Monthly Archives: March 2006

Computers/Technology, Writing

Training Calligrapher

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Training Calligrapher

One of the other things I’ve been trying recently with my PDA has been using handwriting recognition to make input easier.

When I initially got the PDA I gave the built in handwriting recognition a go, which was really no good at all with my usual illegible scrawl, so I gave a copy of Calligrapher from Phatware Software a go.

Now it has to be said that this was a lot better, but I still ran into problems. A lot of the time it got things pretty well correct, however even with the ability to tweak the letter shapes it was looking for, there were still times where the way I wrote a letter totally confused the software. As a result, it actually worked out quicker to still use the on screen keyboard.

Anyway, since last year, Calligrapher has moved on, and now has the ability to learn from it’s mistakes, so apparently after a couple of weeks of training it can get something like a 95% success rate. Following some glowing reviews, I thought I’d take a look.

I’m still at the training stage, but most of the time it is pretty good. Since it is also backed up with a good spell checker, and a good deal of intelligence, it often modifies it’s ‘reading’ of what you have written, based on what you write afterwards. In the picture you can see my dodgy handwriting, and a successful interpretation of what I have written above. Incidentally, once you get beyond the training stage, it will allow you to write anywhere – not just in a fixed area at the bottom of the screen.

Now the only problem I can foresee is the combination of my lousy spelling and lousy handwriting, which gives it a double problem working out what I’m trying to write!

Computers/Technology

Dell and the Art of Being Annoying

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As I mentioned last weekend, I’ve set up my work laptop to sync to my Dell Axim x50v PDA. As part of that I decided to take the docking cradle and power supply that came with the PDA to work, since that is where it seemed to be most useful. However I also thought that I should probably pick up a spare power supply for home, so that I could charge up my PDA when I wasn’t at work.

So on Sunday afternoon I took a look at the Accessories pages on the Dell website. Unfortunately on the ‘Cables, Cradles, Power’ page there wasn’t a separate power supply, in fact there was only a single item, a replacement docking cradle. The pages for the cradle listed recharging in the features and benefits, so I figured that this was just Dell not selling the power supply without the cradle. Anyway, I put in the order, and waited.

On Wednesday I came home to a card from UPS, all printed in German, with the German contact number too. After some digging around I got the phone number of the UPS customer service and gave them a call. They said that Dell did not allow them to redirect parcels or have them collected, and that I should contact Dell. I then spent a frustrating twenty minutes trying, and failing to speak to a real person on the Dell support line, so in the end sent them an e-mail.

The issue appears to be that the same policy that applies to their systems, which is that due to the value they won’t deliver to third-parties, appears to be applied right across the board, even for comparatively cheap accessories.

I got a reply yesterday from Dell’s customer service team in the Netherlands, saying that changing the delivery address was complicated, and that they had arranged from me to collect from the ‘local’ UPS depot – local being in quotes as it is actually in Milton near Oxford, an 80 mile round trip from here.

Small Box - Big Trip

I went off and picked it up after work tonight. Thankfully the traffic wasn’t too bad, so it only took about an hour and a half to do the round trip, including about fifteen minutes hanging around whilst UPS found the box.

However when I got home and got the box open, it proved to not be quite what was wanted. It is literally the docking cradle – the power supply is not included. A bit of looking around the Dell site has found that the X30 cradle does actually state that the power supply isn’t included, however I can’t find a suitable power supply anywhere on the Dell site.

I then started trawling some of the other sites, and found that Expansys do actually stock the right power supply, indeed they also stock the cradle too, which since they send stuff recorded delivery, would have only needed a trip down to the local delivery office in Reading to collect. However, the real gem is that even if I get the power supply, I still can’t recharge, as it doesn’t actually include a power lead – you have to get that separately as well.

Honestly, if I didn’t know any better, I’d be sure that Dell were deliberately setting out to totally annoy their customers. Quite apart from the hassle getting it delivered, Dell don’t seem to supply replacement power adapters for their PDA’s themselves, and even when you can get them they are incomplete too. Suffice to say that I’ll be getting accessories for my PDA from Expansys in future and won’t be wasting my time and trouble dealing direct with Dell.

General

I’m an SSE Shareholder

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My Share Certificate

One of the negative aspects of leaving SSE was that I passed up on both their Sharesave scheme – which would have been pretty lucrative thanks to the soaring share price. However, I took the decision that I’d rather make the move, as effectively there would never be a good time to move if you considered the scheme.

What I’d forgotten about was the fifty free shares that they gave to me and every other employee last year as a bonus. To some extent I hadn’t paid that much attention, as when you read the small print of the offer, the shares were held in trust for three years, and if you left within that time, then you wouldn’t get the shares. So when I got a letter from the company that handles the SSE employee share schemes, I assumed it was just a letter letting me know that I had lost the shares.

It wasn’t… I’ve put a snapshot of the contents of the letter – with all the identifiers obscured of course – on this posting. The contents of the letter was actually a share certificate:

This is to certify that the above-named is/are the Registered Holder(s) of one Ordinary Shares of 50 pence each fully paid in Scottish and Southern Energy plc, subject to the Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Company

I’ve just been on to the website to double check, the fifty free shares account has been cleared out as expected, but the certificate is exactly right – I’ve got a single share in the company, added on 9th March, that as of today is worth £11.47!

