Mike's Life Stuff

I had to write this in response to Firas’ post about iPhone apps.

As we all know, serious and sensible business folk use Blackberrys, right?

So these are the Apps I love on my Blackberry, whilst enjoying the benefit of the device being able to do more than one thing at once. :)

Google Mail

It seems like half a lifetime ago already. My wife had died quite suddenly a few months before, and I was in the early throws of a new relationship with Julie, to whom I am now married. It was an emotional time all round.

I was driving home from the airport after a business trip to Berlin. I needed some company, so I switched on the BBC’s talk channel, Radio 4. The program just starting was “From our own correspondent.”

Normally this show consisted of reports from BBC staffers in various locations around the world – one week a war report, the next an economic update from Tokyo.

The announcer told us that the correspondent in question this week was to be Fergal Keane. I was pleased. I knew he was based in Hong Kong, and I was interested to hear the latest news from my place of birth.

I turned up the radio to enjoy Fergal’s gentle Irish brogue.

I was reading a comment, once again from Dave Doolin, on my previous post. And it put me in mind of Rudyard Kipling’s amazing poem, “If.” So I went and found it online, to re read it after many years. It’s amazing. It’s inspirational. It could have been written for bloggers:

It’s no secret now that the launch of Beyond Blogging exceeded the wildest dreams of Nathan and myself. The last few days have been the most tiring and most exciting of my online career to date. There are few things in life more intoxicating than refreshing your email every few seconds to see another page full of orders, or looking at Performancing Metrics and seeing thousands of people on your website at the same moment.

For two days it was bliss, and it’s still going on! So thank you, thank you so much for all the support and help and to so many of you for buying the book and shouting out such amazing feedback to the world.

Up until 9 years ago I loved mobile phones. As a corporate type, a guy from logistics used to give me a new one every few months, and I never even saw the bills!

Image and more information in the post from Mashable: Nexus one

Then I descended into mobile hell, when I started my own business. Which provider? Which tariff? I hate the way service providers here in Europe have made the tariffs so complicated. My current one has no less than 14 different business packages, and even then, they don’t seem to have the right one for me, although I can’t be sure without spending several hours analyzing the options against my recent bills. I even once made the mistake of calling into one of their shops to see the 13 year old “Corporate Expert” who it turned out could list every feature of every handset, but looked blank when I asked him about tariffs and which would be best for my needs.

I know I mentioned Chris Brogan in my last post - sorry! But he’s run one asking people to put photos on their blogs that show the kind of Christmas they’ve had. There are some fabulous images amongst them, so go to the post and check the comments to see them.

Here’s mine – one of my daughter Lucy’s Christmas presents was a digital camera, and she tried to take a photo of one of our dogs. Here’s the result:

Every time I look at it I burst out laughing!

Now that I’ve been blogging for some time, I thought I’d share a glossary of blogging terms for those readers who haven’t yet become fluent in the language we bloggers use every day. Please feel free to print this or send a link to a non blogging friend – it’s time we shared our secret language with people outside the blogosphere.

Blogger enjoying a traditional “Blog Carnival”

Captcha

I’ve had my motorbike for two years, so naturally the insurance has recently come up for renewal. The renewal notice arrived, and it seemed expensive to me, so I thought I’d do a quick check. Googling (in Spanish) “Motorcycle insurance Spain” gave me a huge choice of options, and I chose one.

Five minutes and a few online forms later, I had an online quote – fully €100 (almost a third) less than my current insurer’s quote. I decided I’d go with them, and printed the forms for completion and faxing later.

Within the hour, my existing insurer called me:

When the iPhone launched I wanted one, in fact I lusted after one. I’d been a Blackberry user for some time, and the iPhone looked so much cooler. The problem was it was launched with an exclusive contract with a different airtime provider than the one I had moved to with a great deal of complication – we have 14 phones on a contract.

I checked my contract, and realized I would have to wait a year or so to change back, to avoid paying some big penalties. I was bitterly disappointed.

Then Blackberry launched the Storm. OK it wasn’t an iPhone, but it would keep me going until the day came when I could get the iPhone, which by now had been upgraded. I didn’t really think about it at the time, but the deal with the Storm extended my contract a little more. But by then there was a rumor that Apple were going to make the iPhone available to a number of other airtime providers, so I got excited about the prospect again.

Until yesterday.

When I saw this video about Sony’s new Android device:

I don’t want an iPhone anymore? Do you?

The internet, and social media specifically, is dramatically changing the whole nature of friendship. I was having a conversation with Frank the other day. We were sitting in a café as we do occasionally, and I mentioned that I had been talking to a “mate” of mine in China about something that morning. Frank interrupted me and said “You have a mate in China? How on earth did you meet him?” I explained that we had met online through my blogging work, and his retort was “Oh, so he's not a mate then, he can't be if you haven't even met.” I let it rest at that and moved on.