Yupp, it’s an iPhone!

I’m sitting here in my room relaxing to some Internet radio. Is it playing via my MacBook? No, it’s coming via my iPhone!

There you have it, I went for the iPhone. I check-out some of the Android phones, mainly HTC, and also had a quick look at Blackberry, Nokia N9x and some Windows Mobile phones. The iPhone is, at this moment in time, the best you can get in Scandinavia. I leave room for the Pre possibly being more to my taste, since judging by the videos I’ve seen it might. However, it is not yet available up here.

So what did win me over to the iPhone in the end? It was a combo of many things, and it has to be said for full disclosure, price did play a part since I got the 3G rather than the 3GS. But after doing my research I can say this to for the iPhone. It has, by far, the most vibrant developer community today. Both in the form of web apps and actual downloadable apps. The geekerati may think Apples practices concerning approval of apps is idiotic, and mostly I agree with them, but that does not detract from the fact that they have more, often better, and cheeper apps than all the other platforms. (An app for S60 can easily be something like €5 …) In short, the iPhone is much more mature than any other platform. Which ironically includes platforms much older than iPhone OS, such as Windows Mobile and S60.

That the iPhone is a better looking device than most of the others help a lot too…

Another area where Apple is way ahead, and I don’t see anyone else, again with the possible exception of Palm, catching up, is hardware add-ons. These are expensive to make and therefor works best in a highly standardized environment. The iPhone has a standard UI, a standard iPod connecter and Apple certifies the stuff! Android is touted as the main threat to the iPhone, BUT all Android phones have variations when it comes to UI. All Android phones have different hardware with different connectors and so on. It’s a mess, and I don’t think Google will even think to standardize this.

So, as a brief summary: right now, there is little doubt that the best smartphone on the market from a usability POV is the iPhone. Yes other phones have better cameras, better screens, better what ever. But the iPhone is one of very few phones, possibly the only phone, that is more than the sum of it’s parts. For me, it’s well worth 299 SEK a month for two years. After that? Who knows.

Tobias

Halloween!

I feel a little like Moaning Myrtle from Harry Potter right now. I’m sitting here thinking about death. Yes, dear readers, it’s that time again; Halloween.

I just had a small, informal ceremony by the fire under the oak. I prayed a little, I thought a lot, gazed at the moon, remembering the dead. I even had my wedding rings out, to try to say goodby to that life. It is time to move on. It will be tough, it will be hard. But I want to find someone new, and I need to let my old life go. I think today was a step in the right direction.

Another thing I did, was thinking about my previous lives. I am a believer in reincarnation, though I can’t claim to know how it works. I do believe one of my recent lives was that of a lowly soldier, in either the French or British army. I think I died during the Great War, and I think I bled to death from a shot in either my chest or my stomach. Why do I believe this? Because I’ve done some self-hypnosis, some meditation etc. on the topic, and this is one of the lives I’ve found. I can remember what it felt like to bleed to death. Does that make it true? No, it could be a false memory of course, but to me it was an extremely vivid experience. I can’t really explain it as such, but please feel free to ask about it! Some day I hope to do a “real” regression, and see if I can find out more.

This was just a short musing over death and Halloween. I hope you enjoy it, if you have anything you want to ask about this samhain thing, or have anything you want to tell me about what you think or feel about death, Halloween etc. please, I love to discuss it!

Happy Halloween to everyone!

Tobias

Self confidence

Self confidence. Some people have it, some seem to not even know what it means. Where does it come from? I, personally, should be fairly self confident. My parents are, I’ve been brought up to believe in my self, and it has had some effect. I have a great sense of self worth! I do not find my self worthless or unimportant. BUT, when it comes to confidence, I just can’t seem to get it right.

This is most evident in relation to relationships, and how to engage in romantic ones. And I of course realize that this is stupid, but when ever I am faced with the issue, I crumble. I have no problem addressing high-flyers at the University, but faced with a woman I am interested in, and I don’t seem to have any guts at all. It’a a tragic thing.

I would seem I am not alone in this. A literary reference (or I could be wrong and this is a quote from the movie) would be for instance Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where Ron bemoans the fact that Harry stoutly fights dragons, but just can’t muster the courage to ask a girl to the Yule Ball.

Why do females intimidate us men so much. We are supposed to be capable of fighting, hunting and be heroic in general (I mean, let’s face it, genetically the purpose of men are to shag for babies and fight each other…). But, faced with a woman we have feelings for, and even the strongest man shrink at sight. Why is this? Is it some sort of a mother complex, are we really so weak?

