- Re: Owen's disaster

- Re: Nokia 9500

- Route 66 TMC,

- Re: Owen

- Re: Backups

- Latest news of Owen (from his mother)

Date: 5 Jun 2006 18:30:11 +0100
From: Chris S Handley
Subject: Re: Owen's disaster

Vlad A wrote:
>> Folks, Owen has lost his boat!
> f... ! What happened? I looked at the adress you provided but saw > nothing, I also looked on his site, I subscribed to his list, still > nothing... Is he ok? Can we do anything?

Look at the top in red, it says:

Status: 2006/05/31 14:28 UTC 17-07.0N 029-58.0W
Owen Morgan on NAOMIJ lost after collision with M.V. Asian Excelsior, Owen is safe onboard MV headed for Teneriffe,
Tita the cat is gone.

:-(
---
Chris Handley

Date: 5 Jun 2006 18:44:26 +0100
From: Chris S Handley
Subject: Re: Nokia 9500

Itamar Engelsman wrote:
> Is it worthwhile the learning curve for a machine to be phased out ? > These days whatever we use will be phased out within a
> couple of years. it makes it a lot harder to invest good money in software.

I think that you have two choices:
1. Buy a new Smart Phone/PDA that is unproved & has no software yet, but looks like it will do what you want. 2. Buy an old Smart Phone/PDA that is proved & has software, that won't be produced for much longer.

Having been forced to do "2" with my Psions, I am inclined to say that buying a Nokia 9500 would still make sense, but that is of course a personal choice.  The Nokia 9500 won't stop working just because they stop selling it!

And I still have yet to see a better sucessor to a Psion than the Nokia 9500 (for my own personal needs, others can of course disagree).


Well ok, you do have a third choice:
3. Wait for some amazing vapourware Smart Phone/PDA that isn't available yet, and may never be!

But I would strongly advise making buying decisions upon what you can buy now, not on what might be.  e.g. Nokia may well replace the 9500 with a Series 60 v3+ device, but that could be years away, and it will have little software for quite some time after that.

Regards,
Chris Handley

Date: 6 Jun 2006 13:21:12 +0100
From: Itamar Engelsman <address truncated>
Subject: Route 66 TMC,

Answer to:  ian

Re.: Route 66 TMC - Without asking customer support I can imagine that the TMC is a separate program from the Route 66 that connects to it at given intervals. I could further imagine that it has been programmed to give details of the traffic situation around the current point of navigation of Route 66 as how else would it know which information to give you ? When I am driving within the M25 (just as an example) I don't need info about traffic problems in Glasgow or Manchester. Accordingly, when you are not navigating the TMC program will not know where you are and might therefore choose at random, or maybe choose all locations or whatever else the programmers did or did not made it to do. For me it makes sense it will work only when navigating.
I don't think the program is that buggy, but it happened to me twice on the way to Manchester a while back that while navigating it suddenly said it could not find the way and stopped the route. There has however been one update to the program which you might as well download and install.
A particular problem I find is that you cannot choose which type of roads you prefer, highways, local roads, etc. The only way you can influence the choice is by changing the allowed speed on each type of road which takes a lot of time to finetune. Therefore it will sometimes take silly routes, but when you are in a strange city you will still get to your destination better than without it.
Another drawback is that there is no connection between countries. If I want to drive from Calais via Belgium to Frankfurt (again, just an example), I don't have a Western European map to plan the complete route but have to do it in 3 parts. So I still have Routeplanner on my mBook to help me out with that.
I never had any problems with the battery diconnecting during usage (neither just the phone nor with Route66) but I have my phone in the car in a carholder. Maybe you should buy a better car ..... <BG> ?
As to the future, I don't expect updates or other improvements on this version anymore, we are "out of date" again with the UIQ v2. But than, the maps are recent so I can "hold out" quite some time. Even my Route- and Streetplanner programs are still pretty accurate.
Of course there has been already a new version called "Navigate 7" for Pocket PC and "Mobile 7" for Nkia, but nothing for UIQ  ..... ! Somehow we Epoc/Symbian users seem to always draw the short straw !


Best regards,
Itamar Engelsman
London, UK

Date: 6 Jun 2006 17:00:58 +0100
From: Chris Cooper
Subject: Re: Owen

This is very sad news; thank goodness Owen is apparently OK.

>>>

Date:  2 Jun 2006 10:16:28 +0100
From: Trygve Henriksen <address truncated>
Subject: Owen in distress!

Folks, Owen has lost his boat!

And more importantly, he lost his cat!

http://www.aprs.net/cgi-bin/winlink.cgi?LA7QZ

Date: 6 Jun 2006 22:59:13 +0100
From: U Hornstein <address truncated>
Subject: Re: Backups

Reference is made to the mail in the The Digest V1 # 934 : Prar <address truncated> wrote on 28 May 2006 21:20:56 (> ):
> Psiwin tells me that my current back up will be complete
> in 311 minutes. Is this a record?

