As part of my secondment at work from the Advanced team to the Backline team, and the fact that it was a total debacle (more on that at some point), I had a good moan with my manager. One of the outcomes of this meeting was a $1000 dollar award (we have these things called “Applause Awards” which colleagues can nominate others for).

With the exchange rate, this worked out at about £650 or so. Now, I used to do a lot of photography, back in the 35mm days and real film! So I treated myself to a Digital SLR, the Nikon D90. After looking at various choices I chose this one as it had some nifty features, and all in all would only cost me about £100!

Having used it for about 6 weeks or so, off and on, I am really glad I got it. It came with an 18-105mm lens, and I recently purhcased a 55-200mm – both NikonVR ones (Vibration Reduction). It is a fairly complex piece of kit, an amateur-pro camera with lots of settings! I alternate between auto and aperture settings for now, will be more adventurous later on!

And finally, I bought a pro Flickr account, which allows me to upload lots of pictures, so if you have an account let me know, or take a look at them here

On the 19th June, Apple launched their latest version of their iPhone, the 3G S. Having a number of friends who have the original 3G version of this handset, I thought it was about time for me to get myself one (not that I am a late adopter of such things, I normally get “hand me down” mobile phones).

Got to the O2 shop in Reading about midday, there was a queue of about 8 people so not bad. After about 30 minutes got to an assistant and started to go through the account setup etc. Admittedly, these people look shattered already as it was the first day of release, and the woman setting my account up said they had a huge queue outside the shop for opening time, with 1 guy admitting he had been there since 5AM that morning – what a cock! During the account setup the assistant was obviously lacking in mental energy as she kept asking the same questions later in the process, then realising her mistake, chukling to herself and carrying on.

My company has some deal with O2 whereby we get a 30% discount on monthly tariffs, which is handy. So I presented my discount card which got put “into the system”, paid my £85 and got my new shiny phone. A couple of days later I received my first online bill – no discount, hmmmm. I emailed O2 and they said to go back to the shop, which we did. After speaking with an assistant (quite cute) they called some other office and were then told “the discount doesn’t apply to the new 3GS phone”. WTF??? “Manager please, now”. We spoke to him about this, and he verified that he had personally asked the question on the day of the launch, and was told it would be done. So, 2 days later got another email from O2 saying the discount HAD been applied. So, so far a fairly good experience with the service provider.

“What about the phone?!!?” I hear you ask, well, it’s a bit faster than the 3G phone in usage, can take movies, has an auto-focusing lens, you can now forward texts (why didn’t Apple do this at the start), has a few other funky things and the screen is easier to keep clean. Initially, when I saw the iPhone I thought “hmm, well its a bit big and my phone does what I need”, but after seeing other people using it, you then see that this device “just does things” as you want to do them. Has some great apps available, the ability to sync-over-air your calendars etc, very cool.

That’s it for that bit. There is lots of info online for this phone, but if you haven’t got one I would definitely recommend it.

Just put Google apps onto my iPhone and it has a very neat voice search application. Just talk into it and voila!

Click here for the link (you will need iTunes for this to work)