Insert Clever Title Here

<rant>
Ah the joys of being a tenant. We just had our six monthly inspection to make sure the house hadn’t been converted in an Asian brothel and meth house. (That should bring up some interesting Google Ad-Words )

But it got me thinking. Now we are tenants and have to put up with what feels like a parental inspection to make sure our room is tidy. Now last time I checked I was a grown up (yes my wife and a number of my friends my strongly disagree) and yet we have to put up with this.

Now the financial income to the landlord/lady on our property is around a low mortgage repayment. So of course the landlord/lady has a vested interest in the property being maintained.

Now consider this… image if we had a 105% loan on this house and the bank was owed a shit load of $$$ with the risk that we are trashing the place and dramatically reducing its value.  At this point the bank could be seriously out of pocket and with the credit crunch that is happening you’d think they might give a flying toss as to what is happening. But no.

Banks go “here is your mortgage please pay on time we need never speak to you again”.  For me there in lies the rub.  We are going to put less money into the house, for all we know it is being negatively geared what ever that means, than the landlord is.  Yet we have to put up with having our bathroom checked for mould.

Now our Agent was all very nice and was in and out in 5 min and took notes on something that we would like fixed, but what is the bank that lends 105% doing about their investment… nothing.  This is one of the reasons that tenants feel like second class citizens.

</rant>

Tags: Annoyances, Funny, General, n95 by Me
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O.k, well the firmware hit version 30 for the n95-8gb over night as well, and I have just finished installing it.   But for those that are uncomfortable about doing such a radical thing as updating your firmware, I thought I would put together a series of screenshots to show what you have to do and how easy it can be.

But one small catch, if you have your phone heavily customised it may not look the same when it reboots and not all of your apps may be where you think they are.  The process is still far from perfect in my opinion but the benefits of a more stable OS on your phone more than outweigh having to spend some time moving a few things around.

Stage 1 – Make a backup….   Just in case things go wrong (and to put your phone back to how it was…!)

To create the backup choose the backup option in Nokia PC Suite.

Stage 2 Click on the Update Phone software button in Nokia Pc Suite.  (yes Mac people you will need to find a PC to use… don’t nark on me!)

Follow the instructions:-) Also make sure you phone is on power or at least has a full battery if the power goes out whilst you are doing the upgrade all sorts of bad things could happen!

Now, if you phone can find the update this is what you will see.  Not all phones will see this update, phones that are closely tied to a phone company for their firmware may not see this update at all.

Now it will download over 100 meg of stuff

Then it will Flash the phone and start installing the software.  At this point your phone will turn off and on a few times.  Your computer will also go through a couple of found new hardware devices as well.

Now all going well your Firmware is up to date.

Now comes the fun part.  Putting your phone back together.  Not all of your apps will be installed correctly.  You will need to go to Applications, App.mgr. and look through the list to see what is not installed.  At this point you can reinstall some of your applications by choosing install.

Now the final stage is to put things back…. the easiest way to do this is to go back to Stage 1, the backup you made… rememember that…  it was Stage 1.  Go to the Back Up in Nokia PC Suite and choose restore backup.

Now go outside and enjoy the day.

Tags: n95, nokia by Me
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No, not the all singing all dancing Google Earth, but the one I use everyday kind of Google Maps.

In Melbourne they have finally added two roads… one a small one being the South Road Extension.

And the other being that small road… Eastlink.

The interesting thing is also they are playing catch up with my Nokia.  The Maps on my phone had both of these roads already)…

However Google still have one advantage over my phone and thus why I use them primarily to work out routes to and from places… the large web interface.

I can drag and drop routes and get a quick print out.  Now I know that Nokia have something in the pipeline to do this then transfer that to your phone and when that comes I may stop using google maps as much.  But until then I will.

But unlike a paper map, I have the update, but disappointingly like some things there is no change log or notification of these updates.

Of course there are still glaring errors.  One of the biggest things about driving in Melbourne is the trams…  for starters they don’t get out the way and secondly the will sit behind you and ding the bell if you are trying to do a legal right hand turn because they feel like it.  So when trying to work out where I am going I do tend to avoid roads with trams…..

And Google Maps seems to not have a lot of them…  Hawthorn Road, Caulfield for example has a tram running its entire length…

Sometimes it would be handy to know when the mapping data is from when trying to plan a route.   But then it just could be that I am a mapping nut and no one else actually cares

Tags: General, google by Me
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Ironic Mobile Advert Fail

Originally uploaded by wolfcat_aus

One of Eye Corps’s wizbang signs (the portrait plamsa tv’s) at Southlands had a modem failure

It was even more ironic given that the add was for a mobile phone. of course it was for my mobile phone, so that adds to the whole circular nature of the experience, an Nokia taken a photo of a Nokia kind of thing.. all very deep and profound I am sure.

I always suspected that these adds were basically simple flash animations just running on a windows box. And the windows error message just proves it. Seriously what a waste of computer just to show some simple animations, but I guess some one is a paying a lot for these adverts that cost nothing to build and nothing to run.

Yep, I am definitely in the wrong business.

Tags: Funny, Photos, n95 by Me
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The Nokia N95 1 (or as I like to call it the Nokia n95 Silver) has had a big firmware update..

• Nokia Maps 2.0 built-in
• Full N-Gage client
• Nokia Search 4.0 with Google plug-in
• Share online 3.0
• Enablers for Comes With Music
• Download! application updated (v 3.1.50)
• Upgrade to Music Player
• Update for Flash Lite 3 (improved viewing of sites like YouTube)
• Current consumption improvements (for e.g. WLAN scanning)
• New baseline for VoIP (with significant error corrections)

(thanks to All About Symbian) for the pointer….

and they also say that the 8gb version of this update should be out in the next few days as well.  I will let you know when it pops up.

Certainly I am looking forward to the NGage only being installed once   Expect a report on the firmware as soon as it comes out for the N95-8gb version.

And I think Nokia owes me money as well…. since I got my I know of 5 of these phones being sold to my friends and co-workers.  I really should get a cut

Tags: n95, nokia by Me
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