Only every twelve months do I upgrade my phone, so it is truly a ‘special’ delivery when the postman arrives with a little white note and a pen asking for my autograph.

This is the first time I haven’t really thought long and hard about which phone came next, I’d resigned to the fact that Sony Ericsson tend to make fantastic mobiles, and so plumped for the highest spec one they do in what I call the ‘work’, and they call the ‘K’ series. I don’t know what the K stands for, but much like CYMK, it doesn’t really matter as long as you know it’s important (the K in CMYK stands for Key actually).

I approached my contract renewal with the sole aim to keep my bill down yet gain as many minutes as possible. I have therefore, ended up on an 18 month contract for the first time. No iPhone for me anytime soon I predict.

The fact is, I only really buy phones for two reasons (excluding phone calls, obviously). The first is the camera. I could have gone for the N95 with all it’s bells and whistles, but even the owners who really should love the thing can’t say much nice about it. Much like Cameron Diaz in a chastity belt; everything you could ever desire is inside, but it’s just so damn hard to get at.

At the moment, 5 megapixels is king (that is unless you want to spend the GDP of a small African nation on a handset). As a person who in 2003 used to parade around with a 5MP camera as the greatest thing I ever bought whilst most people were still asking what ‘digital’ was, I feel slightly wary of my newest purchase. After all, it’s only 3.3 megapixels less than my DSLR, and in the 12 months since I bought my last phone we’ve gained 1.8MP on the previous version.

Anyway, I digress. Five million dots was the lowest I was going to settle for, so if it was going to be a Sony, it had to be this model.

The second major feature I need is synchronicity. My Mac’s, my phone - they both have to mirror all of my contact details for reasons including theft, loss and the knowledge that everyone I know is contactable no matter how drunk I am or what time it is.

Well all modern phones have that feature these days (Bluetooth), but the calendar and contact updating always impressed me on my W800i and K800i previously, so no reason to change what works.

So, I made a blind purchase. The guy on the phone offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse and although I’d never seen anything but a photo of the thing, I knew it was the handset for me.

Well, I may have been a little naive in not having a proper play beforehand. Although on the whole it is a very nice Sony Ericsson from the same mould as it’s two predecessors, it does lack a little in joined-up thinking. It’s not the software which has been improved upon - very well in most cases. It’s not the battery, SIM and memory stick access - a brilliant improvement. It’s not the display - brighter, more clear and sharper than ever. The main issue I have is with the keypad.

It maybe a ‘getting used to it’ thing, but my major bug bear is that although the keypad buttons are beautifully spaced, they are just about the same height as the amount of flesh required to squash-in when you try to press them. Hence, much like a overweight cat sitting on a remote control, the buttons are completely covered, but don’t actually press in.

My solution to this would be my nail (thankfully since I stopped biting them in India, I now have some), but the convex shape of the buttons means all but the most concave of fingernails can press them. This means that my rather ‘pointy’ and ‘nail-like’ nails slide around as though they’re competing in the Winter Olympics.

I do seem to be getting the grip of it, but it has taken a day or so. It will get easier with time, but after just picking up and playing with my old K800i again for five minutes, I think I will miss the big, hit-them-with-a-baseball-bat style buttons.

The other major button errors are the navigation keys. For the K850i, the joystick has become a thing of the past which is unfortunate if you like amusing yourself with Java games, because it’s not so easy anymore. However I’m not overly enamored by games, so I’m just trying to get used to the Big Blue Thing that replaces the joystick and loops around the 2 and 5 keys. It isn’t really bad, but still, bring the stick back - we’re in the middle of a 1980’s revival, we should be embracing these types of old-skool technologies.

The four (or two) silver navigation keys (depending on how you look at it) really are too small considering this a phone and accepting calls/hanging up are pretty important in my old fashioned view of things. However the biggest departure in navigation is the touch-sensitive (light-sensitive) menu buttons at the base of the screen.

Initially I didn’t enjoy them, but I’m pretty fond of them and their animations now. With no tactile response, it seems odd that you’d implement just three buttons using this technology. Then again, they didn’t use much logic in designing the rest of the keypad, so why start using those brains now.

Otherwise, they’ve taken a big step in the right direction. The camera is a real camera. It has ISO selection, metering, a proper mode switch, shutter release and on/off button on the side. The lens is now sensibly protected by a clear cover rather than the fantastically effective crumb and dust pit that previous models came with. It also lights up like Kit from Knightrider, which means if the spinning light ever dies on your Sky+ box you can just sellotape your K850i to the front of it with the shutter open and party on down.

