David Carrington

Since I changed my contract to Orange and got a nice new HTC Touch, Vodafone have been pestering my with calls trying to offer me a better deal. They haven’t grasped that my requirements in my contract have completely changed.

For 3 years or more I was on a minimal Vodafone contract (Singlepoint actually, acquired by Vodafone back in 2003). We’re talking £12/month in the basic contract (750 off peak same network minutes and 50 texts) with bills sometimes going up to about £20. Not very much expenditures at all!

My new Orange contract is a completely different saucepan of penguins: £31.50/month for 500 cross network anytime minutes and unlimited texts. Since they bundled in the headphones and £100 cashback, their offer is far better than anything Vodafone offered me. I even went into the store and they admitted that they don’t have the phone I want or anything close to my needs.

But now my old mobile - hurrah! a Nokia 6310i - gets called every day from Vodafone’s Retention team (08080000133) trying to offer me stupid little deals, such as reducing my current contract to £10/month. This is not what I want at all. I’d gladly pay Orange the extra line rental - I’m using it heavily and I’m going to push the limits of their “unlimited” (aka 3000) monthly texts.

To Vodafone: I spoke to 5 people in various teams before deciding to end my contract, you simply can not convince me at this point to continue with you. You don’t give me what I want.

To Orange: Thanks!!

First off, the most essential feature for me in a phone isn’t something common yet: WLAN support. My decision on getting my new contract has revolved around which WLAN-enabled phone will be good enough for me, as an “upgrade” from my HTC BlueAngel.

I was put off the Nokia N95 because it’s a completely different interface to what I’m used to, even though I did like the integrated GPS receiver. Combined with the reports of it being buggy and full of faults that Nokia won’t fix, I decided to go for the good old Windows Mobile device: the HTC Touch.

There’s a lot of videos on YouTube and various other sites showing the nice packaging of the product and the fancy features included (mainly the TouchFlo interface, designed to give quick access to the phone’s common features).

I knew that getting this phone, with half the processor speed of my existing phone and more restricted on memory, would be a little difficult to get used to. Almost straight away when playing with various programs I was getting “out of memory” messages.

Thankfully, those are avoidable by using software that doesn’t hog as much memory. For example, the built in music player on the TouchFlo interface is nice(ish), but it uses 2MB of memory. Especially without the ability to assign storage memory to program memory on this device - it’s nice to be able to use GSPlayer instead.

The other feature I found instantly different was that the screen is not as sensitive as my BlueAngel. With my old BlueAngel, I can lightly tap the screen - almost resting the stylus against it without applying pressure. With the new Touch, it’s the opposite - requiring quite a bit of pressure to pick up a screen tap.

Neither of these bug me enough to not use it yet - as the size difference is huge!

One of the many YouTube videos I watched about the device informed me that the power cable and headphones can’t both me connected, as they both slot into a single mini-USB slot. So when Orange asked if I wanted a free bluetooth headset, I took their offer one step further and came out of the shop with a set of stereo wireless headphones: Motorola HT820.

Thanks Orange!

Fed up with my transatlantic web host, I’ve moved my website to a server that’s 10 minutes drive from my house. I might even give the company a visit!

As soon as I found BlueSquare, I knew that I definitely wanted to host my site there. Data centres don’t tend to provide direct web hosting, so I started hunting down hosts that used BlueSquare to hold their servers. I came across a few, and settled for Web Hosting UK.

I don’t usually like sites that look as theres does, but I was impressed with how quickly they responded to a live support request prior to my order. I feel a lot more comfortable knowing they’re UK based, available to call on a toll free number, and I’ve got a 30 day money back guarantee as usual too.

I’m planning to learn ASP.NET over the next month or so. It’s been an ongoing thing that was part of my initial reason for choosing the job I did, but was never really pursued by myself or my boss. That’s changing fast and by October I’d like to know it enough to be able to work effectively on some bigger projects at work.

But how do you learn a framework, a completely different way of programming, in a short time?

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The Aim

To create a low power PC to download overnight when bandwidth is less restricted by my ISP. Ideally able to function as a desktop PC with audio and video playback support.

Mini-ITX

I’ve played around with the idea of building a Mini-ITX machine for about 2 years but never gone ahead with it. Upon deciding that “this week” would be the week I bought a motherboard for it, I went ahead and did it. Luckily - a guy at work found a better offer, about 5 minutes before I went ahead with my order.

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