Stupid Dreams

I awoke in the night from the most amazing dream. My first thought was "Wow! I've got to tell Mrs Mungo about this one!"

In the morning all I could remember was that I'd thought I had to tell people about it.

Stupid dreams.

iPhones Are Rubbish

There I said it. I know in some quarters that's verging on heretical but bear with me. Having owned one for a few months now I feel I'm qualified to pass judgement. So here's why I think iPhones are bad:

1. Typing is fiddly and error prone, it's better in landscape mode (if you can get it to rotate, which doesn't always happen - another annoyance) but then you can't see much of what you're typing. The virtual keyboard makes it too easy to gently brush the wrong letter or press in slightly the wrong place. I seem particularly prone to hitting the space bar or delete key when trying to type Ns and Ms. If you do a lot of typing on your phone, which I do, you'll soon wish you didn't.
   
2. Moving the cursor to correct a word is virtually impossible. Oh, you can often get the cursor to the vague place you're after with a bit of luck, but usually it's impossible to get the cursor into the middle of a word and even harder to get it to a specific letter in a word. It's simpler and much less frustrating to delete the whole word and type it again. And yes, I know you can do the thing with the magnifying glass which makes it a little easier, but really, it's still much harder than it should be and by the time you've managed to get the cursor vaguely near the word you want to change and brought up the magnifying glass you might as well have retyped it anyway - assuming it doesn't have too many Ns or Ms in it.
   
3. The damn autocorrect. You can if you're lucky spot the suggestion box popping up and if you're even luckier you can hit the microscopic 'x' in the corner to stop it replacing your word with something random. That said, because using the keyboard is so fiddly and error prone, you do need the autocorrect quite often, so it's not really practical to turn it off. And I'll admit sometimes the things it substitutes are quite funny.
   
4. It fills up with junk which you can only remove by wiping it. I had nearly 4 gigabytes of this mysterious "other" which given there's only around 14 gig available (on the rather inaccurately named 16 gig iPhone) is a fair chunk. After wiping it, it shrank to an apparently more normal 700 meg. Allegedly this is caused by an iOS bug which lets the phone fill up with garbage and there is no way to get rid of it as Apple have not seen fit to provide us with a way to access the file system on the phone.
5. It has poor signal reception. It just does, despite all the fuss surrounding the iPhone 4 it's still pretty rubbish. At my in-laws house I get no signal whatsoever. To be fair, this could be more down to Vodafone than the iPhone, but I prefer to blame the iPhone.
   
6. The battery life is appalling. You pretty much have to charge it every day. My BlackBerry used to last all week. Oddly, it seems to have got worse since I first had it. Previously I could just about scrape through a weekend on a full charge, now I'm lucky to make it through to the next day - and I turn it off at night too! The recommended approaches to extending the battery life essentially amount to disabling everything that makes it a smart phone.
   
7. You can't add storage. My BlackBerry had a slot for SD cards. The iPhone does not. Why? So they can charge you £100s of pounds for it instead of letting you buy cheap add-on cards, that's why.
8. Even the largest capacity iPhone still doesn't have the space that my ancient iPod has, so I have to decide in advance what I want to listen to and then transfer it on. Inevitably, I often want to listen to something that's not there.

Invasion of the Giant Insects

Saw this beauty in Knaphill the other day, I have no idea where it came from but I'm sure it's not native. Or should I say, I hope it isn't! To aid in obtaining a sense of scale, I would say it was around the size of my hand. The box it was sitting on was around waist height.

Tom Jokes

I'm delighted to say, Nephew Tom seems to have inherited Dad's Yorkshire Wit and Humour gene, as these fine examples will testify:

1. Why did the van go all silly? Because it wanted to take over the whole world.
2. Why did the ice cream go to the doctors? Because it wanted to have all of its plasters taken away.
3. Why did the ice cream go into a box? Because it wanted to stay in there forever.

You can't dispute the quality of jokes like those. I'm still laughing about them now.

Solving The Water Shortage

As my lovely wife pointed out, clearly all they need to do it declare a bank holiday every weekend until the reservoirs are full.