency plan – if one of my actual satnav’s packed in while dodging camper vans through the hills around St Ives I doubt my homing instinct would serve us particularly well!

Back in February this year there was uproar from some narrow-minded parents about the employment of Cerrie Burnell for CBeebies. I won’t go into all the pathetic comments that were posted in various forums but basically some people believed that a TV presenter with no forearm would scare children away from TV and she was only employed to ‘make up numbers’. Utter nonsense if you ask me… Anyway, 5 months on and Mini-MaFt has finally noticed this so-called hideous-scare-machine-of-a-TV-presenter’s ‘disability’ and, contrary to the idiots  speculation, he wasn’t scared, he didn’t run away screaming and I highly doubt he will have any nightmares about it either. He simply said, in a perfectly child-like way, “Eh? Where’s her hand gone?”. And that was it! It didn’t take very long to tell him that everyone is born different and that when she was growing in her mummy’s tummy her arm didn’t grow properly. Nothing else was asked about it so I really can’t see why so many parents were so scared of their precious little darling’s seeing someone ‘different’ to them… I wonder if the same people complained that there’s a black TV presenter on CBeebies too…?!

For those who don’t know I manage the Speed Camera Database for PocketGPSWorld.com (among other things). There’s only me who does this so any time away from processing submissions results in having to do the work anyway so my one week holiday in the Costa del Sol now means I have one week’s worth of camera submissions to process as well as those submitted since my return. In other words, my holiday has now resulted in me having to work twice as hard this week. I call it my pseudo-holiday!

On top of the extra stuff to process for PocketGPSWorld I also seem to have had a tonne of stuff to do for my own websites (new links to add, videos to upload, domain names to park and nameservers to edit) – this in itself is a good thing, it’s just a bad time so soon after my pseudo-holiday…