King of the Mountain Tortoises

Here are the first pictures from this Tokyo trip…

The Queen cheerfully rides the Skytrain at Dallas while we’re changing planes.

The Krispy Kreme phenomenon has hit Tokyo.  This location is on the Shinjuku Southern Terrace, near the train station and across from Takashimaya Time Square.  At 5:30 p.m. on Monday night, this is the line.  Believe it or not, the line was as long or longer at 10:30 p.m., but it was too dark to photograph (and my phone had run out of batteries).

It was a cold clear evening when we arrived in Tokyo, and this is the view of Mt. Fuji behind the skyscrapers of Nishi-Shinjuku.

As is our custom, we ate our first meal at our friend Fukushima-san’s Sushicho in the back streets of Roppongi.  The place was packed, and my two favorite customer-friends were there, and this time they actually acknowledged me.  The food was great — The Queen and I both had 3-ko of Uni and Kimedai in addition to sashimi otsumami (the amaebi were super-sweet) and a variety of delicious nigiri.  The sashimi and kimedai nigiri are pictured above.

Here is a video of the Queen enjoying her uni, as only she can.  If only she realized earlier I was shooting video.

Click here to watch.

This morning, we woke up and had breakfast at Matsuya.  I had kimchee gyudon (Korean kimchee and boiled beef/onions served over rice) while the Queen had bibimbap (almost the same thing, but with an egg on top.  I noticed, a sign on the chopstick stand that the restaurant now offers "Volume Up" specials — stay tuned for the Japanese edition of Supersize Me, soon to open at a theater near you.

Jouni (Editor of Nokia’s S60 blog MRKTNGMan),

Thanks for the info on Nokia’s FP2 (Feature Pack 2) release, but the fact that previous models cannot be upgraded continues to give me the nagging doubt that Nokia just doesn’t understand software.

Software is meant to be upgraded; that is its virtue.  If you’re not going to upgrade software, then it might as well be hardware.

If one had to buy a new computer every time Microsoft or Apple released an x.1 release of an OS or an application, then the computer industry would have never developed to its present size.  Even with the ability to upgrade, obsolescence is a big negative for many consumers in hardware purchases and slows their adoption.

Nokia is completely wrong in this issue.  As far as the consumer is concerned, a lot of the OS and applications on his Nokia phone might as well be hardware implementations, since there is no upgrade path and seemingly little or no effort made to bring existing customers into line with new ones.

This is backwards!  Early adopters/evangelists should be Nokia’s marketing secret weapon, but it seems like the company does everything it does to shaft them.

How else can you explain a situation where Nokia itself declares the Nokia N80 and N80IE to be identical in terms of hardware, yet there is no software upgrade to bring the older model’s software into line with the newer model’s?

As I said, I love my Nokia N80, and I would love an N95, but announcements like these chill my desire to purchase new Nokia phones.  In PCs there is a chance that the machine I buy will be rendered obsolete shortly after its purchase; at Nokia, that is a certainty (eclipsed by yet another Nokia 3 months down the road).

I bought a Bowflex Nautilus set of adjustable dumbbells (yes, it’s ironic to feel idiotic about buying dumbbells), stand, and weight bench.  I got them through the miracle of Amazon.com where I got the stand for free ($135 off), the other units at a discount, an extra 25% discount on everything because of an AMEX wish certificate, and nearly-free overnight shipping with Saturday delivery ($15) despite it all weighing about 200 pounds.  The only problem is that Bowflex Nautilus has no quality control — I’m guessing the just take the stuff off pallets from China and send them out.  Who cares that my weight stand has two left hand units (one thoughtfully labeled L for left and the other labeled R for right, despite their being identical).  As a result, I can’t finish assembling it.  DOH!

So, I start to put together the weight bench and find that inside one of the parts is broken and they just closed it up and shipped it anyway.  Double DOH!  Bowflex/Nautlius doesn’t answer their phones on weekends (when their customers might be home and need help), so I’ll have to wait until Tuesday to find out what they propose to do.  I don’t really want to pay to ship back 100 lbs of their defective product, so I guess we’ll see.  I’ll keep you posted.

My trusty iPod Nano (generation 1) served me pretty well.  I didn’t use it every day, but I did use it extensively on trips and in the car occasionally.  Yes, I did have to swaddle it in thick heavy plastic to protect its scratchable body and face.  Yes, I did have to use it with the backlight turned off in order to get more than 1/2 the promised battery life.  But, as my first iPod, it certainly was cool.  Now, it is dead.  When we got back from Hong Kong, I turned it on, and the display was all messed up.  The bottom half of the screen was frozen in a pattern that looked like a UPC code, and the right upped quadrant was blank.  I hadn’t done anything to it, but i figured that somehow the screen must have been broken (which seemed unlikely given its protective plastic suit that it wears all the time).  Well, I went off to class, and when I got back to my desk, the battery had gone dead.  I tried to charge it.  Nothing.  OK, not exactly nothing — a high pitched squeal.  It could have been the sound of a tiny whirring hard drive, except the Nano doesn’t have a disk drive.  I have no idea what it is.  It doesn’t charge.  It doesn’t reset.  It doesn’t do anything but sit in darkness or squeal when plugged in.  I guess I’ll take it by the local Apple store and see if they’ll do anything for me, but I don’t hold out much hope since they don’t even know where to lookup the meaning of “customer service”.  Oh yes, and it’s conveniently out of warranty.  Silly me, my wife is getting me a new Nano for Christmas and I got myself a matchbox-sized new Shuffle to work out with, so I’m hooked on iCrack.  R.I.P.  iPod Nano #1.  Long live iPod Nano #2 (or at least more than two months past its warranty running out).

