Posts Tagged ‘full retard

12
Mar
12

Nokia Lumia 800 First Impressions

By SlickTiger 1 Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
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Nokia-Lumia-800I’m no tech-junkie, but like most guys I get excited by new gadgets and keep an eye on global and local trends when it comes to technology because it’s an inextricable part of our lives.

Having gone to the launch of the Nokia Lumia phones a few weeks back, I was keen to get my hands on a unit and try it out, so the kind folks at Nokia obliged and a review unit was delivered on Friday.

I waited for Saturday to start playing around with the phone and spent a good 4 hours setting it up and trying it out, so here are some of my first impressions of the Lumia 800.

Form Factor

Ahh, form factor. The obligatory first step in any tech review. There isn’t much to say here except that the Lumia is dead sexy, fits comfotrably in the palm of your hand, is solid without being bulky or obtrusive and has a super sleek feel to it thanks to the curved glass touchscreen.

Its smooth one-piece body is completely buttonless except for the volume, lock and camera buttons on the right side of the phone. And speaking of the camera, Nokia made the genius decision to place the camera lens closer to the middle of the phone, thus reducing the risk of gigantic blurry fingers creeping into your pics.

 

 

It has 3 touch screen buttons along the bottom of the screen to go back, return to the home screen and search.

I got the cyan handset and I’ll be honest here and admit that the next time I’m in a meeting / hanging out with friends / sitting at home by myself I’ll definitely be whipping that bad boy out and putting it on the table in front of me all nonchalantly whilst silently congratulating myself for being such an awesome guy.

 

Micro SIM

Like all new generation smartphones, the Lumia 800 uses a micro SIM instead of a normal one, something I found really frustrating when I was playing around with the Nokia N9 because it meant I had to pay R70 to get a micro SIM, do a SIM swap, wait 2 hours for it to go through and then throw my old SIM card away (it’s useless after the SIM swap), only to repeat the entire process in reverse after the review.

This time around I decided not to be a complete douche about it and just cut my normal SIM into a micro SIM using the micro SIM from my iPad as a template and it actually worked.

 

 

This came as a big surprise to me as I’d used a Stanley Knife and some hair scissors to do the job and thought I’d definitely botched it completely. Instead I NAILED IT, poured myself a whisky and silently congratulated myself for being such an awesome guy.

Firing it up

The first two things that struck me about the Lumia 800 were the responsiveness of the touch screen and how super-simple the menu navigation is.

You basically work entirely off two screens – your home screen that has all your tiles (these can be anything from apps to websites to calendar entries to email accounts) and the page you swipe right to that lists more tiles you can choose to pin to your homepage.

 

 

What I LOVED about the Lumia 800 is that it doesn’t keep every app / tile open in the background when you navigate to different places on the phone.

So when you hold down the back button and it brings up a screen with all your open tasks, unless you’ve been hitting the windows button to shortcut back to your home screen, you should only see one open task window.

Otherwise the back button is really all you need to navigate with. Genius in it’s simplicity!

People

I’d heard about “people” at the Lumia launch and was dead keen to try this feature of the Windows 7 phone out. The idea is that you start by signing in to all your accounts (Windows Live / Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, X-Box Live, etc.) and with each successful sign in, your phone pulls all kinds of information from each account and starts populating your phone with contacts, posts, tweets and emails.

I found the experience completely seamless and surprisingly fun to go through (GeekTiger?). Of course, it will pull duplicate and sometimes triplicate contacts (I save all my friends on my phone SIM under their nicknames, so in some cases I had their Facebook details, their details from my SIM and their email addresses as three separate entries), but it’s dead easy to fix by just linking contacts.

In most cases the Lumia 800 correctly predicted who was who and suggested possible links, which made the whole process even simpler.

 

 

Thirty minutes later, a casual scroll through “people” revealed basically every human I’ve ever met in my ENTIRE LIFE, neatly organised with thumbnail pics for each entry. Opening a contact (like my good buddy Action, for example), now gives me the option to call him, SMS him, Facebook chat with him, write on his Facebook wall, mention him on Twitter, send him an email, map his home address, map his work address and visit his website.

It also tells me his job title, when his birthday is and who his “significant other” is, which made the stalker in me do backflips with joy.

Barring his childhood dreams and general philosophy on life, I know pretty much everything about Action now and with three touches can communicate with him in any number of ways.

The one thing that confused me though, and maybe I was being a retard, was that you aren’t given the option to chat with contacts using Gmail. What am I missing here guys? Help SlickRetard please.

 

 

That’s all the time we have for today’s Nokia Lumia 800 review. I’ll be writing a whole series of posts as I get into the nuts and bolts of this phone, but my initial impression and user experience has been pretty damn slick.

Which, when you’re SlickTiger, is where it’s at yo.

Peace.

-ST

20
Oct
10

Computer Retarded

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
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My uncle is a fucking cool guy, but he’s computer retarded.

And yeah, I know what you’re thinking – maybe he posts dumb updates on Facebook or clicks ‘reply to all’ on emails and says things that make everyone cringe, but no, it’s much worse than that.

 

 

He uses a mouse that has a ball in it and the ball’s so full of gunk you end up looking like a complete spazz when you use it because you have to push the mouse across the pad five times to move the cursor from one side of the screen to the other.

Doesn’t phase my uncle though. He uses the machine because it has Microsoft Word and email, both of which he can sort of use. I tried to explain the internet to him once, but he flat out refused to understand what I was telling him.

So I take him three audio CDs that I’ve burned him and he tells me it’s cool, he’s recently learned how to play CDs on his computer, so he’s gonna give it a go.

