So I don’t post for months and the first one back is about pizza………..
But I had to share this with you. A lot of nonsense is written about pizza, especially Italian pizza, but this piece is so well researched it had me searching for flights to Naples.
From the great foodie site Serious Eats, I heartily recommend:
The Serious Eats Guide To Pizza In Naples
A true masterpiece of an article.
I have to say, I think I am done with Apple.
I have long been unhappy with the rate at which their product launches rendered the phone you bought six months ago totally out of date, but their policy of disabling functionality for even slightly older devices in iOS really shows them up for the devious company they are.
Even Microsoft will allow any version of their operating systems to be installed on hardware of any age. The result my be crappy and unusable, but it is your choice whether you want to install Windows 7 on a laptop you bought three years ago.
But not Apple. They are so much better than us that they should decide what functionality should be available on which device.
There surely is no technical reason why FaceTime over 3G should run on the iPhone 4S but not the iPhone 4. Why is it disabled on the iPad 2 but a possibility on the iPad 3?
Can the iPhone 4 really not run Siri or provide voice navigation? So what is the reason that these features are only available on the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5?
No reason other than Apple using functionality to be used as bait which unfortunately, users are snapping up.
It is one thing to release improved functionality but can’t we, the people who have spent so much money on our devices, be trusted to decide whether a feature is worth using? Never mind the millions of iPhone and iPad cables that are now being made obsolete.
I am surprised there is no class action lawsuit against Apple abusing their monopoly position on what OS can run on iPhones and iPads in order to disable functionality on a device that may have been bought a week before the announcement of the new OS.
If I can find a reasonably priced laptop that can run the audio hardware I need, I need to make the switch to Ubuntu. The phone switch, though, is a tougher choice because thanks to Apple, manufacturers of Android phones have been able to smash up the prices so that we are now stuck with spending over £500 for the latest phone.
Apple have us over a barrel but it’s a barrel I am at least looking to get off.
Roy Hodgson has described the London Olympics as a “wake up call” for football players and supporters.
He is certainly right, the Olympics have caused anyone who cares about football to hold up a mirror and take a look at the sport.
Football does not come out too well.
But Hodgson’s focus is wrong, he is trying to use it as a chance to get fairer treatment for players from fans, completely ignoring the real problems at the core of football.
In the cold light of day, football is a horrible, unsportsmanlike sport played by overpaid cheats who are skilled in deceit and fooling officials as much as anything else.
If the sort of collision that resulted in a player hitting the deck holding a random part of his body pretending it to be causing pain occurred in the street, would he go down? Imagine if we all were decked by simple bumps of shoulders or threw our limbs into the air at someone bumping into us walking out of a shop?
Footballers are cheats.
So much of their childish behaviour has become normal and is accepted that it has all become relative to itself, not to real life.
When will we see a player like Ashley Young be awarded a penalty but also be booked for diving? It ‘s totally possible for a foul to have been committed but for the player also to dive to make the offence look worse. It happens many times in every Premier League match and is never punished.
It is not just a case of “It’s either a penalty or a dive”. It can certainly be both.
So what did we see in the Olympics? Sportsmen and women competing for nothing other than the joy of competition and the hope of victory. Was Jessica Ennis thinking about commercial endorsements? No, just about that gold medal, yet Wayne Rooney’s Twitter account is regularly fed by promotional messages from Nike. He is literally being paid for doing nothing.
This is the kind of message that has been forced upon our children for years in the era of talentless people on TV being famous for being on TV.
You don’t need to try, you don’t need to work hard or be good at anything because you can have what you want and are special. You only need to be famous. Babybel cheese has a TV ad with kids singing “We don’t want to get in line”. Really? That’s what we want to teach our kids? That they are so special that they don’t have to wat in line? Good luck with that.
We now have a generation of people who can have their role models as people who have shown commitment and effort in their chosen field and got the reward they wanted.
Enough of these wastrels in the Daily Mail sidebar and Heat magazine being hailed as “a great businesswoman” when all they do it endorse products. You don’t have to be a business genius to answer the phone and say “yeah, I’ll put my name to that”.
Put these Olympians on the front covers, put them on the news because they are actual heros.
