India Calling

Once again, this evening, I found myself on the phone to India.

You all know the experience - you call up your support people, press a few numbers on the phone, and you find yourself talking to a person situated in Mumbai, or Bangalore (those are the two places to which I've found myself connected). At this point, a lot of people start to panic. I'm hard pressed to understand why.

I love speaking to India, because all the people to whom I've spoken are

1. Extremely polite.
2. Very knowledgeable.
3. Incapable of admitting defeat.
4. Delighted when they get someone on the phone who has a bit more than a little technical knowledge - although this is personal!
   

Yes, I admit, there are sometimes problems with making out some of the words. However, I've never yet met the person who will not repeat for me, sometimes more than once.

In addition to which, you can usually get them to give you a weather report while you're on the phone!

Let's hear it for the Indian tech support guys!

Junk Spam eMail, and well meaning friends

What is it about girlfriends? I love my girlfriends, you know. They're a seriously well meaning bunch of friends. For someone whose first experience of having girlfriends in any kind of quantity began less than 10 years ago, I'm revelling in the knowledge that I have a bunch of mates I can count on for support and friendship. Loads of them. It helps that I've met them all in the sorts of situations in which mums usually find themselves - I'm hardly likely to find a Carrie, Samantha, Miranda or a Charlotte amongst them (although we can all dream...)

But I've got to say - Oh my goodness - they are the most gullible bunch of mail-forwarders it's possible to find in the whole of the known universe!

I read an article recently that most email hoaxes are aimed at women. I'm not talking about the Nigerian Scam, or the other Phishing attempts. I'm talking about the ones which don't seem to achieve anything for the originator except that his ruddy stupid email gets forwarded round the world 15 million times.

I got two this morning, both from wonderful lady friends.

1. The Bill Gates is giving all his money away hoax, and every time you forward this email you'll get a cheque for $244, and ever time anyone to whom you forward the email forwards it, you'll get $243 etc.
2. The Red Arrows have been banned from performing in the 2012 London Olympics because they're deemed "Too British!"

I'm not going to put their names down, because I love them both so much, but man! Can neither of these ladies operate Google? It's pretty simple - it took me less than 5 minutes to establish that both of these are hoaxes. Indeed, the Bill Gates story has been circulating for 10 years. Yes, I did say 10 YEARS!!!

I was actually rather pleased to find, from an RAF blog, that the Red Arrows story is not true.

Is it that I'm just particularly cynical? Is it that, as a person who's on the computer a lot of the time I'm in more peoples address books. Or is it simply that ladies care more?

The article suggested that email hoaxes are targeted at women because they can rest sure in the knowledge that women will faithfully pass them on. Remember the one with the subject of Slow Dance, allegedly written by a 9-year old dying from cancer? Actually it was written by one David L. Weatherford, who may look like the original model for The Joy of Sex, but is, in fact, a Child psychologist. I do feel that, despite the fact that his site is horribly designed and makes you nauseous to view it, he deserves the credit of having written this poem.

The article goes on to say that women pass these on because they're more easily scared, and it's easy to prey on our weaknesses - crying babies, children dying, warnings about attacks on other women. OK - I get this, I really do. But am I the ONLY woman on the planet who requires verification? Proof? At least two other sources showing the information, preferably sources like the BBC or something - that's what I want before I believe it.

The fact is that it took me just seconds, after typing in "Bill Gates giving away fortune" to find any number of sites which informed me that not only is this a hoax, there's nothing in the underlying code of the email which would enable the message to be tracked back to you at all.

There are a number of wonderful sites out there whose sole purpose is to keep one informed of the increasing slew of stupid hoax emails, but most of the women in my circle of friends seem oblivious to the help available on the internet. They blindly accept the information presented to them, which has been forwarded numerous times, and just as blindly forward it to their entire address books. These ladies are clearly at risk every time an email says "Please forward this to everyone in your address book - I'd rather get this warning multiple times than not at all.", or "A cardiologist says If everyone who gets this mail sends it to 10 people, you can bet that we'll save at least one life."

