Someone foolishly recommended me as a bit of an expert on iPhones to someone who had just got an iPhone.

Thought I knew pretty much everything to know about the iPhone and oh boy was I wrong. The guy with the new iPhone had only had it for 24 hours and reckoned that he’d figured it all out (Oh yeah. Ed), apart from 2 issues . The two issues, typically, being about functionality I really didn’t know anything about. The first one was about ringtones and how was he supposed to change his iPhone ringtone. I have never changed a ringtone on any mobile phone in my life, so shame on me and my lack of smarts there. His second issue was about jail breaking his iPhone. I’ve also never done that, or even considered it, so my iPhone expertise was pretty much smashed right from the get-go. He wanted to use his iPhone as a modem. I mentioned waiting for v3 of the iPhone O/S when tethering may be an option but he was determined to jailbreak it as soon as possible.

If Apple does release tethering, it’s still up to the networks whether they allow customers to use iPhones as modems. The very people that want the tethering functionality are those that will use the iPhone as a modem for a net book and probably have that streaming TV programs all day long and bringing the network to its knees. Those people are the very users that the networks don’t want to have using tethering. I suggested he may as well jailbreak the darn thing and cause as much havoc as possible.

He also wanted to load 150 games onto his iPhone. I would have thought that if he was that much of a gamer, and it did show a bit, that he’d probably already played those games to death and why the heck did he want to load them all onto an iPhone. Go figure. Not sure the iPhone has enough memory for loading 150 games.

The whole conversation was just becoming an exercise in logic chopping when I asked him whether he used to hate iPhones. He did and now he was lumbered it was obvious he was determined to find reasons it was no good. After about the 3rd time he had told me that he was an IT wiz and spoken very patronisingly to all and sundry I asked him whether he had to talk to people like that as I also am in IT and almost certainly have worked in IT longer than him. That made him think, and he responded ‘how old are you?’ when it was obvious I was older than him. What a dreary conversation. He was at least 10 years younger than me and, apparently, had been working in IT since he was 8 years old and had designed and written Duke Nukem. Priceless.

This conversation should have been conducted on a forum somewhere where it would have denigrated into a flame war.

I noticed that some contacts had disappeared from Outlook, not the end of the world as I have them backed up to a CSV file, via exporting them from Outlook and for a secondary backup imported them into both Hotmail and Gmail.

With hindsight that sentence was easy to write but at one point I had forgotten that I’d backed them up so well and was trying to figure out any other way of getting back the lost contacts. I have a feeling a Facebook application has got something to do with the missing contacts as I had a Facebook Male and Female Contact folders in Outlook and some of the missing, but not all of the missing, contacts were in there. One way I thought about was to import them from the outlook.pst file which was used by Outlook on my old XP PC. I ran Outlook on XP and there were all of the missing contacts. Now the problem was how to get them from there to the Vista PC. Easy, use the shared drives via networking which I knew worked. Wrong. Something recently has changed on one of the two PC’s, though dunno what.

Why is PC networking such a pain in the neck. I’ve been networking PC’s for about 15 years and it still manages to throw me into a loop every now and again. Neither PC could see the other PC. I noticed that the old domain name on the XP PC was set to MSHOME and the network name on the Vista PC was Network so I changed them both to NETWORK and rebooted them both, to no avail. Switched off the forewall on both PC’s, but no luck. The networking road goes on forever.

I tried installing Visual Studio 2005 into a VMware VM at work yesterday and that required some fiddling.

First I tried installing it as a normal non administrator and that didn’t work as the CD/DVD drive on the PC was hard wired, within the VM, to point to the network resource for the installation of Vista, from an .iso file, for a new VM. Tried setting the radio button to make the CD/DVD drive actually be a drive, rather than a pointer to a network file but it wouldn’t stick. Logged into the VM as an administrator user and was able to set the CD/DVD to not point to a network file and was then able to install Visual Studio. Logged out of the administrator user and back into the VM as a normal user and of course I couldn’t see VS at all. Dug around and found a likely looking .exe file and copied that to the desktop and that does run Visual Studio ok.

Today I thought I’d try and install Visual Studio 2008 onto my Vista PC at home. So far it has taken 45 minutes and the install is still running. A worryingly long time.

Just got an email about one of Led Zeppelin’s concerts at the Fillmore West in April 1969, one of those Bill Graham recordings. I had a quick listen and it was a bit rough around the edges. Suppose you had to be there and all that. Anyway to here the live feed click on this. You’ll need an account but it’s free.

For a better sounding recording try this which was also at the Fillmore West but in January 1969.