Richard’s Blog-o-Shite

So then. Not a lot of good press for the boys in blue recently.

Despite being stopped from delivering an Unlawful Killing verdict, the jury in the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest chose not to believe the evidence from the police – none of whom are being charged with anything, by the way – that they had shouted warnings before shooting an innocent man, choosing instead to believe the evidence of all the other passengers who heard and saw the whole things and were unanimous in saying that no such warning was given by anyone. So an Open Verdict was the ‘best’ they were allowed to reach.

That they may have lied about it to protect themselves when taken with the appallingly incompetent way in which the whole thing was mishandled is a pretty big indictment on how the police see themselves as being well above the laws they are supposed to enforce.

Of course, it always looks bad when people like Police minister Vernon Coaker has to apologise for telling Parliament that 70 officers were injured dealing with protests at Kingsnorth power station. Why?

“According to information obtained by the Liberal Democrats, Kent Police officers and staff suffered only 12 reportable injuries, four of which involved direct contact with another person.

“The Lib Dems said the eight other injuries included being “stung on finger by possible wasp”, “officer injured sitting in car” and “officer succumbed to sun and heat”.

“Kent Police confirmed that 12 officers were required to retire from duty because of their injuries.”

But of course the reports of all those “injuries” was used to justify the heavy-handed policing and stop and search tactics employed by the police.

On which subject, I should add that I saw on the local BBC News that plans were in place for people to be stopped and searched for drugs and knives when boarding Thames dinner cruise boats this Christmas: we’ll see, because one of the places they mentioned such searches would be taking place is where I’ll be going this week.

I suppose it makes a change for them to stop and search a white, middle-aged professional. A few weeks back, I was travelling through Leytonstone tube station where a large police presence were carrying out a stop and search on black males whilst I walked straight through. Maybe a white, middle-aged professional type in a suit and carrying a laptop case isn’t likely to be committing a crime?

Or perhaps they do. But on a much, much larger scale…

“And best of all, iTunes gift cards are convenient and fast. You can buy them online or in hundreds of stores nationwide, email them, print them out or gift select items directly to someone special.”

Well you can … if you have iTunes installed on the machine you are at when you want to make a purchase.

I decided that buying an iTunes gift card might be an option for my niece and when I received an e-mail from Apple advertising them, I clicked on the link.

The landing page, however, looks for iTunes on the machine and if you don’t have it installed – as is the case on my work laptop – then that’s it. No purchase is possible.

Fail!

I have resisted buying a BlackBerry – or strictly speaking having one bought for me by the company I work for – for the following reasons:

1. If I want a phone, I’ll use a phone – the smaller the better, so it fits in my pocket.
2. If I want to check or send an e-mail then I’ll fire up a laptop and do it on proper hardware.
3. I don’t want “Sent from my BlackBerry” added to my e-mails!
4. My Nokia N95 8GB does everything I want: camera, phone, texts, e-mail (I have a special e-mail account set up to be checked on it) and satellite navigation using Co-Pilot software.

But when BlackBerry introduced their Storm, I thought “at last, a BlackBerry that might fit my requirements!” So I spoke to the MD and he said I should go right ahead and get a BlackBerry. I dug a little deeper and found that Orange - who we are switching to – don’t offer the Storm: it’s Vodafone only. And besides, the BlackBerry Storm on Vodafone may not work with Exchange (or it possibly might … for an extra £26 a month on top of your price plan!).

Now as our company e-mail runs on Microsoft Exchange, that rather means that the Storm is as useful to me as a chocolate teapot. And it was slowly becoming apparent that being able to access my e-mail or be advised that e-mail has arrived on the go without needing to fire up a laptop with the Orange 3G dongle was becoming more and more of a requirement, it seemed I was stuffed.

So back to square one. I thought. I asked the IT bods to set up mail forwarding for me, so that incoming e-mail would go to my Exchange account and a copy would be forwarded to an e-mail address I had set up especially for this. I had set up my Nokia N95 8GB to fetch e-mails every 30 minutes and it worked.

Except that replies would appear to come from my own address and wouldn’t be properly synchronised with my work e-mails. So I Googled for “Nokia S60 exchange mail” and found this link to Nokia’s Mail For Exchange.

Downloaded, sent to the phone, installed and set up in a few minutes. Then a few more minutes tweaking the settings so it worked and voila! My Outlook Calendar and Exchange e-mails were sync’d to my phone. I’ve set it up to be connected during my working hours (8.00am to 6.00pm Monday to Friday) and then outside those working periods every four hours – I could have made it more frequently, but one last check at 10.00pm and then once every four hours over the weekend is more than adequate.

And It Just Works!

So I now have my Nokia doing what I want as I want it done.