Women appear to be more vulnerable to the nauseating, cutesy emails which tell you why you'll be their friend forever (pass me the bucket, please!), annotated by pictures of cute cats, dogs, hamsters and the like. There's a site for you, ladies! These I appreciate more, although there are all too many of them which exhort me to "Return this to me, if you don't I'll know why!", a nasty form of blackmail, which says "If you don't send this horrible, cutesy garbage straight back to me, I wont be your friend any more." What?! Good god - the least you could do is to change the subject... Oh no - you got me started. Why, for the love of Mike, can people not take out all the previous forwarding information? It seriously can't be because they want to credit previous posters. I suppose it's possible that they don't want the buck to stop at them if people like me take exception and shoot back a caustic response!

So - what can we do about these horrible emails. My efforts at education have been received badly - "So it's a fake - whoop te do! I don't care" from one chap who ended up in the cc: field when I tried to inform my friend about the Slow Dance hoax. It turns out you need to be careful if using googlemail, because it will cc: all the people to whom your friend originally forwarded the mail, if you try to reply. Thankfully the response from my friend was rather more measured.

The message is clear - Please check the veracity of the information you are forwarding.

Doctor Who!

Didja see Doctor Who last night? Well, didja?

Oh. My. Dog!

Actually, this isn't about the series finale, but a resounding cheer for Donna Noble, as played by Catherine Tate.

Who thought, last year when we were told that the new Companion would be played by Catherine Tate, something along the lines of "Oh no, she'll wreck a fabulous series!" I confess, I did. I've seen her own show, although not much of it, because it grated when watching it, and so I didn't try to get into it. Unlike some shows with which I've made an effort, The Catherine Tate Show had no devotees in my ken to enthuse about it and encourage my own enthusiasm. I'd made more effort for The Office, a program I found spectacularly uncomfortable, and which, ultimately I didn't enjoy. I have since found Ricky Gervais to be a very limited actor, always playing the same role. While I did enjoy him in Extras, perhaps because I felt a certain sympathy for the character, his performance in A Night at the Museum jarred, the same performance he'd given in The Office, and completely out of place in what was, otherwise, quite a fun film. I realise it's difficult for actors to move from Comedy into mainstream drama, as testified by the numbers of actors who have successfully achieved this. But those who do are the gems.

While I loved Doctor Who while Rose was the companion - just exactly as a companion should be: beautiful and spunky (can I use that word without being ridiculed?) Martha, who never seemed to come into her own until she starred in Torchwood, was a pretty and brave companion. But Donna Noble - wow! What a heroic companion! What a range of people, from Donna the shallow temp, to Donna who really doesn't like killing people, through to Donna-Doctor at the end, and then, sadly back to Donna the shallow temp. I cried real tears when the Doctor wiped her memory and she had to go back to her life. A real feeling of despair came over me, so real was her own.

So, Catherine Tate, kudos to ya girl! I'm looking forward to finding out what you're going to do next.

And, of course, I'm wondering who the doctor will have as his next companion...

Deciding on a Home

This afternoon, I was summoned to my brother's house for a family conference, to decide how best to help dad and mum. My parents are both 70 years old, and my father has Parkinsons Disease. He's actually managed to hold it at bay for quite some time, having been diagnosed about 20 years ago. He's a hugely positive man, and insisted on remaining active and occupied. I remember how my dad was when my brother got married. Mark married a girl from Yugoslavia (I believe it still was at the time), and due to various complications, they actually decided to get married in Yugoslavia, and have a celebration here in England for friends who couldn't make it for the actual wedding. The Yugoslavian side of things went well, and all was set for the English part. Of course there were a number of Vesna's family who wanted to be at the celebrations here, as well, so a number of them were put up at my parents house in Fleet. What I remember very clearly was that dad was fabulous - he was always the consummate entertainer, the urbane host, charming and helpful to all the guests. And this time, almost as if spurred on by the recently diagnosed "illness", he made even more effort. He was first up in the morning and last to bed at night. He made, and drank, endless cups of Turkish coffee, the favoured drink. He was always available should anyone have a problem, to deal with it as quickly and cheerfully as possible.

And in the slowly creeping dementia he's now suffering, these are the memories to which we should cling. It's even more important now, than at any previous time, that we remember that he has been a very intelligent man. While the periods of being compos mentis are becoming shorter, the sharp wit and intelligence are still there in those times. It's all too easy to mis-understand him, because the Parkinsons has caused his speech to become slurred - the once sharp and funny, yet throwaway comments have become laboured, and un-funny because he has to translate when we don't hear them immediately.