So is it a parting gift from SSE – or just a Computershare screw up? My betting is that it is the latter, as they also messed up the share schemes for a couple of colleagues at SSE when they took over the schemes last year. I’m half expecting to receive a letter in a few days taking my share back again, however for the moment, I guess I’ll just keep it as a souvenir. But for the moment it does look like I’m a fully legal shareholder of SSE.

Calendar/Contact Syncing

One Final Chance for Missing Sync

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I’ve previously reported on my woes with Missing Sync, and it’s general inability to get things right when syncing between my PocketPC and the Mac. This weekend I thought I’d give it one last go, to see if it could manage to get the synchronisation right.

The reason I tried it out this weekend is because I had the laptop from work home. At work we have an Microsoft Exchange server running, and Outlook is the tool of choice, so unlike SSE where the use of Lotus Notes left all our calendars in a nice little private world, here I can plug my PDA into the laptop, and synchronise up pretty easily, allowing me finally to have business appointments in the same place as all the rest.

I started off with a clean calendar in Outlook on the work laptop, and spent a good deal of time with Pocket Informant on my PDA getting categories sorted out, and everything pretty well in order. I then hooked up the PDA, sat back and let it sync away. It synced pretty well, aside from some old recurring appointments starting in 2002, which for some reason Active Sync objected to – these I just deleted.

I then made use of the outlook views to finish of the categories, and also to ensure that my private appointments didn’t end up cluttering up the work server. As far as I could tell, everything had come across correctly.

Encouraged by having synced into Outlook, I then had a go at doing the same onto the Mac. The first thing I did was to clear out everything from iCal, so effectively, all Missing Sync had to do was to make a copy of the PDA, into iCal on the Mac. I’m sorry to report that it couldn’t even manage to get this right.

Whilst it successfully managed to get the normal appointments across, it failed totally to get the recurring appointments correct. It is worth saying that the recurring appointments are doing nothing that iCal itself can’t do – having Matins on the second and fourth Sundays in the month, Evensong on the first Sunday, and the Family Service on the third – but whilst March came out correct, the services were all over the place in the other months, sometimes with the Family service popping up on the Thursday, other times Matins ended up on a Tuesday. Whilst the services were consistent within a particular month, they weren’t consistent over successive months. If the software can’t even manage to just copy a schedule from a PocketPC onto a totally clean copy of iCal, I’m not surprised it makes such a mess of anything more complicated. Frankly it is a total waste of time and effort, and I don’t really think I’m going to be letting it near my PocketPC any time soon.

Church, Pictures

Sonning Deanery Youth Day

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Redefined 2

As you may have been aware, this weekend was to have been the annual Sonning Deanery Youth Residential Weekend, Moving On. However, about a month ago, we took the decision to cancel, as we just weren’t getting the level of applications we needed, and were heading towards a sizeable loss for the whole weekend.

However, although we cancelled the residential weekend, Mike Buckland at Wargrave decided to still bring the Exalt team down, and to organise a youth day at Wargrave, with two free sessions during the day, and a free performance in the evening. Unfortunately from a St James point of view, although we had the largest contingent of young people from all the Churches booked to go on the weekend, that didn’t translate into interest in the youth day. Indeed we suffered a bit from the classic ‘group think’ problem when working with young people, that if one or two key people decide not to do something, everybody else decides not to come along too. The young people were able to come to as many or as few of the sessions as they liked, and looking at the list we had about 25 people through the doors during the day, with a number coming to all three sessions. In terms of St James, there was no official contingent, however we did have one person who came along with friends from school who attended one of the other Churches.

Although we didn’t need to go along to look after our youth group, we decided to go along to the evening session, which as always was a good show, and also a chance for us to catch up with the other youth leaders from around the deanery.

Exalt have been through another evolution in terms of their structure, so whereas the last time we saw them back in 2004 they were a five member group, they now work under two names – as the three member Exalt Ministries when doing Youth Work, and as a duo called Redefined when performing. In terms of the team, the only face from the previous team is Holly, a singer and dancer, and she is joined by Deano a rapper and break dancer for Redefined, and a professional Youth Worker, Colleen, all the way from Nova Scotia, for the Exalt Ministries sessions.

The actual session was fairly similar to previous years, with games, discussion and workshops, and then the songs. Certainly they seemed to go down just as well as in previous years, and as before many of the young people were around chatting to the team for a long while after the end of the performance. However what was interesting is that many of the people who came today, weren’t booked on the weekend, and yet many of the people who were booked on the weekend, such as those at St James, didn’t come today. From what we’ve heard, what we had today were more generally the older young people who had attended Moving On weekends before, who were essentially fans of Exalt, and the younger young people were booked on the weekend primarily because it was a sleep-over. What we seem to have lost is the momentum – the older ones who keep coming back to see Exalt, and the younger ones who initially come for the sleep-over aspect, and then keep coming back. So in general the day was well recieved from those who attended, it’s more a question of getting the interest from others in order to get the kind of numbers we need to make these things viable, and more especially the interest from adults in the Churches who are willing to put in the time to help out.

After the problems this year, and the abortive attempt to organise a weekend in 2005 (the 2006 weekend was largely put together as a response to young people upset that we didn’t do a weekend in 2005 – and yet many of them didn’t sign up) we are looking to have a proper ‘Where do we go from here’ type meeting with both the youth leaders, and the Deanery Synod who stump up the money, so hopefully this won’t have been a swan song for Deanery Youth events.