Chris Saul's Blog

Monday October 08, 2007

Sony design engineers need to wear shirts occasionally

I have two Sony products with earphones - one a set of noice cancelling headphones and the other a Bluetooth handsfree kit.

The headphones have the left ear piece attached to the main cable, with the right earpiece on a longer cord eminating from the left ear piece cable. The right ear piece cable is designed to be strung around the back of the neck. The handsfree has string that's placed over the head like a necklace, with the ear pieces hanging off the sides, ready to be inserted earwards when a call comes through.

Each of them works nicely if I'm wearing a t-shirt, but both are a pain if I'm wearing something with a collar. The left cable tends to get caught on the collar, which means grating sounds coming through on the headphones or catching the earpiece on the handsfree kit when I try to put it in my ear. Even if it gets in, the mic is usally buried under the collar anyway and noone can hear what I'm saying.

My Apple iPod headphones use a normal headphone 'y' design, with the cables neatly sitting between my collar, never getting caught or causing any issues.

I can just imagine the groovy t-shirt wearing Sony design engineers getting excited at how they'd come up with something cooler and apparently more innovative than Apple for a change, without ever testing whether their design was actually practical for anyone who doesn't work at a design consultancy and can't wear groovy t-shirts to work.

If wifi doesn't work in my hotel room...

...don't tell me it does, make me waste time getting it to work and then have it fail, then make me use a cable which I can only plug in by crawling under the desk.

Mr Poggy has taken off

Ususally people here commenting on my size here tell me that I've 'put on'.

Today someone told me that I 'took off', which made a nice change. The annual Ramadan-make-an-effort-kickstart is paying off and the new, slightly slimmerline Chris is reappearing.

My benchmark is my suit trousers fitting comfortably again. That's been achieved, although there are still about five kilos to go till I reach pre-constant-travelling, just married levels. My amazing diet secret is not to travel and not to stuff my face. Radical, but it works. How will things continue now that I will be travelling all the time again? Time, low-glycaemic snacks and an iron will not to eat the cakes at the events I speak at will tell.

Once I have taken off a bit more, I will feel that I truly deserve being described as 'too much poggy' or 'Mr Poggy' by Shona, who heads the cleaning team at Sun Dubai. Poggy is Tagalog for 'handsome'. Who am I to argue.