Club Troppo

Bad back, sad sack. Yes, folks that’s an inane family saying.

Which brings me to the point of this post which is to say that my back is killing me. I have a bit of a scoleosis but am told by those in the know that it isn’t a big problem or explanation for my back ache – which, according to a physio I went to – who seems good – is some muscular spasm or muscular ‘memory’.  I often feel like someone is poking a knife just below my shoulder blade. It’s bearable most of the time, but just.

Anyway, the physio said such things were quite common, were not easy to treat as skeletal problems. He suggested exercises were unlikely to help much and prescribed a few days of Neurofen. The idea was to banish the muscle memory – but it achieved nothing.

It occured to me that accupuncture or ‘dry needling’ might be worth considering.  Anyway I’d be interested in any suggestions, including miracle healers, from Troppoholics.

Postscript clarification inserted by the time of the eighth comment: I live in Inner Melbourne (but, since you ask prefer cappuccino and tea to latte, though I would subscribe to the folk dictum “better latte then never”).

My blogging time over the last few days has been absorbed by creating a “social media presence” for my employer CDU Law School.  It involves not only a blog but also Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn facilities.  It’s been something of a struggle to convince the powers-that-be that it’s a good idea but we finally achieved it.  We’re even employing a consultant to teach us how to link them together to maximum benefit, given that my knowledge of Facebook, Twitter etc is fairly scanty because I’ve tended mostly to steer clear of them (apart from a desultory effort at using Twitter as the vehicle for a short-lived revival of Missing Link).

Anyway, this time a group of law academics has decided to share the load of maintaining a flow of blog posts and tweets, with admin staff moderating comment box activity.  Accordingly with a bit of luck the whole thing might be sustainable.

I will probably mostly post over at CDU Law Online for the next couple of weeks at least, with links here at Troppo.  Thus I’m drawing attention to a post I wrote today titled Catgate Unhinged.  It’s worth a read IMHO, and I’d also value any feedback readers may have on the overall site.  Feel free to post a comment too; no-one has as yet. Some of you might also be interested in subscribing to the Twitter feed which aims at abstracting a wide range of legal stories and cases each day.

Peach Home Loans gives part of its commission each year for each of its borrowers. Last year we gave money to an appeal for African Women as I know one of the people involved.  We’re likely to do the same again this year, but we’re also sending out cards and one can nominate part of the cost of the card to go to charity.

They don’t include that charity. This is what they do include.  Which should we nominate and why?

(Continued)

I’ve been musing about the possibilities of updating Troppo’s “look and feel” (although I haven’t yet caucused with Nicholas and Don about it).  What I have in mind is a more “newspaper-ish” arrangement, probably a bit like Larvatus Prodeo with the front page displaying a feature slider, excerpts from the 8-10 most recent posts and displays of recent post headlines in selected popular categories.  I would also like to add some aggregated RSS feed headlines from other blogs.  I even like the theme LP uses (although without the ghastly purplish-pinkish hue).

I’m sure it can all be done, it’s just I have no idea how and no time to acquire the expertise.  Moreover Ozblogistan Fuehrer Jacques Chester is busy finishing his Honours thesis and won’t be able to help either.  What we need is someone with expertise in the Wordpress backend including some web design capability at least sufficient to “tweak” existing Wordpress themes.  If you fit the bill and are interested in helping, please contact me at ken dot parish at cdu dot edu dot au.  I’m not sure whether the meagre Troppo bank account (from the days when we hosted advertising via OLO) could run to much in the way of payment, but we can certainly feature your name and credentials in lights on the front page.

I am about to make a trans-Pacific flight. Moreover I am doing this on a third world American Airlines plane that I am reliably informed does not have individual movies on demand. This is a fairly serious problem but of course to any Troppodillian it is more of an opportunity in disguise.  Time to get out the trusty iPad and load it up with movies. Only to discover that this is easier said than done – at least for me.  iTunes selection is woeful. I presume this has something to do with Australia’s wise decision to cooperate with the IP Cartel’s parcelling up of the world into separate fiefdoms so that we can’t be given the variety that is available on other continents.

