2009 - What I Did

Two year end bits. One is about what I planned, the other about what I did, in that order.

In a post entitled "2009 - What I'll Do" I said the following:

- Eat better

Overall in 2009 I have eaten better than I did in 2008. No question whatsoever.

- Exercise

I have exercised every other day since some time in May with only very few exceptions, which is a huge win.

- Play the piano.

I played the piano a little, not a lot. I'm gradually learning not to worry about these non-failures. I haven't wanted to play much. What matters more is that when I do
want to play again, I pour more effort into it than I did last time so I make more progress.

- Improve my guitar skill level.

My guitar skill level has definitely improved. I remain fairly amateur but still get a little better. I only really noticed this last week. Skill at being able to work
out songs is something that's also improving, and as I like to play other people's music a lot, that's a good skill to have.

- Finally get a proper living room sound setup.

I chose not to get a living room sound setup but rather concentrate on my studio setup. This is a low priority now.

- Figure out my next career step.

I didn't figure out my next career step, but enjoyed my job a lot more than last year. I'm a little bored of it at present but big challenges are due this year so i'm not too worried.

- Make more of an effort to better understand important, but far away, happenings.

So hard to gague. I think so, yes. I could still do better.

- Cook more varied meals.

I can't say I hit this one. I have been rotating the same few meals all year. I did try a new dish this week though, so there's still hope. It's so hard to cook creatively
for one.

- Isolate myself less at work at lunch time.

Didn't do it, although weighing up how cold the car is at lunch time now I did stop going outside last week and just ate at my desk. The problem with this is it's something i'm against doing. I need to find a solution to this.

- Move into a terraced house giving me more space.

I moved into a terraced house giving me more space, although I only have access to the top two thirds of it, as it's an apartment/flat/duplex. At the time this was the right decision and
living here has been mostly great so far. It's the only place i've ever lived that other people have enjoyed being in. I am now thinking about maybe buying, although I know
realistically I need to weigh up buying low with a minimal deposit or buying potentially less low in the medium term with a better deposit. I continue to argue with people about
renting vs owning and nobody ever has a rational response, being far too tied up in the concept of dead money for no gain, ignoring the warm shelter whist forgetting that their
£130,000 house is likely to cost them nearly twice that in the end whether prices rise or fall. That, the interest payment - that IS dead money, for them at least.

- Try harder to meet people.

Failed.

- Try harder not to have that argumentative tone in friendly conversation.

Trying much harder and succeeding a lot more. Slipping slightly recently but ready to rectify that.

- Get into the local music scene.

There isn't one that I want to be a part of. Priorities change, and the truth is I just don't care enough about doing this.

- Visit more of the UK. None of it is that far away.

New places in the UK in 2009... I saw a lot more of the Cornish coastline than before, despite it being in a fairly familiar area. I do pay a huge amount more attention to my surroundings now than I did a year ago.
I've become very interested in houses, though i'm not entirely sure in what capacity yet. I would still like to get around the country more.

- Educate myself better on libertarianism in order to better explain it to others.

I hope I never said I was a libetarian. Many do and may feel embarrassed some day. It oversimplifies. It's a great ideal, but so are most. That's where they get their name. If anything i've learned to accept
that if the world at large can't collectively find solutions to the problems of people, places, ownership, worth, greed, power and corruption, then I shouldn't expect to be able to find
an answer alone, if indeed there is just one answer. I'm hugely concerned about the size and scope of governments all over the world, and sickened by their reactionary decision making rationalised
in the face of reason and with an unfathomable lack of opposition or even outrage. I would like to think that a breaking point exists beyond which the real world, the people of
that world, will awaken and take it back. We've not been doing this civilisation thing
for so long that nothing can ever change, despite the fact that this is exactly what the powerful would want you to believe.

- Throw out every VHS cassette.

Didn't do it. Got rid of the pre-recorded ones but the others remain boxed. There's no benefit to getting this done in any particular time frame.

- Weigh less than eleven and a half stone.

I hate this one. How is it that a grown man does no exercise for a year and maintains his weight, then takes on a semi-daily exercise routine and finishes the year at the same weight he started?
Several answers. First, Christmas. After all the food I find myself weighing 1-2 pounds under 12 stone, but a few weeks ago one morning before all that I weighed 11 and 8.
This was the closest I came to the goal. I do find I eat more with all the exercise. It makes me hungry! Regardless of weight, I am a little trimmer than I was, leading me to conclude that I've gained some muscle. The health benefits vastly outweigh
the lack of weight loss to me, although i'm fairly convinced that if I continue as I have been and return to my normal, somewhat balanced diet, i'll see that magic 11:7 some time before the
anniversary of this regime, some time in May.

