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I have recently taken a not-random-enough-for-my-liking walk through management self-help text books, management consulting residue and organizational change activities. I was reading my usual suspect blogs looking for contrarian refreshment when a comment referred me to a site that half the universe probably knows about already and has been hiding from me.

This one.

To summarise his bio: Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at the New Yorker. He is the multiple award-winning author of Blink and The Tipping Point.

He writes pretty well.

The article I stumbled upon was “The Talent Myth” from July 2002. “The Talent Myth” is a fascinating examination of one aspect of the pathology of Enron’s downfall — emphasizing talent without effectively rewarding performance.

Gladwell begins by noting that McKinsey consultants convinced Enron that they should pursue a policy of employing only the most talented and intelligent people and letting them find their own way of contributing. “They believe in stars, because they don’t believe in systems.”

“The only thing that differentiates Enron from our competitors is our people, our talent,” Lay, Enron’s former chairman and C.E.O., told the McKinsey consultants when they came to the company’s headquarters, in Houston. Or, as another senior Enron executive put it to Richard Foster, a McKinsey partner who celebrated Enron in his 2001 book, “Creative Destruction,” “We hire very smart people and we pay them more than they think they are worth.”

There are many organizations that pride themselves on hiring the “top X%” of available talent. I have worked for a couple who claim different top percentages. Joel Spolsky has an interesting short essay explaining why he thinks this is a commonly held delusion:

It’s pretty clear to me that just because you’re hiring the top 0.5% of all applicants for a job, doesn’t mean you’re hiring the top 0.5% of all software developers. You could be hiring from the top 10% or the top 50% or the top 99% and it would still look, to you, like you’re rejecting 199 for every 1 that you hire.

While Joel cautions against deluding yourself that you’re employing the top X% of developers, Gladwell sets out to explore a different thesis:

But what if Enron failed not in spite of its talent mind-set but because of it? What if smart people are overrated?

What if McKinsey consultants were wrong? What if hiring smart people and letting the best performing and most talented people pursue their own interests didn’t provide the right outcome for the business?

I guess if you know anything about Enron, or McKinsey’s consulting batting average then you know what the likely answer is.

The article contains uncomfortably familiar scenarios and observations for anyone who has experienced a gamut of management styles:

Wagner and Robert Sternberg, a psychologist at Yale University, have developed tests of this practical component, which they call “tacit knowledge.” Tacit knowledge involves things like knowing how to manage yourself and others, and how to navigate complicated social situations. Here is a question from one of their tests:

“You have just been promoted to head of an important department in your organization. The previous head has been transferred to an equivalent position in a less important department. Your understanding of the reason for the move is that the performance of the department as a whole has been mediocre. There have not been any glaring deficiencies, just a perception of the department as so-so rather than very good. Your charge is to shape up the department. Results are expected quickly. Rate the quality of the following strategies for succeeding at your new position.

a) Always delegate to the most junior person who can be trusted with the task.
b) Give your superiors frequent progress reports.
c) Announce a major reorganization of the department that includes getting rid of whomever you believe to be “dead wood.”
d) Concentrate more on your people than on the tasks to be done.
e) Make people feel completely responsible for their work.

Wagner finds that how well people do on a test like this predicts how well they will do in the workplace: good managers pick (b) and (e); bad managers tend to pick (c). Yet there’s no clear connection between such tacit knowledge and other forms of knowledge and experience. The process of assessing ability in the workplace is a lot messier than it appears.”

The article also notes a potential consequence of emphasising intelligence over performance that I was surprised by:

[...]Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group was praised for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer. Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable: forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward. They weren’t naturally deceptive people, and they weren’t any less intelligent or self-confident than anyone else. They simply did what people do when they are immersed in an environment that celebrates them solely for their innate “talent.” They begin to define themselves by that description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences.

I think I learned more from reading this article than two weeks cringing at tortured metaphors in best-seller management texts.

I think I’ll spend a while longer at Malcolm Gladwell’s site.

“Why?” I hear you type.

Requirements

To save my marriage. Ok, not really. How about “to avoid those tense conversations about communication that inevitably follow my attempts at map reading?”

Although I’d never say it publicly, my spouse is a lousy map reader. She’s always getting left and right confused and is easily disoriented. I suspect a couple of incidents involving slight dings, missing side mirrors with wires dangling, threats to divorce her parents, our children and me have all been to do with frustration from being lost or impolitely timed advice about where she should have turned.

