bitful

So yesterday I had enough of squinting at Windows Mobile interfaces, felt seduced by the user experience on the iPod Touch I got last February, decided it was time to treat myself (it's been hard at work during the past ten months), got my PAC from T-Mobile and I got myself an iPhone 3G.

I shall spare you the oohs and aahs (yes, I uttered many throughout the day) and skip to one point: I also signed up for MobileMe (two months free, then 59 pounds for one year, and I can unsubscribe before starting to pay) hoping that it would be the final answer to my eternal quest for perfect synchronisation of mail, contacts, calendars, photos across all devices. The idea is that all the data resides 'in the cloud' and is pushed through to all the locations you want to see it.

Well, I am about to unsubscribe to MobileMe after less than 24 hours, not because it does not do what it said it did, but because I was not prepared to change the way I work to comply with MobileMe requirements: to put it simply, I am a heavy Google user and it is not possible to use MobileMe to shadow your Google accounts.

You can read a more detailed account at MobileMe and Gmail: Pick one or expect frustration.

So I guess it's back to Gmail with IMAP (working very well so far), Google Calendar Sync with Outlook, and a simple Contacts sync with outlook via iTunes.

Although since I'm still paying for the Mail2Web Exchange account I used before switching to Gmail, one day I might try and see how that syncs with the iPhone.

1. Stephen 'Tin Tin' Duffy was the original lyricist and singer with Duran Duran. He left the band the year before they signed with EMI.
2. Caffeine relaxes the internal anal sphincter muscles.
3. Safari now has a 'Develop' menu. Among other things, it also emulates other browsers.
4. Ofcom allocates unused telephone numbers for drama purposes. You can spot them because they usually range from 496 0000 to 496 0999 for thirteen main area codes.
5. The lyrics in 'Bleeding Love' do not go 'You cut me up and, and I…' but 'You cut me open and I…' - I only noticed when I heard The Wombat's version of the song on the NME 2008 Awards covers compilation.
6. The price of NHS prescriptions is set to 7 pounds 10 pence (as of 1 April 2008) regardless of how much drugs cost.
7. Radiologists at Shanghai's school of medicine use iTunes to organise medical PDFs so that they can be searched and categorised with ratings and multiple tags.

If you are a heavy coffee drinker as I was, just give up coffee like I did seven weeks ago (I used to spend about two pounds a day on it) and you've got one hundred unspent pounds there looking at you.

But then if you count all the diet coke and coke zero I used to drink too (half a litre a day on average), and the occasional frappuccino (at least once a week) it turns out that in seven weeks I have saved 140 pounds. Twenty pounds a week. A grand a year. Practically a very decent holiday somewhere.

And that's not taking into account the fact that I feel much better, I sleep better and therefore have more energy, and - surprisingly - my blood sugar is now stable: it has been weeks since the last time I experienced food cravings at night, or feeling faint in the middle of the day.

Giving up caffeine was one of the best decisions I have made in the last few years.

Facebook Connect is an authentication methodology to log into third-party websites with your Facebook credentials.

On Monday Facebook launched The Run Around to demonstrate how it works. It is a sample site where you can log your runs and track your progress, and you can sign on by clicking the Facebook Connect button. Once you are logged in, your Facebook friends using the site will already have been added for you.

I find this very interesting and I'd like more of these in the future instead of having to send out invitations and reconnect to friends on multiple social networks. It is probably not fo anyone who is very concerned about privacy, although I would have to see this in action to have a better idea about this.

If you run, and are one of my Facebook Friends, have a play around at The Run Around too and help me see how much is shared.

More info: See What Facebook Connect Looks Like

Ever since the launch of the Apple Applications store, I've spent most of my free time downloading stuff, playing games and showing off how cool they are to friends and colleagues.

More generally, I've started using my iPod Touch a lot, getting to a point where if something cannot be done with it, I often don't bother doing it at all.

So the only reason for this update is the new WordPress iPhone application. It totally rocks and now I finally feel that this device has truly become my personal computer.

Sadly, it cannot clean our flat. Yet.

One of the most obvious effects of having given up caffeine completely is that, after four days of 24-hour headaches, I started to sleep. Oh yes I sleep, and how I sleep! Naps in the afternoon at the weekend, snoozes on the couch in the evening, and once even on the way back from work on the tube. I think I might have dribbled a bit. I hope I did not fart.

Until today, my favourite 'me' time was left untouched. Bright and early at 5.30AM, day after day, I answer the call of the bladder, look at the time and rejoice in the fact that I've got one and a half hours to do exactly what I want to do. That is when I reply to emails, check Facebook, read feeds and news, catch up with recorded TV and with stuff on iPlayer, listen to new music and plan the day ahead.

The other morning I went for the usual early morning slash… and I went back to bed. Until 7. And then I had to do what everybody else does, which is get ready very quickly and rush through the door.