In any event I’d like to load onto my iPad some movies that I actually want to watch.  Renting would be fine, though I’ll probably purchase if necessary. I’d be happy with a good selection of old classics if necessary. Why the hell iTunes doesn’t have a good selection of those I don’t know. Does anyone? Or am I missing something?

Does anyone have any suggestions for me?

Steven Jobs is perhaps the best CEO of the last hundred years.  This may reflect my ignorance of other CEOs – which is bordering on the comprehensive – but my reasoning goes like this this: In identifying extraordinary talent, one has to guard against luck.  How do we decide between luck and extraordinary talent? Run the experiment again.  I don’t know of too many executives who, in addition to having about five huge wins running a corporation – in this case Apple II, Mac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad (not to mention Pixar) – (and OK that’s not five things but no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition).  And he got himself ousted in the middle of this performance his successful comeback providing the best possible test of whether his earlier successes were just luck.

In any event I often wonder how Steve would go in a CEO review. After all, he’d be ranked on all sorts of metrics, the weight of each metric would probably be fixed in advance so his skills of leadership and vision (surely where he excels) would be rated 10/10 if there’s any sense to the world, but there would be other criteria. Like “makes all staff feel involved and valued and provides them with confidence in the transparency and integrity of the organisation”. Criteria like “has a transparent, open and constructive relationship with the board”.  Now I expect that Steve would do badly on the first of these and who knows about the second. So if, together they account for say 30% of his score, he wouldn’t do particularly well.

In fact an organisation is an organic entity and what one really wants is people at senior levels who are very good at certain things and some effective division of labour – so there’s an effective spread of talents and expertise and people play to their strengths and cover others’ weakness.

I wonder if anyone can point me to literature which explores the fallacy of composition I’ve implied is going on above and what might be done about it in determining criteria and the weighting between criteria that should apply when deliberating on important decisions.

Skype spamming seems to be on the up and up. I had about six people yesterday telling me they wanted me to add them to their contacts. I just got my second today. When I tell them I’m busy, they all seem fine with that, and don’t keep bugging me – or most don’t. But most want me to add them to my contacts. Why is that such a big deal for them – and am I taking a risk chatting with them for a minute or so?

What’s the economic model behind this? And yes, some are from Nigeria. (Though it surprises me they say so.)

A while ago I blegged in search of a new smart phone. Well disposed to Android I thought I’d buy Samsung Gallaxy II S which had had rave reviews. Anyway, some people expressed curiosity about how things would end up, but I ended up taking Neerav Bhatt’s advice on the thread and buying a Motorola Atrix. It’s got bigger battery capacity and possibly better reception than other phones on Telstra.

So far so good, though it seems a bit clunkier than the more consumer/gaming friendly phones. Also the greater battery capacity seems mostly consumed in greater power consumption rather than longer life, but reception does seem noticeably better – not a small benefit. For a while I was crestfallen that it didn’t auto-reformat webpages on zoom, but I found a way to do that – I still can’t do it on iPhones or iPads though perhaps the cognoscenti can tell us how.

And of course there are those things that you’d need to hire the phone for a week or so to really find out before you buy – which I didn’t do. I can’t get it to auto-format when I’m zooming on Google Reader where I spend a lot of time – even though my last Android did that. Is there another browser I can download that will? Atrix seems to have some cut down Firefox as a default rather than the standard Android browser. A quick search on the Android market doesn’t turn up anything answering to that description however.

I had also imagined that the phone would synch with Outlook if I asked it to. Not a bit of it. I’m amazed and a bit outraged, but there you go. I have set up a kludge where I synch contacts in g-mail, but you need to be a paying customer of Google Apps to have it cross synch to Outlook – though Google release their Calendar synch without ties.

