a view through my own eyes

Tomorrow is going to be a long day.

In the morning I have a hospital appointment to check up on the wonkiness of my eyes, whilst I wait I will need a book to read.

Then it is off to work where we are running the area First Lego League finals, for which I need my camera and associated bits and bobs as a few of us usually use it as an opportunity to skive off work, take publicity shots and play who has the biggest lens.

After that I need to sort out some stuff for a seminar in the evening, for which I ideally need my laptop and all the relevant notes, paper and a couple of pens.

Between that whole lot its a rather large amount of stuff to need to lug around which needs assorted bags.

In an ideal world I could have a rucksack that will easily swing round to my front to allow quick access to my camera, it will also have room for a modest selection of lenses and other bits and bobs. Also it will have room for my laptop, stacks of papers, a couple of pens, a paperback book and finally room to stick my lunch (as in a couple of sarnies, a banana and a bottle of water). Most importantly it needs to have an antigravity device so it weighs nothing fully loaded and be small so it takes no room at all.

So why is it then that every woman I know manages to get everything they could ever possibly need ‘just in case’ in a teeny weeny handbag, but I cannot find a bag as described above that would actually be useful?

Yes I bought an iPhone – there I have said it.

A lot of people seem to either utterly rave about them or completely hate them.

Before I bought the phone, I read reviews (like at Arstechnica which is a tome in its own right) and more popular but not quite so geeky sites, so I did go in with my eyes, open aware of most faults and benefits.

Here are my thoughts:

It is primarily a telephone and an iPod.

As a telephone that makes/receives calls and has a working integrated address book it is absolutely brilliant. These are the primary uses for a telephone as far as I am concerned if it cannot do that and do it well then the phone is kind of pointless. The other thing that is essential and is related is that you must be able to backup the address book, the iPhone syncs to the Address book on my Mac (I gather it works equally well with Outlook and Windows – but I have not tried it and have no intention of doing so), it does so perfectly.

Getting my old address book from my PDA (Palm) and old phone (Sony Ericsson W800i) resulted in duplicated and corrupted entries in the Address book which took several hours to clean up and sort out. Now the PDA and old phone are out of the loop it is finally consistent and tidy.

The same can be said for the calendar application – it just works. It may not be the most advanced calendar tool in the world, I don’t need it to be. It does repeats until a date, does alarms and does not need to do much else. By the way – add a contact to the address book and assign a birthday and it automatically gets put in the calendar – something that I have been wanting the Palm to do for about the last ten years (Yes I know that the Psion did it years ago but my Psion is dead and would not sync with anything these days anyway).

The UI is intuitive and ‘just works’ even an idiot could use it (well I am managing), actually I am going to go so far as to say that this is the best mobile device UI I have ever used. Yes an on screen keyboard is a tad odd and does take a few minutes to get used to but its a damn site better than piddly little keys and because it is on screen it does not need to slide out of have to allow for movement which keeps the size of the phone down. Go to an Apple store or to a phone store and have a play, dare you.

Thats the really good stuff out of the way.

Text messaging; the SMS app is good, messages are threaded and so you can keep track of conversations. The only real downsides are that you cannot send a text to multiple recipients and that you cannot send multimedia texts though to be fair I cannot say that I have ever really needed to do either and tend to use email anyway. The best thing though, is that when a text is received it is automatically displayed on the screen so you can just pick the phone up and read it, no unlocking and then fumbling for the SMS app and then reading it, the message is just there.

The mail client does IMAP which is essential in my view, again this integrates with the address book. No you cannot send BCC mail or digitally sign mail which is a pity but something I do rarely anyway (but then I still stick by the principle of don’t put anything in email that you would not put on the back of a postcard). To read email and send email its fine, I would not use it as my regular email application but to keep track of my mail and send a few out that cannot wait until I am back to my desktop/laptop its fine.