In my own case I’ve also started to see a pattern concerning my friends. Many of them, both men and women, have, independently of each other, told me I am a rather strapping young man and definitely a bit of a catch. Why is this so hard to take in? Why is the positive stuff so much harder to listen to than the bad. And the bad is just in my head! The more I think about this the less it makes sense. Whoever came up with the preposterous idea that humans are, on the whole, rational beings didn’t really observe humans, now did they? We are emotionally driven creatures, with abnormally large brains.

At the end of the day, it may be a very simple solution that is required. And that is to channel the genetic courage from millennia of surviving (after all, we are the best based on darwinian principles) tigers, wolfs and fleas. What the world needs now, is love, sweet love, and a gargantuan portion of courage!

Thobias

My eternal curse

My dear readers, Halloween is drawing nearer and  this time I therefor want to tell you about a curse. A curse that has afflicted me since I was very young. I can’t remember exactly when I was cursed, but I was.

I have always had a lot of female friends. I have male friends as well, but I think a quick head count quickly show that I am one of “the girls”. And this is where the curse stems from. I have been labeled NICE! This is the gravest accusation that can taint a guy’s life, and potentially ruin it forever. At least in so far as any romantic involvements goes.

You might think being nice is a good thing, and in many ways it is. I don’t want to hurt people, nail kittens to walls, shoot people or terrorize women. You know bad-boy stuff. But, bad boys do get all the fun when it comes to girls too. A girlfriend of mine, as in a friend who is also a girl, once tried to dispute my point. She stopped after I pointed out that she has had two long term relationships during the time we’ve known each other, both, she had to agree, were bad boys. At least when she met them.

I’ve entered into friendships by accident from time to time, because, well, I really wanted something else. But somehow I ended up a GOOD FRIEND; or worse, a NICE guy. It’s death for a young man like me. Instant zombiefactor! Is this at all avoidable? Again, I don’t want to become a jerk. And I don’t mean to stereotype here, but I will, many women seem to prefer idiot men who treat them in dubious ways. Why the F is that?

What I want tips about from you, dear reader, is this: How do you avoid the “nice” label, without treating women and others badly?

Thobias

Love…

It is time for me to bare my heart for a moment. Other people chose do that in a diary, but on the other hand they talk this stuff over with friends. And that is something I am not yet ready to do. Also I’d like to add a disclaimer, no I don’t think I’m anonymous on the net. I think I am one of the most easily tracked down people I know. It’s just, being disembodied helps me be more me, in a way.

Love is a strange thing. When you have it, you are often not sure if it’s true, and the you lose it, and at once you realize just how much you were in love. That was me, about six months ago. I don’t think I realized how much I actually loved my wife, until she went away. Now? I don’t know. I still feel a pang of pain when I see her, but I would under oath tell you, that is not the person I married. I can’t put my finger on what or why, but there is something about her I do not recognize. Would I want her back? Put it like this, right now I feel like if I never saw her again, that would be one week too soon…

These days I have another form for problem. What to do when love strikes again. Now, I have always had an easy time getting infatuated with women. I think I may be harder pressed to fall in love, as it were. One reason for the latter is that I am shy, and have low self-esteem (though a good sense of self-worth, these are not the same thing). I have never really had the guts to tell a girl that I might be interested in her. Why you ask. I don’t really know actually. On the one hand, that is. The reason the old me, the one still inhabiting part of my mind, would give, is that they would laugh at me, humiliate me, be disgusted or that I would ruin a good friendship. Because that adds to the complexity of the problem, I tend to get infatuated by women I know. I don’t have to know them well, but I rarely fall for strangers.

I look around and I see people with much more of a weight problem than I have, finding plenty of girlfriends/boyfriends. Why shouldn’t I be able to get “my share” so to speak? The truth, of course is, that when you don’t tell said girl what you feel, how the hell would she know. Which in turn, turns this in to an excellent Catch 22. (Probably not quite right, but you get my drift…) I mean, even as I write this my heart is pounding in my chest, and I feel faint. The mere thought of telling a woman, and yes as may have guessed there is a special someone I am thinking about, makes me feel queasy.

It’s a sad state of affairs, and I really do not know what to do about it. Should I tell her, and risk all that, or leave it be and just hope that she is happy, while potentially remaining single and unhappy myself?

Question – Do I think you need to be a couple to be happy? Well, no. But I am more and more sure I do. I think that is very personal, and I work best in a duo.

