The modern connected world is ridiculous. I work in it, and I love it, but still it’s ridiculous.

I’m sitting here online at my PC, with my iPhone beside me.

Han and Rob are on MSN. I start talking to Han, and it’s somebody else, so instead I start texting her.
Then she is there, and replies to the text I just sent via MSN.
I have Firefox open on Facebook, and somebody adds a comment to a status. It flags it up on Facebook, my iPhone ‘bongs’ because it’s just received the email telling me that the comment has been made, and soon enough Outlook will do the same because it’s connected to the same email account.

I can either refresh the page, click the notification, go to the email, or go to Facebook on my iPhone, all to see this update.

Then Han makes a comment on a photo on Facebook, all the bongs happen to tell me, I see it, then discuss it with her on MSN, rather than Facebook.

Whilst it’s great that we can all get information in so many ways these days (granted, Facebook is hardly mission critical), it’s all a bit ridiculous isn’t it?

This post doesn’t really need a more elaborate title than that.

Apple’s iPhone joined the mobile phone market in 2007 with considerable fanfare and flag-waving from Apple and the infamous (in geek circles anyway ) Apple fanboys (and fangirls).

A lot of people – myself included – wondered what was so great. It didn’t do 3G support, which most phones have had for several years now, it was tied down to one carrier, and you were limited to what you could do with it in terms of software.

The hackers came onto the scene, “jailbreaking” the phone for use on other carriers and opening up the platform to software developers.

This year, stocks of the original iPhone began to dwindle, prompting frenzied discussion about the coming of the ‘new iPhone’, a hype which continued unabated until launch day, causing O2 in this country to sell out of the premium 16GB models online in about three hours, and their entire online preorder stock of 8GB models within the day.

The new phone promised faster downloads with 3G, GPS capabilities and Apple’s new “App Store”, allowing Apple-approved software to be downloaded and installed over the air or via the iTunes client.

The first time around, I was sceptical. This time, I had to have one. I bought into Apple’s hype, cancelled my Orange contract, and got on board with O2 and Apple for the iPhone 3G (8GB) “experience”.I’ll say it now, in case the rest of this becomes to long to read.

This device is good. It is really, properly good. If you’re half tempted to get one, then I would say definitely.

I’m not going to put up a load of unboxing pictures, because firstly all the pictures came out crap, and secondly you can find lots on the net if you really want to. Suffice it to say that the packaging is up to Apple’s usual high standards. You get even less in the box this time though – the original phone included a dock, which this one doesn’t. (And when I ordered one, it didn’t even come with another USB cable. So much for charging it up on my bedside table without constantly swapping cables around!)

Notice I say device, because it’s a lot more than that. The phone aspect – whilst well done – is almost a secondary consideration.
The device itself exudes quality. From the (fingerprint-magnet) glossy black plastic back (not metal, thanks to the many radio devices included inside) to the glass front screen, the whole thing feels solidly screwed together. It’s incredibly light and svelte, but doesn’t feel too delicate – the only thing reminding you to be careful is the whole it leaves in your bank balance

The first part I was interested in was the iPod. I used to have an iPod and loved it – the control systems were just so intuitive, it was smooth, and the synchronisation with iTunes was great.
I think that the transformation from touch-wheel based navigation to simple touch-screen has lost some of the magic, but to be fair I haven’t played with the iPod extensively yet. I’ve got a train journey to London on Thursday, so I’ll be getting more familiar with it then no doubt.

I’ve not even played it through the earphones yet, but hooked up to a pair of Harman Kardon Soundsticks it sounded great.

You can also hook directly up to iTunes through the phone and, if you’re on Wifi, you can purchase songs there and then and download them to the phone. If you’re on 3G/EDGE, then as long as the filesize is below 10MB you can do the same.

Everything is accessible from the home screens, which are simple and easy to rearrange as required. Some people on the net wish for centre-justification of icons and such, but for me it’s a very simple and well done navigation format.

