I've recently started going back to the gym seriously again. It's been really enjoyable but I've found that unlike in the past where I would read a book, this time around the book I'm reading (dante's inferno), isn't really suitable to the gym at all. As a consequence I want to listen to music, but my archos isn't really suitable due to it's size and weight as well as being a HD based music player (in other words susceptible to bumps). So I inadvertantly found myself in the market for a flash player. Now my primarily concern with any music player is quality, especially as I have a good set of earphones. Aside from the quality it needs to be able to support as many codecs as possible and have features that are suitable to my purpose, ie be shock resistant (all flash players are), waterproof, and have possible extra features. After extensive research the winner is a Sony NW-S205FW.
The Sony NW-S205FW is treating me very well so far. It has all the features that I required, as well as having time, pedometer, calories calculator and a few other useful functions and comes standard with a nice arm strap. All in all I'd recommend it to anyone that needs something to listen to music at the gym
Friday, January 26, 2007
Sunday, January 14, 2007
America in summary
Well I've been back from my trip to NY for a week or two now but I thought I'd finally write up my last blog on the subject. The trip itself was really enjoyable, though in a different way to a lot of my other ones. This time around I spent most of the time just sleeping and relaxing, I really didn't have any great desire to be doing a lot of the touristy things (having gotten them out of the way in my previous two trips) and consequently spent most of my time worrying about what restaurant I'd go to next. A hard life. I was a little disappointed that I wasn't able to do some of the things I'd planned on doing, namely, Ice skating, helicopter ride and seeing the NY Knicks play, it was a case of the Australians thinking we didn't need to book and once again being drastically wrong, still those disappointments to one side I really had a good trip.
NYE was a low key affair, when people heard I was in NY for NYE they all seemed to assume that I'd be at time square. The reality of "doing" time square for NYE is you queue up starting at about 1900, there is no toilets and you're not allowed to drink and then at 0000 a crystal ball drops .... in light of my description I'm sure you got the impression it wasn't my definition of a great party. Instead John, his girlfriend Karen, his sister Anne and myself all headed out for a nice meal at an Italian restaurant in west village and then on to a pub. Later in the evening we met up with some more friends but the night was all but over by then and we all shortly after 0230 headed home. There was one amusing incident though. Just after we arrived at this new pub and met up with some of Johns friends we were all standing around talking when suddenly there was an overwhelming stench. Clearly someone had farted, but this fart was on an awesome scale. As soon as I started to smell this fart I started to back away from the person I was talking to and trying to move out of the sphere of influence. By the time I'd traveled over 2 meters I begun to appreciate the true horror of what was happening. It was then I cast around and saw one of those massive americans that looked like a crane had just got out of his house that he'd been shut in for a few years was walking past out group. At this point the rest of the group, scattered over about 5 meters, begun to retch and cry out in alarm. John, seeing me standing off to one side looking like I was recovering breath, ran over to me in an attempt to try and outpace the smell. To no avail. He ended up standing next to me, eyes watering and said "you've got to admire the power of that ben, that's seriously impressive". Understatement of the year already I suspect.
From a technology perspective there were a few things that struck me about New York. Now bearing in mind that america was largely the instigator of the current technology revolution in the form of the net, it still surprised me that skype out was free. For those of you who don't understand fully what that means, in simple terms it means that using a small program on your computer, you're able to call ANY number, mobile or landline, in America for free. The implications of this are quite huge when you think about it. A simple example of what this means is that there is a growing number of people who no longer actually have a landline, after all why would you bother when for most of us we only use the landline to dial out on, not receive calls. The other thing that was interesting about New York was that their quality of service from their ISPs was atrocious.
Most people use the net in such a way that they are actually quite unlikely to notice small interuptions, or outages in their access. For example, if you're browsing this website and stopped to read this blog entry, then chances are that you're not going to notice if your ISP has a blip for a few seconds and stops passing all traffic. Even applications that you think might notice it, say Instant Messaging clients, can tolerate very small outages, in the area of a few seconds. What this all means is that if you're an ISP you can afford to, in the sense of not upsetting many customers, have a number of small outages and this is precisely what happens in New York. In London things are very different, the ISPs here have to deal with, I can only assume, a lot more net savvy crowd of people, people I work with do not tolerate their ISPs to go down at ALL, because in many cases the way they are using the net is subtly different. For example playing an online game will give you huge visibility of any kind of network slowdown, let alone outage. So without giving more examples you can imagine my surprise when pretty much every ISP I was connected to, regardless of size or reputation, constantly had outages, in the vicinity quite often of one every 60-90 minutes.