If she ever were to read this, though I don’t think she even has an inkling as to my feelings for her, I guess what I would like to tell you goes something like this:

I think you are amazing. You make a room brighter by your mere presence. You make my heart smile, and I drown in your mysterious eyes. I am by no means sure what it is I am feeling for you, I just know that my heart aces when I’m not near you. Would you consider going to the movies with me, and maybe to a restaurant some time. Just for a date. I would be the happiest man on earth if you said yes. Then we could spend some time trying to find out what my feelings are, and if they are mutual.

I think I may be in love with you, would you be interested in finding out together?

Thobias

Obama and the Peace Prize

So the Peace Prize has been awarded yet another US president. This time it is Barack Obama, 44th president. It seems it was a long time since this award was quite so debated. Is it right, is it wrong. Should someone “more deserving” have gotten the prize instead? I’ve even heard rumored that Twitter may have been considered. From what I’ve understood, most of the nay sayers would have prefered to have Prime Minister of Zimbabwe Morgan Tsvangirai as winner.

Now, I’m not trying to say that Prime Minister Tsvangirai wouldn’t have been a deserving winner, and I do agree that President Obama is perhaps not ideal. Afterall, his is a country currently engaged in war in two countries and he is pro death penalty.

But, and I think is the point the Norwegian Nobel Committee have wanted to get across, this is not a prize given just for what is achieved to date. It is also given as a means to put pressure on politicians, organizations etc. And by giving this to what may be one of the, at least outside the US, most popular and dynamic US president in years, the committee effectively rubs America the right way.

And with the wars, I urge people to remember this. They may have been started for dubious reasons, but we, the international community, can’t just let the Iraqis go now. Nor the Afghans. We need to make sure we leave those countries as stable as possible, so that they won’t just collapse and pave the way for even more hardship. And to the point concerning death penalty, this is a tricky one. But I believe this is an issue we will have to battle over time with the US. In the EU we do not allow the death penalty, and we have plenty nations on our side. The way to handle this issue is not to attack Barack Obama. Where he comes from, it is not an illegal action, and we can do exactly nothing to make it illegal except through diplomacy and through the UN. My point is, in the context of this prize, I am not sure his views on the death penalty is a valid argument, precisely because it is an internal US affair and the committee have, in their nomination, pointed to President Obama’s international efforts. That said, he should now be very encouraged to have the federal government start working against the death penalty. Although I have a feeling, it will be just as hard to get them to do that as it is to start to see sense concerning gun control.

So, in conclusion of this my little approval of Obama, I have to say I was as surprised as the next person at his winning. But I think it will empower him to make more of an effort with nuclear disarmament, ending the wars and reestablish the US as an international ally. It may even make effect US internal policies, like death penalty laws. Like it or not, we need the US. We need it in Europe, we need it in the UN we need it in the world. That’s not to say we can accept any kind of behaviour, and that’s precisely why it’s a good idea to promote anything resembling a proper policy administration in the White House.

It was a surprise to Obama, who said, “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize”, continuing, “But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women and all Americans want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents.” – Wikipedia 2009-10-11

Thobias

Feelings

As a man I can, with resounding verve, say that feelings are hard. While I won’t go so far as some other men and claim the frontal lobe to be a complete waste and as such should be devolved, I do recognize the difficulty it has put us as a race, and men in particular, in.

Women seem to complain that men do not understand their feelings, and guys, we don’t. We have no way of really understanding why several pairs of what to us essentially looks like the same damn shoe seems like a good idea. However, this does not detract from the fact that the ladies do feel this.

“Oh”, I hear you say, “he is just going to write a post where he is facetious and makes fun of women! I won’t read another word.” Well, that is your choice, but hang in there. I am just pointing out that there are differences as to what we feel. Men feel passionate about stuff most women, and some men (my self included) will never even begin to fathom. Like football. Why is it fun to watch men who undoubtedly have nice physical genes, although I’m less sure about the more brain-related ones, kick a leather-bound ball around on a nice lawn?

The question here is: Does it matter?

Both sexes feel, in spite many mens assurance that they certainly have never felt anything. Although they did cry that one time, but their team had lost and their dog had died. And anyway all the beer was gone… And the fact that we all feel, young or old, black or white, man or woman makes this an integral part of who we are. (Now please don’t start saying “Well animals feel too!” I know they do, but this article is about us, so f@ck ‘em)

Now, in the best pseudo-scientific tradition, I have concluded that both men and women feel. So let me ask the followup: Why does it seem so damn hard for me to handle feelings? (I’ve left the world of generalizations behind here and I am now venturing into my own murky depths.) One example here is when my ex-wife told me she wanted a divorce. Right there and then I reacted with slight anger, then by being quiet. The day after, when alone in the flat, I cried. I cried for a whole day, so much so that the cat’s started to look worried. But during that whole thing, through the numbing pain and sticky tears, I couldn’t shake the feeling of looking like an idiot and sounding even worse. “What if someone heard me?” Now I’m asking my self, so what? Everyone is sad from time to time, and I’m raised to be “soft”. But still, in the whole male “culture” (or what ever you want to call it…) there is a feeling of “you can’t cry, ’cause only women and people of deviant sexual orientations (from a writing point of view, the days before political correctness were definitely more frugal) cry”.

