There are many ways of saying you were wrong and I’ve been searching for a good one lately.

Long story short, my attempt at time travel did not go very well. I took the Nokia and went back at least 5 years. Although it is good at making phone calls as I expected, its solid hardware is crippled by slow and under-performing software that gets in your way in many unpleasant ways.

While I stand behind my last take on Android 100%, turning back to Symbian was a folly.

Here’s a brief summary of my experience so far:

1. Phone calls and messaging: just works. Good.
2. Mobile browsing: works so-so; the embedded browser is based on Webkit and renders most sites reasonably well, but if the site is relying on JavaScript heavily, the world stops spinning. I whipped up a quick demo with jQuery Mobile: a simple form with ~ 10 fields, and I almost could not scroll down the page. Neutral, because I don’t use it for browsing much.
3. General system responsiveness and ease-of-use: quirky and hostile.

   The boot-up seems fast up to the point where you enter your PIN code, then the UI kind-of  loads, but you have to wait 10-20 seconds before all application icons appear on your homescreen and you start using the phone.

   Then, whenever you scroll down the applications menu, the movement is jerky as if the phone is actively resisting your commands.Most apps except the dialer take their sweet time to load. Worse yet, you don’t get an immediate visual feedback that the app is starting and have to wait 2-3 seconds before it either loads or you tap the icon again in case the OS didn’t register it the first time.

   Even such a basic thing as unlocking the screen can become a fighting match as the phone acknowledges my jerking the unlock hardware key with an angry vibration, yet does not unlock the screen until the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time.

   In summary, it feels as if the phone is living its own comfortable life and complains every time you disrupt it by wanting to use it. Bad, very bad.

With that said I cannot recommend the E6 at all, even disregarding its “smartphone-like” capabilities and only considering it as a voice and messaging device. Whether or not Nokia did a better job with the Windows Phone I do not know and am not particularly keen to find out. The only thing that’s still keeping it in my pocket is that it can share the data connection via a Wifi hotspot (ad-hoc mode only, though, and you have to pay for an app to do that, in my case JoikuSpot).

If you are the prototypical geek, you’ve probably only seen the inside of a gym once in the 2nd week after Christmas. That was when the shame of the extra pounds gained over the holidays momentarily overpowered your will to spend time doing more useful things, such as producing Ruby code.

I have been there myself. Once you hit 30, however, your monitor-focused lifestyle can start exacting its toll on your health and well being, which is what happened to me in the summer of 2009.

Having developed a severe back pain, I was unable to complete my daily commute using the Prague public transport without gnashing my teeth in pain as I stood in the metro wagon. During our family vacation in Italy, we had to stop every 200 meters on our walk through Bologna as I had to sit down and shake off the pain. The pain had become intense and had not subsided even when I laid down to sleep.

One day I could no longer stand the sense of humiliation such ailment brings and started shopping for solutions. Physical therapy was one. And the therapist suggested I develop some back muscle to fight the root causes of my pain, which was obviously a by-product of my sedentary lifestyle.

I had been an on-and-off visitor to the gym since my teens but if I were to count the “on” days, they were outnumbered by the “off” days by a huge margin. You see, I don’t really enjoy exercising, though I do like the hormonal rush you receive after a good workout.

Looking for ways to make the exercise fun and effective so that I wouldn’t give it up after bringing the pain to bearable levels, I looked around the web for inspiration. It was then when I discovered the Stronglifts 5×5 program.

Long story short, it has cured my back pain completely after one month, I haven’t been ill once, and when I do occasionally catch a common cold, it’s gone in two three days tops.

I think that the appeal of Stronglifts for me was its simplicity and focus. It’s a weight-lifting program that’s designed to make you stronger. You alternate two workouts, which means no more wasting time deciding what exercise to do next. You plan your progress weeks ahead as you are only adding 2.5kg of iron each time. And, since you only do free weights, you no longer compete with other amateurs for the use of machines. Oh yes, free weights are one of key ingredients to success in this program.

Now, let me say that I have re-visited the SL website after a long time and I do not particularly enjoy its direct-marketing copy. Nor do I enjoy the fact that you can no longer download the ebook freely. You now have to sign up and wait until Mehdi releases a new batch of PDFs sometime this year (as if distributing a PDF carried any distribution costs!) This is bullshit; I’d much rather pay, say, $15 without having to get on the mailing list.

Perhaps I am missing something but this is a serious flaw of the program, one that does nevertheless nothing to stop you from jumping on board and progressing from a weak geek to a strong and fit one.

It has done wonders for me in the 12+ months that I’ve been doing it. I’ve gained about 10kg of muscle, which is actually a lot less than you can do; I am a smoker, and I’ve had trouble keeping my diet straight (I’ve only added breakfast to my menu this month).

It just works and you don’t have to necessarily become a body-builder in the process; just the increased fitness and strengthened immunity is a fantastic outcome. So yes, you can keep spending most of your day in your IDE and only invest 3 hours of your time every week to insure the well-being of your inner code monkey.

I am not associated with the proprietors of Stronglifts 5×5 website in any way and have not received any compensation of any kind (just that so we are clear). I am just that happy with what it has done for me and thought I should share.

• Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder
  The money quote: “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.” I agree to some point – locking into a cloud provider is no different than locking into Oracle / SAP contract. We need a mechanism to ensure that our data stays ours no matter who the provider is at the moment.
• Mobile Startup Case Studies at mTrends – mobile media lifestyle trends – m-trends.org
  Why is everybody still making another photo sharing app after another? Are there any other use cases for mobile? It shouldn’t take a credit crisis for us to start getting serious. Can’t wait for Web 3.0 (apps with value AND a pricelist) to come.
• The Business of Software – Offering free editions
  Interesting discussion, esp. for anyone trying to make a dime by selling software in the economy of “free”. I am strongly convinced that we’ll be seeing less “free” in the very near future. Nothing trumps “value for money”.
• Ditching the Semantic Web?
  Perhaps. The problem of this (and many other lofty ideas) is that they haven’t been inspired by a real, dire need of actual people. But then, ideas and ideals do sometimes generate real, actual needs. Pick your side.

So I hear Apple is now blogging to calm its customers who are none too happy about MobileMe flaws.

Apple? Blogging? Is the sun still rising from the east?

Apparently Firefox 3 isn’t a good enough browser for me to see it for myself. Clicking repeatedly on “Continue” had no effect – this is the only page I could access.

It’s been long since I’ve been discriminated against by a web site, mostly because all the major browsers now support all the features you can imagine, so discrimination makes no sense anymore. This reminded me of the days when companies assumed I’d install software just so that I could see their web site.

In 1999, I might have bothered.