Pete's Eats

The alpha-geeks of the internet, some of whom I count as friends, have all been bashing on and on about Make Magazine so much in recent months that I thought I’d go ahead and buy a sub.

Which I did, on the 7th of March.

I went down the pub last night with some of the local digirati and one of them, Mat Walker, produced his copy of the magazine which he had ordered from Amazon some ‘days’ ago. It struck me as strange that you could get it from Amazon so quickly, but if you ordered directly from the publishers it took so long… So I emailed them this morning to ask where it was. This is the response:

Dear Pete,



Thank you for your message, your first issue of Make is preparing to ship, please allow 2-3 additional weeks for delivery. When ordering a subscription, your shipment takes slightly longer to be processed, as opposed to ordering just the first issue. Rest assured that your copy will soon be on its way.



Thank you,

Make

make@espcomp.com

Another two to three weeks! WTF? So I asked for a refund and a cancellation as per their ‘no quibbles’ guarantee… And was then told that as the first issue has shipped already they’d only refund the remainder of the sub fee.

Hang on. Spot the deliberate mistake there? One minute it hasn’t shipped and the next, after a refund request, it has:

Dear Pete,

The first issue has shipped, however you will not receive it for at least another 2-3 weeks. You have been refunded for the remainder of your account balance, totaling $37.47. The cost of the first issue ($12.48) has been subtracted since this issue is now on its way to you.

Thank you,

Make

make@espcomp.com

These two messages came in three hours apart. But the delivery estimate of another two to three weeks hasn’t changed. They must be rowing it over the Atlantic to me because I don’t know of any other way they’d be able to make such a slow delivery…

So, the crux of this is, if you order the magazine from Amazon it will take DAYS. If you order from Make directly it will take 6 WEEKS – a slice of time they describe as ’slightly longer’.

They took payment straight away mind you…

I was going to waffle on about how an Apple handset would be sooooo cool and all that – but after actually thinking about it for a moment I realised that actually it probably wouldn’t be – not after the first 5 minutes anyway… So, I’ll just concentrate on the main reason for this post:

That’s an OS X theme for my Sony Ericsson S700i that is. It really does make my phone feel very ‘Appley’ too. It came from a site called ZwahlenDesign which has serious amounts of themes for Nokia’s, Sony’s, Siemens’, Sagem’s, Motorola’s, Panasonic’s, Sharp’s, and LG’s all pretty much based on OS X or various iterations of Linux too.

Now I’m on a mission to create a Newton theme for it too

But since Apple’s last OS update my installation of Safari seems to be struggling rather a lot of the time… The spinning beachball, which now inhabits even my sleeping mind, is making work fairly difficult in recent days. “Change browsers then”, I hear you all chant… Well, it isn’t that easy is it? I mean, I have 5 years worth of bookmarks in Safari and it knows a lot of passwords that I’ve long forgotten myself.

It seems to me, that Apple are getting a little bit ‘Redmond’ in their attitude to software updates these days (I heard that sharp intake of breath…). There was a time when you could count on anything Mac-related to work really, really badly and we all got used to that – loved them for it even! Then came OS X and everything changed – our wallets getting even thinner because of all the new software we had to buy was one of those changes – but more than anything else, it worked! I once had a Mac OS X Quicksilver machine that ran for over a year with no restarts at all for instance – try that with OS9! But, lately, the various things coming out of Apple HQ are sometimes of questionable quality – in recent years various updates have attracted considerable negative commentary because of things that got broken along the way etc.

It’s not good enough you know. We expect better from the glowing white Apple.

Oh, and a nice OS X driven pda/phone wouldn’t go amiss either…

I’ve just read an American article about the current state of Northern Ireland politics entitled, “Sicily Without Sunshine”, written by John F. Cullinan. The title refers to the IRA’s perceived status as some form of organised crime group like the Mafia. My feelings about the NI situation have been made fairly clear in the past so I won’t regurgitate that now, but the article is pretty rounded and deserves a read itself.

It links to a recent cartoon (see below) that illustrates the fact that so far, eyewitnesses have reportedly claimed to be in the toilets when the McCartney murder took place.

click to see full-size image

Much press has been had by the victim’s family over here in the UK, and rightly so, but there never was much coverage of the event itself. Certainly, I wasn’t aware of the full horror until recently. Here is a quote from the above linked article, detailing the event itself:

By all accounts, Robert McCartney, a 33-year-old forklift driver, had sought to calm a dispute arising after words were exchanged between his friend, Brendan Devine, and a senior IRA figure (who bellowed, “Do you know who I am?”). But when the IRA man drew his finger across his throat, at least a dozen men attacked McCartney and Devine with broken bottles and knives taken from the bar kitchen. After being dragged outside, both victims were repeatedly stabbed, struck with iron bars, and left for dead. Devine miraculously survived; McCartney, who was disemboweled and nearly decapitated, did not.

I hope someone (as in: a politician with a spine) takes this whole thing on soon and sorts the situation out once and for all. It is clear that the IRA and Sinn Fein will not give up their old ways and all the time they are allowed to carry on doing what they’ve always done then nothing will ever be resolved. In the words of Bertie Ahern, “What sort of eejits do they take us for?”

The sort of eejits that let murderers out of prison in the name of ‘peace’ - that’s what…

Microsoft is always buying up interesting technology providers but rarely, since the tech industry collapse, is much made of it publicly. That’s not the case with Microsoft’s acquisition of Groove Networks and it seems, to me, that there has been a steady rise in the value of such companies for some time now. I’m not talking purely monetary value here, but the value of their offering to the market place. It very much seems that the die-hard view of some persistent entrepreneurs is paying off at last with new tech companies being looked at without raised eyebrows… That hasn’t really happened since 2000/2001 so I think this is a very exciting time to be working in the tech industry.

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Note: I had the chance to hang out with Ray Ozzie out in Tokyo last year for a few days and he was a genuinely nice guy who was demonstrably excited about his company. He was keenly interested in Flash-Lite too – hmmm…

Just when I think I’ve really, genuinely lost my bizarre passion for Lego technics they go and produce this:

And, in one fell swoop, condemn me to a weekend of pressing little plastic bricks together just so I can put the whole thing in the loft the following weekend. Clever bastards…

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Seen on Gizmodo

So, T-Mobile are putting wifi connections on the London to Brighton line. Excellent move – if it works…

Well spotted that Ben…

Seen on the brilliant Wooster Collective but soon to be followed up by actually going and seeing it in situ – once I’ve worked out where it is

UPDATE: Thanks to Mat we now have the location mapped out