But why the hell shouldn’t I cry. It was one of the most heart wrenching moments of my young life. What should I’ve done? Laughed? Swallowed and stored it away in the container marked “psycho” and take it out a rainy day when I’m fifty? No, crying is good. Crying is cathartic. But still shameful. I don’t know about other men, but to me it’s almost, if not more, shameful than masturbation. (I don’t masturbate, but I’ve heard it’s popular…). Why is that? Most of my female friends have cried with friends, strangers, me etc. around. I don’t think I’ve cried even once with them around. Not because I want to be macho, but because I just feel like I can’t. I cry during movies, but do I show that to anyone? Hell no!

At the other end of the spectrum is dating and falling in love. I recently signed up for a dating service. Have I used it? No, not really. The recommendations written for me by some of my friends made me blush, and there are plenty of good looking women my age on the site. So why have I not been on a date? Well, frankly, flirting on-line fells like just another sure-fire way of getting rejected. How do you approach women? I’ve got plenty of female friends. I think most of them love me in that platonic-boring-we’re-just-friends kind of way. Approaching women and hanging out with them in the sense of being friends have never been difficult to me. In many ways I prefer their company to that of guys. They look better (generally), they have wider spectrums of interests (again, generally) and I just like it.

In a way that is wonderful. But, how should I put this, it lacks romance. Do I want to be romantic with any of my friends? No, not with most of them anyway. But I am stuck in the male-friend category! I seem incapable to forge any other kind of relationship with a woman. Why is that? Do I only have “friend pheromones”?

Somewhere I heard that it’s supposed to be cool and hip to be single. Let me tell you right now: that is a blatant lie on par with saying that Josef Stalin was a slight nuisance in his day. Being single, in a word, sucks. So this is what all this text has lead up to. Me simply asking the egocentric question of how you go from “that-nice-guy-who-is-fun-friend” to a date or even better, lover? It is a tricky question, and I pose it at the risk of diminishing all my female friends, which is something I do not at all mean to do. I love my friends, male and female. But at the end of the day, I do not have any “friends-with-bennifits” relations, nor is this all about sex (though it is undeniably a big part of it). I want someone to talk to when I wake up, someone to have a picnic with in the afternoon, someone to argue about what movie to watch with. And then yes, someone to have wild and crazy sex with all night long. We don’t have to do all those things everyday, that would be a bit too much, I think. But every so often. That would be nice.

Thobias

Smarter phones and the need for convergence

So, once again I’m coming up on buying a new gadget and I turn to you, the fantastic blogosphere. My thinking is getting a new phone, a smartphone.

Newton and Pilot

Now, let me first give you some background. I am an old Newton fan, Palm user and I’ve been sporting mobile phones since somewhere around 1997. I’ve tested several systems over the years, and currently use an iPod touch as my game device and PDA.

So, let’s first take a quick look at what I will not get: An S60 phone, or (gods forbid), a Windows Mobile phone. Sorry Nokia, I’ve used S60 and quite frankly I feel it would have been fantastic five years ago… I have a friend who just got a Nokia 5800, an I was not as impressed as I had hoped I would be. Windows Mobile? I just can’t stand it.

Blackberry was a contender ’til I had the displeasure to try one. I just can’t get my head around it, and the apps seems wicked expensive. So no, thank you.

What does that leave? Well, iPhone, Android and webOS. And here the questions starts to pop-up.

I have a relatively good grip on the iPhone, being a heavy iPod touch user. I like the OS, I like the apps, I’m drinking the Apple kool-aid and like it. But, I still want some apps to multi-task. Like web-radio, chat etc. I want to consolidate my messaging, mail, sms etc. I want it to integrate better with Facebook, Twitter etc. Though the Facebook app for iPhone is very nice. This leads me to consider other alternatives.

Android

Let’s start with Google Android. I am drinking tons of Google juice already. I love Gmail, Google Calendar, GTalk, Google Reader, Google Notes etc. I love Google and the kind of University type fun the often prove to have in droves.

