Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 5:18 am. 0 comments
I’m beginning to think there’s a Tablet PC fairy smiling down on me. I previously posted that if you want my attention right now you’ll post about the touchscreen-enabled portables, and lo and behold people do. The object of my lusts remains Lenovo’s X60t, despite the apparent lack of customisation options on their UK site, and so it’s good to see TabletPC2’s Review Tzar Linda Epstein award the MultiTouch version of it her coveted “Editors Choice”; Marc Orchant’s first-impressions are similarly stellar, and lest you think it’s only the pen-faithful who are enchanted along come I4U to say:
“Without any stretch of the imagination, the X60 could easily be a favourite of many large IT departments and tablet PC enthusiasts” I4U Review
No surprise, then, that I’ve already been on to Lenovo’s PR people and am on the waiting list for a review unit.
The other piece of tabletty-goodness is that my good bud Ewdi (who got married yesterday - congratulations Mr Ewdi and Mrs Ewdi!) sent me over a Samsung Q1 UMPC to use while my tc1100 continues to suffer. It’s the first time I’ve had my hands on one, and while passive touchscreens take some getting used to when you’re more familiar with active ones it’s nonetheless an awesome little gadget. Having read Steve’s ultra-handy guide to setting up a streaming multi-room audio system I’ve now got another thing on my to-do list. Perhaps I’ll couple that up with trying out Windows Home Server, since I got accepted onto the beta test for it.
Of course, no blog entry would be complete without my traditional hat-tip to Mike Cane, who I’m coming to consider as my spiritual creepy-cousin. He’s been playing with a Q1 too, and I’m glad to hear that he’s suitably impressed. Given Mike’s general attitude toward, well, life, that’s high praise indeed.
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 3:21 pm. 2 comments
Right, I promise that at some point in the near future the snarky posting will begin in earnest, but for now I want to rant and here’s as good a place as any. Today’s subject is Bulldog Broadband, herein known as BB, and their Crime Against Chris is lethargy in reconnecting my internet connection.
That’s right, suckling chiddles, I’m currently without my sweet, sweet 24Mbit/s ADSL, having moved apartments. The nice people at BB first told me they could expedite the switch, so that I’d experience little to no downtime… naively I believed them. Of course, now I’m told that it’ll be the 17th before my connection is active. And right now this second I’m looking at my modem which is flashing to tell me that ADSL is active but won’t let me log on.
Here’s the deal, BB: I make my money writing for SlashGear, so when I’m not writing I’m not getting paid. That means you’re not getting paid. I’m sick to the grinding back-teeth of your relentlessly moronic customer services lackeys, their rude supervisors and the perpetually delaying, stalling, “I can’t let you do that” tactics continuously rolled out to prevent me from speaking to anybody higher up the BB food chain.
Now BB recently got taken over by Pipex, and they just so happen to have premises five minutes down the road from where I live. So how about I take a trot down there and do a little impromptu SlashGear interview, see what platitudes they can offer me? After all, Peter Dubens, Bless’d Chairman of Pipex Communications did tell us:
“The acquisition of Bulldog brings further scale to the Pipex Group and we are delighted to welcome all the Bulldog customers”
Sounds like an invitation to me, don’t you agree?
Or maybe I should save my ire for the numerous forums and blogs where other dissatisfied souls weep and gnash. Perhaps I should’ve expected such crapness, given the catalogue of errors, lies, faults and missed appointments experienced when trying to get the first flat wired up for the internets. Come Monday I’ll be ringing them again; even if I can’t get my promised connection any sooner, I’ll be doing my bit to make their lives miserable in the meantime.
So currently I’m using a review phone from the good people at T-Mobile to connect via their HSDPA service. You better believe that they’ll get an ace review.
Posted 1 year, 7 months ago at 5:19 am. 1 comment
These inaugural posts are always the hardest. Perhaps I should start by wishing all my loyal readers and commenters a deeply merry Christmas.
This blog will be a pseudo-continuation of my first attempt at writing online, http://danteshandcart.blogspot.com/, which is where Vincent Nguyen of Aradius spotted me and brought me into the fold. Now I blog for SlashGear and SlashPhone as well as review some lovely pieces of electronic shininess. I’m based in the UK with my partner and our robot cat, where I also project manage a contraception service for young people.
But you don’t care about that, do you. You want to read snarky posts about what politicians are doing, and thinly veiled comparisons between the latest and greatest in the world of tech, life and media and the dark practises that go on behind closed doors. Which is a relief, really, because that’s what I love writing about.
Have yourselves a festive one, chiddles.