Have you ever called a business—for example, a bank—and found yourself immediately bombarded with an incredibly loud phone tree designed so that in case you have hearing loss you can still hear it? Immediately, you move your thumb over to the volume keys and turn it down.

“Ahhh”, you exhale in relief, then sit for another five minutes listening to the most god-awful static-filled musak. Suddenly, the music stops. Has someone picked up the phone? You listen, but you don’t hear anything.

“Hello?”

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Apparently Norway is also not immune to having technologically stupid government officials

A few days ago, Norway joined an elite group of asshats who seem to be operating under the delusion that iTunes is going to destroy civilisation as we know it. I agree that the world would most likely be better off without DRM for all of our media; it only increases complexity, decreases usability and operates on the assumption that your customers are crooks, which is patently offensive. However, we’ve managed to get along with it just fine for many, many years in a host of other products, as Alex Zaharov-Reutt pointed out recently on iTWire.

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No, it doesn’t tell your future

In August of 2005, I got my first notebook computer, an iBook G3. One of the first things I noticed was that, when using the iBook for any extended period of time, it got very warm. After some searching online, I discovered that there was, in fact, a solution: notebook coolers. From that day, I’ve found them to be an indispensable part of my portable computing experience, and I’ve been through three of them now, trying to find the perfect one. And that’s what this is about: having owned three of them, I believe I’ve found that perfect one — at least for 14″ iBooks — and I’m so impressed with it that I want to share it with you.

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Or “Why I stuck with a cheap, shitty phone all these years instead of getting a RAZR.”

By now I’m used to the heckles I get from friends and family regarding my sticking with a Samsung SGH-X475 for the last few years instead of upgrading to any of the newer “whiz-bang” phones that keep coming out, like the Motorola RAZR.

My phone doesn’t have a camera. Or bluetooth. It doesn’t have MP3 ringtones. It would get online if I were willing to shell out the cash, but who wants to use T-Mobile’s browser? When people send me pictures to my phone, I have to log on to a web site to look at them (which I never do because it’s a pain in the ass) and then they disappear after a few days. About the most it can do is make phone calls and send/receive SMS messages. The paint is all but scratched off because I keep it in the same pocket as my keychain.

It’s a commodity phone. I got it because at the time I needed a replacement phone, but I didn’t see any point to spending a whole lot of money on a more full-featured phone. I spent $80 on it. I sent away for the $30 rebate on it years ago but never received my rebate. Even then it was probably still overpriced.

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Utility brings master plan more into focus

In a surprising and bold move, today Apple released a public beta of a utility called Boot Camp, which allows Intel-based Macs to dual-boot Mac OS X and Windows XP. This is surprising because Apple managed to do the one thing that so many people had been clamouring for, and bold because it means that Apple is rolling up its sleeves and getting serious about fighting back against the pounding they’ve been suffering from Microsoft since the Mac was first introduced in 1984.

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