I'm back

It's been some days since we came back from holidays! We had a really nice time and also some adventures. Hopefully, I will tell you all about it. However, I fear that my body wasn't ready for the temperature drop of the return journey! In Italy temperature reached 42 degrees during the day! We were sleeping with the air conditioning on.

However, when we landed back to London we returned to the lovely summer British weather! It was raining and the temperature wasn't more than 15 degrees! So, I instantly got slightly sick. I'm not going to share the details with you, but I'm at home today, with a heavy head, watching morning television with a bucket of tissue next to me, anti coughing syrup and all the rest. It's not that bad. I'll try to drink lots of fluid, stay indoors and warm. I'll be fine soon.

Till then, that's a photo of a healthy me some days ago:

having an espresso in Sardinia by the beach

Goodbye Nokia

Or how a company can let you down…

After my very first mobile phone which was a yellow Ericsson many years ago with one line of a black and white screen and tiny buttons, I switched to Nokia and I stick to it. I went through many different models, including some legendary ones which still function even today. I always believed that Nokia makes really good, sturdy and resilient phones. They might not jump onto new technologies quickly but they were innovative, like introducing WAP to mobile phones, with good hardware.

One of my first Nokia phones! Simply immortal

After focusing on phones with good cameras like the N81 and N86 that including an amazing 8MP camera before many of its competitors, I decided last year that it was time to try a smartphone. Even before it was released, I fell in love with Nokia N8 by watching the promo video on the Nokia website. The phone had good enough specs and featured an amazing 12MP camera. I wouldn’t go for an iphone (I’m reluctant to follow the masses) and most Android smartphones weren’t that impressive (low battery, bad camera etc) at the time.

When it was released reviews were a bit harsh on it. Everybody said that the phone itself was good, but its operating system crap! However, Nokia released a note that the Symbian operation system will receive updates and will get better and the company will support developers in creating enough applications to support their new Symbian smartphones. So, while I suspected that the OS would be a bit bad, I bought the phone I think very early February 2011. It went all downhill after that.

Innovative 'Matrix' phone

Elop, the relatively newly appointed Nokia CEO (and previous Microsoft employee) released a memo about how ‘Symbian is a burning platform’ and that Nokia should abandon it! That happened around 2 weeks after I bought the phone (which wasn’t very cheap)! That memo was the beginning of the end for Nokia at least for me and I can explain why. It affected developers who refused to work on Symbian applications. Which serious company would spend money to create apps for a dying platform, even abandoned by the company who created and supported it for years? However, without any applications, how can a company expect to sell smartphones?

That memo had tremendous effects on the company itself. Elop singlehandedly rendered all Symbian phones obsolete without having to offer an alternative. He said that Windows Phones would be the future of the company, however the first Nokia Lumia with WP as an operating system was months away from production. The company lost its credibility and its sales dropped so significantly that it now faces tremendous financial issues.

Very good phone 

As a customer I felt like I was stuck with an outdated phone making me angry on a company that I used to like. Nokia focused more on creating the Lumia series and the preannounced Symbian updates arrived with months of delays. Now, after months of waiting I’m running Symbian Belle. It is so much better than the early Symbian version but it’s too late, too little. There are hardly any good applications released on this platform for months. That is the reason that I refuse to go for the Nokia 808. That phone was awarded as phone of the year in the Barcelona conference at the beginning of the year for featuring a staggering 41MP camera! However, it runs Symbian and not generally supported even by Nokia itself.

Generally, Nokia and Elop are all about the Lumias now but I refuse to follow them. I see the same mistakes happening. They announced that not any of the existing Lumias can be upgraded to version 8.0! That means that if I buy a Lumia now, I’ll get stuck with yet another obsolete platform. Why would I do that again to myself? Not to mention the mobile phone carriers who are boycotting Windows Phones since Microsoft bought Skype! Skype is loathed by them. I feel bad for all the people who lost their jobs working for Nokia but things look very gloom for the company now. Its market share dropped so much in such a short period of time. Maybe Microsoft will buy it… I don’t know. If you want to read more about it, this blog by Tomi Ahonen is simply amazing. He used to be in Nokia and simply hates Elop's guts! You can read how a CEO put his company in turmoil. 

But as a let-down customer I say goodbye to Nokia and hello to Samsung! 

The elephant in the room

I work in IT, or ICT as they call it now, since it includes communications as well. It's all very excited (or geeky) I know. My manager has 49 people to report to him. That's quite a group, especially when we occasionally go to the pub. We manage to populate most of the venue we go to and we create quite some noise there. Most of them are really nice people; however I am the only 'gay in the village'! All the rest have girlfriends, fiances or wives that they sometimes bring along or mention quite often. And since we are in IT, the vast majority are male. I think that there are only 3 women in the team. One of which was an old co-worker of mine from my previous job. 

So, in such a heterosexual and geeky group, I was reluctant to talk about 'J', before I tested the waters. However, the very first day I joined, I heard from a team leader of the group a nasty comment about lesbians. It was one of these ridiculously unfunny 'Beavis & Butt head' quality jokes that you hear from a developer with no social skills whatsoever. Some similar stupid jokes were heard during the following months as well. So, I decided against talking about my personal life, especially at the beginning. I wanted to pass my probation period, get to know these people better and then start opening up.

A couple of weeks ago we were again in the pub. After a couple, or more, of drinks they started talking about the only female developer we have to another developer of my age. She wasn't present at that outing and they knew that he was single and they were trying to set him up with her. Apart from me, everybody else taking part in that discussion were either married or engaged. He was being a bit reluctant about her (can't blame him), but it then occurred to me that I was excluded from the available candidates for her. They didn't ask me about my relationship status and they didn't offer to set me up with her. So, I either do look gayer than I thought or the ex-co-worker spilled the beans about me and some people already know.

So, last week, when we were at the pub again, a colleague and his fianc￩, also working on the same company but in a different department, asked me about my holidays. They asked me who I am going with, a girlfriend or friends. My reply was: my boyfriend. Then came that small pause, you know, the few seconds more than normal that it took them to reply something like 'that's nice'! I briefly told them about JJ and mentioned the fact that it's not out in the open yet because of that team leader, I mentioned earlier. Oh, I am going to tell him eventually, just not yet! I was glad I've talked to them even if I now know that a secret known by 3 at least co-workers, is not a secret anymore.

However, even after all this time, there is a small triumphant feeling when successfully coming out to people even if they are simple work colleagues.