Ok, so it’s missing optical zoom, and WiFi. It’s not really a cutting edge departure in design, and it’s sort of ‘gone a bit Britney Spears’ on the keypad layout. But hey, it’s new, it’s shiny, it’s a SonyEricsson and I’ve got so many more minutes now that I’m going to have to start making new friends just to mop up the call allowance.

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Anyone who has had a discussion with me about my TV habits in the past six months will probably have heard me mention the BBC iPlayer. I signed up for a beta account the day they announced it back in the summer and was lucky enough to get immediate approval to start using it.

For me, ‘On Demand’ has been the most important advancement in the television watching experience for a very long time. I understand the hype, but have not yet really engaged with HD, digital recorders or services like Sky+ - I’m spending less and less time actually sat in front of a TV to watch programmes.

This is probably partially down to my lifestyle - the computer is always to hand and in most ways it delivers my DVD/video-watching experience in a far smoother way, and I’m not limited to when I watch what. Even when I do use the TV, Virgin’s Catch Up TV service is a regular player, and although I’m unsure why there are two extra & identical channels dedicated to just Virgin content, I tend to hit the big blue button (on the old Telewest remote) and browse through around a week’s worth of content.

The main problem I find with accessing On Demand content on the TV is speed. I’m used to zipping through menus at lightening speeds, and having to wait for slower-than-56k-modem-speeds for just a textual menu to load drives me up the wall. However, when you get there, the experience of watching something you missed two days ago rather than having to sit through forty minutes of some other drivel to wait a repeat to start, still wows me.

When I started using the iPlayer beta back in the summer, I was still using Windows mainly, and so it didn’t matter that I needed to download most of the programmes in big lumps (using the Beeb’s own peer-to-peer network). However, I knew that one day before the end of the year I was going to switch over to Mac, and with no sign of when support would be coming, it looked like I’d have to run the service on a virtual machine for a few months. In actual fact, no sooner had I installed Windows, I found BBC had suddenly made some of their programming available through embedded Flash players, but I still had to download some of the content.

It turns out it was just the beginning of a wider roll-out, and now everything (as far as I am aware) is available as a embedded video. Initially, I was a little skeptical about the quality - in the first week or two there were a few instances where the playback went down mid-way through a programme, but this seems to have been ironed out. I did wonder if the quality had suffered because of the streaming nature of the system, but after using the new Flash-based media for about a month, I can’t say I’ve really been bothered and the problems have become less frequent. It’s not like you’re having to watch it at a measly YouTube quality anyway (and I think that will remain a benchmark of TV-streaming for a long while).

The interface of the system has seen some changes since the beta launch of the pink and black iPlayer. I was initially concerned by the reliance on JavaScript in the interface, and had occasionally hit bugs which prevented me from getting what I wanted without having to refresh the page. The desktop application twinned with a web application approach that was used for the peer-to-peer element was a little bulky I felt, but no I don’t have to concern myself with that, the process has become far more lightweight and nimble than most video-delivery services; the BBC being lucky that it doesn’t have to include anything but the content, unlike feature-packed, advert-ridden, social-video-networks.

I can’t really fault the immediate benefit of a multi-platform, Flash-based, seven-day service, except that perhaps I’d like it to include programming from other networks. According to reports, plans are in the pipeline. I’m always disappointed to find Channel 4 doesn’t supply their content in a wholly Mac-friendly manner (try live streaming of Channel 4 or the 4oD service), but I know that we are still in the early stages of development of these media repositories, and further down the line it we will hopefully see more providers offering their content in the way the BBC is now doing. After watching iPlayer content in this new way, I would definitely advocate that this is the way forward with the medium. Those who still want to download (as long as they have a copy of Windows), still can.

And maybe one day we will see whole series back-catalogues being made available through these services. 4oD have a pretty good pay-for system for this already, but the BBC would have to provide the service for free.

The BBC’s listen-again and on-demand radio operations have also been poured very recently into the iPlayer mould, although the change is superficial at the moment. RealPlayer is still required to access any of the content, but I’m sure they will eventually take the lead from Channel 4 who have been pioneering a Flash-based system with custom playlists of programmes so you can create seamless radio experiences for yourself. Still in beta, Channel 4 plans to launch a number of new digital radio stations in the next year or so, but their beta channel (4Radio) is already available in this way.