I’m not too proud to say I’m a terrible navigator. I’m topologically challenged. I have had a long history of being too optimistic about my “secret” back streets shortcuts which has frustrated many of my passengers. Me included.

Unwarranted pride in one’s ability to find and navigate the fastest route, and someone telling you where to go is a dangerous combination. Dangerous to your passengers, dangerous to other road users and dangerous to your long term relationship with other car occupants.

If you have the money, and you value harmony in your relationships then you’d better get some satellite navigation in your life. Nothing promotes calmness on a family car trip to an unfamiliar destination like a disinterested, robotic, map reader.

Enough frivolity and foreshadowing. On with the review!

How to read this review

I’m not able to compare the TomTom 300 Go with many of its contemporary competitors. I have had some limited exposure to satellite navigation systems in the US. The one I have used is Hertz Neverlost, as a result of US business trips. I have seen a recent Garmin of TomTom 300 Go-like proportions in use, but I haven’t used one myself.

Beyond my experience with a more-than-likely superseded Neverlost navigation system I don’t have much to compare with. When I compare things, it’s probably not a fair comparison.

If there is a function, feature, or aspect of the TomTom you’d like me to talk about then please mention in the comments and I will add more information to the post.

Preparing the TomTom 300 Go

The retail box for the TomTom 300 Go AU (Australian Maps version) contains the navigation unit, a soft zip-up case, a USB cable, a 256MB SD Flash card with Australian Map data on it, a CD with drivers and SD Flash backup software, a car charger, and a mounting arm that attaches to your windscreen with a mechanically-augmented suction cup. A notable omission is a charger you can plug into a regular 240V powerpoint. A wall charger may not seem completely necessary given the TomTom will spend its life in your vehicle, but there’s a good reason to have a wall charger early in your TomTom’s life.

The PC application that upgrades the TomTom’s firmware will not work unless the TomTom’s battery is fully charged. This is quite frustrating if you’re anything like me when you first get the TomTom. My first instinct was to get online and see if it has the latest firmware and maps. The maps were fine, but the firmware was out of date. I wanted to upgrade as soon as possible and make sure I was working with a unit that had the latest bugs. Sadly, driving around for a while with the TomTom car charger plugged in convinced me it was going to cost me half a tank of fuel to get the TomTom charged up so I purchased a wall charger for $60.

I think I was too hasty. The TomTom charges quite quickly on the car charger, and the battery life is allegedly 4 hours. I haven’t used the wall charger since getting the TomTom to firmware flash-enabling battery levels. Maybe next time there’s a map or firmware update I’ll feel vindicated.

The first thing you do with your new TomTom 300 Go is to stick it to the windscreen of the car.

The suction cup is pretty good, but you need to re-apply it occasionally or your TomTom will spend some time on the floor of your car, or in your lap. The suction cup on the arm is better than it sounds. Rather than having to schplock the arm on the window and hope it sticks you press it to the window then move a lever to generate very satisfactory-feeling suction.

The mounting arm either contains an antenna or being near the car window is a good spot for picking up GPS satellites. Either way, the mounted unit finds satellites faster and more reliably when mounted on the arm than sitting on the passenger’s seat.

The TomTom is designed to snap into the mounting arm and release for secure storage when you leave the car. The mounting mechanism is very tricky to use in the dark, and just plain ordinarily tricky to get right when you have adequate light. It is possible for the TomTom to appear locked into its mount when it isn’t and fall off its mount while you’re driving. I think the mounting catch could have been much better designed. A dead-giveaway that the TomTom 300 isn’t mounted correctly is if the screen goes grey and refuses to pick up any satellites. If this happens, you’re likely to have the TomTom fall in your lap shortly.

Operating the TomTom 300 Go

First thing to do is to touch the TomTom’s screen. You’re now at a page of icons, and the first one is “Navigate to…”

Press that and you’re prompted for Town, Street and then Number — entering information on the touch screen with an alphabetic keyboard (I changed the keyboard to qwerty in the preferences). The keyboard buttons are pretty good for me, but I have made typos. Confusingly there is a backspace and a “back button. Pressing the back button takes you back to the menu rather than erasing a character. It’s a trap for novices and I haven’t been fooled again since about the 10th time I pressed it.