So far, all applications have been very quick to load and utilise. I’ve had several odd random slowdowns that only seem to effect the keypad in SMS, but a reboot has cleared that – as has simply switching to a different application and back again.

SMS was my next biggest concern. I text a lot more than I phone, and have never gotten on well with the keyboards on Symbian/Windows Mobile Smartphones. Thankfully, Apple have actually put some solid thought into this as well. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once the initial acclimitisation period is over, typing on it is really very quick and easy. The ‘predictive spellchecker’ is pretty good as well, and I think it’s actually learning – it doesn’t change “Ed” into “we” so much anymore

Texting is actually kept as a threaded conversation between people. Whether or not this is a good thing is probably down to personal preference more than anything else, but I think it’s pretty good.
Need to send a message to Contact X? Just grab their conversation thread in the SMS main screen and get tapping.

For those that are interested, the stir fry was very good. We saw Narnia, I didn’t really get what was going on for most of it

You can also hook up email accounts to the phone, provided they support the IMAP Protocol. I have my main GMail account attached, which I check as and when I need to – or I can set it to do it every so often (it obviously uses more battery power this way though).

I also signed up to Apple’s new “MobileMe” service, which provides Contact, Calendar and Email via Push. This means that as soon as something is updated on any of those services, it is immediately “pushed” to your phone. You can also access the service anywhere online, or synchronised to your home PC. So far, it’s been pretty good. It’s £60 for the year though, so I’m still evaluating whether or not it’s worth it.

The other “big thing” with the new iPhone is GPS – or Global Positioning System for the uninitiated. Satellite Navigation, basically.

Apple has kicked GPS up a notch with the iPhone though, with applications that truly make good use of the GPS receiver other than for just finding your way around town.

The included “Maps” application (which does exactly that, actually) uses Google Maps for either simple “Where the hell am I?” functionality, but also directions.

It first attempts to use GPS to select your location. If it can’t do that, it then looks to a mixture of the cell-tower you’re receiving signal from, and any Wifi router you’re connected to with a location that is registered with a service called SkyHook.

The above screenshot is a “best guess” by the phone as I was inside at the time and it couldn’t get a GPS lock. It’s not all that far off, so that’s pretty good.

I’ve already downloaded two applications – Exposure and Vicinity – which make use of this feature. Exposure hooks into Flickr, for simple photo display, or the “Near Me” feature which picks up your current location, then displays photos listed on Flickr that are near your location. It seems to work really well from my limited testing so far.

Vicinity is very similar, but you can ask it to list cinemas, pubs, restaurants, banks, etc., another very useful tool to have.

Internet browsing on the iPhone is also a revelation. After using the painfully clunky Mobile Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 6, Safari on the iPhone is like stepping into a different world. Not only are certain pages designed specifically for the iPhone – such as Facebook – it deals brilliantly with “regular” webpages – displaying them fully until you either double-tap to zoom in, or “pinch” the screen to zoom in and out to custom levels.

The entire thing just … well, it just works. That sentence pretty much sums up the Apple iPhone 3G in a nutshell. It does lack a few odd things – MMS, video recording and cut & paste are the three major things. MMS is a bit of a pain, video I can live with out, but cut & paste would be really useful. I hope that Apple addresses these in a later software update.

Overall though, I’m chuffed to bits with this pho…device. It does everything flawlessly, quickly and with no fuss. Microsoft and Symbian should be learning some hard and fast lessons from this device, because it simply blows other smartphones out of the competition, let alone out of the water.

When I started on a design for this site, I tried to go for something mad and abstract. Think scratchy drawings, lots of line-art and distressed typeface.

It failed.

I realised why today, when thinking about why I liked Biffy Clyro’s latest album so much, but didn’t like the older ones much at all.
Then I got it.
Puzzle is quite a polished piece of work, certainly compared to the older albums. And I like it for that. I think an enjoyment of high production values applies to other favourite albums/songs, even though I never singled that out as one particular aspect until now. For example, BT’s Emotional Technology is widely recognised as a highly-honed and polished piece of work, and some people criticise it for that.

