Monthly Archives: February 2005

Word of the day: resile

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I was reading a story in the Guardian about the British government’s reaction to the latest IRA announcement*, and I read: “No 10 has never resiled from its view that the IRA was involved in the bank robbery”

resiled?! What’s this? Is the Grauniad** up to its old tricks? Apparently not: to resile is, inter alia, “to abjure: formally reject or disavow a formerly held belief, usually under pressure”. Dates back to 1520-1530, from the French resilir and before that the Latin resilire, to spring back. Same root as resilient. And I’d never seen it before. Neat.

* The IRA is throwing a hissy fit because it was caught robbing banks, so it’s withdrawing its commitment to decommission its weapons. Makes perfect sense….?

** I think it was Private Eye that dubbed the Guardian “the Grauniad” on account of its frequent typos.

Trackback blogspam

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This morning, starting just after midnight Eastern, somebody started spraying trackback pings at my blog – about 150 so far, still going. A few weeks ago, while tweaking the template for the front page, I’d added a list of the last five trackbacks. I just got rid of that, so now (as far as I can see) there’s no trace of the spammer’s sites or addresses anywhere on geoffarnold.com. Hopefully this will persuade the bots to ignore me as an unprofitable target…..
[UPDATE: 2/3/05] Another burst of 50-60 pings this morning (on top of the 250 in this current plague) provoked me into doing what I should have done all along: install Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist. It was amazingly easy. No excuses…..

Back to basics

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After my recent rant about the lamentable state of the US cellphone market, I calmed down. What am I really looking for? I’ve already got a decentadequate digital camera; I’ve got a Bluetooth mouse, so I don’t need to use my phone as a remote control for my PowerBook (plus I won’t always be using my PowerBook – more in a week or two). I need a basic cellphone that has decent battery life, good signal reception, good audio, and an easy UI. I use the WAP! portal! to! My! Yahoo! a lot, so decent GPRS (EDGE) is a plus. Oh, and I’d like a usable hands-free solution, rather than that earbud-on-a-string that always seems to get tangled in my seatbelt.
So today, after my Nokia 3650 spontaneously powered off for the umpteenth time, I picked up a Motorola V551, along with a Motorola Bluetooth headset. Let’s see how it goes. I’ve noted one annoyance already: Motorola and Apple don’t agree about Bluetooth, so to use iSync I’ll have to get a cable. And when I select silent or vibrate mode I’d like a really clear indication of this in the external display. But on balance, I like it. It feels right; menus are mostly clear; the multimedia stuff is ignorable; the screen is dazzling; predictive text entry is a little easier than I’m used to; IM and email is a snap. The battery claims are impressive; we’ll see what reality is like.
Oh, yes, I did have one more criterion: that the price be low enough that if the perfect phone comes along tomorrow I won’t feel like a schmuck.