When you first start playing with the TomTom it pops up a few full-screen dialogs to help you out if you’re a novice. One of the first hints was along the lines of “entering the city(/suburb) name in the street address will take you to the center of that city”

Once you have entered your destination address, the unit will prompt you for the type of route to calculate. The options include, fastest, shortest and walking routes.

I general, the shortest route will just try to minimise distance so it is not too useful or practical. The fastest route seems to prefer main roads to back streets and also main roads with fewer traffic lights to main roads with more. I have not yet used the walking route calculation, so I can’t comment.

Once you have chosen the route type, the route is calculated and you might be presented with a yes/no dialog about whether you want to use toll roads or not.

The calculation of a route within Sydney takes about a second. The calculation of a route from Sydney to Melbourne takes less than 10 seconds.

When the route is calculated you press the “done” button and you are presented with a cartoony perspective view of your vehicle (rendered as a blue triangle) sitting on a road.

The bottom left corner shows how far until the next manoeuvre and an arrow showing what that manoeuvre will be. The middle bottom shows distance and estimated time to destination (accurate in light traffic). The right shows estimated time of arrival and GPS “signal strength.”

The perspective view is a marked improvement on the Hertz Neverlost I was used to. The Neverlost has a top-down, traditional map view, which from memory shows as much map behind the car as in front. Neverlost requires manual intervention to zoom the map in so you can read the street names as you approach them. Then you need to manually zoom out to regain your ability to see where the next turn is.

The “3D” perspective view shows streets that are close in front clearly along with their names and allows merging and tangling roads and future turns to be displayed earlier than in a plan view. The perspective view can also be configured to show “points of interest.” I have ours configured to show little icons over the locations of petrol stations and zoos.

Pressing the top-right of the screen will zoom the camera back - increasing the field of view of the “camera” and the top left zooms in. Pressing the bottom left summons the volume control, and the bottom right lets you look at a plan view map, GPS satellite stats and battery charge levels. Pressing the centre of the display takes you to the icon menu.

As you drive, TomTom gives voice instructions. I found the default voice pretty unpleasant, and the Australian male voice provided was a bit grating too. Eventually I settled on one of the UK female voices because she was pleasant sounding and there was good value in listening to someone who seems to be an American trying to put on a British accent. “On the rotary. Go straight. Second exit.” Once we figured out what a rotary was, life was sweet.

The audio cues seem to take a couple of standard forms:

• “Right turn ahead” — anything “ahead” means more than 800m away
• “Right turn in 800m” — at 800m from something you will get a cue to prepare
• “Turn right at the next street” — when that instruction makes sense
• “…and stay in the left lane” — is added when you need to know
• “Keep left” — means stay in the left lane, but don’t take any exits
• “Bear left” — kind of a merging instruction, we’re still not 100% clear on what a “bear” is, but it’s not confusing. Usually it’s a slight turn.
• “Take the highway” — get off your piddly side street and get onto a real road, suckah!

The audio cues are nicely timed and repeated at the right moments. The perspective view draws big green arrows on the road so you can visually confirm the road you’re supposed to end up on.

Stuffing up

If you ignore the TomTom’s instructions or make a mistake may, rarely, ask you to do a U turn. After a few more seconds of ignoring that advice it will recalculate the route — usually in a manner that doesn’t require U turns.

The Hertz Neverlost was obsessed with getting you back onto the route it had sweated blood to calculate for you. I think its voice cues were along the lines of “proceed to the highlighted route!” [ed. corrected June 2008 thanks to Alan's extensive field research] Re-calculating the route required manual intervention, probably because it is older technology that would take a long time to perform the recalculation and prove very annoying if it did it on the fly.

Traveling Salesman Problem

One potential use of satellite navigation is itinerary optimization. Although the TomTom300 allows for multiple way points to be planned, it will not determine the optimal order to visit those way points. If you’re looking for a GPS that solves this, the TomTom 300 isn’t going to solve those NP-hard problems for you.

Bluetooth

The TomTom 300 Go can use your Bluetooth-enabled phone to download traffic and weather reports. Sadly these reports are not available to TomTom users in Australia yet, so bluetooth is strictly for impressing your gadget-loving friends at this time.

