On Sep­tem­ber 15th Nin­tendo announ­ced the Euro­pean launch date and price, a short while after the Ame­ri­can and Japa­nese launch infor­ma­tion was unvei­led. And so, come Decem­ber 8th the Great Bri­tish Wii launch occu­rred amongst qui­vers of redu­ced stocks and pre-orders not being satis­fied. The big­gest pro­blems see­med to occur at Play​.com where their 10,000 orders were met with a paltry 700 units. Many peo­ple, friends inc­lu­ded, are now not recei­ving theirs until after Christ­mas. I also orde­red from Play but I was lucky enough to place my order within an hour of the price announ­ce­ment afo­re­men­tio­ned and Play​.com put­ting up the pro­duct for pre-order. Indeed, my Wii arri­ved by post on launch day, although I could not pick it up until Satur­day. This also coin­ci­ded with a Chi­nese exam and the last day of term, suf­fice to say my brain didn’t know what to do — torn bet­ween the trials of revi­sion and ner­ves and tri­bu­la­tions of a child’s Christ­mas eve syn­drome. I have now had the Wii for four days and feel I am ver­sed enough to give out my ove­rall impres­sions thus far.

First impres­sions: this thing is tiny. Even the Wii-mote and nunchuck are decep­ti­vely small. They also feel sur­pri­singly sturdy and there is a defi­nite air of qua­lity about their pro­duc­tion. Hol­ding the device is com­for­ta­ble and enjo­ya­ble, poin­ting is inc­re­dibly easy and as pre­cise as I had expec­ted, even after rea­ding some reports that this was not the case. The inner spea­ker is also exce­llent, des­pite qua­rrels about its qua­lity, I just love hea­ring the sound of hit­ting a ten­nis ball or the thwack as I hit the ball out of the park. Tur­ning on, the Wii-mote was sync’d correctly and it wor­ked right out of the box, as did the auto­ma­tic CD feed. The blue light only comes on when input­ting a disc or tur­ning the Wii on; I’m not sure if this is meant to be the case, I’m not bothered.

I could be a hand model

Con­nec­ting the Wii online pro­ved a sig­ni­fi­cant hassle. No Ether­net port lead me to the setup of my old wire­less rou­ter which I am not currently using in my halls of resi­dence. This itself came with hass­les which I wont go into, but suf­fice to say it took more than an hour to get this PC back up and run­ning. In attempts the­reaf­ter to con­nect the Wii it con­nec­ted smoothly and down­loa­ded the Wii upda­tes. Howe­ver when it came to down­loa­ding the license agree­ment for the Shop chan­nel, etc. I recei­ved the Wii error code: 220602, asso­cia­ted with DNS pro­pa­ga­tion issues. Rea­ding dis­cus­sions online sug­ges­ted a cou­ple of solu­tions, my Wii is already next to the rou­ter, on chan­nel 11 and had of course been pre­viously con­nec­ted. Firstly I tried remo­ving encryp­tion from my con­nec­tion, this did not resolve the pro­blem. Even­tually the pro­blem was fixed by some quirky DNS switching solu­tion: ope­ning the manual con­fi­gu­ra­tion of DNS addres­ses for my net con­nec­tion I swap­ped the first DNS around with my second (find these out via run CMD > ipconfig/all). This wor­ked and once again I was a happy bunny.

With my order I of course recei­ved Wii Sports and I also purcha­sed Zelda: Twi­light Prin­cess. To be honest, I haven’t pla­yed Zelda too much — I have pic­ked up the dog, and fired the eagle at the mon­key before catching two fish for the cat to steal but I am still rela­ti­vely young to the game. My 7 hours cloc­ked up thus far (total play time is shown on the Wii mes­sage board along side daily achie­ve­ments which are inte­res­ting to look back on) have mainly been spent pla­ying Wii Sports. I took first to the Ten­nis, Golf and Bow­ling which became ins­tant favou­ri­tes, now I have prac­ti­ced a little more with Boxing and Base­ball I am also enjo­ying these. My ten­nis rating is currently sit­ting pretty at 940, sub-pro whilst my top bow­ling score is 181. My Fit­ness age is 28 and I have yet to get that sec­ret 91 pin ins­tant strike.

My expec­ta­tions for the pro­duct were excep­tio­nally high due to hype and all the videos on You­Tube, etc. I was posi­tive nothing could live up to them, yet having pla­yed for more than 7 hours it most defi­ni­tely has. Now all I need is a second con­tro­ller, some Wii shop cre­dit and another mul­ti­pla­yer game or two; it’s going to be hard wai­ting for Mario, Metroid, Trauma Cen­tre and Smash Brothers. Oh how it all costs money and we Bri­tish are scre­wed by our 17.5% VAT.

