A Geek's Christmas

So far the weekend has been a bit of a geek-fest. During the week, I have been looking at other ways of hosting my blog. Blogger has been rather unreliable of late and I get withdrawal symptoms if I can’t post when I feel the urge. I’d also been looking at redesigning the template to give it a cleaner look. A template redesign would involve me in quite a lot of manual HTML coding and my knowledge and skills in that area are currently quite basic, but I’m picking it up.

As part of all this mulling about redesigns, I’ve been surfing lots of other blogs looking for style ideas and, in the process, was reminded that I’d thought about doing a photoblog. I have a decent digital camera, but it is too bulky to carry around all the time, so I decided the time had come to retire my venerable mobile phone; in the age-old tradition of middle-aged men everywhere, the time had come to replace it with a younger model with fancier features. Brett has been muttering about getting a new phone for a while, so we thought we’d take advantage of Orange’s two-for-one deal on 3G phones and both get video phones.

If only it were that simple.

There were times on Saturday afternoon when I felt we were the confused customers in a TV commercial, scratching our heads and saying ‘So many bundles, so many models, and so many options! How can we decide what’s best for us??’

It took us a while, but we did eventually come to a decision (and heartfelt thanks to the manager of the Wimbledon Orange Shop, who was the only assistant we found who really knew what he was talking about.) I came away with a nice new Nokia 6630, which has a good quality camera built-in. Unfortunately Brett has to wait fourteen days before he can get his because of ill-thought-through conditions on the two-for-one deal, but in the end we will both get fancier phones.

So… back at the ranch, I started testing my photoblogging abilities while Brett read his latest comics. The photoblog is not quite ready for launch yet, but I am now configured to post pictures via email from my mobile phone which is pretty cool.

The new phone is neat. My old phone could, in theory, do almost everything that this one does (except having the 3G bandwidth) however I couldn’t get it to do much with multimedia/Internet stuff without all kinds of contortions. In the time since I bought my old phone, the manufacturers have obviously got their ideas (and their software) better sorted and the new one is fine: Easy to upload all my contacts and generally easy to set up.

One thing that brightened my morning today was that, realising it can use MIDI files for its ringtones, I uploaded a selection of old files I’ve had lying around in my filing system since the days when MIDI files were new and exciting. So I now have the options of Chopin’s Minute Waltz, The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, YMCA and the Loony Tunes theme to choose from. Unfortunately some of the ones I might have used have several seconds of silence at the start, so I have had to pass on the themes from The Godfather and James Bond.

And that was my Saturday: A geek’s Christmas.