Crowd Reaction

My spouse has been using the TomTom 300 Go for nearly a month now. She uses it when she’s uncertain of the location of her destination. So far her reaction has ranged from “It’s fantastic!” to “It fell off the windscreen while I was driving.”

I’ve used it a few times on routes I thought I was pretty familiar with and it has found me a much faster way to go.

I have used it to navigate between:

• Bennelong and Crows Nest
• Bennelong and Thirroul
• Bennelong and Chatswood
• Bennelong and Manly
• Bennelong and Granville
• Bennelong and Newcastle

We have also used it to plan trips to Melbourne. In general, it rocks.

Foibles

The most frequent problem I have found with the TomTom 300 Go is to do with maps. Occasionally, the house number you are traveling to is not in the GPS’ map database so you have to travel to a cross-street or another house number.

One problem I have seen repeated on the same stretch of road is that the fastest algorithm may make suboptimal decisions with certain specific road layouts. The specific example is in Sydney when traveling south down Burns Bay Road when your route is taking you to the exit that gets you onto Victoria Road heading west in the direction of Parramatta. The TomTom 300 tries to get you to take the exit that is usually used to get to Hunters Hill making you pass through a traffic light and down to the Victoria Road exit, rather than waiting to get you onto the exit closer to the turn onto Victoria road. The problem might be that the GPS sees the whole side-road as an exit, and gets you onto it as soon as possible regardless of the lower speed limit and traffic light.

The screen on the TomTom is bright and has good contrast, but you can still lose the ability to see anything useful in sunlight. The upside is that the audio cues are good, and all you usually need, but the visual cues are also very useful and I rue losing them. I’ve moved the TomTom around, but being mounted inside the windscreen makes it impossible to keep it away from direct sunlight.

Conclusion

The TomTom 300 Go with Australian maps is simple to use, and excellent even for someone who thought he knew where he was going. I’m not the only one who likes it. Last week my wife said “I don’t know how we survived without it.”

Update 2006-05-30: Postscript

Also fixed some text.***

Dr Phil Burgess, who featured in an earlier vignette here on Brainsnorkel, is in the news again!

Telstra’s CEO, and Australia’s favourite “public policy and communications” mime were conspicuous in their absense from the Australian Senate Estimates hearings this week. Selected excerpts from today’s excellent Crikey (direct link not available) illustrate the Senate’s ability to do do a very fine improv’ version of Monty Python’s Cheese Shop skit.

Senator CONROY—I note that Mr Trujillo does not seem to be here.

Mr Quilty—That is right.

Senator CONROY—Not good enough for him, again! Is there any chance your boss Dr Burgess is coming, Mr Quilty?

Mr Quilty—Not today.

Senator CONROY—We seem to be missing Mr Gration.

Mr Quilty—The corporate secretary is currently doing a course at Harvard.

Senator CONROY—So we have no-one from Telstra senior management present today at all?

Mr Quilty—We have a range of Telstra executives here today.

Senator CONROY—I used the word ‘senior’. It is not a reflection on anybody at the table—I do want to make that point. Even in the past when Mr Scales graced us with his presence, he would have been considered to be at the senior management level. But there is nobody from Telstra at the senior management level present today.

Mr Quilty—I would say that we have here some very senior—

Senator CONROY—Some fine and excellent people and I have met with many of them over many years now, but nobody from senior management.

Senator RONALDSON—Mr Quilty, if this continues, you will be bringing in the office cat for this in about two years time. [...]

Then the Snark was hunted.

Senator RONALDSON—When was Mr Burgess last in Canberra?

Senator CONROY—He has had his passport revoked for Canberra, Senator Ronaldson!

Mr Quilty—I am not aware of the exact date of his last visit. I would have to take that on notice.

Senator RONALDSON—Do you know whether he has been here this year?

Mr Quilty—I think he has, yes. He definitely has been here this year.

Senator RONALDSON—Absolutely, yes, but I do not think you want me to reinforce the point I made earlier on. He is the head of government relations, he is a senior executive, he could well have been here.
[...]

Finally, Senator Conroy translates Senator Ronaldson’s question for the benefit of the audience.

Senator RONALDSON—So Mr Burgess knows of the matters to be raised today. According to you—and I will take it as a no—he does not view with contempt the Senate estimates process. Why isn’t Mr Burgess here?

