Movin'

As promised I've move the blog to a new home. Please adjust your browser...normal service will resume as soon as possible. http://stufforama.wordpress.com

Blog Smog... As part of my return to at least part time blogging, I'm thinking of moving the blog to an alternative Blog Site like Wordpress. For no other reason that I fancy a change...as in it's as good as rest. As I've already taken a rest from blogging this seems like the next best thing. I'll probably change the domain name too as tonycocks.com seems to get blocked by some profanity filters (dunno why) and as many of you know I'm the least profane person alive in Britain today. I might also blog about the Windows Mobile stuff a bit more as running mulltiple blogs is time consuming and frankly not much fun.

Kingston, come in Kingston… Not sure if I mentioned it but we’ve moved house. After eleven years in our two bed Victorian terrace in sunny Barnes, about five weeks ago we crossed Richmond Park to equally sunny Kingston to a similar vintage Victorian three bed Villa. It's a 'Villa' apparently ‘cos the door is in the side of the house rather than the front which makes the building longer than normal. The location, remember the mantra, is spot on being half way between the aforementioned park (we’re now closer) and Kingston town centre, in fact we’re about 10 minutes from almost anywhere in this part of the world. Moving to a larger property has meant that the furniture we have fills about one room and we’ve had to buy some grown up stuff like a proper dinning table and my first ever lawnmower. OK it’s only a Flymo (a Vision Compact 350 if you’re interested) but a lawnmower for me is a sign that times are changing. Daft I know. More space has given me the opportunity to trade up to a flat panel TV and a Panasonic 42” PX60 now affords some serious Xbox 360 fun. Ghost Recon is still as hard as nails but at least it looks fantastic not to mention…big. The BMW ZM Coupe is now a long distant memory; I do miss its quirky, bonkers looks and warp speed acceleration but not the BMW dealer network which for normal paying punters (i.e. Not company car drivers) should be a million times better considering the wallet emptying expense involved. It’s been replaced by a Ford Mondeo Estate….I know I had the same reaction when it was proposed to me, but after a few minutes behind the wheel and the fact it was a fully loaded ST220 it was a steal. I even like the colour.

We need more explosions Mr De Mille With Bryan Singer off remaking Superman and 20th Century Fox not having the patience to wait they gave the Directors chair for X-Men 3 to Brett Ratner. Who? You know the fella that made classics like Rush Hour 2 and The Family Man. Was there really no one else? Well credit where credit's due, Ratner makes a valliant effort to carry on where Singer left off. But rather like a fake Rolex, at first glance it looks like real 'McCoy' (no Beast related pun intended) however it's just ultimately not a quality product. Gone is the emotional connection with the characters, even Magneto's Brotherhood of Mutants, and it's replaced by explosions and a feeling that some studio exec wanted to cram in as many mutants as possible. In the hands of Singer the same script would have been more engaging, subtle and textured but also we'd have had the finale the franchise deserved.

How they squeal when they're caught Some of the excuses are priceless... http://bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?link=waaahmbulance

Leonardo wouldn't like it... And neither did I. Went to see The Da Vinci Code the other night and it's not good. Whereas the book is a veritable page turner, despite the ridiculous plot sign posting and feeble dialogue the movie is slow, leaden and just plain dull. Ron Howard was either having an off day or the script was hamstrung by what Dan Brown would allow the writers to do. A direct scene for scene translation of a book does not a good, or even passable move make.

Hello Again... Don't suppose anyone has missed me.

