David Hurst

Except he’s not red any more. I can’t believe Liverpool have let a player of Peter Crouch’s stature go for a piddling 9 million quid. The guy has proved his exceptional scoring talent for both Liverpool and England, and why Rafa doesn’t think he’s worth holding on to is beyond me. Who’s he going to replace him with? Robbie Keane? What a joke.

Liverpool’s loss is Portsmouth’s gain.

For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted a multi-function sports watch with a thermometer on it. Not because I specifically need one, nor because they are particularly accurate, but because a friend of mine had one back in the late eighties. They cost far more than my paper round and pocket money would have ever stretched to, and I’ve never been a great saver. So, now that I finally have some spare cash, and in a fit of nostalgia, I went out yesterday and bought a Casio PRG50 solar powered watch.

These things are BIG and I will probably look like a complete cock sat at my desk wearing a watch so large it has it’s own gravitional field. Small moons in the distant reaches of the galaxy are being pulled out of their orbit by my enormous watch. It is so big because it has an altimeter, barometer (including thermometer) and a compass. Sweet. Everything I could ever need to navigate from the office back to home.

On a serious note, as a newly qualified motorcyclist, I am fed up with checking the weather forecast, which is woefully inaccurate. A personal barometer is much better - it’s accurate to my local area and it’s up to the minute. That’s the excuse I gave to my wife for spending £129 anyway.

So, how is it? I couldn’t tell you. This “amazing” solar technology is supposed to eliminate the need to change the battery and break the water resistant seal. (I’m not sure I care that much about that - I’m not a diver and I won’t ever be more than a metre or two under the surface. I think it will survive.) The idea of saving money on replacement batteries was nice. The way the shop assistant described it to me, all I need do is wear the watch in daylight and it would have plenty of power. What a pile of crap!

I put the watch in direct sunlight all yesterday afternoon and evening. I left it under a bright lamp all night and I moved it into direct sunlight this morning for several more hours. The watch still has no power to do anything other than tell the time. I couldn’t tell you how accurate the compass is, because the watch can’t summon up enough juice to run it. I’d love to describe tales of happy weather dodging thanks to the barometer, but I can’t, because the watch doesn’t have the power to run it. I’d like to be able to tell you my relative altitude here in Somerset, but alas, no power equals no altimeter. After my lengthy charging session, the compass almost worked, and then the battery drained.

What about the other features of this watch? Well, there’s an alarm. Oh, and a back light that comes on automatically when you look at the watch in low light. Well, the manual says it does anyway, I wouldn’t know because the watch can’t power the backlight. It doesn’t work when you push the light button, and it doesn’t work when I flick my wrist in the dark.

I spent fully one hour trying to find the stopwatch and countdown timer. I followed the instructions in the manual, but it wouldn’t work. A little bit of detective work on the interweb revealed that I had in fact been given the wrong manual, and this watch does not have a stopwatch at all. The watch supposedly had loads of money knocked off, but even if the retail value is only £129, you expect a frigging stopwatch and countdown timer on your sports activity watch. What a joke! The shop assistant was showing me this watch side-by-side with the PRG40 and she said the features were identical. I knew the PRG40 had a stopwatch, so I naturally assumed the PRG50 would too.

Casio, what’s gone wrong with you? You used to make great watches, but this thing is useless. Apart from the ridiculous lack of chronograph, I would need to be an outdoor worker in the Australian Outback to get any kind of use from the advanced features of this watch.

If you must buy one of these Casio Pro Trek watches, don’t buy a solar powered one. The not changing the battery thing is a lie anyway. All rechargeable batteries have a finite life of charge cycles (usually around 500 full charges from empty), so, assuming you could ever get any of the functions to work, you will be changing the battery at some point anyway. Probably within 3 years judging by what I’ve read on the forums. An ordinary battery should last 18 months - 3 years anyway, depending on how much you use the watch.

As for me, I’m going to get my money back.

UPDATE

Well I got my money back. The watch is faulty. Guess which part failed? The battery which “never needs replacing”, does in fact need to be replaced. The shop said they’d “never had a problem” with Casio watches before, so maybe they do work. Who knows? Who cares? Not me, because I’m not buying one.

I didn’t mention above that I had already purchased a PRG40 from another store which I had to take back - it had some debris stuck between the screen and the glass. They didn’t have a replacement, so I went elsewhere and was sold the PRG50 instead.

So, two watches from Casio, and both had problems. Am I super unlucky or have Casio let their quality control slip?

I’m going to check out the Suunto Core instead. It’s more money, but what the hey, at least it runs on a (user replaceable) battery.

Apple have announced the new version of OS X (10.6 to be called “Snow Leopard”) is due to launch in 2009, and with this they have given a brief overview of the expected features in the new OS. In a rare move for the computer industry, Apple appear to be focusing on re-writing core portions of the OS in order to decrease its footprint and provide better performance. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft’s policy of increasingly bloating the OS so that it requires ever more powerful hardware. So, here’s a quick summary of the changes (which may not be final yet):

Increased RAM support
The new OS X will support RAM up to a theoretical limit of 16TB. Yes, 16TB! 64 Bit technology always promised leaps like this, and it’s good to see Apple finally implementing them. I can’t see why any user would ever want 16TB of RAM, but it’s nice to know you can.

