General Musings for the week of 27th June 2010

I am very happy to report that Tallulah Rendall - who I have been telling you about in the last two weekly updates - was successful in meeting the pledges needed within the required timeframe and as a result now has the funds she needs to be able to finish working on her second album. Thank you to everyone who pledged some money towards the effort. I look forward with some anticipation to getting the new album when it is released. Please continue to donate as she has some great items you can pledge for including a personalised song written for you, a private gig in your own house and a book of lyrics and demos. Head over there and see.

In other news: Congratulations also to Shaun Terry who's wife had a baby boy on Wednesday

I upgraded my iPod Touch to the new iOS4 earlier this week. The upgrade wasn't the speediest thing I've ever done but it appeared to work flawlessly. I now have a unified inbox, multitasking (where programmed) and sub folders for my apps. Further updates as they come. In related news I received a microsim through from my network operator this week. It's interesting because I haven't purchased an iPhone4, I haven't put down a deposit, and I haven't decided whether I am going to transfer or not. I did sign up to be informed of updates from the service provider and now I have a sim I can activate and use in place of my current sim (They sent an adapter so it can be used in phones that don't have microsims). I'm wondering whether to swap over sims or not - regardless of whether I buy an iPhone 4. Any thoughts?

I see that Apple are coming under fire for the problems of dropped calls on their iPhone 4. One lawyer in the US is issuing a class action lawsuit against Apple claiming they knew there was a problem, refused to recall the products and claimed that purchasing extra accessories or holding the phone differently was the only way to solve this.  Should be good for some publicity if nothing else.

On a related topic I see that Microsoft have pulled the plug on their Kin phone after less than three months. Rumour has it that they targeted their social media phone at the youth market... but priced it at the same level as higher spec smart phones. This effectively priced them out of the market. Why you would expect Microsoft to know anything about pricing for the market I have no idea. Being the monopoly that they are they tend to create the market price and gouge their customers for as much as they can ($500 for a professional Office Suite when Apple sell theirs for $79 or $169 including operating system and media applications). Get real Steve Bulmer - you aren't the only dog in the pound any more!

It appears that July has crept quickly up on me again this year. That means that - despite the fact I was knee deep in snow only a few short weeks ago* - it is now past the middle of the year. The nights are getting longer (fractionally), the days are drawing in (a bit) and we are on the long slide towards the British winter. Or am I just being a bit negative? Probably.

The good news about July is that it brings us the US Independence Day celebrations. Happy Fourth Of July to all my US friends and readers!

So now I see that Post-It Notes are being blamed for the downfall of civilisation now. Well, not quite that bad. It appears that leaks to the media etc. about governmental discussions are becoming so bad that ministers have stopped writing things down in official records and are starting to communicate things informally via Post-it notes that are then destroyed. So when the freedom of information act allows current day political machinations to be officially made public we will no doubt find that everything we knew already was everything that there was to know. It'll all be on Google anyway.

*It wasn't really a few short week ago - it was almost 6 months. But it feels like it.