On one hand, I did not like it. Leisure is always preferable to pressure.

On the other hand, I managed to do the essential tasks I had to in about fifteen minutes, instead of diluting them into ninety minutes of perfecly useless (but one hundred per cent pleasing) surfing.

If only I did not feel fantastic without caffeine, I'd have a triple expresso just because it's more fun.

If you follow my short updates on Twitter or Facebook, you will now that I have given up caffeine on Saturday, and that I've been crippled by headaches ever since.

I knew my caffeine intake was way above sanity (about 10 cups a coffee and a couple of 500ml bottles of coke zero during the day, and two or three mugs of tea in the evening) and wanted to do something about it.

Knowing myself pretty well by now, I had a very good feeling that cutting down was going to involve a lot more energy than stopping altogether. After all, I failed every single attempt to cut down smoking, but when I went cold turkey five years ago, it worked and I have not smoked since.

So I started my Saturday with a mug of peppermint tea. Incidentally, I like peppermint tea, so it's not a big effort. I had a couple more cups during the morning, then at around lunchtime the headache started.

I must add at this point that I was also trying to cleanse and detox by trying out the Master Cleanse during the weekend, so I thought the headache was due to insufficient calories, or a reaction to maple syrup (Dr B. said it gives him headache).

However, by evening the Master Cleanse was out of the window, I ate and I drank and a darn good idea it was. But the headache was still there, I went to bed with it and I woke up with it too. It followed me all day on Sunday, laughed at the painkillers I threw at it, and again on Sunday night I fell asleep with the back of my head throbbing and sending discomfort down my spine.

Yesterday and today I have been feeling better, the headache is coming and going, I cannot put my finger on what makes it worse - but I have noticed that working out makes it disappear.

I am very surprised by my body's reaction to caffeine withdrawal, it feels oddly familiar and I recoil in horror because it is very similar to the first few days of each and every one of my (near-monthly) attempts to stop smoking. Is caffeine really that addictive? Or - shudder - am I allergic to peppermint tea instead?

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• Crazy Japanese create iMac-like iPod dock | Register Hardware
  One Japanese manufacturer has designed a dock that gives the iPod Touch the appearance of a miniature iMac. There's a version for the iPhone too.
• Powerset
  Scaled-down, simplified interface to browse Wikipedia information on iPhone and iPod Touch.
• Create Your Own Smart Bookmarks in Firefox 3
  '… things in other applications that are similar to Smart Bookmarks. For example, iTunes (and many other media players) have what are referred to as Smart Playlists.'
• Superdrug Health Services
  A series of tests you can have at Superdrug: Food Intolerance, Healthy Heart, Mole Clinic, Allergy, ECG.

1. Google has a gay Easter egg hidden in the English interface: if you search for gay (or lesbian) the thin blue vertical line that separates results from sponsored links turns into a rainbow. Via Brugo].
2. 'Tapas' means 'lids, covers' in Spanish, probably because the snacks were originally used to protect your drink from flies or sand by placing them on the glass.
3. The word 'wop' (derogatory term for an Italian) is derived from the Neapolitan 'guappo' meaning 'cocky, swaggering person'.
4. The actor playing captain Lee 'Apollo' Adama in Battlestar Galactica (Jamie Bamber) is British.
5. The 'wheelies' in 'Chorton and the Wheelies' came about because movement on wheels is easier to animate in stop-motion.
6. The 's' key toggle stars on and off when you select an item in Gmail or Google Reader
7. The 'Dublin' in Dublin Core (metadata element set) is in Ohio, not in Ireland.

In the end last night I (and probably another few hundred thousand people with me) could not get my hands on Firefox 3, so I went out.

I have just downloaded it now (it would be cool to set a record for number of downloads in 24 hours), but I will probably wait a bit before installing it because

• it is always recommended not to install just-released software straight away;
• some people I know are experiencing problems with Firefox 3;
• last time I checked, not all add-ons work with Firefox 3 yet.

If you have installed Firefox 3 and want to revert, you can download previous versions of Firefox.

I will probably download and install the Firefox 3 Portable Edition that can run alongside old versions, until I am sure I want to upgrade for good.

So yes, I went out last night. I never ever go out on a school night these days, so I limited myself to three pints, and yet I am not feeling too good this morning, but fortunately I am going to be staying later at work tonight because I have a Spanish class at 6.30PM, so I can go in later than usual. Ooh I'm rambling aren't I?

Yes, I was saying I went out. And had a very good time with Jonathan, David and Ian at Retro Bar. We saw Dave and Simon and took part in the weekly Pop Quiz.

I expect Jonathan to write about it on his blog today [update: he did]. I hope he does, because all I can remember is that our team came second with 18 out of 21 points. I cannot even remember the name of the team, apart that it was picked by flicking through a copy of Boyz and pointing randomly at some text.

Right then. Coffee, porridge, Nurofen Plus, shower, then off to work.