Better multi-core support
OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will have core components re-written to make better use of multi-core processors. In fact, the entire system will make use of the available processing power, which should show the end user real speed increases in daily usage.

Open CL
This new technology allows the computer to make use of unused power in the GPU of your graphics cards. GPUs have phenomenal computing power, hardly any of which is being used unless you are playing the latest game. This is a feature that developers will have to implement in their software, but if they do, it promises even better performance from existing technology.

Media and Internet
The new Mac OS X will include Quicktime X, the media technology used for iPhone, presumably also lighter in weight than the current Quicktime. In terms of Internet performance, Apple claim the new Safari will run Javascript 53% faster.

All of these changes amount to what borders on thriftiness from Apple, and frankly I think it’s great. I have an Amiga 1200, of mid-90s vintage. It has a ridiculously slow processor by today’s standards, virtually no RAM, no hard disk and just a low-density 720KB floppy drive. Despite this, the Amiga always had a rich array of games and software that wasn’t so far behind current technology as the figures might suggest. Developers just had to be space-conscious. Their games had to fit on tiny floppy disks, and be carefully optimised. The current trend is nothing like this. Hardware is so cheap, that the developers just demand that you upgrade your hardware to pay for their laziness in development. This is proved by looking at something simple like word processing. Can you type your letter any faster on the current version of Word than you could on the first version? No. And yet you have to have a computer significantly more powerful to run it.

So, I welcome this return to common sense. I’ve paid for two processor cores, I would like my computer to use both those cores at every available opportunity. If I’ve paid for a 200Gb hard disk, I don’t want to find huge portions of it consumed by a bloated operating system. Making existing technology faster through better written software, now that’s common sense computing. Microsoft can keep their touch screen nonsense - Apple are actually listening to what computer users really want.

There isn’t a raft of new features and innovations in this latest version of OS X, but Snow Leopard will include full support for Exchange 2007, and this is great news for people using Macs in a corporate environment with Windows servers. I’ve been waiting for this for ages. Entourage really is crap. I would much rather just use Mail, iCal and Address Book with my Exchange server. The only downside I can see, is that there is no mention of support for Exchange 2003, which is what most businesses will be using. Still, it is progress.

In the computing world of the future, Apple users will compute faster and more efficiently on their existing technology, whilst Windows 7 users wave their arms around in front of their expensive (and newly upgraded) touch screen, wondering why on earth they can’t just use a mouse like they always did.

Here’s the information on the Apple website: http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/?sr=hotnews

I need to fuel my car, but I can’t. I have enough fuel to get to my job this afternoon, and then I’m stuck. How can this be? As I understand it, it’s only Shell’s delivery drivers that are on strike, and yet the BP and Texaco stations are out of fuel. Shell amounts to between 10% and 17% of the UK supply. Fuel stations typically can last about 4 days on a delivery, and the drivers are striking for 4 days. At best, there should only have been some minor temporary shortages at Shell filling stations.

So why can I not fill my car today? Simple. I can’t buy any petrol because of all the morons who get panicky and go and fill their cars up when they don’t need to. Petrol panic buying was inevitable, as soon as the news stations started saying “if nobody panic buys, then we’ll be fine”. To the average dim-witted moronic UK driver this translates as: “fill up your car as fast as you can… and as many jerry cans as you can find too!”. Most of these pig-ignorant plebs don’t even use their cars. Driving past a petrol station in Taunton on Friday night, as the panic set in, there was a high percentage of older people filling up. The kind of people that use their unfeasibly shiny Fiesta (complete with tartan blanket on parcel shelf) to get to ASDA once per week. They can probably last a whole year on one tank of fuel, but thanks to their greed, I am immobilised.

I thought I was being a responsible citizen, showing due care and consideration for the welfare of others, but this is clearly a flawed perspective. Most people seem to be operating on a me first, me again second, and if there’s any left… that’ll be me please, policy, and there’s just no way to contend with that by doing the right thing.

So, I will wait patiently for the fuel trucks to arrive, then I shall fill up every vehicle I own, and a few gallons worth of fuel cans besides. By creating my own personal petroleum stock pile and generally sticking two fingers up at everyone else, regardless of their need, I too can join the ranks of inconsiderate warts on the anus of humanity, but at least I’ll be mobile.

And of course, the petrol retailers will cash in on this opportunity to fleece the motorist a bit more. Frankly, if a gnat farts somewhere in the vicinity of the petrol supply chain, we end up with another 2p on every litre. All around us, the green campaigners claim that our cars are destroying the planet, and that oil reserves are drying up. Utter nonsense. Cars are a small percentage of UK pollution, and there is plenty of oil left. Oil companies only have the ability to harvest a small percentage of the oil in the wells they discover - the vast majority of it remains.

The motorist in the UK is a soft target, and it’s easy to see why. The kind of people that panic buy petrol when they don’t need it, are either greedy or stupid (or both), and neither category is particularly likely to stand up and protest. Oil is an essential requirement for UK businesses and families, much like food. If there was a famine, would anyone tolerate paying more than 50% tax on their food? Hardly.

WAKE UP! 

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