It makes perfect sense of course. I like shiny things. I’m big into technology. I always try and go for the things that have been worked on and polished to perfection … or as near as it can get. It’s why I find myself buying the next version of software and hardware even if the old one is doing just fine, and why in certain aspects of life I can be a bit of a perfectionist.

I said to Rob the other day how I wanted to change the blog again, but couldn’t even write my ‘About Me’ section, so how can I design something that reflects me when I can’t even figure out what to [i]write[/i] about me?
So I guess that’s answered then. Whatever it becomes, you can put a decent bet on that it’ll be shiny and polished

Not that it’ll change for a while I imagine, seeing as I have this week off before I start back at HP-CDS for another 6 months!

Apple fans love to document their unpacking ‘experience’ when opening a new Apple product. Apple to design very nice and easy packaging that looks almost as good as the product itself, but I think that’s going a little too far.

This however, is just great

Connectivity.

That’s what the modern world is all about, supposedly. O2 are all about how ‘things are better when we’re all connected’ at the moment with their latest ad campaigns, and most hardware/software houses are trying to push their products as the things that will connect you the most.

But despite that, it’s still bloody difficult to ‘get connected’. These days we all have a huge amount of information swirling around the place, from documents saved in folders, through emails and text messages to photos and online communities.
As technology has continued to fall in price and increase in power, most of us all have at least one computer – possible a second in the form of a laptop – and a phone that is now capable of taking photos and videos to shame some actual digital cameras and is able to access the internet completely wirelessly via 3G or EDGE networks.

Keeping all the information current and synchronised between all these devices at any one time is an arduous task at best, and downright impossible at worst. Microsoft is doing its best to usher in a new world with it’s new Live Mesh technologies (Google it if you’re interested, it looks quite promising) whilst Apple is forging ahead with its proprietary solutions which I’m sure work wonderfully if everything in your life is an Apple product.

I’m a Microsoft man and also heavily into computing and gadgets if you hadn’t already figured that out. As a result I have two PCs (desktop and laptop) and a PDA/Phone running Windows Mobile 6. I’m also a contractor and as a result, ideally need access to my emails and important files wherever and whenever. Thankfully with a bit of prior knowledge and the desire to learn, I’ve managed to come pretty close to achieving that.

A server machine sits in my study, running Windows Server 2008, Microsoft’s latest incarnation of their server software. Another machine sits upstairs under my desk, running Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003.
The former holds all of my files in a centralised location (which allows for simple, automated backups). The latter holds all of my emails, contacts and calendar information and can send and receive this data via the internet.

All three devices (desktop, laptop and phone) are configured in such a way that, theoretically, whichever I am using should have access to the latest version of whatever file, email, contact or calendar item I wish to peruse. I’ve been wrestling most of the day with an Outlook problem which turned out to be related to a cached file (and I think I know how it got caused too) but that’s all sorted now, so I’m a happy Ed.

This may all sound incredibly boring to most people, but it’s incredibly useful for what I do, and has also helped me learn a fair bit along the way, which is nothing but helpful in my professional life.
There’s still a little way to go – i.e. allowing the laptop to access files and emails from outside of the local network, but I’ll get there.

There’ve been some changes around here, as you might be able to tell, subtle though they may be.

I tried to theme the header to be as much about ‘me’ as possible. Basically, things I like. So we have some Formula 1, PCs, photography, my car and my lovely lovely speakers which are – as I type – feeding The Crystal Method silkily into my ears. There’s something at the bottom too.

I started out on Saturday (after getting my car repaired, woo!) just doing a simple Pendulum-themed heading for the standard Kubrick theme. I mentioned it to Rob, who then decided that the time was right to get a wriggle on and start with his.

So began hours (about seven I think) of collaborative web-design over MSN. And when I say collaborative, I mean I tried to help him out as best I could with various solutions to what he was trying to do. The interim results were … intriguing … to say the least.

It also brought home to me that occasionally, being bloody minded can yield real results. Rob wanted to get a page that would automatically centre both horizontally and vertically. The background image was fine, but the text was not. I was adamant that it could not be done; I’d looked before and been told “No way”.

