(no subject)

[shermarama]

As is traditional on many LJ posts these days, let me begin by explaining why I haven't posted in ages and how the mechanics of modern life tend to prevent this.

One, having finally got a smart phone with decent data access I can check email and flists and facebook and Hyves (blimey, going native) easily, and am less keen to get behind my ageing laptop for news of the day when I get home. And while smart phones can do remarkable things for their size, writing posts of the dimensions I usually want to write is still quite hard, even with a remarkably good keyboard. Two, I've been busy, and that doesn't help the stuff to report: time and ease of reporting it ratio. But here I am with a forty minute train ride and a swipey keyboard (and darkness out of the window, sunrise now occurring after I get to Rotterdam) and it's better to do something than nothing.

And now I can only think of my immediate concerns. I might be late for the 9 am meeting, I hope I get to do something involving robots and dew point sensors this afternoon anyway, I must get the Christmas shopping finished, I hope the beer festival in Essen this weekend (in Belgium! Getting a train to another country! By about half a kilometre, at that particular point in the impossibly convoluted Netherlands/Belgium border!) is fun. Being reminded when cycling past some workmen this morning that Amsterdam doesn't fasten its floors down, the pavements and streets made of bricks laid in herringbone patterns directly onto a bed of the same fine, sandy silt that lurks in vast layers at the bottom of lakes, making still-hanging cloud structures you can practically navigate by if you're foolish enough to disturb it. The things I've done (brewed two lots of homebrew, both drinkable, had a minor diving incident because of the extremely cold lake water, leading to me having to ride Chris's bike, which is too small for me, around the steep-bridged city centre with thirty something kilos of cylinder on a trailer on the back to get new valves put on them, eating a lot of Dutch holiday related food, almost all of which seems to be letter-shaped, gradually improving my Dutch by applying myself to reading the Rotterdam edition of the Metro everyday
), these things have mostly gone unrecorded.

And the forty minutes is pretty much up. Damn these smart phones.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I would agree that acquiring a smartphone turned me into a consumer of, rather than a contributor to, social media - especially LiveJournal.

[shermarama]

The post size is all wrong on LJ. I think people do write short ones, but that's never been what I've used it for.

[aphroditemf.livejournal.com]

Which smartphone did you get? I have an iPhone, but haven't tried posting on LJ using it - because, as you said, the keyboards on phones are rather small and fiddly.

[shermarama]

I've got a Samsung Galaxy Ace, which is a bottom-of-the-top-end sort of one, with not that high-res or large a screen, partly due to price and partly due to that being about the largest size of phone I'm willing to actually carry round. The keyboard is about as good an interface as it could be, though. You swipe along chains of letters on the keyboard to make words rather than poking at individual letter buttons, and apart from its one irritating habit of preferring 'pod' to 'of', it's generally pretty intelligent. And given that I've got rather more of a vocabulary than the txters it was designed for, the dictionary's remarkably good too. It's still fundamentally a tiny thing trying to do something it can only just do, though.

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

I've made a few LJ posts from my new Samsung Galaxy Note. The screen is much bigger (which helps a lot) but though I've discovered the swipe option I've not yet mastered a favorite setting for writing (the self-spellng thing seems to cause me grief.)
I did have to write a large post - also while on the train, and ended up writing it in a word app (easily saved and spellchecked) and then copy and pasting it onto LJ. I think this is the strategey I will use in future, especially if I want to write a massive post offline while underground and then post it in a brief overground interval. Your Samsung must have a word app too, might be worth trying?

[shermarama]

Ah, yes, I'm a natural speller so I don't find that a problem, mostly, apart from the word cancelled, which I'm determined has two ls in it, while this dictionary thinks it only has one.

[shermarama]

But, and that's where your idea of a word app is a good idea and also why I'm posting this as another reply, what I really need is a better text editor. This one has no cursor keys and once you've left the end of the text there's no way back. Single paragraphs are not for me.

[ceb.livejournal.com]

Dutch holiday related food, almost all of which seems to be letter-shaped

I <3 Banketletter. Ian's family make it from scratch each year, and home-made marzipan is so much better than shop stuff it's unbelievable. You do need a huge fuck-off food processor to grind the almonds though...

[shermarama]

Banketletters (we got given them at work, though they were called boterletters, but I think they're the same thing) were a definite highlight. I've made marzipan from pre-bought ground almonds a number of times, usually with orange zest and cointreau in, but never tried it right from whole almonds. That probably works even better, doesn't it?

[ceb.livejournal.com]

Same thing, banketletter or boterletter. Boter means butter, not sure what banket means.

Whole almonds is just mmmmmmm *drooling noises*

[shermarama]

Banket seems to be something to do with bakers, from the other places I've seen it, but it's not literal. It's very tasty, though.