The downside is Google is a very engineer-driven company. That makes it very cutting edge, but design is lagging in many ways. I mean, come on, very few Google services would win any beauty contest. Clean and simple, yes. Beautiful? Not really…

Android has suffered a little from this too. Enter HTC Sense. HTC seems to have made a great job with beautifying Android. However, this probably means you get a less consistent OS? It is, according to test on Engadget and Gizmodo also slowing things down. BUT, it is open, always connected and looks more fun. It is also much more customizable and I don’t care what Steve says (I know, the gods might smite me…) but some things on a phone SHOULD multi-task!

webOS

Palm is an old love affair with me. I’ve always loved their stuff, bar their Windows Mobile phones. webOS seems to be an awesome platform. Sort of mating Android with the iPhone and getting only the good genes! However, I’m still to test this in reality. They are not sold in Sweden yet, and it seems the Swedish operators have a very stand-offish position to Palm. It seems I could probably buy one from the UK, but still. It kind’a sucks.

Another thing with the Palm, is that both the Pre and the Pixi are using hardware keyboards. As a resident of a country with umlaut characters in the local alphabet, I’ve hated hardware keyboards for a long time. Software keyboards are a little tricky sometime, but at least I don’t need to press anything extra to get åäö!

Downsides?

The downside to both these platforms is I like using iTunes and only the iPhone syncs. Does this matter? Well, no. It seems Songbird has actually reached a level of maturity where I could live with it as my main jukebox. Calendar? Syncing via CalDAV and Google Calendar would solve that. Thank’s to open source and the cloud it would seem I could live with either.

But there is still the undeniable fact that the iPhone is very much more mature than the other two.

What is it I do not like about the iPhone. People go on and on about it not being open, in my opinion that is a non-issue in the long run. Phones and Apple have mostly been rather closed, and both are doing well. No, my gripes are of a different flavor. I am a self-confessed web 2.0 aficionado, and as such I am naturally a joiner…  This is where the iPhone lucks-out big time. It does not support convergence in any way. Ah, but it does, you might say. It supports MobileMe Sync and Microsoft Exchange. Ehh, yeah. One is something like $100 per annum and the other is distinctly corporate news. No, I mean I want on place to handle chat, sms, mms, email. Where I can see all my contacts no matter if they are on Facebook, Gmail, AIM etc., in one place. Palm understands this, and HTC seems to also be aware of this. Apple? As much as it saddens me, no. They don’t even include a flippin’ chat client! Also, more and more I am dependent on Google Calendar, and have to sync that with iCal for it to get on my iPod touch. Not convenient.

What to do?

The iPhone is a fantastic product, don’t misunderstand me. But I feel Apple is a little bit in their own world, and unlike when it concerns computers, their vision is not quite the same as mine. I guess I may be a fringe case, and I am painfully aware of the greatness of the iTunes App Store. But I do still have a very nice iPod touch. Arguably I could go with an HTC or Palm device and still have the best of both worlds?

What do you think? Where would you go, especially with these factors in mind:

• The Android phones available in Sweden are priced the same as an iPhone 3G, and frankly I want the 3GS.
• I have a very nice 8GB iPod touch.
• Increasingly, I live in the cloud, not on my laptop.

Thobias Vemmenby

Long, long ago…

It’s been a long time. So long I could swear the login page creaked when I logged in. It’s been a topsy turvy spring and summer. I’ve had to face some demons and things have, as they generally do, happened in ways I could never have foreseen.

The most shocking of them is that my wife all of a sudden decided to leave me. So I had to move up to my mothers big house. I still have a year left at the university and next to no money to live on, so… Sure, there’s two sides to this story as always. But the divorce I guess I can live with. These things happen. I wish she would have included me in the decision instead of just hiding it and finding someone new, but you can’t have everything now can you.

No, the real kick in the face was that she went out with him before the divorce came through. We still lived together, no papers signed, nothing like that. And she goes of for a week to live with her new bo. That broke my heart, that she couldn’t treat me with dignity in any way. But maybe I am old fashioned?

On the upside, I am now 1/3 of my way to becoming an editor. It’s fun and interesting so far, though I wouldn’t mind combining it with Web 2.0 if I could. The tricky thing is that our head teacher has happened in a spot of trouble, and we really don’t know if he’ll be back this fall or not. *sigh*

Well, my intention is to get back on the blog bandwagon now. And this is a start. But beare with me, it’s been a long, long time since I did this. In a different life, in a different time. But anyway, welcome back to The TwilightShadows!

Thobias Vemmenby

Don not be alarmed!

I am still alive, it’s just that some personal problems has beset me. I’m hoping to resume my blogging here at the TS very soon.

Thobias