Mr Quilty—Telstra has taken a decision that I would lead the team and that, other than that, the team would remain the same as that which was here in February. We believe that we have the people here to answer the questions you will ask.

Senator CONROY—Is there anybody here at the table with an American accent?

Senator COONAN—I am afraid not.

Don’t read the rest of this post if you’re offended by the word for boys’ private parts. And I don’t mean “Eeeew!”
Read the rest of this entry »

Prominent AstroTurf organization CEI has issued some television ads that have some people convinced that The Onion is signaling its intention to move to television. The ad campaign is titled “CO2: they call it pollution, we call it life!”

Treehugger says:

[...]we thought we would look at them to see if they could be parodied, but they cannot, they are already parodies. It is as if they hired Jon Stewart to put them together[...]

Tim Lambert says:

If the CEI staff was locked in an airtight room, would they still call CO2 Life?
[...]
The CEI warns people that using Linux is legally risky, attacked the FDA when it proposed regulating tobacco, and relentlessly attacks Kyoto. It is no doubt just a coincidence that the CEI receives extensive funding from Microsoft, Philip Morris and Exxon.

I had an idea for a new ad in this series. It goes something like this.

Image (cc) Farl

It looks like some good will come from the US FTA in the areas of format shifting and fair use. File this under notable announcements.

MAJOR COPYRIGHT REFORMS STRIKE BALANCE

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock today announced significant copyright reforms which make our laws fairer for consumers and tougher on copyright pirates.

“These are commonsense amendments which will maintain Australia’s copyright laws as the best in the world for the benefit of our creators and other copyright owners and for the many Australians who enjoy their creative works,” Mr Ruddock said.

The changes will, for the first time:

• Make it legal for people to tape their favourite TV or radio program and play it at another time
• Legalise ‘format shifting’ of material such as music, newspapers, books – meaning people can put their CD collection onto IPods or MP3 players
• Provide new exceptions allowing schools, universities, libraries and other cultural institutions to use copyright material for non-commercial purposes
• Provide new exceptions for people with disabilities to allow access to copyright materials
• Allow the use of copyright material for parody or satire
• Provide new enforcement measures to combat copyright piracy including onthe-spot fines, proceeds of crime remedies, a change in presumptions in litigation to make it easier to establish copyright piracy

Research also will be undertaken by the Australian Institute of Criminology on the nature and the extent of piracy and counterfeiting in Australia and how best to respond to the problem.

“Copyright is important and should be respected,” Mr Ruddock said. “That is why the Government is updating our laws to keep pace with technology.”

“Everyday consumers shouldn’t be treated like copyright pirates. Copyright pirates should be not treated like everyday consumers.

The Government also has agreed to remove the statutory cap on licence fees paid by radio broadcasters for using sound recordings. There is no reason why a statute should determine what the rate should be for music played on the radio. [This will not impact on community broadcasters.]

A draft exposure Bill including these and other reforms will be released in the near future to enable further consultation with stakeholders.

[...]

The worrying parts of the press release include “[...] a change in presumptions in litigation to make it easier to establish copyright piracy” and the following from the FAQ:

Q: Can I make a ‘back-up’ copy of a CD in case the original is lost or damaged?

A: No. A format-shift copy must be in a different audio format to the original.

With a lack of forethought or wholesale surrender to DRM, the changes also (explicitly?) exclude copy-protected audio CDs, Software and DVDs from format shifting liberalisation. I suspect these new changes will result in expanded use of DRM and widespread abandonment of the liberalised media formats by copyright holders.

Overall, these changes sounds like good news for Australian consumers who own audio on unprotected tapes, CDs, books and video tapes they would like to format shift. The market effects will probably be bad news for consumers in the long term as media shifts to “protected” media.

The Australia-USA FTA’s requirement for harmonisation of Technical Protection Measures laws is likely to see Australia pass a DMCA-lite bill real soon. Consumers have been offered their carrot, now we’re going to see just how big a stick can be.

** 26-5-2006: Updated with clearer summary and added link to the March 1st 2006 parliamentary report from the “Inquiry into technological protection measures (TPM) exceptions” **

Google Web Toolkit. Write Java, translate to AJAX.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Just wow. I’m motivated to do something, anything, web-based and useful in Java. It’s been a long time since that last happened.