I tried to go by my local bank, TrustOne Bank, to get some crisp currency for my godson’s present.  I dropped by just after 3 p.m. yesterday and found them locked up tight.  On the door was a sign, letting us customers know that they would be closing at 2 p.m.  Why?  Don’t they think their customers might need to transact some business before the long holiday weekend?  Maybe they should have even stayed open late?  Nope.  Yet another business that seems to place the convenience of their staff above the convenience of their customers.

Well, they’ve made me think about why I even need a local bank account if my local branch isn’t going to be open when I need them.  Maybe I don’t need them at all.

60 hours in Hong Kong for Thanksgiving break.
See the fun! (we must have done something other than eat, but not much…) 

I’m running amuck with my Nokia N80, so come to my photoblog to see our 75 hours of fun in Japan.

http://mountaintortoise.typepad.com

Every day, like Hachiko, I show up at the Nokia UK site waiting to see if they are now supporting Phone Software Updates for the Nokia N80. And, every day, I look at the same list of 12 Nokia phones and go away disappointed, wondering if the day would ever come where I could update my N80 to the latest firmware.

IT’S HERE! TODAY! Maybe it will turn my phone into a brick, but I’ll give it a try.

Why is this important. The latest firmware includes updates that fix bugs in previous versions of Mobile Phone software. It’s like getting patches for your PC. Except, in the case of cellular phones, you have traditionally had to go to an authorized service center to get that done. And if you’ve bought you phone from Amazon.com, the local T-Mobile shop will politely tell you to go away despite your being a customer of theirs. And if you own a Nokia phone purchased in Singapore, you have to go back to a Singapore Nokia shop to get your phone’s firmware updated. Yeah, like that’s going to happen anytime soon. The Nokia flagship stores in Chicago and New York will just politely turn you away.

But, now, at the Nokia UK site, you can update your phone’s firmware officially through Nokia. Yes, I know there have been shadowy alternatives using a variety of bootleg software that you need to collect from various random servers, and then hope for the best. If Nokia hadn’t done that, I would have eventually tried that method (think of it as taking your Nokia to a back alley physician for medical care). Until now… now you can go to Nokia UK, and see the N80 listed among the supported phones, download the software updater, and update your firmware on your own home PC.

Nokia ROCKS!

I figured out how to use the Semacode reader on the N80 to actually take a barcode and turn it into a URL that launches automatically in my browser.  COOL!  The trick seems ironically seems to be to not get so close that the barcode fills the camera viewfinder — it needs to take up only about 5-10% of the screen to work — more and it doesn’t work at all.
OK, now for the bad news.  My N80 and Symbian 60 v3 security force me to tell the system each time that it’s OK for the Semacode app to use the phone’s camera.  It would be very nice if I could answer that question once and have it remembered (maybe in a future firmware update).  Also, the decoding of the barcode is a little slow (waiting even 5 seconds or so seems like a long time when you’re just staring at your phone).  Finally, it can only launch the standard N80 WAP browser and not the super-cool N80 S60 HTML browser (that’s got some features even Firefox doesn’t have).  Again, hopefully this will come in a future firmware update.

I’m still really liking my new Nokia N80.

The forums are all abuzz about its short battery life.  Yes, this is a problem, but hasn’t been too much of an issue for me since I told it to stop looking for a Japanese 3G network in Memphis (there ain’t one, so quit looking), stop looking for a WiFi network when I don’t need one (hey, if I don’t need a WiFi network, I don’t need to know where one is), and stop using so much power when it does connect to a WiFi network (since I’m usually in a place with great WiFi coverage or no WiFi coverage).  Luckily, all three of these settings are easily accessible, and my battery life is about par for most cellphones.  True, I can drain it fast using all of the crazy non-phone functionality, but I can’t run my dedicated digital camera or my iPod all day on either of their batteries either.

What do I like about it?  Well, there’s all sorts of strange and cool functionality out there, if one is willing to download new applications for the phone.  I’m pretty adventurous, but knowing that the Official Nokia Service Centre for my Singaporean Nokia N80 is halway around the world, I don’t want to do anything too foolhardy.  Nonetheless, here’s what I’ve been adding and doing.

