Occasional Observations

Short of formatting and rewriting all the data en bloc, is there any software out there to defrag an USB-powered 1.8-inch HDD, running Vista? The built-in MS tool doesn’t do it, Executive Software is yet to respond to my week-old enquiry and while PerfectDisk RX is doing a fine job on fixed drives, it doesn’t want to touch the little ‘un even though I enabled the option to check USB drives.

Keeping to-to-speed with UK TV isn’t a priority – thank goodness. We’re late adopters. So far we have watched only the first two episodes of Life On Mars (and wondered what the hell the fuss is all about), we’re still to see a single minute of Little Britain, and The Office passed us by. Completely.

A year or so after its screening, we just finished the second series of Sir Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice, UK-style (side note, the US version is waaaay more saccharine). My goodness. I’d already noticed that candidates whose resumes pass my desk for occasional PR opportunities are pretty “pumped up” to put it mildly – some of the 25-year-olds have experienced more in a year or less of actually working than I’ve done in the last 20 years.

Therefore it should not have been a surprise to experience the over-inflated egos of the finalists, and their seeming inability to see things without their rose-tinted glasses. Perform miserably on something and my internal quality control alarm bells sound. I’m not keen to take it on the chin but I have some dignity and pride, and sometimes the excuses are so lame, they’re funny.

Screw up completely on a task – for example by failing to sell a single item, while competitors were selling them by the comparative bucketload – and the standard answer is to tell “Serallen” that you’re a number one sales person. Fail to lead and tell him you’re an inspirational leader. Lie, lie lie through your teeth. Scary, there’s a lot of people living in dreamland out there.

Watching the series for the first time a year after the TX dates, we get an advantage – instant gratification on the big question: what are the candidates doing now? The second series folks fancied themselves as meeja stars, bigtime – as is evident from the plethora of pumped-up egomaniacal websites. But what’s this? Just one year on, almost all are now six months or more out of date. That gives these “media celebs” the stardom lifetime of a butterfly. Quite right, too.

The whole deal with convergence stories is that in addition to creating multi-function devices, they’re supposed to make life easier, right? So I can make phone calls from my computer and browse the web with my mobile. Both concepts are now well-established and the bugs are largely ironed out: pretty easy to set up and use. These days, Skype usually tells me around 10m or more people are logged-in, in the early days it was a few hundred thou.

Netgear, a networking company, has jumped on the convergence between multimedia home entertainment and the PC, coming up with its EVA700 Media Center Extender device. It sounds great: a W-LAN connection to your hi-fi cabinet, streaming audio, video and photos to the big screen and audiophile speakers in your living room. Just plug and play.

At under EUR200 if you shop around, it’s a lot less than a full-blown Media Center PC, which is probably family room overkill anyway, and I’m not in favor of leaving a machine on all the time when it’s used for a few hours a week. Hence the debut of the Netgear EVA700.

Great idea – except that it doesn’t (yet) do the bit I expected Netgear would be best at: wireless networking. It insists on a wired setup first – and since I didn’t have a 15-meter Ethernet cable to hand yesterday, the whole setup has slipped by 24 hours. Did manage to persuade Eva to play an MP3 from a USB stick, and then an AVI file, but the user interface is basic, clunky and messy, and it doesn’t appear to work with NTFS-formatted drives. Vista compatibility? You’re joking, right?

The wired setup tonight is the acid test – otherwise I’ll send it back. No, an Apple iTV won’t do instead. My serious reservations about Apple product quality were reinforced when I looked at an iTV demo unit the other day, and it was running really hot – almost too hot to touch. As the enterprise server guys will tell you, stuff that runs too hot is more likely to fail. Not to mention all that ‘lecky I’m converting to heat for no reason.