So the chat today was to establish what I suspected all along - we are, as a family, still reading from the same hymn book. We all, my mum included, want my dad to have as much dignity as possible. While his nursing needs may be forcing him into a home, there's no need for this to be a hurried decision. We all remember, with shudders of horror, the home into which my grandmother was put when her senile dementia became too much for one person to deal with it alone. A rushed decision which was regretted with every increasingly infrequent visit. A home which, upon waking the inmates, would dress them and deposit them into the "day room", where a television provided the only stimulation. I think we all know that this kind of "stimulation" is worse than useless.

So, the meeting this afternoon was a fair success. I hope that both my mum and my dad realised that the rest of the family support them both. We know that mum is under a great deal of stress, because dad is not aware of the times when his mentis is not being very compos, but I like to think that we were able to reassure dad that we aren't planning on "shoving him in a home" to rot away in front of a television.

Next week we will all be attempting to visit Sunrise home in Fleet. We have a list of questions we plan to ask, and we'll have a jolly good poke around.

This entry brought to you from my mobile phone!

Ladies in IT

I received my copy of PC Pro a couple of weeks ago, and as usual, I dived straight for the back, and the letters page. There, to my astonishment, was a letter from a lady working in IT who was being, for want of a better phrase, sexually harassed by her male clients. I can't find a link to the letter online (although I'll keep searching), and I don't want to type in the whole letter in case of copyright issues, so I'll put in a few of the choicer complaints...

"Most end users are bored men in offices who are already annoyed that they can't fix their computers, and many resent being told anything technical by a young woman. They flinch when you touch their machine, snort, argue, put up porn screensavers and often mistake technical attention for sexual interest."

Apparently one client, who had called her to his home for a totally bogus computer problem, referred to her as “too sexy to be safe”!

I did write a letter in reply, to PC Pro, but I don't think it was as coherent (or well spelled) as it could have been, and anyway, this is, apparently, a rather thorny subject. So I'm not going to copy it in here. A letter, by it's very brevity, can't really address the issues. I did cite my 25 years in computer support, and while it's possible that my response is coloured by sour grapes, NO male user has EVER referred to me as “too sexy to be safe.” Mind you, it's likely that a) I'm just not sexy enough to be harassed, and/or b) I've just plain not-noticed their come ons. After all, I tend to lump users under one umbrella – they are the cause of all computer problems. Having “user error” growled at them as I fix their problem does tend to keep them quiet.

As far as I can see, a lot of women actually seem to bring light to this issue in a way which is guaranteed to invite ridicule – check out this story from PC Pro. To address just one issue here, this is an exerpt...

"There's a real need for women in the technology industry to stand up and be counted, shout about what we believe in and to set standards for ethically informed and socially committed inclusive technology projects and programmes that can help real women and people with real needs of all kinds to reach their fullest potential," says Professor Goodman.

Is it just me, or does the phrase “ethically informed and socially committed inclusive technology projects and programmes that can help real women” make you want to stop listening/reading at this point? While I cannot argue that men and women are different creatures, surely any kind of attempt to artificially create a project/programme for “real” or any other kind of women is automatically going counter to the idea of being “inclusive”.

Let me, for a moment, digress. I went to university! Yes I did! I got into a smashing Computer Science course at University College in London, and I was as proud as punch when I got a place, especially as I'd done adequately in my A-levels, but hadn't managed to secure a place directly out of 6th-form college. I'd had to take a course at the tech college – Maths, Stats and Computing, in which I obtained a better than average grade, which secured me an offer of a place, and, as I previously mentioned, I was proud! Until I discovered that I'd got a place only because “they” (and I'm not sure exactly who “they” were), had decided that they wanted to have 50% of the intake as females. Imagine my despair! OK – I didn't despair that much, but I was mildly miffed. It was as if “they” had taken away my achievements, and said, in a rather patronising way, “There there deary, you can come and play with the big boys.” As it happened, I had no kind of discrimination from any of the chaps on the course, or within the faculty – they were all charming (there was one chap who was a bit iffy, but he was from a culture who view women as second class citizens anyway). My fellow ladies on the course were bright, intelligent and, for the most part, lovely girls. I was delightfully happy for a whole year until I flunked my end of year exams, and had to find a job.

