Semantic Auto-Correct

The interesting developments that led to Siri on the iPhone 4s got me thinking – wouldn’t it be great if we had an auto-correct on iOS that was just a little more semantic?

I often type “ate” instead of “are”. If I write “Where ate you?” into a text message, iOS should really know that I mean “are” and not “ate”. It’s not a difficult substitution to make. Who on earth would ever mean to say “Where ate you?”

Then before the upgrade to iOS5, my iPhone insisted on changing “thr” to “Thr” instead of “the”. No matter how many times I dismissed the change, I always got bloody “Thr” as a substitute, whether I liked it or not. And all because I once allowed Thr to stand as a valid correction. It reminds me of Original Sin – the idea that we are still paying for the sins of Adam. A little harsh.

Let’s have better error correction please, because otherwise the iPhone’s only weak point remains that on-screen keyboard on the tiny screen.

My Walled Garden is Unkempt

Previously in my Apple Walled Garden, apart from single issues that Apple never respond to until they’ve [fixed them][1], things have been pretty rosy. The machines just go on working year after year, the [kernel panics][2] occur so rarely that when they *do* happen, they are genuinely shocking. You’re left trying to remember how many months it’s been since the last kernel panic. I don’t remember the last time. As for apps, well, they are robust and you just don’t seem to lose any work.

For the last week or so, things have not been so good.

The Alarms in my favourite timer app, [Due] [3], have stopped ringing on completion.

iCloud seems to be duplicating and triplicating my iCal entries all over the place. I feel like a parent chasing behind a perpetually messy teenager (actually, I feel that anyway, but that’s by the by) deleting the extra entries that sprout up for no reason. It’s 2011 for crying out loud, you’d think that calendars would be smart enough now not to duplicate entries that are clearly duplicates? If there is an entry for a given day proclaiming the anniversary of a given person’s birth, shouldn’t the Calendar be smart enough to prompt you about spuriously reminding you again on a yearly basis?

Mail has started crashing regularly. I’ll just be adding a new recipient, and as the late, great Steve Jobs used to say, “boom” – and it’s gone. Thank heavens for small mercies though, as a draft of the email is usually saved. It’s still enormously disconcerting though.

And my favourite miscreants, [Evernote] [5], who only just got their acts together and provided a clipper extension for Safari after keeping us paying, praying customers waiting for months, have a clipper on their hands that doesn’t work at all. No updates in sight. Have a look at the nice, empty clipper window below.

Evenote clipper

There are other niggles too. I have had nothing but praise for Flying Meat’s brilliant Acorn image editor, and Gus Mueller really, really cares about his customers, but that too has started crashing on me, losing me work.

Of course, all of these people want me to describe the steps taken that resulted in an [error] [4], but the very reason I use Apples is so that I don’t have to worry about crap like that. I just want stuff to work and not get in the way. That’s why I’m on Apple and not using the PC. I don’t want to be a system administrator, I don’t want to be an engineer, I don’t want to be your bloody beta tester. I have paid for your product and I just want it to work. And if it doesn’t, just give me my money back, OK?

The only problem with such an attitude is that a computer isn’t just a product. It’s an ecosystem of frighteningly complex inter-related pieces of software and hardware. So I have no idea if the fault lies with Apple or with the various software vendors, and they all point the finger at each other. It’s a bit like the gas engineer who points his finger at the plumber, who points his finger at the previous plumber, who points his finger at the water company, who point their fingers at the road people at the council, who point their fingers at the electricity company who…. and you are left with nothing but a puddle on your floor and several holes in your bank account.

(n.b. This post was written using MarsEdit, which supposedly offers Markdown preview, which I set, but it doesn’t seem to work. If you see malformed reference links and asterisks instead of italics, that’s another ugly weed in my walled garden for you)

[1]: “Standard Apple Practice is to studiously ignore all complaints until they’ve managed to address the issue. Meanwhile, us loyal Apple users are left gnashing our teeth in frustration at the wall of silence.”

[2]: “Apple parlance for ‘blue screen of death'”

[3]: “I thought about adding an affiliate link here, but if the app’s not working properly, it’d be bad form for me to make money out of your future misery. And anyway, almost nobody reads this blog compared to the old one I did, which is fine, makes it more exclusive, right?”

[4]: “I used your app. It didn’t work. It’s not my job to fix your app. It’s your job. I pay you for that.”

[5]: “Unlike the brilliant Gus Mueller of Flying Meat, Evernote never respond, certainly not on Twitter, despite my paying them yearly, and in fact, they were pretty rude to their users on their forum about the lack of a Safari clipper for quite a while. They complained about not having the resources to address pre-release software, which is fine, but we are paying customers, and on launch, they had their pants down, advising us to use Chrome or Firefox.

 

85 Kilos? Done. Ticked. Trophy Awarded.

Sweating, drained and utterly hammered at table tennis over 90 gruelling minutes this evening, I came home and stood on the scales. It’s an unusual time for me to weigh myself, I usually do it in the mornings. I knew it would be special. I knew I’d lost some water, and I just wanted to see it.

I was pleasantly surprised. 84.6 kilos. It’s not my real weight of course. Tomorrow morning it will have climbed to just over 85 as I regain my water, but that figure is as real as the 101 kilos I saw not that long ago. Only two months ago I was at 95 kilos.

The target had been set by my diabetic consultant at around the 8th of August or thereabouts. All I knew was this time, my life depended on it.

So I did what it took and I hit my target in record time. Do I have a slim stomach? Nope. Am I still chubby? Yep. But I look so much better than I did two months ago, it’s shocking. I feel so much better than I did two months ago, it’s shocking. My resting heart rate has dropped from 80bpm to 60bpm. I’m seriously looking forward to seeing my blood pressure results in December, when I’m supposed to check back in with my diabetic consultant having lost 10 kilos.

I can’t wait to see the surprise on her face when she sees I’ve lost 15. That’s right. Between now and December, I’m going to lose, insha’Allah, another 5 kilos.

In honour of Tim Ferriss, whose brilliant book The Four-Hour-Body changed the way I approached my weight attack this time around, I am going to have a cheat meal of disgraceful proportions this Saturday. A Subway, one foot, filled to the brim with the filthiest stuff imaginable. And you know what? I will put on two kilos in two days as a result. Then it will fall lower than before. Ferriss exploits the fact that your body needs to be shocked from time to time out of its complacency. OK, he is far more scientific than that, but what it boils down to, and what you will see from my charts, is that despite a couple (maybe three) cheat days, despite the temporary blip, my weight would keep dropping. And that’s because as you diet-survivors know, if you starve the body, even a little, it will start to fight with everything it’s got to hold on to its fat stores. Subway tells your plateauing body that “it’s all good dude, there’s no situation here, burn that fat”.

There are complications. A diabetic doesn’t just put on a bit of weight on a cheat day, but your blood sugar also goes out of control. There is little you can do about it except measure your insulin doses very carefully. I can’t stress this enough. The great thing about the rest of the time is that my diabetes has never been in better control. I know some of you Type 1s might have been thinking “he’s dropping insulin to drop weight” but I can assure you, I’ve had the complications, and I don’t want to die of them. I have not cheated with insulin. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll explain later.

In the meantime, just know this:

  • My diabetes has been brilliantly controlled
  • My fasting blood sugars are decent(ish)
  • My energy has been high
  • My table tennis keeps improving
  • My suits keep getting looser
  • People keep commenting on the difference
  • I’m dropping weight by the bucket
  • I’m incredibly happy about it
  • I’ve hit my target a full 7 weeks early.

And from the post after next, promise, I’m going to tell you how I did it, and how you will never be able to do it unless….