After two trips to NY in two months I can say that I really do like that part of the world. The american culture is very different, John summed it up best I think when he said that "Americans are participators" and he was dead right, it pervades their society at every level, from the "buy in" you get with team building excercises at work which most Europeans / Australians would be to cynical to participate in, through to their desire to be in the spot light answering a football quiz at an ice hockey game, the effect is obvious, and while it's not something that I like, it does make for a very interesting spectacle. Aside from that though there is a lot to be said about a good standard of living, with an emphasis on service and doing it right and efficiently and making sure that everyone is happy. I strongly suspect that I'd probably struggle to work there, I'm just too lazy to get into this one week off a year (the average amoungst my profession working in NYC) but still, I'd like to go up to Boston and see if that is similar as I could easily see myself living and working there at some point in my life.
NYE was a low key affair, when people heard I was in NY for NYE they all seemed to assume that I'd be at time square. The reality of "doing" time square for NYE is you queue up starting at about 1900, there is no toilets and you're not allowed to drink and then at 0000 a crystal ball drops .... in light of my description I'm sure you got the impression it wasn't my definition of a great party. Instead John, his girlfriend Karen, his sister Anne and myself all headed out for a nice meal at an Italian restaurant in west village and then on to a pub. Later in the evening we met up with some more friends but the night was all but over by then and we all shortly after 0230 headed home. There was one amusing incident though. Just after we arrived at this new pub and met up with some of Johns friends we were all standing around talking when suddenly there was an overwhelming stench. Clearly someone had farted, but this fart was on an awesome scale. As soon as I started to smell this fart I started to back away from the person I was talking to and trying to move out of the sphere of influence. By the time I'd traveled over 2 meters I begun to appreciate the true horror of what was happening. It was then I cast around and saw one of those massive americans that looked like a crane had just got out of his house that he'd been shut in for a few years was walking past out group. At this point the rest of the group, scattered over about 5 meters, begun to retch and cry out in alarm. John, seeing me standing off to one side looking like I was recovering breath, ran over to me in an attempt to try and outpace the smell. To no avail. He ended up standing next to me, eyes watering and said "you've got to admire the power of that ben, that's seriously impressive". Understatement of the year already I suspect.
From a technology perspective there were a few things that struck me about New York. Now bearing in mind that america was largely the instigator of the current technology revolution in the form of the net, it still surprised me that skype out was free. For those of you who don't understand fully what that means, in simple terms it means that using a small program on your computer, you're able to call ANY number, mobile or landline, in America for free. The implications of this are quite huge when you think about it. A simple example of what this means is that there is a growing number of people who no longer actually have a landline, after all why would you bother when for most of us we only use the landline to dial out on, not receive calls. The other thing that was interesting about New York was that their quality of service from their ISPs was atrocious.
Most people use the net in such a way that they are actually quite unlikely to notice small interuptions, or outages in their access. For example, if you're browsing this website and stopped to read this blog entry, then chances are that you're not going to notice if your ISP has a blip for a few seconds and stops passing all traffic. Even applications that you think might notice it, say Instant Messaging clients, can tolerate very small outages, in the area of a few seconds. What this all means is that if you're an ISP you can afford to, in the sense of not upsetting many customers, have a number of small outages and this is precisely what happens in New York. In London things are very different, the ISPs here have to deal with, I can only assume, a lot more net savvy crowd of people, people I work with do not tolerate their ISPs to go down at ALL, because in many cases the way they are using the net is subtly different. For example playing an online game will give you huge visibility of any kind of network slowdown, let alone outage. So without giving more examples you can imagine my surprise when pretty much every ISP I was connected to, regardless of size or reputation, constantly had outages, in the vicinity quite often of one every 60-90 minutes.
After two trips to NY in two months I can say that I really do like that part of the world. The american culture is very different, John summed it up best I think when he said that "Americans are participators" and he was dead right, it pervades their society at every level, from the "buy in" you get with team building excercises at work which most Europeans / Australians would be to cynical to participate in, through to their desire to be in the spot light answering a football quiz at an ice hockey game, the effect is obvious, and while it's not something that I like, it does make for a very interesting spectacle. Aside from that though there is a lot to be said about a good standard of living, with an emphasis on service and doing it right and efficiently and making sure that everyone is happy. I strongly suspect that I'd probably struggle to work there, I'm just too lazy to get into this one week off a year (the average amoungst my profession working in NYC) but still, I'd like to go up to Boston and see if that is similar as I could easily see myself living and working there at some point in my life.
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