This picture has now almost overtaken the picture of the TVR as my top-view image on Flickr. And all because of tags. Meg Pickard found it and asked that I add it to the Guardian recession monitor photos group, and the volume picked up from then.

I met a media chap the other day who told me I didn’t look like or sound like a techie and he meant that as a deep and sincere compliment. So I took it that way, and in any case I like to have artistic aspirations in writing, theatre, art and photography so it tickled my own conceits.

However it is good to see mobile companies beginning to value the developers that drive the adoption of new services. We’ve seen the App Store with its deluge of torches and tip calculators, the Android Challenge and it’s dismal winners, and the utterly dull BlackBerry investments. Nokia have been running developer competitions for years, but usually restricted to games.

Now Sony Ericsson are running a competition for X1 “panels”, which sounds like a great promotional vehicle for smaller or individual developers.

Find out more here.

I was discussing an interesting conundrum with blogger Peter Evers this week. We both found that the things that were the most exciting and bloggable were, unfortunately, confidential or commercially sensitive. Today eMarketer talks about “blogger moms” which is an excrutiating terms, but, I guess picks up a group of people who have axes to grind but no affiliation. Looking at bloggers in mobile it’s noticeable that most people are recording what other people are doing, not about their own business.

The closest historical model we have to this is the newspaper column written by industry figures. I’ve been a magazine columnist and it’s hard work producing something consistently interesting and on-topic even once a month (although to be fair to myself I often wrote feature articles for the same title). While blogging is quick and low overhead compared to professional publishing, it still takes time and effort which is hard to find.

I wonder where the final balance will fall.

Somewhat over ten years ago I wrote some fiction which included holiday homes coming with broadband and video conferencing equipment so that harried entrepreneurs could keep in touch with their work while their families had real holidays. I was reminded of this last week when even the small flat we had taken for the week had internet access as well as a fabulous view across the bay (La Rade) at Villefranche-sur-Mer.

This connection is, of course, very useful for checking opening times, locations, events and the weather. (Not that the weather forecasts were ever correct. It was, however, impossible to resist pulling down e-mail. Easier not to answer, helped by Orange/Wannadoo blocking SMTP traffic. Sigh. Why do they insist on doing that? It is not a spam relay, it’s an authenticated connection for heavens sake. No doubt it is easy enough to look up the right SMTP server, and changing settings is easy when you know how to do it, but how many normal users do?

That’s probably why webmail services like gmail and hotmail  are so popular - nothing to configure or understand.It just works. So turns out that conventional e-mail isn’t consumer-ready either. Sigh.

No, not a complaint about roaming charges! I’m off on holiday for a week and I’m unlikely to have web access, so there won’t be any updates.

Well I must say I pretty impressed with how Vodafone supported me through the failed N95. I say mostly as two things didn’t quite work, but I’ve received a working replacement, restored my last backup and I’m off working. The only thing that has not been restored are a few videos, which is a pity but nothing more. And for some reason, the one Symbian native app that I have (the brilliant Screensnap60) never works after being restored so I had to put it back.

The glitches were in the logistics of letting me know when the replacement would arrive. I received a text saying that the handset would “be delivered on  by DPD” with a double space between on and by. Clearly a merge or date insertion had failed. It also said that I’d receive a tracking number by SMS the morning of the day it was due. That didn’t happen.

I called customer service late morning and the agent told me that the parcel was on the lorry and would have called the driver for me, but I declined. The handset turned up at 2pm instead of before 12 noon, but that’s no big deal given the traffic congestion we had at the moment.

For those who have not been through this process, you take the SIM, battery and back cover off your device and give it to the courier. He, in turn, gives you a nice sealed box with a refurbished/repaired handset  in it, without battery or back cover. But it does include a test certificate.

I don’t know if I get better service because I’m a high-volume user, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Well done folks.

As I wrote yesterday, my N95 8GB died. Ouch. Speaking to Vodafone’s customer service was quick and efficient, and I was offered the option of a repair via the shop who could give me a loaner, or have a courier send me a replacement refurbed device. Yesterday I was favouring the former, but today realised that the latter is much more efficient as I’ve still not managed to escape the gravitational pull of the office.

So called in to a very helpful agent who arranged the details, and then I received a text immediately confirming what I had to do in prep. What was particularly encouraging was that the agents didn’t try and argue with me - they believed it was dead and not that I was being daft.

So full marks for customer service.

On which note, yesterday I received  a call from Vodafone’s Automatic Viccy who wanted to ask me how it had been for me - all done by keying “1 for unsatisfied to 5 for very satisfied”. I would have prefered an SMS or a mobile internet site, but I suppose this might work for a wider range of audience.

When I acquired my lovely Canon EOS 450D digital SLR camera earlier this year I was persuaded to move to shooting in RAW. As the name suggests, this is the uncooked format that the camera itself uses before converting to JPG. Compact cameras, and the default mode of amateur SLRs, is to generate user-friendly JPG for direct transfer to the computer. Easy. And I’ve taken thousands and thousands of them.

Using RAW, however, has the distinct advantage of allowing you to post process things like ambient lighting and colour balance, resulting in much better pictures. However this is also a disadvantage as you have to do this processing, even when the gain is quite small.

So here am I, in October, processing RAW pictures from our summer holiday in July. While it’s great to remember good times, sunshine and warmth, it’s taking forever. Not only that, but my home desktop is short of memory, and the conversion programme is swapping like crazy which further slows matters down.

However the ability to change a slightly cold-looking picture into the warm Mediterranean smile it was always meant to be really is quite neat. Oh well, let’s leave those files cooking overnight.

Well, it’s happened again. My shiny black N95 8GB flicker and died. The screen did a passable impersonation of television form the early 70s and went blank. Power cycling causes a quick vibe, some back lights and then nothing. So it’s either off to repair or swappable for a refurbed device. Still having difficulty decided which to go for.

Some of our more exotic devices are tied to networks other Vodafone who have been taking my money for over 10 years now, so I’ve picked a Sony Ericsson W850i from our test devices to keep me going. It is very light, slim and feels solid. The slider is much better to the touch than the N95 ever was.I’m also intrigued to discover that it has “fitness functions” so I’ll be able to see how many steps I take as I want to and from work.

However the real issue is that it doesn’t have my address book, e-mail settings, apps, Flickr login,  and all the other bits and pieces I use daily. So some painful admin work this evening.

It’ll be interesting to see if the backup restores properly when I get another N95.

After moaning about iTunes, here comes another Apple complaint. Not content with treating Safari as malware and trying to install it along with iTunes, I’m now being bugged to install the “MobileMe Control Panel”. And I’m not a MobileMe user. This is very annoying and I wish they’d stop degrading their brand values like this.