Couldn't Have Said it Better

The first part of this opinion piece from rugbyheaven.co.nz is exactly how I feel:

http://www.rugbyheaven.co.nz/4331053a22363.html

See: Winning back the fans – MARC HINTON

Treo Battery Life Acceptable

After following some of Brother Gordon's advice I switched email off and only used bluetooth when necessary. Now the Treo lasts two days without a charge with moderate use. Somewhat acceptable. Heavy use means you have to charge it overnight otherwise it will konk out at 3pm the next day.

Appointment of Deans a Mistake for Australia and New Zealand

Let’s take a little history tour. The 2003 All Black side was young and inexperienced but coached by a charismatic young ex-player on the way up. The All Blacks met a hugely experienced Wallaby side in the 2003 semi-final and got dicked. We lost it. We choked. We blamed the coach. After all he was drinking with the players for God’s sake! We sacked him and we instantly felt we had lanced the festering boil of failure and were on the road to recovery. We laid down a four year plan to win the next world cup. Good’o, carry on, no worries mate.

Fast forward to October 2007 and we have our new coach and, man-for-man, the best side by far in RWC 2007. This time, however, we perform even worse against lesser opposition. What does the NZ Rugby Union do this time? It re-instates "the coach that did no wrong", the coach that can’t explain the loss except to say “the French played really really well”. Go figure. Well I’ve figured and I am telling you that the reason the NZRFU re-instated Henry is that they were trying to make amends for sacking Mitchell in 2003. Nothing more, nothing less. And this decision also hit a chord with the NZ public for the same reason: atonement for past guilt.

Today Robbie Deans has been announced as the new Wallaby coach. I am in two minds about this appointment. Culturally, Deans is going to find Australia, Australians and coaching the Wallabies a steep learning curve. The Australian psyche is more confident and independent than in New Zealand. Hometown folksiness like Dean’s sending his wife around to a player’s house with scones to welcome him to the team will be met at the very minimum with raised eyebrows and sniggers to outright derision in Australia. This is a country that breeds the very best winners the world has ever known and they tell you about it quite a lot, trust me, I live with them. Humility is not their cup of tea; they feel at home with sarcasm, and, my favourite, “putting shit on people” is a national past time. Dean’s will have heaps piled on him in no time at all given what he's got to work with. He appears to have a more fragile ego than other international coaches and that doesn’t auger well when you are in the land of knockers.

Deans is far better suited to coaching the All Blacks. His loss to New Zealand will be sorely felt but I suspect not as bad as the Australians think it will be for New Zealand. The NZ Rugby Union should avoid the knee-jerk reaction of banning him from the Crusaders, because, as the Chinese general Sun-Tzu wrote, keep your friends close but keep your enemy closer. Deans is now our enemy.

My New Palm Treo 750v

I have now had my Palm Treo 750v for two weeks so I thought I would write up my experience.

My previous PDA phones have been an iMate JASJAM (Dopod) and before that an O2 Xda Mini. This new Treo is probably the best of these three overall.

First and most importantly, it’s the lightest. Unlike the O2 or the JASJAM you can actually have this phone in your shirt pocket without your shoulder drooping.

This model Treo runs Windows Mobile 6.0 which is a dream for synchronising with my Vista laptop. All that syncing stuff always worked very well on all these devices but Windows Mobile 6.0 takes that to a new level. I particularly like the way the Mobile Sync automatically detects new photos from your phone and downloads them – no more navigating with Explorer to try and find the location of the images and copying them manually.

[I gave my old phone to Alyssa and encountered a bizarre issue. I wanted to DELETE all the contacts and appointments in my old phone before I gave it to her. Do you think I could do that? No, Billy Gates decided that I am too stupid to be trusted with a delete all function so he simply removed it. I had to go through a number of steps I discovered on the tech tips pages to clear out my stuff without erasing the entire device]

The Treo is even simpler to use that the older versions. Mobile 6 is not much different but Palm has added several neat little features not in the standard version. One is that the phone is permanently in “contacts” mode when at the today page. That is, whenever you type in letters on the keyboard it starts searching the contacts for a match rather than having to first go to contacts then typing the name. Another neat feature is that when you press the green phone button it pops up a menu with all your recently called numbers ordered from most recent showing the name of the person and a submenu IF you have USED more than one number for that person.