In all of Google’s latest week of ADD therapy (cf. Infectious Greed’s “please Google, no new products”) this is the one that I think is “teh win.” I’m still irrationally happy that Google notebook exists. But by comparison if GWT works as advertised its place in history as a wonder of the Web 2.0 world is assured.

Is it any good?

The V3x is a great phone with a few problems. The size and features are great. The accessories and supporting software leave me cold.

Don’t read the rest of this post expecting a long, detailed review. I will focus on the things that matter to me about the V3x. If I’ve skipped anything you’d like me to cover, or if I’m mistaken, say so in the comments and I’ll try and fill in the blanks.

My needs

My needs aren’t spectacular. I have spent a long, long time being very happy with a Nokia 3200. That should say something.

Why I needed a new phone:

• I got a TomTom Go 300 GPS Navigation unit that talks Bluetooth to a 3G phone to access a traffic web-service for route optimisation. Sadly this has no useful effect in Australia… yet, but TomTom claim to be working on it.
• My 3200 had intermittent problems with its (top left) select button. The select button was vital to unlocking the phone so I could call people, and also vital for accessing the 3200’s only trade-show feature — holding down # to turn the “torch” on and off.
• My spouse got one and it seemed to meet with her approval. There was tension having to arrange places for Nokia and non-Nokia phones to be conveniently charged around the house, so standardising on one phone model was attractive.
• Keeping up with the Joneses

The most important features of a mobile phone for me (in descending order of importance):

1. Audio quality,
2. Headset quality,
3. Mute,
4. Battery life, and
5. Speakerphone

Yes, you read correctly. Mute at number 3 with a bullet and no sign of 3G porn.

Most of the time that my mobile and I spend together I’m on mute. That’s because I use my mobile phone to attend conference calls and meetings while I’m out of the office. Usually when I’m out of the office on a call I’m around screaming children and clattering dishes. If you have spent any time on an audio conference bridge, you very quickly become thankful that mobile phones have mute capabilities.

Physical design

Size: 86.3 x 47 x 24.4 millimeters

Compact. Palm-sized when closed, and not so small you have to operate it with a magnifying glass and tweezers. It is small and flat enough to fit in a pants pocket unobtrusively, and rounded so you don’t have nasty sitting-down accidents. It opens up to be large enough to reach from your ear to your mouth and feels like a “real” phone hand set that you speak into rather than away from.

Weight: 96 grams

Solid-feeling. Seems to be constructed with a plastic shell around electronics mounted in an aluminium chassis. The guy in the shop said the solid build (more solid than the slimmer, non-3G, V3) helps with speakerphone audio. The speakerphone is pretty good, but is it because of a solid chassis? Dunno.

Physical external connections: Mini-USB

The Mini-USB port is the only physical plug. It is used for:

1. Recharging with one of the two supplied AC-adapter chargers
2. Plugging in the stereo headset
3. Connecting to the USB port on the PC

This means you can’t recharge the phone and use the headset at the same time, something the Nokia 3200 could do with a socket for recharging and headset.

Also of note (because someone asked) is that the phone has a slot for a micro-SD card next to the SIM and battery to help with your MP3-dependent lifestyle. My V3x came with an almost adequate 64MB micro-SD card. Strangely I can take photographs into the phone’s memory, but the option to take photographs directly onto the SD-card results in mysterious sounding error messages.

Two displays

One display, a 96 x 80 pixel colour display, is on the outside of the clam-shell. This small display gives you caller ID, the time, message counts and ringer setting feedback while the case is closed.

The large display, 320 x 240 TFT, is only visible and active when the phone is open. Though, like the light in the refrigerator, I can’t be sure it’s not active when it’s shut.

Two cameras

One camera is “VGA” and faces you as you look at the main display. This is the video camera used for showing your face in video calls. The other camera is 2 mega pixels, and faces outwards for still and video photography with the large display as viewfinder.

Here are two examples of V3x photographs. One photograph shows the macro mode to show the bundled headset and the Blue Ant 3x Bluetooth headset I purchased as a replacement (more about that below). The other photograph is an attempt to demonstrate how the phone deals with long shots. Click each one to view larger versions.

This is a pretty serviceable camera.