To my surprise, and I’ll admit, slightly annoyance, he managed to find a perfect CSS schema that allowed exactly what he wanted. After a quick look, we adjusted the Wordpress CSS to mimick the settings, and there it was.

Ironically, after spending hours trying to tweak a CSS-framed design, I ended up scrapping it on Sunday when I started to work on the header image. I’m pretty happy with the way it all turned out. It’s not-at-all overcomplicated, it’s easy to read, and should be able to have new stuff added to it fairly easily, if and when I decide what that ’stuff’ should be

Mmmm, Mint-Chocolate KitKat bars are delightful.

It was bloody nice weather today. For the most part I was inside, sitting inside a room with 12 servers and no airconditioning, plus a number of other blokes, but after work it was still nice to drive home in the sunshine.

I also got to wear my summer shirt for this first time this year. It’s a Calvin Klein short-sleeved shirt with an awesome orangey-bluey-swirly-nonsense all over it, and I love it. Even though it is a few years old and a little small on the arms, I still pull it out everytime it’s very warm.

Let’s hope it continues.

I now have another potential music festival dilemma. Glade. It’s an electronic music festival on in July. The only name I really know is Pendulum (wooooo!) but it would be really interesting to go and get immersed in the whole thing. I’m just so indecisive about these things this year for some reason, it’s really annoying

I spent the last week in Coventry, studying a CompTIA Security+ related course. Ethical hacking, prevention and hardening methods, etc. Not exactly stuff I’m going to bore you with here.

My accommodation was a large house in Earlsdon, which I’ve stayed in twice before on other courses. The house doesn’t have internet access, so I made do by hijacking the wireless connection of the people next door. Last week I arrived in Coventry, and tried tapping into the connection.

Bugger. They’ve password protected it.

There’s no easy way past WPA-PSK encryption, especially as my copy of BackTrack 3 doesn’t work with my laptop, so I decided that watching copious amounts of Scrubs in my downtime would work better.

Bugger #2. I forgot to put them on either of the portable hard drives that I brought with me.

The stage was set for some potentially boring evenings. Once such evening, I was messing around with the laptop and its webcam, and decided to play around with the Time Lapse feature, the first result of which can be seen here: Time Lapse Ed

Yes indeed, that’s me reading something, being bored, texting stuff, and having a weird martial-arts-type fight using a pair of clothes hangers (remember where I said I was bored? Yeah).

I decided I’d try to make a longer timelapse, so I set it going, and promptly forgot about it.

That in itself wouldn’t have been so bad, except I didn’t choose Time Lapse, I chose Motion Detection. Cue lots of videos of myself wandering in and out of the room, changing clothes, occasionally dancing around like a moron and also some weird slightly-eerie ones where I lay in bed watching Swordfish. From the thumbnails, you can just see my face bathed in a weird white light …

It’s weird knowing someone has been spying on you, and it’s downright bizarre when that person turns out to be yourself.

We’re back, baby! Haha!

Yes indeed. Liquid Elephant, that last bastion of half-cocked ideas and random melancholy is alive and kicking in what is surely it’s fifteenth iteration. Something like that anyway.

Those few that still remember Liquid Elephant (not that the others are dead, just that I’m sure they stopped caring a long time ago) may raise a smile and, perhaps, a glass of strong alcohol at its return.

The site has been through more alterations and facelifts than Cher herself, but we’re back to what it started out as; just a place for people to write some thoughts, ponder the meaning of life, and indulge in various illegal activities, safe in the knowledge that it is I, not them, that owns this domain and whom law enforcement will ultimately come for.

Where this will go, nobody knows. But as I type, my good friend and esteemed colleague (for the few occasions that we have actually done some work together) is setting up on the site, over here.

As for the look and feel, I sincerely hope that inspiration strikes sooner, rather than later, and I can come up with something better than this warmed-through interpretation of the standard Kubrick theme, upon which all baby Wordpress installations are based.

Stay tuned.