scenes of London: 30-05-2008

what ever happened to mobile phones that you could drop?

Well, I think it's time for a bit of a rant. May really has been the month of the mobile phone for me. So much so that I think i've started dreaming about them.

It all started with upgrading my mobile phone at the beginning of this month. I phoned up my service provider to ask if I was eligible for an upgrade, already pretty sure that I would be eligible in a week from that time anyway, but thought i'd check. Anyway, the friendly lady on the other end of the phone told me that I had been, in fact, eligible since March. Strange. So I rushed into town, in a flurry of excitment (how sad of me) and went into the phone shop having done little or no research beforehand and asked a man working there to show me some of the latest handsets. Everything except for what I had previously. And he couldn't have been friendlier, and what I considered at the time, helpful. So, after some fiddling about, and in a moment of seemingly blind spontaneity and what I now know was madness, chose the prettiest phone on display. The Samsung Soul U900. It's like my head suddenly ran away from me. I just couldn't resist the colourful touchpad. It's like when you're in a restaurant, and you know what you're going to have, but when the waiter finally comes to take your order, you suddenly change your mind to something completely different, and you don't know where it came from.

So I took it home and opened it and charged it, and played with it, and it seemed fine. I played with the ringtones, and was surprised at how awful they sounded, but didn't want to admit this to my girlfriend because it would have suggested that I had made a mistake. So I just played with the touchpad a little more to make myself feel better. After a few days, and surprisingly few phonecalls, I started to really like the phone. It looked great, and felt great. Because I'm worth it.

Now, the problems started when when my girlfriend got a new phone, also a Samsung. Her phone came with the almost exactly the same ringtones, but the quality was great. I was absolutely green. A mobile phone model, almost a year older, that sounded 50 times better. Also interested in comparing the call quality of the 2 phones, I stuck my SIM card in her phone and tried making some calls. Good call quality and clarity. Ok. I hadn't really made many calls on my phone at the point, except to the Oyster Card helpline (I had lost my Oyster Card that week), and I had to admit that those calls had been pretty quiet and I had struggled to hear the person at the other end, on occasions. But, I was willing to put this down as a one off. Well, when I put the SIM card back in my new handset... what a difference. I could barely hear. After that, I began comparing ringtone quality. No contest. Her's won hands down. So at this point I was feeling pretty crap about my new purchase, but I still didn't admit this to her.

So 2 days later, I decided to go back to the shop where I bought my phone and compare it to the example that they had in the shop. Exactly the same. I was hoping that it was merely a handset fault, but no. They all seemed to be that way. The man in the shop told me that I could have a brand new replacement, but as I had only renewed the same contract, and not started a new one, I could only have a replacement of the same phone. Feeling slightly skeptical, I decided to take the new handset and give it a try. Well, I had it for 5 hours and took it back. Terrible. No improvement. This time I pushed for my consumer rights to be allowed to change the handest for another model or brand, ready to go into a spiel about being a 4-year-old customer, but they gave in surprisingly easily. So I selected a Nokia.

"Good old Nokia" I thought.

Hmmm.

I've had it for 1 week now, and although the call volume and quality are great, I'm getting a problem. And that is that, on ocassions, the screen appears to "fuzz" and black out temporarily. What is this? Anybody? I truly despair. Whatever happened to the good old solid phones of the late 1990s? I remember running across a road and dropping my Nokia 5110 (yes, we all had one), and watching it slide along the tarmac practically creating sparks, just knowing that if a car were to run over it, it would, in all likelyhood, be fine. Well, it was, and I just picked it up and carried on. Mobile phones are not like that anymore, and the worst thing of all is their software. Why are phones, in particular, released with so many bugs? Why? What other consumer electronics product gives as many problems as the mobile phone, and would we stand for it with anything else? Surely the primary purpose of a mobile phone is to be able to make telephone calls? Take that on board Samsung. It's strange, though, because it only seems to be the telecommunications divisions of large companies, such as Samsung, who appear to release so many buggy products. For example, products in other divisions of Samsung Electronics, such as Digital Cameras, are receiving great reviews. How can quality vary so much within one company? I guess that it has do to with the fact that the mobile phone market is so fickle and fashionable that products are rushed out. We can only guess.

Oh, and in the meantime, we've had to take my girlfriend's mobile phone back because of a faulty card slot. Yuuhuuu.

Now my step-father wants me to research mobile phones for him because his phone is faulty. Hmmm. Happy days.

here's something you didn't know about Spain...

Gracias a las dos personas que me presentaron estos videos. Ya sabeis quienes sois, pero no voy a revelar vuestras identidades ;)

across the IJsselmeer

I was looking at Google maps today and decided to look at Holland and The Netherlands. I realised that, although the long "dyke" connecting Holland to the rest of The Netherlands over The IJsselmeer is a very famous feature of the country, I have only ever seen it in maps (see photograph below). Strangely, I have never taken the time to look at photographs of it. I have, in fact, traveled very close to this area when I visited The Netherlands in 1997. And now I've seen it in photographs... what a place!

captive since the day I was born

Unless you're a deep sea clam, it’s impossible to have not heard something of the recent incident in a small town in Lower Austria. Nearly one week later, and having spoken to many people about the subject, I still find it hard to come to terms with and have spent a good few nights thinking about it last thing before falling asleep. It seems useless to speculate on facts which we are slowly being fed each day by police investigations and the media because every day we hear something new or different, which may or may not change the odd detail, but I suppose that, in time, we will know everything. Whatever we hear, however, doesn't change the fact that it is a cold, evil and calculating mind that would have been needed to have been able to carry out such an act. To be able to live out, effectively, two completely separate lives without one consuming the other or even 'leaking' into it is beyond the comprehension of most people.

Now that the initial shock of it has worn off (albeit only very slightly), and following the sense of complete dispair of what happened and what the future might hold for the victims, one moves on to thinking of what should be done with such a person (or persons). Something that I find equally hard to come to terms with is how it seems (if the newspapers are relaying this fact correctly) that this man will only serve 15 years in prison. He might die there, in which case he won't even serve the whole term of his sentence, or if he survives the term, he will be free again. Many people live to be 88. It’s not so unusual. So, whichever the outcome, how exactly will he have paid? How could he even come close to paying? He has not just stolen 24 years from his daughter; he has stolen time from his children/grandchildren too. If one does the maths, he has stolen a total of 66 years from these innocent people. How can that ever be replaced? I just hope that the youngest of the children (5 years old) will have less memory of the events, due to his age, and be able to live a normal life in time, but of the other children... one of whom might not even survive her coma, how will they cope? how will they even begin to start a normal life? Not content with emotionally scarring them, this man has left them with the physical appearance of people 30 years their elder.

So what can be done? Death seems like a soft penalty, and at the same time, if we would prefer him to live and suffer for what he has done, are we not somewhere on the way to sinking to this man's level? And if he were to begin to show remorse, what would that do for anything now? I can't see how it could make anything better. Like all of these cases, we all want to get into this evil man's mind and somehow see how he works and find reasons for his actions, even to make him see the error of his ways, but the sad truth is that we will never get that satisfaction. And, more sadly, neither will his victims.

Something that I find very chilling about this case is that Elisabeth was said to have been put in the cellar on the exact day that I was born: 29th August 1984. In that time I have lived a childhood, been to school, travelled to many countries, met wonderful people, graduated from University and started my first proper job, but in between all of that, just experienced the sounds, sights and smells which are a product of a good and ordinary life. Well, like most other people, I am sure that I will continue to digest, with great interest, every single piece of information that the media gives me.