No, it is not. The other day I had a backup lasting 1092 minutes (with full COM speed of 115kbps, not with a slow-speed belkin USB device).

A note for all people with large CFs (mine has 1 GB) to backup: PsiWin looses accuracy in time calculation when large files are processed: I started the backup early morning and gasped when I came back in the evening: still 900 minutes to go!! But it was just a constantly false figure during the transfer of the largest file (Wikipedia, 330MB). The overall scheduled time of 1092 minutes was quite exact. So, if you experience a similar behaviour, just have patience and wait.
--
With greetings from Germany
Ulrich Hornstein
For spam protection: Please NEVER type my mail address into a www page ('send to a friend' or similar)!
Sent by MC218 (EPOC palmtop)

Date: 7 Jun 2006 00:27:05 +0100
From: The Digest Team
Subject: Latest news about Owen from his mother

Hi all,
here is the information from Owens mother about his disaster.
Owen will soon have access to his account<address truncated> Pls. contact Owen himself.
We will not publish more messages about this matter from outside the Digest Community.

Regards
Rolf Vonau
The Digest Team

-------------
From: "Reidun O. Hanserud"
Hi all.
The Asian Exelsior arrived in Santa Cruz, Tenerife on Saturday morning. On the morning after the collision the captain asked Owen if he was sure they had collided, because they hadn't noticed anything. Well, I just wonder how much they would expect to notice of a collision between a 45000 ton ship and a 28 ft. wooden sailboat.
Owen was met by the British Vice Consul, a representative of Lloyd's, and as far as I understand, the ship's agent in SC. He says they told the agent about their doubts, too, but he asked them if there were any other ships in the vicinity. They said no, so he said: Well, then it must have been you.

Here is Owen's account of what transpired in Santa Cruz (received here on Monday):
Hi.

The situation at the moment is going from bad to worse, but at least I am still alive. The vice consulate will only give me an emergency passport valid for four days to go to the UK, never mind my home is in Norway and I never lived or worked in the UK.

I will talk to them again tomorrow morning. The first thing I needed was a statement from the police reporting the loss of the passport which I now have. I will also try to talk to the Norwegian consulate tomorrow and see whether they can help me in any way. I donīt have Norwegian citizenship, but I am resident and have paid tax to Norway all my life.

Getting a new full passport here is done via Madrid and takes five weeks. Getting a new passport in the UK when it is lost rather than just a renewal, takes one week. A renewal could be done the same day. Derek lives in Wolverhampton which is a bit out of my way, but it would of course be nice to meet him and Pauline again. It looks like my only option is to fly to the UK and try to get things sorted there.

The other bad news is that the shipīs owners have said they are not paying for the hotel! The captain gave me USD 400 and they reckon that is enough. It was the shipīs agents here who put me in that hotel and it is way out of my price range. I would never stay in a luxury hotel like that even if I was rich enough to afford it. In Lisbon I stayed in a small very friendly place right in the centre of town and it was much nicer and only 25 Euro for two nights. That means I will have to check out today and find somewhere else. The agents were also surprised that the shipīs owners wonīt pay for the hotel.

As for any problems with payment from the ship owners, I will talk to Jan Holvik (my lawyer) and see what he says.

Owen

Well, that was Monday. He has got an emergency passport from the British Vice Consul valid for 4 days to go to the UK, and flew to Newcastle to-day. Stansted would have been more convenient, but there were no flights there. He had a choice of Newcastle at 15.55 or Bristol between 20 and 21. That would have meant he would have arrived in Bristol in the middle of the night, so he chose Newcastle leaving SC at 15.55 local time. The Canary Islands have GMT as standard, so if they have daylight saving time (like we have here), that would have been 14.55 GMT. He arrived in Newcastle this evening and is staying the night in a B&B. To-morrow morning he will take a train to Grantham in Lincolnshire where his uncle lives with his family. Owen's father is flying over to-morrow with his birth certificate and other relevant papers so that he can apply for a new passport there. As that will take a week, it means he won't be home until the end of next week.

I talked briefly to Owen at the B&B this evening.The host was grumpy and said: "you can't keep the phone tied up, so keep it short!!!!!"

Owen said if any of you know of any joint acquaintances who are not on this mailing list, please let them know what's happening, and ask them to e-mail Owen so that he can retrieve all his e-mail addresses. They were, of course, on his laptop that dissapeared in the waves.

One more thing: He wondered if anybody has posted his e-mail address on a website, because all of a sudden he has started receiving SPAM, which he never did before. The SPAM makers have something called SPAM Robot Search Engine that scrutinizes the web for e-mail addresses, so if you do post an address on a website, replace the @ with (a), thus:
naomi.j(a)frisurf.no. Then the address won't be detected, and if someone wants to write to him, they only have to change back. If any of you have indeed posted his address, please make sure it is changed ASAP.
I'm sure Owen will write to you all when he is back home safely.

Reidun (Owen's mother)