I’ve come to the conclusion Apple are trying to take every application in the business market – and gimick-ify it. Lets go back and take a look at the middle of  last century – 2005. Apple introduces the iPhone – a smart mobile phone which has smartphone-capability. 3G, wifi, organiser and email functions etc etc. Whats that? It hasn’t been done before? Oh yes it has.

The BlackBerry, PocketPCs and Palm – all three did what the iPhone did before but for a different target. The business market. Businessmen and women didn’t need the flashy, gimicky shite the iPhone included – they needed something that worked and worked well, and they’d been using and doing it for years before Apple decided to introduce it’s crap. Apple targetted, instead, the home market. Particularly the young, domestic type. They had applications and functions that matched the BlackBerry, PPC and palm, but instead they did it in a nice, flashy way. It looks great and performs great – with a fuckin great pricetag…

But you could say the iPhone WAS revolutionary. Okay, maybe some parts of it was. What about the Touch?

iPAQ and Palm had been producing digital organisers for decades before Apple. They were widely used in the business world (and still are). I would get on a train, and although I used mine to watch videos, a man next to me was using a similar model iPAQ to fiddle with a spreadsheet. What I find infuriating is that Apple’s iPod Touch does the same – but for another market. With the pricetag.

And now we have the iPad – a tablet PC, by all accounts. Revolutionary, oh my god it’s brilliant! Microsoft haven’t done this kind of tablet-PC style device ever! Using touch sensitive devices to do something a PC would normally do!! OMG!!! It’s FANTASTIC!

/endsarcasm

No, it isn’t.

Apple might have the art of eyecandy, usability and gimicks down to a T, but if I wanted to buy a PDA or smartphone I sure as hell wouldn’t get one that would charge me £600 for the trouble.

A few months ago I trialed a blog called “BRiWEB” – the Bristol Weather Bulletin. Basically it was a group of 3/4 forecasters blogging online, every few hours, about weather or the remainder of that particular day, and the next day, with long-range forecasts being made every 24 hours. It never really took off, but if I get enough interest I’d like to start it again..

Would anybody reading this be at all interested? In either being a forecaster or a reader, for that matter?

Whatever you didn’t want to happen – happened.

I can think of at least half a dozen couples that, once in a relationship, have now gone their seperate ways. My own included. The Haiti earthquake disaster, to which the “Great Freeze” of the UK cannot really compare. Bomb scares on flights, this early in the year.. Is this some kind of signal as to what we can expect from 2010? If it is I think I speak for a lot of us when I say fuck this, I’m going back to 2009!!

For me so far this year has been far from great. As well as the above my watch strap has broken, I have a terrific £70 phonebill to deal with, my job sucks, I haven’t flown in months and quite frankly, have so much crap to deal with I might as well just stay in bed tomorrow morning.

But things can only get better. I will post this and go to sleep, wake up tomorrow, have a shower, a shave and eat some weird French cereal. I’ll put on my shirt and jumper, some trousers and my shoes and grab my bag and black coat and head out the door. And as I’m heading up my drive I will be me again.

And to any of you not yet touched by the hell that is “oh ten” – you are damn lucky!

So over the past few months I’ve been playing around with this that and the other and decided that I can’t pay for my webhosting anymore. :’-( Which means those that I’ve hosted will now have to find their own hosting or get a free blog. Like mine is now. So I’ve got a new site.

I say it’s new, but if you look at the posts, they’re back from ’07/early ’08. So it’s my old site, as a new one.

Only thing that pisses me off? I can’t import the old posts, or get my old theme back.

So I’ve been browsing the Internet, and reportedly four died in a mid-air collision this morning at 1100GMT. Terrible yes, to the local aviation community. But  these two aircraft are Grobs from RAF St Athan.

Flight lieutenant Alastair Hawes said the planes were on “air experience” flights.

Such flights usually feature an RAF instructor alongside someone, usually a young person or cadet, who is interested in a military career.

The aircraft involved are believed to be twin-seater Grobs used in basic flying training.

I don’t know how this effects the local VGS like Hullavington, but I’d imagine we can see 6AEF at Colerne grounded for the remainder of February and possibly we might see (or hear) some shockwaves at 625. It’s quite worrying how they were both downed and all occupants died. I hate to think the implications for the ATC…

So it’s 6th February 2009, and my god is it cold…

I just got back from seeing a few friends of mine and delivering one very late present (Sorry!!) and it is bloody cold out there…

Over the past few days we’ve had a LOT of snow, more snow in the past week than in the past 6 years. All of it added together has made quite a lot of the white stuff settle, and as night moves in today leading onto Saturday morning, it’s been melting. This means the roads are covered in that horrible slushy brown stuff that just makes my boots soggy. But once that water is on the road, and it’s nightfall, it freezes. Or at least, it has done tonight.

Some of the main roads around North Bristol really dangerous right now. They haven’t been gritted since yesterday, and for me walking home it was slippery just walking across a T junction. Black ice is really a bitch. So anyone driving over the next day or two for gods sake BE CAREFUL. Filton aerodrome and Bristol International were both closed today until 4pm due to the ice/snow threat, and I think Filton is still closed until Monday. No idea how bad Lulsgate had it but we must’ve had it a lot worse.

Whats more is we have MORE heavy snow forecast for Monday evening….:-D

Well bugger me, it’s been a week of up’s and down’s…

First snow we had was Sunday night, 5 days ago. Started just trickling then it HEAVED down, the whole day pretty much, and was still coming down at the end of mine (around 4pm). Good day that.

Tuesday and Wednesday was a bit shit for…several reasons…

Thursday though! My god, the snow was back on Thursday morning around 1am. With a damned vengance too. Roads closed, only motorways and A-Roads around South Gloucestershire being gritted, so that meant most bus services were out and we couldn’t drive anyway. Huge snowball fight, I got a bit wet, and all that jazz. Great fun, pictures at the bottom.

Friday (today), the snow was back AGAIN! It had all melted yesterday leaving some slushy crap behind but it snowed heavily this morning and the roads were shut AGAIN! I mean, hahaha, it’s great!

Hullavington has 6-8 inches of snow level on the airfield, so like hell am I gliding this weekend…:-(

Yeah it’s a bit random.

More to come from Hullavington next Sunday, if I remember to take my camera.

Tasty beverage. Yom yom.

So a bit of background information for you. A few weeks back I bought a printer from eBay, some guy had about 150 of the things and he was getting rid of them really cheap. £10 including postage and packaging, a lovely laser printer with a hell of a lot of toner. So I got it after about 2 days, plug it in and haha, “PAPER JAM”. Then it complains about some missing toner bottle or something, so I just gave up and left it.

So I emailed him and he was going to send me a new toner bottle from a printer of the same model, one that was gonna get scrapped. That was about 5 days ago and to be honest, I forgot about it and I had a huge package wrapped in bin bags and masking tape waiting for me in the kitchen. Instead of sending the spare part, he sent me the entire printer.

Om nom nom, two printers for the price of one!