First up, I really hated that Windows ad campaign “That was my idea”. No, it wasn’t. It was someone else who probaly worked for Apple, MIT, Microsoft or Xerox. It wasn’t your idea and claiming it is is lying. Stop it.

Anyway, that’s the title rant over. So they previewed the iPad 2 yesterday. I watched the video and found myself nodding and ticking off mental tick-boxes in the sky. Tick boxes put there by my dull disappointment at the original iPad. I wasn’t just “not fussed”, I actively didn’t like it. I detailed them in my snappily named post “20 reasons why the iPad sucks“. Interestingly, Googling “iPad sucks” (in quotes) you get 39,700 exact matches. “Mac sucks” gets 35,600 and “iPod sucks” gets 43,000. So a device that’s been out barely a year has roughly the same amount of “sucks” as a product from the same company that has been out for 10 years (iPod) and 37 years (Mac). Not very scientific but I clearly wasn’t alone.

So iPad 2. How did it stack up against my original gripe list?

1) It’s heavy. Fixed

2) It’s sharp and hurts. Fixed

3) It’s hard to hold. Not Fixed

4) It spins. Fixed

5) It’s symmetrical Not Fixed

6) It’s not stereo. Not Fixed

7) It takes AGES to recharge. Unknown

8 ) It has flaky Wifi. Fixed

9) It looks obvious. Not Fixed

10) It doesn’t play Flash. Not Fixed

11) It crashes. Unknown

12) The menu is too airy. Not Fixed

14) The keyboard tries too hard. Not Fixed

15) It has no Word Processor. Not Fixed

16) It has no cover. Fixed-ish

17) It’s not so portable. Fixed-ish

18) It doesn’t have a stand. Fixed-ish

19) It has no camera. Fixed

20) It’s not so new. Fixed

So that’s a very scientific…

Fixed: 9

Not Fixed: 8

Unknown: 2

So will I buy one yet? The Flash thing is still a bit of a stinker for me. And a few of the things I’d like to do using HTML are still painfully awkward (online timesheets or weekly shop).

But it has PhotoBooth! My kids will love it and make the same daft video and faces they don on my mac. So, if I managed to get enough money together or not go on holiday this year, you know what, yes, probably! So that’s nice. The world can sleep easy tonight.

I’ve been blighted, as have many others, by YouTube video appearing blank and simply stating “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.”.

There have been a couple of suggestions, like restarting your router, hard coding your IP, using an IP tunnel application, turning of Google Web Accelerator and so on. Some suggested it was a YouTube caching issue or an IP problem but it was also a bit random. My own Ducati Exhaust video stopped working while my Halo Soundtrack video was fine. When I’m at work, some of the videos that work at home failed, and vice versa. I use a Mac at home and a PC at work. Both use Firefox but all browsers seemed to do the same thing. All-in-all verry confusing.

However, it turns out it’s none of that. I’ve just updated my flash player from 10.0.2.26 to 10.0.12.36 and all’s well again. While I’m happy it’s all working, it’s also a little worrying that the big media owners and entertainment portals are so reliant on something as ‘simple’ as a Flash version issue.

If I was YouTube, I’d make this solution visible on the homepage (that’s if anyone actually visits the homapage). I’m supposed to be clever and if it escaped me, it’ll be escaping a fair few others. My impression of YouTube was suffering if I’m honest, thinking they’d become too big for their architecture to cope with.

But now I can check out all those vidoes of kittens again. Karma restored.