To end this, here’s a pic­ture of Sonic enjo­ying this new toy:

A Last​.FM free down­load once again. This time from my friend and res­pec­ted music maker Wixel other­wise known as Wim.

This track is called “A Decem­ber Goodbye” and is from the “Heart” release. It is 7 minu­tes of bliss and is one of my favou­ri­tes from the album:

8 tracks of melancho­lic acous­tic gui­tars and warm elec­tro­nics — a very per­so­nal and intros­pec­tive record that might remind you of bands like the not­wist, the remote vie­wer, xela, album leaf, de por­ta­bles; the cd comes in a car­ton box with a beau­ti­ful poster!

For latest release details and tour infor­ma­tion I sug­gest hea­ding over to the offi­cial Wixel site.

In a num­ber of public pla­ces inc­lu­ding a cinema mul­ti­plex in Cam­bridge and Lei­ces­ter shop­ping cen­tre (UK) I have come across ter­mi­nals tou­ting, “Free Public Inter­net Access” or “Free Inter­net Zone”, these are owned by ope­ra­tor Red Moon Inte­rac­tive (that I do not has­ten to link to). At first sight you may think “fan­tas­tic, I can check my mail amidst my hec­tic Christ­mas shop­ping spree” or something just as simi­lar. Approaching the ter­mi­nal you will be pre­sen­ted with a list of cate­go­ries, “Auto­mo­tive”, “Com­pu­ters”, “Clothes” etc. and a search box. I wan­ted to check the release date for a cou­ple of video games not out yet so I typed in my que­ries and hit go on the touch sen­si­tive screen.

Red Moon sta­tes on its page,
“Red­moon Inte­rac­tive pro­vide free Inter­net access in Shop­ping Cen­tres and high foot­fall loca­tions across the UK through our net­work of inte­rac­tive touch screen ter­mi­nals. Using our ser­vice your cus­to­mers can search the Web or check their Email free of charge without lea­ving the com­fort of your pre­mi­ses.”

My results soon appea­red, alas I recog­nise this page struc­ture, it’s a “Made for Ads” or “MFA” site. All of the search results, which claim to be genuine, were irre­le­vant cost-per-click ads that somehow matched a key­word. Attemp­ting to gene­ra­lize my search in hopes of obtai­ning some form of rele­vance brought no luck and only the most gene­ral of terms such as “video game” brought any rele­vance wha­tsoe­ver. Hea­ding back to the main page I clic­ked the various cate­go­ries, a new list of ads per­tai­ning to a spe­ci­fic cate­gory appea­red in a dif­fe­rent colour. Every sin­gle link on the ter­mi­nal took you to an ad, in order that you may find any con­tent you had to click an ad. There is no address bar to con­firm the page you are on or to enter a new page. This makes the ter­mi­nal a poten­tial secu­rity risk and rife for phishing scan­dals that attack the non-savvy Inter­net users likely to use this “ser­vice”. Even the email links lead to ads for online email providers.

From my web sleuthing it appears the ads are pro­vi­ded by Over­ture which is now Yahoo! Search Mar­ke­ting , and they state: “The move opens up the oppor­tu­nity for adver­ti­sers to reach a more loca­li­sed audience in the run-up to the launch of Overture’s geo-targeted searches. For exam­ple, con­su­mers may use the ter­mi­nals to search for spe­ci­fic ser­vi­ces in their local area while out and about. […]  Overture’s spon­so­red links will be retur­ned whe­ne­ver a user con­ducts a search via the front screen on any INFO-NET ter­mi­nal. (2003)”

I won­der, do Yahoo adver­ti­sers know that their ads are being used in such a way? Would they wish to be asso­cia­ted with such a com­pany? Do they want peo­ple to view their sites in a public place where online purcha­ses are risky and unli­kely?  Obviously ads for shops within the mall will have some rele­vance and may lead the shop­per to their store, howe­ver the adver­ti­sers them­sel­ves will not see goals or direct purcha­ses online and the value of such ads can never be accu­ra­tely deter­mi­ned remo­tely by the adver­ti­ser. As for those ads that need web based returns, whether it be click-throughs or sales, any hope of achie­ving these through such a ser­vice is highly unlikely.