Overall, the impact of the BBC’s iPlayer on my television watching habits over the past six months has been significant, and whilst I enjoyed 4oD as the first in it’s field I really don’t want the hassle of firing up Windows everytime I want to watch Grand Designs - I’d rather go and use Catch Up TV on the box. Online for mainstream television, the BBC iPlayer now leads the way.

(p.s. Anyone who knows a good way to control the iPlayer using an Apple remote and is reading this… I’d be very interested to know!)

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It’s probably best to say Happy New Year at this point. Mine was spent in London, another cheap return ticket by train and plenty of amusement along the bank of the Thames.

Swan and myself started with a couple of beers in Seven Kings before heading into central london where we met with Devito and Ainhoa before finding somewhere to sit in a Wetherspoons somewhere behind the Tower of London. A bit of ameretto and a couple of hours later we took off again closer to the river, having a good little meander in and around walled gardens along the river and through the marinas before ending up outside the Lord Mayor’s office with Swan’s sisters and their respective boyfriends.

It was quickly decided to find some shelter (a bar) where we waited for the strike of midnight. We had stopped right outside HMS Befast, hoping to be able to glimpse the spectacular fireworks, but rather perceptively, we managed to avoid them completely. It didn’t seem to matter too much at the time though - we heard Big Ben, saw some flashes of light behind the City skyline and retreated back inside briefly to place one last order.

At this point Swan, Devito, Ainhoa and myself split away once more and took to scouring the backstreets for some final place to spend the early hours. Despite our best efforts to crash a party without tickets, we found places would let us in if we paid, so we did.

The rest of the evening was spent on a cultural exchange with a group of Swedish tourists. I now know that something that sounds like ‘schlips knutze’ is a tie with a knot, however I am struggling to find ways to work this into conversations. It took about four hours to get back to Swan’s and I didn’t get to sleep until 7.30am.

By the time I arrived at Marylebone at 3pm later on New Year’s Day to catch the train home I was feeling surprisingly awake, but after walking back from the station then fish and chips, I was out like a light.

A good start to the new year by my reckoning.

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I do feel that for various reasons that persons wanting to read this blog might have felt they haven’t been getting their money’s worth in December so here is a bumper round up to clear up what’s occurred during the time I’ve spent not writing very much.

Since Lufbra a couple of weeks ago I’ve been working hard on a number of projects that have been taking up large chunks of time, including building a big contact database for one client, and pushing through a series of refreshes on another of my larger projects. What with the stuff up in Sheffield too, it’s been manic, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been enjoying it.

Despite all this, I’ve tried not to neglect social stuff as best I can, so have recently had a good few meet ups with Will (talking about a potentially very nice bit of work), Steve, John and Tom, Raj, George, and Wii sessions over at other Tom’s (where on my first attempt to use the controller I managed to smash a glass all over his front room).

And further afield, last night I went out in Bank with Swan and Devito, one of two trips to London this week, as I’ll be down there again for new year as well. For the first time possibly ever, I’ve had so many invitations for things to do on 31st January I feel mortified that I’m having to turn people down… after all, the past three years have been very last-minute affairs.

Last night was very humorous. It involved age-old drinking games, posh bars, cheeseburgers, an Albanian, sore knuckles (not from fighting however), falling asleep on a bus for far too long and a Krispy Kreme doughnut. I then spent most of this morning nursing a ferocious headache while my mate’s 13 year old brother hurled insults at me on an etch-a-sketch. It wasn’t a conventional hangover recovery method, nor was it particularly effective.

Christmas itself was the usual family thing, and after having the main event here at home, the next day was over to the relatives in the country, and thankfully it was for lasagna and not for more turkey. Presents-wise I’ve done not too badly, although I’m chocolated up to my eyeballs and visits to the pool have become fewer and further between due to changes in the daily schedule. I’ve drawn up a list of things I need to purchase in the coming weeks, but have yet to venture to any sales. Internet shopping seems far more appealing.

I’m hoping that 2008 is going to be as good if not better than 2007. Still, 2003 is the year to beat in terms of greatness, so here’s to hoping and a belated Merry Christmas to you all.

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The run up to Christmas, Christmas itself and the aftermath have been a great big sticky pudding mix of socials, late night working sprees and over indulgence, and not really in that order.