Don't let the bells end! It’s the shortest day in the year so it must be my birthday. The last few weeks since the beginning of the month have been interesting to say the least and I think I’ll start with the best bit. On Saturday I went to the Fasthost Christmas Party in Gloucester, not you might expect a unique event as it is almost Crimbo and companies on occasion have parties. This one however was quite different as we flew there by helicopter and the band was The Darkness. As expected they did indeed rock and Dan Hawkins and I shook hands not once but twice. Here’s hoping some of that rock magic dust has rubbed off on me. Mrs C suggested she’d found her new favourite way of getting about and I agree helicopters are brilliant; sadly they’re not on the car scheme. A big, very big, thanks to Matt Winwood for the invite, it’s going to be tough to top it I can tell ya! I’m settling into my new role as the Development Manager for MS Partners interesting in mobility. All the Partners I’ve met have been friendly, enthusiastic and I’ve seen some very clever things done with MS powered handhelds. Now Mobile 5 is here that will only get better. Speaking of handhelds my current favourite is the HTC Wizard, AKA the T-Mobile MDA, QTEK 9100, O2 XDA mini S. It sits rather neatly between a full size PDA and a Smartphone. Support for GPRS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and the slide out thumb board means I can use it as a portable data centric device buts it’s small enough to be as unobtrusive as this kind of device can be. Not sure if I mentioned it but my beloved M Coupe now has a new owner and I’ve been without wheels for about three weeks. It’s quiet liberating really and as I can spend most of my time in the London office, or the Barnes one if I want too, it’s not been a problem. I will have to get an alternative four wheeled vehicular convenience at some point so if anyone knows an Audi S6 Avant or a BMW 540 Touring going spare let me know. Karen passed the first year of her OU Psychology degree with flying colours, well done Mrs C! Any athletes looking for a Sports Psychologist for the 2012 Olympics should apply now. So dear readers have a great Christmas and see you in the new year

The Office I installed Office 12 a few days ago, well Beta 1, and it's not bad. Not bad at all. The obvious things like the update UI look great, I think the ribbon bars are a top idea. Outlook which looked pretty good anyway has been tweaked and had a bunch usability shortcuts added. The LCS integration is already in place and when the WSS and SPS bits are finished it'll be very impressive. Yep...being beta it suffers from some of the usual undocumented features that litter beta software but I'm happy enough with it not to go back to Office 2003.

Pebble smebble... Who was it who thought it was a good idea to render perfectly good looking Georgian houses with a mixture of cement and gravel? I hope the 1950 precusor to Sarah Beeny who dreamt this up has a red hot poker where the sun doesn't shine.

Zens dead baby! Sadly my Creative Zen has died, well not died exactly, but has a terminal illness. Creative have had a few problems with the Zen Micro, specifically the 3mm headphone socket which can drop one of the stereo channels so it sounds like your listening underwater. It seems as if the Neeon has had this defect passed on. As I got it from a guy in Hong Kong via eBay I think I've paid the price of being an early adopter. C'est la vie! All is not lost though as the Zen has a standad Seagate 5Gb microdrive in it and that'll fit nicely in my camera. So....with what remains of my last Ebay sale I picked up a 1Gb mobiBLU DAH-1700. I know I'd never heard of mobiBLU either but they seem to make the world's smallest WMA/MP3 players. The 1700 is about half the size of a lipstick, has a tiny colour screen but...and this is the killer...it's OLED, so it uses about 25% of the juice of an LED screen and can be viewed in direct sunlight. Battery life is a consequence very impressive. It even comes with a video transcoder so will play MPEG4 vids and has a picture viewer too. OK so the screen is too small to watch Star Wars properly but it makes for great geekware.

Xbox 360...it's rather good Had my first play with an Xbox 360 today and I was rather impressed. Played Call of Duty 2 and King Kong, both look stunning. The controller is a delight to use too. It's gonna be a monster especially with the updated Xbox Live.

Hail Satan! If you haven't listened to the Tenacious D album, do so as you're in for a treat. Excellent stuff!

Bring forth the devices... If like me you think carrying around a phone and a PDA is every so slightly silly a while ago I took procession of an Orange M1000, nice device which I swapped for my C500. When a colleague needed to borrow one I ended up letting them keep it as I had upgraded the OS on my C500 to Mobile 2005, mainly to try out push email. Lucky me then with my new role means that get my hands on all the latest devices, as apparently a new Orange M5000 is in the post. Based on the HTC Universal of which a variant is the upcoming O2 Xda Exec it’s packed with lovely gizmology. 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPRS etc etc. For me the big advantage is like my C500 it comes with Windows Mobile 5 but due to the larger screen and build in keyboard mobile mail and web browsing are a lot easier; load on the mobile version of MS Communicator and I’m done. Hey, it’s even a phone HTC who make these devices have a whole boatload of new designs in the pipe line and with people like Motorola and Samsung lining up a range of Windows Mobile phones we’ll be spoilt for choice.