MaFt’s Musings

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?

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.

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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 �

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…?!

I don’t use Facebook that much other than for free webspace for uploading photos, the occasional game and the occasional message to someone I’ve not seen for years. However, when the kids woke me at 9 this morning I still felt compelled to grab me a ‘Vanity URL’ – I also got Mrs-MaFt one too.

It’s one thing that has really bugged me on Facebook, the difficulty in finding someone, even someone you know! Numerous time I chatted to people via MSN Messenger or on the phone saying if they were on Facebook they could see the photo’s I just uploaded – it usually turns out they are and the conversation then resorts to discussing which keywords to use to try and find each other as more often than not there are 16,000 people with the same name and it’s hard to recognise someone on a tiny profile picture, that is assuming it’s even a picture of them!

So now, Facebook have finally caught up with the times and allow facebook.com/your.name style URL’s – only 3 years too late…! Maybe soon they will get rid of all the crap and it will just be Twitter with photo albums!

For those thinking “it’ll be Christmas by the time he blogs again” well, you’re wrong. But not too far from the truth though!

Been stupidly busy sorting out poorly kids and poorly me as well as trying to get stuff sorted for the Christmas play I stupidly agreed to do…

I’ve been pretty busy with work stuff to – lots to do with PocketGPSWorld.com as usual but I’ve also recently finished the Migrant Workers Information Bradford site as well as completely redesigning the Jalapeno Drums site. The Jalapeno one is still showing the old site while we wait for domain names to be switched between hosts etc etc – all great fun…! I’ve also updated the portfolio part of my site at MaFt.co.uk/design so it’s not been a total loss!

That’ll do for now, I’ll try post more in the near future!

MaFt

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