The Unreasonable Man

I inserted a note to G-d into the western wall today, for a friend. An Orthodox person at the wall tried to convert me and point out he was collecting. Sympathetic as I am to people trying to do good deeds, I cannot give to everyone who asks.

The Rabbis have decided walking through a metal detector does not constitute “work”:

Here it is.

Daniel was suffering with the heat:

As said - we are in Jerusalem. Click to see larger images:

As beautiful as I remember it from last year, of course. The Arab Suq is full of colours:

Daniel and new friends:

More about Israel soon, but for now: again., a good decision to come.

We are in Jerusalem.

Off in a few hours to Israel - expect some shots and blog posts from there.

It is interesting to see how as we age, we appreciate the things we did not fully appreciate when we were young. Like photographic art. Or like Fred Astaire tapdancing Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Link here - and watch the whole five minutes. Is that genius, or what?

..is Earth-cryingly dumb. The baby menu system (instead of a clean and easy-to-operate pulldown menu, you get toy-like bug button things) are bad enough. Lack of simple menus is one thing; lack of functionality is crazy. Try editing an HTML message.

Or try changing a plain text message to html or vice versa. I could not figure it out after 10 minutes. I still have no idea whether it is possible (if not, I need to get a refund).

And all new html messages are written by default in “Calibri” font, thus ensuring that  no recipient will ever see a message the way I see it. Who writes this stuff - 12-year olds?

Combine this with the hideously slow performance, the hundreds of megabytes taken, the fauilure to terminate half the time I exit the program, and the terrible unreliability (crashes, halts, hangs, memory leaks) and you have a disaster area.

The sad thing is, as said here earlier, that naive users still believe that this crapware must be good “because everyone else uses it”.

Outlook 2007 is the rare software that I like less and less as I get more used to it every day.

Slow blogging days because fast work days - I am trying to get ready for our Israel/Egypt vacation. And that means between travel arrangements (and a strike in Israel possibly disrupting our plans), I have to get the business ready for an absence. After this week, I will need that holiday.

The only annoying thing is that the new Crackberry is threatening to cost me $50-100 a day in Israel because Rogers charge a 10 kByte minimum at $0.05 per kB for each transmission.  I am still looking for ways around that.

Calendars have come a long way.

They are even unfriendlier than before, and less likely to succeed.

I have today:

• Installed Outlook
• Installed a 3rd-party synchroniser between Outlook and Google Calendar
• Installed Blackberry Desktop Manager

The result: a PC that is now glacially slow. Disk doing accesses all the time. 57 running processes (I had just 49 before I started). Outlook crashing my PC after installation. Appointments all over, except where I want them. Crashes and bugs. Outlook kind of syncs with Google Calendar (but it misses deletions). Addresses synched into the BB, but onl ywith one phone number. Also, the Blackberry seems to only sync with one calendar; I have two. So my BB only contains my personal appointment and not business, making it pretty useless.

The only people so far who have done a calendar well are Google: but that does not translate to these other devices.

Outlook in particular is useless junk. The only reason I have installed it is the considerable pressure from people who do not understand IT. They want the magic MS offers, and they believe MS cannot be wrong.  They see the problems, the delays (startup now takes a minute longer; checking email in Outlook takes 10 seconds vs 1 second in Windows Mail (Outlook Express) before) - but they blame these faults on faulty implementation rather than faulty design.

This is a pity. I now have to live with a PC that is less stable, slower, and much more confused, with half bits of phone numbers and calendar records scattered over the place.

I think I should go back to a paper organiser…

Over to the blackberry-black dark side: I bought a Blackberry today, for work use. First - very unfairly first - impressions:

Rogers: not impressed at all. Staff did not know pricing plans. Prices differed between store and phone. Rogers store staff “[does] not recommend using this abroad - it is incredibly expensive”. Billing systems a mess. Cost sky-high, a ripoff. Reasons given are lies. And the Rogers web site gives me this when I try to log in:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ‘80004005′

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][TCP/IP Sockets]General network error. Check your network documentation.

/include/DbOpenConnection_00.asp, line 7

Fun.

The Blackberry itself:

• Sleek, well designed. Nice screen.
• The Mini-USB connection is great. But why does it say “not enough power to charge phone”? My new Lenovo T60p has enough power to feed disk drives; it should be able to feed a phone. Very disappointing.
• The mail setup wizard is useless unless you speak Blackberry. Why not just tell me things in normal IT language? I know what a pop3 server is, ok?
• To lock keyboard I have to go through an onscreen menu. What genius designed that?
• If there is a way to adjust ring volume without navigating for minutes through menus, I have not found it.
• In general, the GUI is quirky. Yes, of course I can learn a quirky, unfriendly interface. But why should I have to? The phone comes with a “tips guide” and the menu has a “Did You Know” guide. These guides always mean the interface is bad: a tips guide is full of things I would never have guessed on my own. This is why the world needs an iPhone.
• The device garbles HTML in emails. E.g. my signature in HTML emails I send from Outlook is garbled and badly spaced when read on the Blackberry.
• Opening an attachment gives me a “500 error”
• I tried to download new themes. After [paying for…] getting to the web site., I get a message “Sorry. There Are No Themes For Your Blackberry And OS Version”.
• Common things that should take one button but that are well hidden or take many clicks and mouse movements include ringer settings (vibrate/loud/etc), turning off radio, screen brightness, and many others.

As said, this is a very preliminary first look. Basically, “it’s OK, could be better, it’s a typical useless interface designed by Telco-people”. And we don’t get iPhones here and we get to pay thousands for connectivity, not $50 for unlimited fast connectivity like in the USA. But it looks cool, it has Blackberry Push, and there’s nothing better available. So we deal with it.

A more considered critique later.

I am still gasping -  I still cannot believe the data charges for a Blackberry. See my earlier post on this subject. I am supposed to get one (or a PDA again) for work. The only options for data traffic really, really are, as far as I can see:

• GPRS/edge (Canada has no 3G)
• $400 for a Blackberry, three year term
• $100 per month data traffic for 200 MB (three year term)
• PLUS, the killer, $0.05 per kByte when used abroad.

That is both Fido and Rogers (who own Fido). These are the only international options (Neither Bell nor Telus offer GSM).

The 0.05 per kilobyte means that if I travel to the US or UK, say, and I use 10 MB (which I think I can do in two days just by receiving spam), I pay $100 + ($10,000 x 0.05) = $600. If I use 50 MB, that would be $2,600.

So what do other people do? Every time I get off a plane there are a dozen people Blackberry-ing away, Are they all paying $2,000 a month or am I not seeing something?

Michael