My elder daughter sent me an MMS of a jetski she had been riding while visiting family this week. Cool.

Not so cool was that it didn’t arrive as an MMS. It arrived as an SMS inviting me to log in to a URL for Vodafone Livestudio! with my phone number and an abstract password. After some passable attempts by my phone to render a large, complex HTML page, I found I had to link through to another page, which sort of rendered, but there was no way I could log in. The form just didn’t work.

As it happened I was in the office and had the computer beside me, and was able to login easily and view the picture and accompanying text. It’s worth noting that she is on O2, so it wasn’t sent via Vodafone service.

Surely an MMS is meant to be enjoyed immediately and directly? What if I was out and about, away from a computer? A distinct lack of joined-up thinking going on there!

On adding the downloads to Windows Media Player, the bell ringing items were scattered all over the place, ending up in several different parts of the library. One of them remains called “Track 15″ by “artist”. Of the 15 tracks only 3 ended up in the right place.

At least the music is wonderful!

To celebrate the SpiralFrog-Universal announcement and hearing a track from Brian Eno’s long-term thinking bells project on BBC Radio 3’s wonderful Late Junction, I decided to download some new Eno ambients from Enoshop.

The process was comparatively painless, but could have been much better. I had to download all the tracks from the three albums individually. Thankfull Eno albums tend to have only one or two tracks, but the bells albun has 15, so that was a lot of click/download cycles.

The next issue was that the files came down with encoded names! Ok, so the music player lifts the name from the file, but my computer-user mentality wanted the tracks renamed and organised into named folders. More manual effort.

With a bit smoother interface this is clearly the way forward. It’s good enough for me, but I’ll buy less music in the future. But I do worry about the lack of consumer orientation with this. Ok, Brian Eno Ambient music may not be a mass-market product, but SpiralFrog and company better make this as easy as iTunes allegedly has. That’s my next port of call!

I’ve been looking at ways of doing time and task management, and after an ask round of the team I was pointed at a number of different applications and services. I’ve been playing with one of them, Google Calendar, and I’m impressed. If only it had task management as well as calendaring it would be perfect.

As it is I’m just blown away by how easy it is to use and how elegantly the browser-based interface works. Nice.

Unfortunately the task management stuff I’ve seen so far isn’t nearly so elegant.

Two things I really love:

First a great new book The Flight of the Silver Turtle by John Fardell, one of the founders of Viz comic. It’s a sequel to the very wonderful Seven Professors of the Far North. Children’s adventure stories that are a rip-roaring, old fashioned adventure set in a very modern world. Both books touch on serious topics such as racism, antisemitism, the horrors of commercially-driven war, but with such a light touch that there is no preaching. It’s just implied that they are deeply wrong and you have to fight against them.

And while glued to the books, drink the best tea in the world. African Nectar by Mighty Leaf is a packaging of South African Rooibos tea, but is quite the richest, floweriest tea I’ve ever tasted. It’s expensive, but it does come with full-size leaves in silk bags. The website is very pretty as well.

I can’t place calls and people can’t call me on my main Vodafone number today. Strangely enough I could call customer service, and with my special “spends too much” code I got straight through to a very helpful lady. She checked the internal info and it said all fixed, but she persisted, spoke to engineering and confirmed that there was a major network issue.

The use of a PIN to indentify yourself when calling Vodafone turns out to be a great blessing. It’s like checking in business class for a flight - no waiting and you get taken seriously first time. I’m less keen on having to tell the operator my PIN, but it’s not like it gives them any information that they can’t get anyway.

Clearly the problem is between them and the rest of the world, not the radio side of things as I’ve just received my monday Film Club MMS spam.

The creativity of spammers knows no bounds.

I hadn’t anticipated that the “comments” option on this blog would attract spammers. Clearly I’m not alone, as WordPress offers a “Mark all as Spam” option on the moderation page.

My father received his new Dell laptop yesterday. I spent some time removing all the mountains of useless junk that comes preinstalled, and on the way back to my house I thought… no Skype!

A positive infestation of AOL stuff, a couple of other internet providers, Google desktop, and several random pointless applications, but not Skype.

I wonder why? Won’t they pay? It would have seemed an obvious thing to include.

I’ve read and heard various people proclaiming that WiFi-enabled mobiles spell the end of the network operators. Otherwise smart people seem to take the fact that the technical ability to make a VoIP call from, say, your local Starbucks means the end of a supremely successful and easy-to-use style of communication.

Let’s look at some facts. First of all most of the protestations about WiFi coverage generally come from San Francisco and the bay area where WiFi cover is quite good. Try heading out of town guys, or even worse, try going to some of them furn places where they speak funny, no WiFi! We may lambast the network operators for their numerous faults, but they do provide amazing coverage.

Next, how do you pay for the WiFi? At least last time I was in a US Starbucks I had to pay for access via a complex registration processes with credit cards and addresses. That’s certainly still the case in Europe. I just don’t see this working on the mobile - imagine the scene. You’ve just ordered your Caramel Machiato and realise you need to make a call. You pull out your phone, your credit card, and then start banging away, multi-tapping your address. Wow. Really user friendly. Ok, so maybe you have a subscription that usually just works in Starbucks. What happens if you try Peet’s coffee? Gosh, you need a different registration. I’m not convinced.

Further, the network operators aren’t going to give you one of these phones. You’ll have to buy it retail, which is likely to cost $300 to $500 dollars. That’s quite a lot of money to pay for “free” calls which you could have had on your call plan for, uh, free. So economically it doesn’t add up for me.

I’ll keep on - WiFi isn’t really ready for consumer use yet. In common with most computer-derived systems, it is too fiddly, too unreliable and too difficult to understand. Compare this with switching on your phone and making a call. Now that’s a consumer service.

Lastly, those of us old enough to remember location-specific communications. Rabbit was a network of wireless phone points; standing within 100m of one you could make a call. Sounds familiar? It didn’t last long.

We’ve bought a new vacuum cleaner - a nice bright yellow one by Karcher, better known for making power cleaners. But the shop didn’t have any spare bags. One quick search and lo, www.dustbag.co.uk. Don’t you just love the web? You can really find absolutely anything you are looking for out there.