I downloaded and installed the Nokia podcasting application.  It lets you download podcasts when you’re on a WiFi network (you could do it on a non-WiFi network, but it would be slooow and expensive on my T-Mobile plan, so that’s not happening for me) and listen to it later via the phone’s music player application.  It works pretty well, though I was stumped for a while.  My favorite podcast from Barenaked Ladies (one-click subscription from iTunes) is apparently in some variant of the m4a format that my podcast application will download, but the music player won’t play.  I wonder whether it’s because they often use pictures embedded in their podcasts.  More conventional podcasts seem to download and play fine, so it’s something about BNL’s that’s strange.

I thought about downloading a new music player to see if that would help.  There’s an open source  music player called OggPlay currently in beta that works on Symbian Series 60 V3 phones (of which the Nokia N80 is one) and looks very promising.  However, after reading in the Readme notes that on some versions of the N80 firmware that the beta software won’t uninstall, I got cold feet and decided not to install it.  My other music is playing fine, and I’m not that desperate to hear the BNL podcast on my phone.

On the topic of strange software (at least for someone sitting nowhere near New York) is Nokia’s Parkcast software.  Nokia has put up WiFi networks in several NYC parks to highlight the value of having WiFi capability on one’s phone.  There is also a Parkcast application that allows you to listen to NYC CBS radio stations (NY Mets games on WFAN) and read the New York Times.  Yes, it isn’t very practical for me, but if I ever want a dose of NYC sports talk radio, it’s on my cell phone.

On the much more practical side is an application called Soonr that allows me to access files on my home PC via my mobile phone.  Soonr has a desktop component that runs on your home PC and lets you designate which files you want to make accessible to others via the web.  Phone users can open their web browser and access shared files from a Soonr PC, giving them access to those files from anywhere in the world.  This may not make immediate sense to many phone owners, but when you have a Nokia N80 that can read Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents, Adobe PDF files*, music files, video files, and photographs, Soonr becomes much more compelling.

In terms of cool, the neatest thing I’ve installed lately is Orb.  Orb also has a desktop component that lets you control the TV card on a PC and stream the video to any phone worldwide.  With the N80’s WiFi capabilities, the quality of the video is quite watchable and surprisingly good.  In fact, the download speed of my phone on a WiFi network exceeds the upload speed on my PC, so my home network speed is the gating factor.  You can access live video (changing channels on your PC) as well as videos that you’ve recorded using Windows Media Center.  This is very nice for when we travel to Japan and in an insomniac moment in the middle of the night want to watch something other than Larry King Live.

Agile Messenger for Nokia Series 60 V3 is a cool instant messaging application that allows me to talk to friends on MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and Google instant messaging all from within a single program.  It’s currently in Beta, which as far as I can tell makes it free to use now; however, when it becomes a finished product, Agile charges $30 per year.  I don’t IM all that much, but I might still spend the money because when I need it, I might really need it right then.

I downloaded a strange little application called S60SpotOn which allows me to turn on either the backlight or the camera flash of my phone indefinitely (or until the phone battery dies).  I don’t know that I’ll need to use my mobile phone as a flashlight much,but it’s free so the price is right.  Also, it was very useful in correctly positioning my Invisible Shield.  For those of you who followed my continuing saga with the Shieldzone people to get an Invisible Shield for the Nokia N80 that actually fits a Nokia N80, I finally succeeded.  The product is good, and they’ve got one conscientious and dedicated customer rep (Darryl), but the rest of their staff seems pretty clueless (I received three different shipments of Invisible Shields, none of which fit).  After the first two were sent and returned, they admitted that the size was wrong, redesigned it, and promptly shipped me yet another of the old (wrong size) ones via UPS 2-Day Air.  Finally Darryl took things upon himself and sent me the correct one.  It’s very cool, durable, and looks great.  After four shipments, I think they lost money on my $9.95 sale, but at least their N80 product now works (and I hope they’ve destroyed the old ones and aren’t continuing to ship them).  Their iPod products are probably awesome and fit correctly (since they have iPods), but since they don’t own all the different phones they sell shields for, they’re in the dark about exact sizing about newer or more difficult-to-find phones (the N80 having been both).

I’ve also installed then Mobipocket E-Book reader for my N80.   Mobipocket is a subsidiary of Amazon.  Given the choice between watching TV or reading books on the N80 screen, the former is much more attractive than the other.  However, Mobipocket has software to allow me to create my own E-books, so this might be a good way of packaging my travel research for easy mobile access.

Finally, there’s a version of Python for the Nokia N80 and other Series 60 V3 phones.  However, since I don’t have the time to mess with it right now, I haven’t installed it yet.

One disappointment is in the lack of themes for the N80.  There’s a very simple white theme for Symbian Series 60 phones, but it doesn’t work on V3 phones, so my N80 is out of luck.  And I’m too lazy to investigate theme writing.

Oh yes, and I still am nowhere on barcodes — Semapedia.org didn’t work on my N80 either.