The other day it came to my attention that the latest version of my mobile contract (T-mobile solo 30-day, £20pm, 500mins, unltd texts) now featured an extra 100 minutes and free unlimited internet for people who were starting a new contract. So I phoned up T-mobile, nicely asked them to move me on to this new deal, and they promptly charged me 25p for the honour of telling me, for some reason or another, that they couldn't.

So the next day I phoned them up, told them I had every intention to moving to Vodafone's 30-day contract, and they put the extra minutes and free internet on immediately :P

I can highly recommend these 30-day contracts for people who have their own (not network locked, unless you use the same network) phones already - as they don't rip you off for a phone with it, you get a better deal. The current T-mobile solo 20 plan is on offer and looking good - for £20 you get 600 mins, unlimited texts and free internet on your phone, which you could easily pay £40 for on other networks or with a handset included.

So I live in a house with 3 computer scientists (the kind that like building their own computers and stuff), so I get my fair share of banter aimed at my "little" Dell desktop (for those interested, it's a Vostro 200 slim tower). You can imagine what it's like when it goes wrong - like it did this morning. I think the actual quote from one of them was "It's all well and good having a nice processor and graphics card but it's no good if the motherboard's made of cardboard".

But this is the reason I bought a Dell, and why I don't make my own computers - I'm not a hardware guy. What I want is a nice quiet little box that will sit under my desk, drive lots of apps at the same time, have sockets for me to plug a huge number of peripherals in to and handle 3.5 million pixels of screen real-estate and not make a fuss about anything - which mine does (most of the time). When it does all go to pot though, I don't want to spend an entire day sitting around fiddling with cables and trying to figure out what's wrong because I don't have time for that. There are much bigger problems to be solved, and I somewhat need my computer to do that.

What I do want, however, is a nice person on the end of the phone (because it's a Vostro I get the Dell Enterprise-level support, which is very useful indeed) to tell me a simple series of steps that I can do to get my computer working again, and who will get it fixed without me worrying whether my hardware will survive or not. This is very much what I got this morning, which makes me happy, because within an hour of my computer refusing to turn on and beeping at me repeatedly it was back up and I'm now sat here working on it.

If I wanted to spend hours at a time fixing issues with my computer, then I would build my own. But I want to do work, which is why I bought a Dell, because I can then blame them when it goes wrong, fix it, and get on with what I was doing. Also, thanks to whoever I was talking to this morning for being so patient. 

I was introduced to Popfly (http://www.popfly.com) nearly a year ago now, and recently I have been having a bit of a play and developing my own game with it.

The main feature of Popfly is the ability to quickly and easily create games, mashups and parts of mashups using a very simple drag-and-drop user interface. It's really easy to get started with projects, and if you need to do something complex for some reason you can simply click one button and drop back into the code behind it and make the change you need!

The game I created took about 2 hours including getting to grips with the Silverlight-powered UI and figuring out some particularly cryptic error messages. It is a simple side scroller - simply avoid the blocks that appear at random times.

I think the game is a good demo of basic game development with Popfly, and illustrates how it is fairly trivial to drop back into the code if you need to make an adjustment or a more complex action. Hopefully it can be used in demos as a short project illustration.

If you want to have a play, the link is http://www.popfly.com/users/386453/Blokz - don't forget to add it to your favourites if you like it!