Another cool feature is that SMS messages are arranged into “chat sessions”. You select the conversation and then it lists all previous SMS’s from that person just as you would see in MSN Messenger or similar chat applications.

Mobile 6 makes sure that you never lose a number. If you receive a call from a number that is not in your contacts it makes sure you can save the number to a new contact or an existing contact.

The keyboard is pretty finicky to begin with and I still make mistakes when typing an SMS, however I am getting better with it and I can see that with another week or so I will be able to type as quickly as I was on the JASJAM.

This device is the first PDA/phone that I’ve had that you can use one-handed - useful when you are in airports and need to make and take calls while you are lugging bags or a laptop around. I lost the stylus of two days and never had any problems operating the phone.

Best: A switch on the top of the phone to turn the sound off. This way you can switch it off in your pocket if you forget to when you enter a meeting. No more getting the stylus out and turning the volume off.

Worst: Battery life. Now this is a shocker. The battery will not last a busy day on the phone! It needs to be charged EVERY night. I am quite unhappy with the batter life to be honest. I am seriously considering purchasing a second battery for when I go on business trips. Given the likely purchaser of this type of phone is a power user/business person, then wouldn’t they have made sure the battery lasted at least a day of heavy use! I checked the net for reviews and some claim it lasts 2 days with moderate use. Perhaps mine is faulty.

Worst Gotcha: This is not a problem with the phone but a gotcha to watch out for. Windows Mobile 6 and MS Exchange 2003 allow you to configure your PDA to receive email by push technology (similar to a Blackberry). Well it works great and so I configured it on my phone and started getting emails when they were sent to my work address. Then I checked my Vodafone bill after a week: $650 in charges!!!!!!!!!!! Yikes, after getting back up off the floor I disabled the feature and got on the landline to Vodafone. They informed me that I didn’t have a “data plan” – I stifled the urge to tell them I had a “shove it up your date hole” plan. Seems that I can purchase 100MB for $20 a month which would do my mail but because I didn’t have a “data plan” I was paying premium rates. The nice operator (he says through gritted teeth) said to call back when I got my bill at month end and they may be able to reduce it. Fortunately it is a company phone…..

In summary this is a very good phone but the whole combined PDA/phone/iPod things is still a little way off.

Henry Re-appointed

So Graham Henry has been re-appointed as All Black coach. I have boycotted Rugby News generally since the dismal failure of the RWC2007 - one that is the worst ever choke in my recollection – so the comments below need to be taken in that context.

I am glad that they are not doing a Mitch like in 2003 (knee jerk reaction is to sack the coach). What I am not happy about is that they continue to say they, the coaching staff, did nothing wrong and that the strategy was right. I have not heard anyone in the coaching team say "hey man we got it wrong but we won't make the same mistake next time".

Why, knowing the draw a year in advance, did they ponce about prior to the cup with easy games? Why did they NOT understand in their guts that the Frogs would truly test them and that they would HAVE to have a plan to win the match by 1 point? It was destined to be close given previous world cups. The type of the game was spot on from previous world cups. All highly predictable. Yet we failed to have an appropriate game plan - just the pure belief that "running rugby" and "we score tries" mantra would win it. Dumb, dumb, dumb. And from what I hear there is a collective state of denial going on in NZ over this.

They DID do some things wrong, big time wrong. Admitting it means you can learn from your mistakes. Failure to admit your mistakes means you are doomed to repeat them.

The denial has gone on too long now for Henry to publicly admit his mistakes so I will be waiting to see if Henry shows signs he has learnt from his mistakes. Time will tell.

I often wonder what the fall out would have been if the Aussies had gone on to the semis.

I have not yet donned an All Black cap or jersey (but I occasionally do sneak on some great AB socks Mum gave me).

GO THE MIGHTY ALL BLACKS!

How Today's Mass Media Controls Us This Way

http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=49