The point of this little digression is this. This was the earliest form of “positive discrimination” to which I'd been exposed. But positive discrimination is an oxymoron (I love that word!) It's still discrimination. It's an artificially created project/programme FOR women. While, in this case, it helped me, what happened to all those boys who didn't get a place because I and my fellow girls were bumped into their places? It didn't even occur to me to be upset for them until a few years afterwards.

But then...

You know, I've been guilty of positive discrimination in my time. I've advertised in local newspapers for “female to share” when I've wanted to share my living space, and yet I find this completely acceptable.

I wont discriminate against any of my users – they're all still the reason computers are infested with nasty gremlins!

Prince Caspian

I went to see Prince Caspian at the cinema on Sunday morning, and although there are a few niggles (and you know me and my niggles!), there was much to be enjoyed, too.

OK - yes, I've read the book, and there's usually a great sense of disappointment when a well loved book is turned into a film, because it's unusual for the director to have experienced the same sense of awe that I did when reading the book. If, indeed, he (or she) read the book at all.

I remember the feeling of pleasure I got when watching the very first Harry Potter film, because the whole of Diagon Alley had been described in such great detail in the book, and in a short pan down the alley, one could see much of what had been described. This was a truly exciting moment for me, because the words had been moved to the screen, and while it'd taken me minutes to read the description, there it all was, without being laboured - perhaps 5 glorious seconds of perfect description. I haven't phrased that well, so I may come back to it.

In contrast, the third film had none of the colourful page to screen translation I'd enjoyed in the previous two films, and while the critics proudly trumpeted the "darker" feel of the film, I was outraged by the addition (addition? what are they thinking, there's plenty of very funny material in the book they'd had to cut) of a ridiculous shrunken head in the Knight Bus. In addition to which, the only darkness I could find was that there was virtually no colour to be seen, and someone seemed to have forgotten to turn on any of the lights.

So, it's possible that you can see that the look of the film is quite important to me. I want to feel that I've been transported to that place in my imagination I created when reading the book. This is sometimes a bit of an unrealistic expectation, because New Zealand doesn't look a lot like Narnia, in my imagination, anyway! Actually, to be perfectly honest, Narnia always reminded me of an English woodland, with widely spaced beech trees, a scattering of silver birch, and some crusty old oaks. The pictures in the books could have been drawn from any one of the places I played in as a child, from the woods at the back of my friends house in Blackwater, to the streams chuckling through the New Forest.

However, there are other images which have been captured well. As you probably know, had you read any of the books as a child, there are a number of charming little illustrations dotted throughout each book. Perhaps it was really these which gave me the images I've so carefully cherished all these years. It was, therefore, a pleasure to see some of these images included in the film. I remember being charmed by the bulgy bears, especially the one who would always suck his paws - and there, for just a second, was the picture - a bulgy bear, sucking his paw. The picture of Reepicheep, surrounded by his mousy followers, all getting ready to cut off their own tails after his is lost during the battle. The little underground home in which Caspian recovered after falling off his horse.

I fully expected some plot changes, especially after the mad chase in "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe". I'm sure I didn't expect a full on assault of Miraz' castle in the middle of the film, but perhaps this was better than the drawn out mini-scuffles depicted in the book. The jury's still out on this one.

I didn't even mind that there was a little romance between Susan and Caspian - I realise that this was not what C.S. Lewis had in mind, over 50 years ago, but the age of the actors suggest that there would at least be some interested glances exchanged. This may have been a children's book, but the film is aiming for a wider audience.

I think what did bug me most was the silly plot device (again with Susan) where she tried to put off the boy from another school at the beginning, and then looked at him with more interest AFTER she'd met Prince C. Come on, you're straining my credibility with this one. She's just realised that she's met this gorgeous young man, a real warrior, but sadly they can't see how it would pan out, so she's making nice-eyes at the geek-boy? Not going to happen!

Still, all in all, it was a better film than the first adventure into Narnia. I'm looking forward to the next one!

N78 Enchanted

I've got to carry on with my praises of the N78. I expect you've worked out now that I'm a little bit of a geek, and gadgets are my catnip. Yes, I admit, I drool over photos of the iPhone (I'm a girl - what can I say?), and the HTC range have me reading reviews like a woman possessed.