The web browser is great, OK it does not do Flash or Java but on the whole I consider that a good thing, if it had an advert blocker it would be better still. I cannot say that I have had any pages fail to render correctly – no doubt there are some but the same can be said for any browser.

Wifi is mostly excellent, it does work with WPA2 at home, so I can surf the web whilst using the loo (should I choose to do so) and quietly check the football (where the ball is round) results without digging out the laptop. The only downside is that it does not support WPA2 Enterprise mode so I cannot use the wifi at work but there I have a machine on my desk and I can borrow a laptop without issue anyway.

Surfing using the GPRS/Edge data stream works and is as sluggish as expected, I am not that fussed, if I am out of wifi range then just to be able to load a webpage is to be honest a bonus in my view. Maybe a full 3G connection would be nice but then if I am out I don’t want to be online all the time, I don’t want to be able to surf the web or read my mail everywhere I go. As it is the phone automatically pulls my personal mail all the time even over EDGE/GPRS which is kind of nice but may well turn out to be a pain.

There is a camera – no it is not great. It is fine for the odd snap, but if you want a good quality picture of something then use a real camera, after all it is a telephone.

The iPod side of the iPhone is well an iPod I don’t really need to say more, maybe it would be nice if there was more storage than 8GB but taking a quick look around it appears that no other phones currently offer more than 8GB anyway, so again it is primarily a telephone and not an iPod. If I want to carry my entire music collection round with me then I will need a bigger mp3 player than you can currently buy anyway. Filtering music down to a discrete selection is hardly any work in iTunes.

The one BIG fault that I have with the iPhone is that there is no visual indicator on screen to show that call forwarding is enabled which is a right royal pain in the bottom if you forget that it is turned on. I did and thought the phone was broken.

One thing I would like it to do is make more use of bluetooth, being able to connect my GPS to the phone and hooking in to Google Maps would be great. As would being able to sync the phone to my laptop without having to tether via the USB cable.

Most of the downsides mentioned are software issues which could probably be resolved. To be honest I expect that Apple will resolve them by the time that the SDK is released and the phone is then open to third party applications. I will be very suprised if there is not a massive software update with fixes and some extras before third party developers can get their hands on it for real.

A lot of people have complained that you cannot allocate your own ringtones, if you want something different you have to buy it. THIS IS A GOOD THING! If you want to change your ringtone to the sound of a constipated cow finally getting one out that is up to you – but since its a bloody stupid idea you can damn well pay for it. Sorry but I feel that a telephone should sound like a telephone! Yes it is a ringtone tax – I really do not care. Also lets be honest here, Apple are only doing what ringtone sales companies have been doing for years anyway, they are just able to force you to pay for the ringtone. At the end of the day its only a notification that the phone is ringing, the fact that your phone does not sound like B52 flying overhead is hardly a hardship, if anything its a good thing as perhaps then I won’t get so annoyed at peoples phones going off on the train/bus/wherever with some stupid bloody tune. Then again perhaps I am one of the few people in the world who like my ringtone to be fairly discrete. Damn I sound like Victor Meldrew.

The biggest complaint that I have seen in reviews is that it is not perfect, but most of the reviews seem to want the phone to 1. do everything and 2. do it perfect. No phone does. At the end of the day it is a phone and what it does do it does incredibly well and I would rather that than it tried to do everything and do it badly. No one is forcing you to buy an iPhone if you don’t like it don’t buy one, if you want the perfect swiss army phone go and make one yourself – you will probably make a killing but don’t forget that it needs to be usable.

At the end of the day the UI is amazing (there I have said it) and is so nice and easy to use, other phone companies will I think have received an eye opener as this is Apples first go at a mobile phone and in terms of usability it is light years ahead of the competition.

[edit] more detail alert from original version!

Well today was dipping from the fountain of artificial youth day.

Yes I had botox treatment.

The plan is that the muscles behind my left are are tweaked on a temporary basis (a couple of months tops) to see how things work out.

