Matt and Laura’s incredible duck collection
All bosses do this, right?
When in doubt, sticky note it
Jane and Tarquin visiting London
So my boss admitted the other day that he hadn’t blogged since starting his job: if I fall off the wagon, therefore, at least I’m in excellent company. That said, last weekend I went to my second of hopefully many more Puntcons, worth recording for its many stimulating conversations alone. Not to mention the rather odd moment when my old admissions tutor swam by. (Would anyone dare accuse Cambridge of having a rather cosy side? Surely not.) I toasted Hume’s brilliance over cider and sausages, debated the long-term social disruption posed by embarrassing Facebook photos of your teenage self falling into a pond and eavesdropped on some clever new ideas for apps floating over from the next punt… well, who wouldn’t like to spend a Sunday doing that?
(Silly question, obviously, although not quite as silly as it seems. In the pub prior to my fifth NewsRevue last night – fifth! – Josh and Niamh relayed the story of getting into a fight at a gig after six loutish blokes pissed into a cup, kicked the contents of said cup over themselves and any unfortunate bystanders, and then proceeded to round on one guy who objected to this unwelcome showering. Now, diversity is great and everything. It’s one of the many wonders of living in a pluralist liberal democracy that people are free to pursue their own interests. That’s special. That’s awesome. Go kick a ball around a field for money, go camp in honour of a fictional wizard, go giggle at unemployed News of the World hacks: go have good times, then sit back and laugh about them later with friends in the pub, hence neatly resolving the thorny problem of how to fill that yawning gap between birth and death. Hurrah. Great. Sorted. But do people really sit round and fondly reminisce about that time we covered ourselves in our own urine? At the very least, it seems a touch unimaginative, no?)
Also this week: lunch with Sanna and Theo, judging the annual QPCS Summer Carnival parents vs. students debate with Grace – sadly we agreed on everything, and so the opportunity for an X Factor-style judging bust-up was thrown away – and Saoirse’s birthday picnic today. Happy birthday! Let’s all steer clear of any flying cups.
Fleeing the rain!
One of the more successful ‘all of the Selfs’ photos of recent years
Although my first week at Groupon has been fun, it must be said that working Mondays to Fridays really does make the weekend come alive again. I spent this one meeting up with others at Simon’s in Cambridge, where we ate an enormous quantity of tasty food (including some skilfully made panna cotta courtesy of Patrick, yum yum), played competitive games of Hungry Hungry Hippos, watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and whizzed through the air on an impressively high spinning fairground ride which had a disconcerting habit of accelerating you towards our planet face down. (Loved it really. Obviously.)
I am rather sad about my recent economic woes, though…
Caught up on not one but two classic films this week, When Harry Met Sally and Alien, and enjoyed them both as much as their reputations would suggest I should! Honestly, though, sometimes I feel that life is just a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where you’re forever trying to fix the most glaring holes in your pop culture awareness… 
Anyway, I have an announcement of sorts! In a week’s time I will be starting a three month traineeship at Groupon – in a proper office with chairs and desks and actual people and everything! Don’t ask me too many questions, though, because (a) I don’t want to turn my entire life into a job interview and (b) I don’t imagine I’ll be discussing it on my blog very much. But rest assured that I’m looking forward to it, and grateful so far to be getting some variety in work rather than charging down a single graduate route straight away. So, hurrah! Rather neatly, Melissa took Grace and I out for lunch last week as well to celebrate coming to the end of writing School Wars. Rest assured I will plug it mercilessly when it comes out later this year (Septemberish?) but in the meantime here’s a nice photo of us looking pleased with ourselves:
Look at us! You definitely want to buy the book, don’t you?
On reflection, ‘hello sweetie’ would have been cleverer
(Rest assured I have Twitter pinned)
(The name itself is probably a mistake, by the way. Not only is it unlikely to excite consumers much but it’s also nothing like Windows – although I suppose once Windows 8 comes around it might.)
Anyway: a major factor in all of this is obviously cost, and I’ve always preferred to be on SIM-only deals rather than long-term contracts because they seem to be much better value. Virgin, for example, will give you 500 minutes, 3000 texts and 1 GB a month for around £15 a month – and you can cancel whenever you like. But buying an unlocked iPhone outright is, what, around £600? I bought the Optimus 7, on the other hand, for £200 – and the hardware feels nice, too.
But it’s the software that really matters, and although it may just be a matter of taste, I generally prefer the quite innovative feel of the Windows Phone to everyone else’s rows and rows of icons. Integrating services together makes sense, too: my Facebook account has pictures for everyone and my Outlook knows their phone numbers, so why not link them all together and combine all the information seamlessly? Touching, typing and scrolling all work well, although there are a couple of strange failings, like calendar text which is far too small to read and no custom ringtones. (This latter one is being fixed, though.) Also, I don’t know how common this is across all smartphones, but it’s silly that the phone’s alarm can’t turn the phone on.
Plenty of commentators have said the same thing: that the Windows Phone is a decent smartphone platform that’s just too late to the game, and can never catch up with the others. They might well be right, and if you want the widest choice of apps then you need to look elsewhere. But aside from that, it doesn’t really matter a great deal. Most of my mobile data (contacts, calendar, e-mail, Twitter etc.) is either in the cloud* or synced with my laptop or both, and I could just as easily switch to another smartphone in the future without much hassle. For the moment, though, Windows Phone 7 genuinely offers something both new and a little delightful.
(*In the cloud with Google, mostly. Just because I’m on WP7 doesn’t mean I want Windows Live handling everything.)
Helen on Getting ready for some adventures in China: “Enjoy China! Look forward to hearing all about it. A young woman who worked on our ‘casuals’ staff whilst going…” Apr 4, 12:34