However, now I've found my gadget, I've decided that I'm going to find the best software I can. And I have to tell you, it's no easy task. Unlike palm software, which is written for just the one OS, there seem to be many flavours of Symbian. Just point yourself at MySymbian and you find that they have 6 places to shop for what appears to be 6 different types of symbian! OK - I'm a novice (although this isn't as unique as you'd think, what with me trying out new Linux builds on my Asus eee) and maybe a lot of these are very similar - what do I know?

As usual - and this could end up being a huge whine - the inventory of built in apps is a bit sad. No, it's a lot sad. The calendar is, as I mentioned before, barely adequate. It's not completely useless, but since this machine is really going to replace, not compliment, my palm, it's got to be really good.

I started by searching the interweb for "symbian calendar" and after following a few links, found myself a couple of likely looking contenders, Handy Calendar by EpocWare, and AquaCalendar which appears to be by Pocket Torch. I decided to install them both, and within a few days I'd decided that they were both pretty good pieces of software.

Handy Calendar starts with a month view at the top, showing the appointments for today at the bottom of the screen. Each appointment for a specific day is shown as a dot on the month view, so you can see quickly how full each day will be without having to navigate to the day. There's a decent amount of space under this month view to show the current/selected day's events. I liked this, because it means that I can see most of the appointments I'm likely to make in any one day. For each day highlighted there is a little "busy bar" shown, which gives me a visual representation of how much of the working day my appointments take up.

If I want to make a new appointment (as opposed to Reminder, All day event, Anniversary or Task), I can just start typing it in with either my bluetooth keyboard, or the T9 keyboard on the phone. There are 4 tabs at the top of the page, and as soon as I've finished editing a field, I can move to the next tab along by pressing the right key on my 5-way navigator. The little pictures are clear on the tabs, allowing me to see, easily, where I am.

If I want to make a recurring appointment which will wake me up every morning at 06:30 EXCEPT on Saturdays and Sundays (I have the girls for that task), I can do that. I know, as my brother pointed out, I can make a recurring appointment every Monday to wake me, and another one for every Tuesday, and every Wednesday etc. But what a fag! Is it really unreasonable of me to want to be able to do this in one go? The whole point of getting a PDA is that you want it to help you organise yourself (unlike a real PA, who I'd pay to organise me!) and make it easy to do so.

I haven't explored the package in very much depth, but it's definitely replaced the on-board calendar program with ease.

AquaCalendar starts with a similar view, although the space available to show the appointments for the selected day is quite substantially smaller - somehow, despite all my efforts to show this in a different way, the best I can now view is 3 lines (very small) of appointments for the selected day. I thought I could view more when I downloaded the app, but something I did has managed to leave me with a view of daisies all over the screen, and unless I tell the software that I want it to show me words on the days of the month, that's what I get. I've tried telling it not to show me icons, but that has no effect. I can also get appointments to repeat on specific days of the week, rather than all of them.

I liked the way that AquaCalendar allowed me to edit the background colour of the display, and that an icon can be assigned to each appointment (aha! This is how I got a screen full of daisies!). Unfortunately for the writers of AquaCalendar, this is all window dressing, and since I can't get the main display to show me what I want, all the colours in the world aren't going to make up for it. Although I’ve got the functionality I wanted, it’s clunky to add your appointments (you have to press the options button, choose new, then decide which type of appointment you want, at which point you can start typing in the details. Although there is a similar “tabbed” style interface, you have to press back to finish editing the tab you’re on, and then you can move to the next tab. The pictures at on the “tabs” are not very clear, so you need to be there to work out what it is you’re editing. That’s not a real drawback, just a comment.
So after my 14 day trial, I’ve made my choice.
While I liked AquaCalendar, I preferred Handy Calendar, because, pretty colours and icons aside, it’s important to be able to view my daily grind as easily as possible. So today I purchased Handy Calendar. Oh, and there’s a price difference – Handy Calendar costs $39.95, where AquaCalendar costs $24.95. And they’ll add VAT in for you too!
Now what I want is a shopping list program which allows me to enter a number of items into it, and check them off a check-list to be displayed while I shop. I used Handy Shopper (no relation!) for Palm, which was a great bit of software. So far I’ve found just 3 pieces of software claiming to work on Symbian s60v3, but one of them doesn’t have a trial version, one of them I couldn’t get to install, and the third I couldn’t get to download. Although only $9.99, I’m not going to buy a program without having a good trial first.