Also, someone gave me a Samsung Gallaxy II S to play with on a plane. The guy who’d just bought it loved it and I was seriously impressed.  It seemed very user friendly – and very thin which somehow more or less irrationally appealed to me. So I think I made the wrong choice, but I now have a new phone. I console myself with an analogy with Machiavelli’s suggestion that changing things is hard because the people you hurt hate you much more than the people you help love you. I notice the things that bug me about the Atrix, but I guess if I’d bought the Samsung I’d be noticing all the things that I didn’t like about it – perhaps its battery life is quite a bit shorter, which would be a pain.

Nevertheless all up, I leave you with the picture above. Only engineers could work out a docking arrangement in which you get to see the screen of the thing you’re docking with OR the screen of the thing you’re docking. In fact it’s worse than that – by the look of it.  If you want to look at the screen of your Atrix, you can’t operate your computer. I don’t think the UX guys got a look in. (Stop Press: on going through to the page on which this picture appears it says that the laptop ends up with a picture of the Android screen on it. Why the two couldn’t be side by side – or have an option for that is a bit beyond me, but there you go.  The review shows that the Atrix’s great merit is its power – it’s certainly fast.

The other part of the deal is Telstra for its better reception. They’ve already entirely stuffed up so many things, it makes me want to weep.  But it will all work out no doubt.

I’m thrilled to say that we raised over $30,000 for Africa. Troppo itself initially raised a little over $2,000 to which would have been matched the contribution I’d promised, but in the last day I also said to the fund raisers that if they could get some more funds in by referring their clients to the site I’d match them. They proceeded to come up with some substantial and one very large donations. This took me to my maximum exposure – which was bounded by half the amount needed to fund all the kids shown which took Troppo’s contribution to over $11,000 with the final result being over $30,000 for the kids of Kibera. Pretty good huh? And thanks to all for participating.

And of course it’s not to late to give. Just download this pdf for the bank details and follow the instructions on the previous post and off you go.

My first smartphone was an Apple iPhone.  I’m rather proud of being a technology laggard – it’s nice to have others at the bleeding edge.  Anyway, just before doing the Govt 2.0 Taskforce I thought I’d better get a bit hip and get a smart-phone and only one appealed – the iPhone – by then the latest version was a “2S” I think. Anyway I managed to leave it in a public place briefly and that was the end of it – for me anyway.  Someone had a second hand Android phone for sale so I bought it and have been very happy with it.  It was an HTC Desire.  I was happy with it until recently when it occasionally takes it upon itself to reboot – including when you’re in the middle of doing something.  At its worst it cycles through boot ups and downs until you take the battery out.  Not good. And HTC have been the soul of uselessness claiming that my phone has a British IMEI or whatever the number is called, so I have to take it up with an international HTC centre.  Which is more than I can be bothered with. So I need a new one.

Should it be an Android or an iPhone?  The Android is not quite as well integrated or designed, but it’s cheaper, more open and the most important features work better. The most basic thing for me is that the default browser in the Android is really excellent with by far the best feature that it reformats carriage returns as you zoom in.  Someone told me that the iPhone’s browser is built on the same open source platform as the Android’s one, but it doesn’t do that.  Neither does the iPad’s browser (nor the third party browser I’ve so far downloaded – Atomic). Completely beats me why they don’t do it, but there you go – Steve Jobs is the billionaire not me, so I’m sure it’s an entirely frivolous feature that I’m after – enabling me to read different lines by just moving my eyes, rather than scrolling left and right twice for each line.

The other thing which is really useful on the Android is the four button ‘global menu’ built into the hardware.  I’m not sure why Apple sticks to its one button solutions long after more buttons are so clearly demonstrated to be superior – but there you go.  The Android also synchs all things in the cloud, which is just much better than having to synch through the iTunes which is bad enough as music synching software and a joke as a synching program for a smart phone.

Anyway, I’m thinking of getting the Samsung Gallaxy II S which has had rave reviews.

Your mission, gentle reader, should you decide to accept it, is to answer the following questions.

1. Should I buy the phone I’m thinking of, or another one and if so why?
2. Where is the best place to buy it – presuming as I think I should that buying it outright is the best way to buy it.
3. Is there anything else I should know?

HTC