Soft features

I can’t say I’ve taken a thorough tour of all of the features of the RAZR. The features I like most are voice dialling and the browser.

The built-in no-name browser works well for the one URL I go to with my piddling data allowance: Gmail.

Voice dialing is very good. There is a button on the side of the phone to activate voice commands, and the hook/flash on the headset activates voice commands too. The voice recognition is much better than the voice synthesis the phone uses to confirm whom you’re dialling, but it’s still a great feature for driving.

Mute is a little hard to get to. Once you’re on a call, it’s about 5 clicks away to mute, and two key-presses to unmute. This seemed a little lame, so I purchased a Bluetooth headset (see below) that has a mute function. The problem is that the Blue Ant 3x bluetooth headset has three buttons in, if you excuse my ASCII art, a small “(o)” button formation over the earpiece. The “o” is the hook/flash button which is also used for answering calls, power, and waking up the phone’s voice dialling according to the phone’s state and the length of key press. Pressing the “(” increases volume. “)” is volume decrease. Holding “(” and “)” down simultaneously mutes. Accidentally pressing “o” while on a call hangs up the phone. A few experiments convinced me that it was impossible for me to mute the headset without hanging up the damn phone.

A lot of online reviews say the V3x doesn’t have an operating system. Of course it does, but not a name brand one that Motorola is happy to talk about (greater than 50% chance it’s VxWorks?). In mobile phone speak, not having an operating system means it doesn’t run a Palm, Windows or Symbian variant. It does have a J2ME engine. If you’re enthusiastic, the development guide is available online.

Audio quality

Audio quality is pretty good. Pretty good means it does not sound as good as my old Nokia 3200 brick which I consider very good. Although the headphone audio is just good, the microphone audio transmitted seems much better quality than the Nokia 3200 on a quick voice mail test.

One item of note is the very funky-looking stereo headset. I spent two hours on conference calls with the bundled headset soon after getting the phone and noticed two things about it:

1. It’s uncomfortable. You can see the shape of the ear pieces in the macro photo above. These ear pieces don’t fit in my ear comfortably. The ear buds fall out of my ears and I spend a lot of time holding them in place or putting them back into my ears.
2. Talking seems to make the phone go half-duplex. When I’m talking on this headset I can’t hear any incoming audio. There isn’t any sidetone either, so it’s an unsatisfactory experience on the whole.

I quickly went out and purchased a Blue Ant 3x Bluetooth headset, which has much better audio quality, seems to make a good fist of being full-duplex, and stays in my ear.

PC Connectivity

The PC connectivity suite has some entertaining variations to the theme I identified earlier. People who own this phone have no respect for other peoples’ personal space…

…or they are modern-day Plastic Bertrands:

Moral: If you see someone with a RAZR V3x operating in camera mode — stand clear.

The PC software links to the phone through Bluetooth or USB to establish a 3G Internet connection. Useful for people with laptops and a better phone plan than my Telstra “Cheap-Ass” AU$20/month 3G plan.

Contacts and schedules can be synchronised with Outlook and Outlook Express, or imported and exported to text. The sync process I have used is manual, though there is an automated process that seems to rely on performing a sync when the Phone Connect application starts up at PC login. This is nowhere near as seamless as the sync function on a Windows or Symbian system, but I haven’t explored sufficiently to figure out if I need to be more charitable or damn it utterly.

In the end…

1. Audio quality is good
2. Bundled headset quality is poor. Remedied by buying a Bluetooth headset
3. Mute is less convenient than I’d like it to be, but it exists
4. Battery life is excellentgood (I bow to Sunny’s mobile cred)
5. Speakerphone is very good

I like it.

Just saying.

I had spent the evening researching the process of upgrading my Linksys WRT54G v2 to Sveasoft Talisman Firmware 1.2 RC 1. 1.2 RC1 solves a problem I would like solved — Sipura DHCP compatibility. 1.2 also adds a feature I want to play with — Multiple Wireless SSIDs and authentication from one box.

About 15 minutes before I thought I should really be sleeping I decided to execute the upgrade plan. Bad, bad, bad Chris.