I stand back and watch while he pushes the mouse backward and forward across the mouse pad a couple of times, all the while dragging desktop icons randomly around the place and dropping them into folders where they don’t belong.

Finally he positions the cursor over Winamp and double clicks it.

‘Cool,’ I say, ‘yeah that should be able to play the CDs.’

‘Yes. My friend showed me how this works.’

‘Ok,’

We stare at the screen. Nothing happens. My uncle double clicks again.

‘Um. I think just give it s-‘

He double clicks again.

‘Just give it a little time to open th-‘

He double clicks again.

‘Um.’

We stare at the screen. Still nothing happens.

‘Maybe just put the CD in and see if it picks it up,’ I suggest.

‘Ok,’ he says and switches the computer off. We stare at the screen.

‘Why… did you just do that?’

‘Oh shit. Is it off?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh. Sorry, I was trying to open it.’

‘Ok, that’s this button,’ I said, pointing to the eject button next to the CD drive. ‘So just… switch it on again…” I said and patiently waited while Windows Professional 2000 rebooted.

Once it was back up he wasted no time in double clicking the Winamp icon again and then one more time just to be sure.

‘Cool… lemme just put the CD in…” I said, hitting the eject button.

He double clicks again. The CD drive closes. He double clicks again.

After a few seconds, the CD drive makes a sound like an old hoover and starts playing t. he. C. D. lik. e. th. is.

‘Is it broken?’ he said, baffled.

‘Um, no. You’ve opened Winamp six times.’

‘Ah, I see.’

‘So let’s just close a few of these… hit play again… and… it’s a done deal…’

‘Ok, now it’s playing fine.’

‘Cool, can you remember that?’

‘No.’

‘Ok,’

‘Want a beer?’

‘God yes.’

And that’s what it’s like with computer retarded people. You can’t change them, but as long as there’s beer, everyone’s happy.

-ST

16
Feb
10

Why I Don’t Play Action Cricket

By SlickTiger 5 Comments
Categories: Being Slick and Killer Posts
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Look, I don’t want to start this post on the wrong foot here ok? This is about why I don’t play action cricket, I’m totally down with the fact that you might play action cricket, playing action cricket is a perfectly acceptable pastime that thousands of mentally disabled people engage in worldwide, keeps them from banging the cat, I’m cool with that.

 

 

In fact, one of my best and severely mentally disabled friends, The Glaze, used to play action cricket every Friday with his buddies from work, that’s how open minded I am about the whole thing.

They were part of some league or other, which meant they played against a whole bunch of other tards who’d formed these ‘work buddy’ teams to encourage healthy socialising outside of working hours.

But let’s be honest, these ‘work buddy’ teams only exist because three or four douchebags in the office are FUCKING AMAZING at EVERY CONCEIVABLE SPORT and so they rope in a whole bunch of other guys who really suck at sport so that the douchebags can laugh at and humiliate the others in public.

If some guy at work came up to me and said, “Hey dude, we’re starting an action cricket team, it’s gonna be rad bro! We play every Friday after work, have a couple of beers, it’s chilled, wanna sign up?”

My reply would be, “I’m sorry. Friday nights are when I masturbate furiously to re-runs of ‘Murder She Wrote’. Sounds retarded doesn’t it? Yeah, well so does action cricket.”

 

 

See, The Glaze didn’t have the malevolence in his spirit to perceive the trap he had wandered into by agreeing to play action cricket in a ‘work buddy’ team until it was too late.

And so there he’d be on Friday evenings, NOT enjoying a few sneaky libations with the rest of his real life friends, but rather stuck in some day-glo green astro-turfed nightmare, trying with all the skill he could muster to hit a ball with a plank of wood.

Just wait, it gets better.

At some stage during their league games, the office douchebags decide to implement a new rule. The person with the lowest score has to drink a HUGE mouthful of warm beer, not out of a glass, no, that would be too easy. Not out of a shoe either, also not degrading enough.

Instead, the player with the lowest score was forced to drink a HUGE mouthful of warm beer out of the communal ball-box.

Two things immediately struck me when The Glaze broke this news one evening in shame – a) Why the fuck did they all use the same ball-box? and b) WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THEM?!

At this stage let me just make one thing clear. By ‘ball-box’, I’m not referring to a box that balls come in, I’m referring to the moulded piece of hard plastic that players wear to protect their sweaty junk from injury.

 

 

Surely at the exact point that someone suggests you play for stakes like that is when any sane person makes any excuse imaginable to get the fuck out of there?

What’s really funny though is how badly The Glaze’s team sucked. By the end of it all I think they’d lost every game except for two. They still got medals for effort though, every player in the team, which really cracks me up because The Glaze got the lowest score four or five times, once even managing to score –12, so in my estimation, he must have drank about a pint of ball-box beer.

Unfortunately he took his medal out with him on Friday night and by mistake lost it, which made me laugh so hard I cried because who in God’s name would want to walk around clubs and bars with a medal they got for drinking ball-box beer?

“Hi cutie, nice medal, what’s it for?”

“Drinking ball-box beer.”

“Oh my GOD!”

“What is it Tracy?”

“That guy’s an action cricketer!”

“Ok, stay the fuck away from us freak or I’m calling the Police!”

But what really cracked me up is the fact that the poor dude’s downed a pint of ball-box beer and now he’s got nothing to show for it! Hahahahaha! Double-edged sword muthufukkah!

 

 

The lesson here kids is never let your ‘work buddies’ rope you into any kind of sporting activity that you aren’t a semi-pro at or they’ll finally have that opportunity they’ve been waiting for to make you drink their ball-sweat.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you 😉

-ST