nArchos

I had planned to entertain myself on my trip to Detroit with an Archos Media Player which I bought on the company’s dime to give to one of the guys up North to demo. (It was one of the first devices with our latest chips in it). Unfortunately the player turned out to be an unadulterated piece of junk. I guess I have come to expect every piece of multi-media equipment to like an iPod in its simplicity and ease-of-use. The Archos was none of these. I turned on and tried to browse the web. It immediately asked me to register itself on the web in order for me to download the web browser software!!! Worse than that it required that I type in its serial number which was at least 12 digits long, underneath it and printed in a point size that would challenge anyone without bifocals. After I had finally successfully registered it I tried to put the contents of a DVD onto it but found I had to spend another $25 to unlock the DVD copying software. Large faceless corporations complain about"media piracy"- well this we certainly a shining example. By now I was getting annoyed and having coughed up the $25 for the unlock code I tried to copy the DVD to the device and the copy failed. “This may happen if the DVD is copy protected” the newly unlocked manual proclaimed. So I’d spent $25 to unlock software that was useless. I wondered if the problem lay in the Firmware, so decided to upgrade it. After 30 minutes of fiddling (which I could ill afford the night before a trip), I did indeed manage to upgrade the Firmware of the thing, whereupon it refused to connect to the PC ever again- giving a “USB Device Failed” message. I gave up and went to bed.

Spulling Errors can be sirius!

This week I found renewed belief if that old adage of read and re-read what you type because chances are you misspelled it or worse you type it correctly but the computer thought it knew better. Here are two examples...

As some will know quite a few people are leaving my company at the moment for one reason or another and I recently learned of another friend who had been "let go" this week.

I quickly txted him "Sorry to hear you have been made redundant." and signed it Rod. An innocuous enough statement of sympathy for my former colleagues plight... Just before I was about to hit send I glanced down at my signature and noticed to my horror that the autocompletion software had kicked in and replaced Rod with ROFL!

Also...

Lunching with my friend Cathy Browne can be dangerous for my profile. We spoke about Twittering and how she had recently appeared on YouTube having known more about Twitter than the presenter at a recent Twittering event in the valley.

Excited at the prospect of seeing Kathy on the 'Tube I got back to the office and typed in "Cathy Browne Twitter". I got nothing relevant so I quickly looked up the name of the presenter who was a guy called "Shel Israel" and typed that in.... YouTube is of course owned by Google and its mighty search engine looked at what I typed and decided to "correct" it. Well, I got to see a very unusal list of YouTube posts that I really hope to never see again!

Alexander got a Ripstick for Christmas