Sydney, rapidement
In Sydney, avoid the Ibis Hotel at Darling Harbour. It earned its stars playing Mario.
Here we are in the deep south for TechEd 2008, which is a junket (claims A) for he and jelashke to further dissect What This SharePoint Stuff Is Anyway. On their review, the talks seem pretty bland, especially when compared with the pre-conference training, but there are dinners and there is swag and there are people to catch up with. I'm not actually part of this, but now have a pass to the party tomorrow night, so I'll not be left in the cold.
Like I was last night during the Guitar Hero competitions, alone, cold, drinking in an unfamiliar city, constantly refreshing iPhone for any response to my forum plea for real life social contact. Queue queue.
On that note, I've spent about five times as much iPhone bandwidth in the last four days than I have in the last month. With extended use the grand amalgam of all flaw in the most useful iPhone programs -- foremost, Safari and Maps -- becomes apparent, a mixture that is the product of a shocking recipe of instability and missing functionality. I've been treating it as a laptop substitute, on the street, in coffee shops, in conversations when there's a third person present, etc.
Off the top of my head:
- No way to view URLs that have no markup (people generalise this as a lack of copy and paste)
- Unreliable "here" button in Maps
- Safari crashes frequently
- Locly manages to be either cool or useful, but not both
- No way to save map geocodes as addresses within Contacts
- No mechanism in the Gmail web app to apply labels
- I managed to crash the menu screen, requiring a hard reboot (windwalkr shares some blame, but only because it was his app I was forcing to quit when it broke)
- Optus iZoo has no way to view remaining download quotas (you need to manually reset the phone's statistics every billing period)
- Text (SMS) app takes enough time to load a conversation of more than several pages that an explanation is required
The last few days, in brief. The Jet Cafe in the QVB building retains my fond recollection as a purveyor of sorbets. Ryans Bar on George St earns the award for the most approachable yuppy piazza to serve a ten dollar steak on a Tuesday night. Kinokuniyain TGV is still our most fondly remembered bookstore. Right next to Kinokuniya is Ichiban Boshi, which serves pretty decent tempura udon, unagi-ji and is the first Australian restaurant I've stumbled upon to serve okonomiyaki, that food of kings. Google has also released a browser, supplanting Firefox on Windows for me.
The rest of the week seems to be full of people. Maybe not Friday-daytime, yet. Looking forward to seeing annege and B on Friday for the first time in year(s).