February 2009 - Posts
The phone has been updated with a move to T-Mobile and their Vario 4, which has GPS and a very nice touch screen which is 640 by 256 and does a nice job of showing web pages and info in general. I got the Web and Walk add on for browsing on the phone, and the best thing it’s still cheaper than my old Orange contract each month. And I liked the C600 but it was well past it’s sell by date. It’s nice to have GPS now I don’t use more than Google Map’s but it’s nice to have and when I get out and about more will be useful for tracking where I am. Now the really useful bit is the slide out keyboard which is full QWERTY and for me is a real godsend because I’m not ready to use an onscreen keyboard. Now I cannot wait till Windows Mobile 6.5 comes out in June or July and I should have a free upgrade.
Now I’ve had the same number since my Scottish Telecom days in 1997 and it was nice once more to have it PAC’ed across today and with my contact taken care of by Exchange it was a doddle to move my life to see new phone.
I got HTTPS access to my Exchange Server, all the credit goes to http://www.amset.info/exchange/singlenamessl.asp and Thawte for selling me the certificate, an expensive £100 for a year but it’s worth it keep everything secure. Now I do not say this often but get yourself a Cert even a self signed one is better than nothing but if like me you need to also sync a old mobile phone and a new one you should give Thawte a look they are fairly cheap and using HTTP is not really an option because you’re password is sent in clear text.
On my mobile is going to be upgraded to a T-Mobile Vario IV as soon as I find out why the one sitting beside me does not have the extra Google Maps and the browser Opera when the manual clearly says it does but it’s not either on a CD or in the firmware of the phone.
Now why do I care, it’s got a GPS and a large screen and a very decent camera. 3.2 Mega is a lot larger that my current phone and Andrew will love seeing himself when he realises what it’s capable of – he loves pictures of himself.
The Linksys (now Cisco) router is having problems it’s a 160N and from the way people speak them on the Internet that model has a problem and I just happen to have a early one which has seen not seen a firmware upgrade in more than a year – so off to talk to their support again or rather Jan is given the support operation could be anywhere in the world and my speech is not to clear following the accident.
Is not I bet in the state mine was yesterday, now I left of calling Tech Support for a bunch of reasons but it kept getting worse. Yesterday it got so bad that I had Jan (my wife) call them and she sat through them asking her all sorts of dumb questions and bamboozling her with the incomprehensible (to her) IP addressing schemes and options but it now works and the worst I had to do was renumber the IP scheme of the house but that was easy because it was Server 2008 and I have to use Windows 7 because Vista does not want to play ball with the Internet but Windows 7 does. Go figure, life is to short and I have a working solution. Don’t leave off small annoyances like flaky wireless do them today and don’t blame your partner because they do speak geek get a lot of joy out of them being special in other ways, knowing IP addressing schemes like class B vs. class C and which numbers are in them makes no difference apart from I know them – it’s not something to aspire to, just something you know or not.
If you have time have a look at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=hC3FTQq6J1GWrD4GTq1MzA_3d_3d and provide some feedback on your experience of user groups for provide some feedback to Microsoft as they try to help us all in these tricky times.
And it’s very good, certainly tackles the difficult bit of between the no nothing beginner and someone who’s knows a lot more, it’s certainly aimed at someone with a starting experience of PowerShell (or Monad as I still tend to call it) but it handles the line bit pretty well.