So today I see the optometrist again to repeat the measurements with prisms and to ascertain whether I will suffer from double vision – we don’t think that I will and the measurements came out the same as on the two previous occasions. They then explain the procedure so I know what will be happening.

Then I see the consultant (different one for this job), who explains the potential problems – as he put it the odds of it seriously affecting my eye are at about the same level as a general anesthetic going tits up. Also the reason we are doing this in the left cornea transplanted eye – is that if it does go tits up then only one eye is rogered. So sign off on the consent forms.

So then we wait, its a short simple job so they do several of us one after the other. As we wait the optometrist goes round applying anaesthetic eye drops – 4 in all. Eventually it is my go to be done.

Lying down on the bed they stick in more drops, swab my face with an alcohol swab and apply a couple of electrodes – these allegedly, combined with a sensor on the very big needle go to a box that makes a crackling noise that changes depending on the density of the muscles in the appropriate area combined with the needle.

Anyhow the plan is that the area is numbed, a very big needle is inserted down the side of my eye into the muscle and botox injected and then held in place for around thirty seconds.

Things started getting interesting when I asked if I should still feel the eye drops going in, so they added some more and some more, oh and some more. So gently they poked the side of my eye which I could not feel although I could still feel the drops – which I should not be able to do. After a brief discussion which went along the lines of: if it hurts let us know – we went ahead.

Next stage is to ensure that I cannot close my eye whilst this goes on, the major downside is that I get a ringside seat of the humungous needle and the surgeon peering through mini binoculars strapped to his head. To hold the eye open they use a speculum which fits around the eye and clamps the eyelids open – well it should because it kept slipping loose which was almost a stuff this I am out of here excuse. In the end one of the nurses had to hold the thing still as it was not clamping properly on its own.

So at this point we have a nurse holding the clamp thing still, another nurse who wants to reassure me (more detail on this coming right up), an optometrist applying eye drops to ensure that the eye stays clean and refreshed and another optometrist playing with a box that is wired up to me via the electrodes and the mahoosive needle, and finally the surgeon who from my angle and frame of mind at that moment was the last person I wanted to see.

The needle slipped in most of the way without issue, then it went into the muscle. At which point it hurt, it hurt enough for me to point out that it bloody well hurt – actually I yelled out ‘OW’ rather loudly. The consultant mentioned that he was in as far as need be now, could I live with it for another thirty seconds? So I lived with it, whilst doing the best I could to destruct the bed with my hands that were gripping the sides and gouging into the mattress. The needle came out and to be honest it hurt, I don’t want to think how much it would have hurt without the anaesthetic.

Whilst this was going on, one of the nurses asked me: “would you like me to hold your hand?”! My initial thought was: ‘fuck off you condescending cow’, instead I replied: “actually I would rather concentrate on deconstructing this bed with my bare hands”. She took the hint.

Five minutes later I am off the bed and out into the waiting area with instructions to wait a few minutes before setting off. To be honest there was no way I was staying, so despite the fact I was shaking like a leaf – I legged it and mrspao followed.

So now back home it is late in the evening, my eye is weepy, a bit bloodshot and I don’t think that mrspao has noticed the blood on the outside of my eye. Also it hurts, it hurts rather a bit. The optometrist did warn me that it could be rather sore for a couple of days.

Over the next few days the botox should kick in and my eyes should straighten out. Next week I go back and see the optometrist as a followup to see if it has been successful, in time I can go for full surgery for a permanent correction – that at least will be under general anaesthetic.

All in, I hope that the procedure has worked and that my eyes are straightened out if only on a trial basis, I really detest the panorama vision and mostly I hate the way the vision goes weird when I switch eyes (I just can – I don’t get 3D vision like most people) – this should sort that out as when I switch eyes both eyes move. Most of all I would like to be able to look mrspao in both eyes at the same time.

But as the title said, there is no way I am having the botox done again. How some people have it done on a regular basis I don’t know.