You may also have noticed that things have changed here a bit.

The first thing to note is the reason that I haven’t posted for ages, probably the longest I’ve left it while still in the country, is that this website is no longer at it’s old slash-blog location. Although all the links still work, I’m now floating ‘Just Beyond The Bridge’ over on it’s own domain making it well and truly standalone.

AndyHiggs.co.uk may get it’s own blog back eventually as a different type of beast, but for all the usual stuff you now come here. Feed-reader users fear not, due to the wonder’s of feedburner you won’t notice a thing, except you now get all those photos too…

In more technical detail, what I’ve done is shifted everything that was on my old TextPattern installation over to ExpressionEngine. Well, you can never jump on a bandwagon too quickly I think, but of course it’s much better to arrive fashionably late.

I’m not entirely convinced by everything yet, although it does appear pretty flexible and have some nice facets; this is an exploration of the package as much as anything else, so bear with me while I bang around with the code, iron out the glitches and clean up the somewhat shabby code in places. There are some encoding issues I’ve discovered (where ‘Bent?’ read ‘Bentō’ for example) and maybe a few articles that don’t quite map as before. If you spot anything glaring, comments will be gratefully accepted below.

Rather surprisingly the Internet Explorer 6 hacks file was the smallest I’ve ever made for a site this size, but admittedly they don’t get all the opacity fun that you do on the full fat version. There is some jQuery image resize shizzle going on too for those of you viewing this on a GameBoy sized screen… it should look good down to quite small (give it a go if you like).

Design-wise, it’s no classic, but I wanted to get my photography back in here and hence at the moment (December 2007) you can see a panoramic view from the Tibetan plateau (taken on my last big excursion).

As I say, work in progress, but feel free to chip in, after all, you’re the ones that have to look at it.

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I tend to have found that even a year and a half after leaving the place, I have gravitated back to my place of university education, Loughborough, on a pretty regular basis. Once again this was demonstrated by a trip at the end of last week that has meant I swapped part of the week for pretty much the whole of my weekend. It’s 1.30am on a Sunday and I’ve just stopped working. Mike and Swan met me in The Bridge and we took off via car to the ‘Boro for what was billed as probably the last time we’ll do it, at least for a good while. Although student nights out are very funny, cheap and a good place to catch up, they are also not aimed at people who are no longer students. Most of the people we know are now gone, and over the two nights up there, we saw a handful of people we knew, but soon enough another generation will have passed completely through. It was good to make the most of the last crumbs of studenthood while it lasted though. I got back on Friday and went for a brief drink with Will who appears to be really enjoying his time on placement. On Saturday it was yet another Multipack meet up and Stu, Trev, Matt and myself graced Lloyd’s on Broad Street for a couple of hours. Aside from these few hours with friends, the rest of time has been firmly planted in front of reams of code. Of note, 24 Ways have been producing some really nice articles this year (on the most part) and the iPlayer has been updated (Stu – the question is, will I write about it…?). This whole Mac thing is getting easier every week. I've got quite a lot to think about in the coming days; it’s going to be a busy one.

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After my second trip to Sheffield at the beginning of the week, I found myself in Aberystwyth this weekend, and look set to be in Loughborough midweek.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty heavyweight affairs but I think everyone at Rattle was more than pleased with the result (me included). There’s nothing that can’t be fixed up with a craft knife, a roll of masking tape and a power drill (though I get the impression my ‘safety socks’ wouldn’t normally pass as workshop gear. They aren’t steel toe-capped or anything.

While up there I spent one evening trying to locate Tongy’s new flat. He’s been commuting to Barnsley from Loughborough everyday for the past few months and finally decided to get a place a little closer to work as a two-to-four hour commute twice a day is a little on the nasty side of sadistic. Apart from the issues with a lack of postcode (the place is brand spanking new) and most of the roads now part of a fantastic one way system (turns out no one had informed the GPS) we managed to catch up for an hour or so.

Being Sister One’s twenty first this week, I took the train out to Welsh Wales on Saturday and spent a festive night out in Aberystwyth town Despite being three years into her course, this is the first time I’ve managed to make it over there, but it was a good night and very, very cheap. Raj showed his face as well and I sampled the local speciality drink, an ‘Admiral’ which was more pleasant than I had been expecting.

I seem to remember there were quite a lot of hot looking elfish girls wandering around too; always a bonus.

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