My expe­rience with the access points, a rough 20 minute test explo­ring dif­fe­rent ave­nues of search, as I wai­ted for a film scree­ning, conc­lu­ded that this is a com­mer­cial ven­ture (albeit a cle­ver one) that I could and would not clas­sify as a ser­vice. Fin­ding what I wan­ted pro­ved impos­si­ble and kno­wing that each click would gene­rate a tiny pro­fit for Red Moon with little to no return for the adver­ti­ser, as a web adver­ti­ser myself, was infu­ria­ting. If you add to the mix the non-savvy users that will igno­rantly click on all links in frus­tra­ted hopes of fin­ding something of impor­tance you get a highly pro­fi­ta­ble busi­ness that further deva­lues online adver­ti­sing. Indeed, the less of a ser­vice Red Moon pro­vi­des the more users will return to the search index or “results” to try another site, thusly buil­ding a tidy pile of cop­pers through cost-per-click ads.

If you are loo­king to ins­tall these ter­mi­nals please take note of this. The ina­de­qua­cies of the Red Moon ter­mi­nal to pro­vide a ser­vice to its users will be directly pro­por­tio­nal to its pro­fits — the lon­ger it takes to find infor­ma­tion, the more ads are clic­ked, the more money is made. Red Moon, as an anony­mous pro­vi­der, has no repu­ta­tion to main­tain with its users; it is those that host the kiosks that will ulti­ma­tely be faced with the dis­grunt­led sur­fers and dec­li­ning res­pect of its patrons. Once more, the secu­rity of this ser­vice is questionable.

At one and a half years I figu­red my phone could last at least dou­ble that and I wouldn’t have to fork out for a snazzy new gizmo for quite a while. I’m not par­ti­cu­larly enthu­sias­tic towards mobile pho­nes, yes I am fas­ci­na­ted by their all-in-one capa­bi­li­ties and ongoing impro­ve­ments (as, after all, I am an elec­tro­nic engi­neer) and I would love to have a 7 mega pixel camera, built in digi­tal radio, 4gb hdd, javasc­ript ena­bled inter­net, blue­tooth and all those other perks but one sim­ple fact remains; I do not use my phone as a telephone enough to warrant a monthly paid con­tract agree­ment. Thus I am left with the low end pay as you go options and all the shitty fallouts, or the one off cost of £300 for something high spec.

Because everything is gea­red towards con­tracts and the tech­no­logy is moving along so fast it seems nothing is built to last, this rules out my second option — a £300 price tag is not a worthy invest­ment if it wont last me 2 years, that and I am lia­ble to lose it and phone insu­rance is a scam. My pre­vious two pho­nes both died a mise­ra­ble screen-fading Nokia death before their time and all the other in-betweens have had atro­cious bat­tery pro­blems; I have yet to lose a phone and I don’t drop them — they just are not built to last. And so onto my Moto­rola story; having aban­do­ned the faulty scree­ned Nokia pro­duct lines I ven­tu­red towards a new manu­fac­tu­rer, Moto­rola paying a lowly £40 for the V220 model. I vie­wed this purchase as an inter­me­diary until high spe­ci­fi­ca­tion models became affor­da­ble and I plan­ned for it to last 3 years. Come Satur­day after­noon, a windy but rela­ti­vely warm winter’s day in Lei­ces­ter, my fully char­ged un-dropped never bashed phone with already defunct camera is sit­ting quietly in my poc­ket. Oh, my phone is on vibrate-then-ring, set to loud -  I have a mis­sed call that I somehow mis­sed while wai­ting expec­tantly for the phone to go off (this hap­pens often). Unloc­king the clam I am pre­sen­ted with this:

Pretty colours. My first ins­tinct is to reset, remove bat­tery and SIM, replace and res­tart. The error con­ti­nues and this con­firms my fears: c’est cassé! All the func­tions of the phone still seem to work, I can ring peo­ple (if I know their num­ber) and change the ring volume, etc, I just can­not see what I am doing. My first guess as to the cause was faulty soft­ware — a nasty bug that I could fix if only I could get to that “reset to fac­tory set­tings” option somehow (why isn’t there a but­ton inside to do that?). Howe­ver I am now thin­king it may be due to wear and tear on the clam’s hinge which would explain why the camera went first. Ulti­ma­tely I plan to open this all up and take a look inside, my sis­ter has the same phone that she doesn’t use so I can raid it for spare parts, etc.

Con­si­de­ring I have just finished a safety cri­ti­cal sys­tems course where requi­red fai­lure rates are 1 in 100,000 years, this per­sis­tent fai­lure of pho­nes within 24 months when no mis­treat­ment has occu­rred irri­ta­tes and annoys me to no end. The irony is that I was for a short time over the sum­mer an “honou­ra­ble Moto­ro­lan”, i.e. an emplo­yee of theirs (somewhat). I guess now I shall move on to Sony Erics­son and then another manu­fac­tu­rer when that model una­voi­dably fails.