1. Locate the image file with known-good current router firmware.
2. Check registered MAC address against router. Download 1.2RC1. Genuflect to warnings about using snapshot firmware.
3. Back up the router settings.
4. Do a long reset (hold down the reset button for 15 seconds) to reset configuration to defaults.
5. Log into the web interface with default login/password credentials.
6. Upgrade firmware to 1.2 RC1.
7. Attempt to login…

Hmm. The default username and password no longer work.

I give up and sleep. Fitfully.

I was assisted in waking up at 5am by my baby daughter, so I thought I’d try some new things to resurrect the router before work.

I hunted around with Google Desktop Search (I had no Internet connectivity at this time) to see if I could find anything that could help. Thankfully I quickly found something I’d overlooked during my research.

For future reference, since about Sveasoft Talisman 1.1 the default username and password have changed to admin and admin, from [blank] and admin.

I foresee an evening of restoring my previous configuration settings followed by an early night and the peaceful sleep of someone who has configured two SSIDs on one router.

Yeah right.

Via Tristero on Digby — President Bush discloses his happiest moment in office: Reeling in a big perch from his own lake.

War and Piece, among others, reports that Porter Goss, head of the CIA, resigned suddenly last week. Media analysis blames personality conflicts and an impending airing of dirty laundry in developing “Hookergate” scandal.

I, however, have a better explanation. Here is a transcript of The President in conversation with Porter Goss shortly before his resignation:

GOSS: You know that perch you caught?

GWB: The big one at the ranch lake? Ol’ Osama Bin Perch?

GOSS: Yes.

GWB: Of course. He gave up after a long fight. He didn’t count on doing battle with “The Decider.” Heh heh heh.

GOSS: The CIA received intelligence there were no perch in your lake.

GWB: Mmm?

GOSS: A CIA diver attached that perch to your lure.

GWB: ?!!!

GOSS: Yes. Our most difficult and successful covert operation since Special Agent Harry Whittington was injured during a quail-herding operation.

GWB: Get me Negroponte on the phone. NOW!

You know it’s true.

I have a new phone. It’s a Motorola RAZR V3x 3G UMTS clam shell. I got it because it was a nice solid full featured phone that was AU$0 down on a cheap-ass AU$20/month two year plan.

The V3x has some great and annoying features that I will cover later along the lines of recent Girtby.net and OddThinking phone-toutin’ posts.

This post is about realising that I’m an impostor. I should not own this phone. I’m not in this phone’s demographic.

Exhibit A: The PC sync/update application’s splash screen. Helping to dispel the myth that pretty much every 3G business case is built around porn.

Exhibit B: I had been calling my phone’s colour “blue.” I’m mistaken. The colour is “Cosmic Universe Blue,” and I’m sure the capitalisation is important.

Upon considering these two pieces of evidence I thought I’d been sold the wrong phone. A good phone salesperson would determine quickly that I need a phone that comes in “Video Killed The Radio Star Commodore 64 Beige” with a picture of Mr T and Sheena Easton on the splash screen.

Never mind. I set about bringing the phone kicking and screaming into my demographic.

I was sure it would reject me for attempting to use ring-tones that were older than, say, the canon of Coldplay or Britney Spears. Fortunately I’ve managed to sneak on the opening bars of Bureau’s “Only For Sheep” and Epyx Games’ C64 classic voice talent from Impossible Mission: “Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay forever.”

If I can figure out how to get it to make 300 baud modem negotiation sounds when it connects to the Internet I’ll be right at home.

** Update: Fixed broken image link in single page view **

Kudos to Chris and the crew on a successful launch for the very slick Collectik (”like mixtapes for podcasts”).

It’s a cool interface for looking at what other podcast subscribers are interested in and how they tag their interests. Collectik is also excellent for marshaling your own mix of podcast feeds and shows to consume as a single feed.

The problem it solves for me is that my podcast listening habits are sporadic. iTunes (my podcast thinger of choice) likes me to be a regular listener of a podcast or it will stop downloading it to save bandwidth. When I get on an airplane, or a long train ride I count my blessings that iTunes decided a month ago that I didn’t need to download the latest Radio National AM or PM on my iPod any more because I don’t listen to it frequently enough. Grumble.

Anyway, Collectik allows me to bundle up a bunch of feeds that I can subscribe to through iTunes. Consequently I access that feed frequently enough that iTunes doesn’t stop downloading my rarely-listened to, but highly treasured, podcasts so they’re available to me when they’re most needed.

Take a look.