- Put away less alcohol. It's becoming less enjoyable.

Definitely the least alcohol i've consumed in any year since I started drinking, although in many ways this relates more to a less active social calendar. It works either way.

- Clean up more.

At times I did but at others I didn't. Right now I should.

- Find the best view in Leicester/Leicestershire.

Found it. Unsurprisingly it was from Bradgate park. Think I said this in the half-year review. Haven't been in a while after somewhat exhausting the walks around the area during my footsteps challenge in the summer.

- Stop using standby.

I did start turning the standby on my TV off when it was walked past. Now it's in the corner it doesn't get done. I'm not entirely convinced this makes a huge difference. Need to read up.

- Don't cave in to climate change propaganda beyond career supporting lip service.

Done, although it's becoming increasingly difficult to fight this tide without upsetting people. They're not like a fucking religion, they are a fucking religion. I'm not into arguing about it. Just remember that when carbon credits become a real currency, it's currency derived from nothing of value and makes no sense (and no, betting on or against doom is not tangiable nor does it have value).

- Walk more and further.

Done and I'll continue to do so.

- Code something outside of work. dotnet, java, python, whatever, just do it.

I went all year without coding anything outside of work, but then started looking at the Android SDK 2-3 days ago, so technically i'm doing this one.

- Keep plants alive.

Despite my continued neglect, all my plants continue to thrive and people continue too complement me on how well I keep them alive. Honestly, I think most people must not realise
that plants can drown and are overwatering, because watering them about twice a month, if that, seems to be working for me, escpecially in the colder weather.

- Visit Japan.

Didn't happen. Too expensive this year. It's in my top five place to visit, but not top 3.

- Learn every country on the map.

I have no idea why I thought I wanted to do this. Needless to say, I didn't.

So, that's what I wanted to do and roughly how I stuck to it. How to look back? In the interests of doing a retrospective glance a little differently each year, this year i'll be making notes from 12 months of my blog and personal gmail account. The first bit of each month is about what I blogged, then what I can decipher from the emails.

January

* Hate Filled Facebook
* My Problem with the Windows 7 Taskbar
* Getting my goat, grinding my gears...
* 2009 - What I'll Do

In which I set out some goals for 2009, bitched about Seagate and Freecycle, complained about the Windows 7 taskbar and discussed uneasily the sheer visibility of pure hatred on Facebook.

First Film: Chinatown - held on to it for weeks then realised it was the wrong film, some Bollywood movie. Didn't actually watch it. Poor start.
Joined freecycle got rid of old red dwarf and simpsons videos. Never used the service again, but got pissed off that they seemingly signed me up to a new realcycle service. Still not quite clear on this, but the mail has stopped.
ASDA credit card reward went down to 1p/litre fuel discount making it only just worthwhile, but a good credit builder nonetheless.
Brand new terabyte Seagate drive reported bad sectors in first days. This means the last two hard drives i've bought were faulty. Replacement, same model, has been stellar though.
Bought a new in car FM transmitter that didn't last, mainly because I tried to wire it directly to my car battery, which melted it. Volts, Watts and Amps are all different things, and all are important!
best film: Casino. I'll be revisiting this sooner rather than later.
Weird music order: Heaven by Bryan Adams, Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who and Common People by Pulp. All good though.

February

* Senseless Censorship
* QUICK: Jade Goody
* QUICK: Android - Does No Compue
* QUICK: Odds On, Nine through Twenty One
* QUICK: Wikipedia and Facts
* QUICK: Decession or Repression.. Who Cares?
* QUICK: Changing Desires
* QUICK: The more I like it the more I wanna spoil i...
* QUICK: It would have been my fault, but...
* QUICK: Lost
* QUICK: Silent Cameras
* QUICK: Somewhere between 140 Characters with a Fac...

Where I introduced QUICK posts including the dilemma of linking facebook and twitter updates, the possible outlawing of silent cameras, opinion on lost season 5, the act of driving and almost crashing in snow, tv spoilers, perfect homes, prime ministerial tounge slips and wikipedian circles... Even a rare poem, leaving just enough time for an early days rant on android, press coverage of jade goody and senseless tv censorship.

First Film: Nixon. Only okay. A little long and probably for people more familiar with the Watergate scenario.
Music: Freebird by Lynard Skynard. Old and overplayed but definitely needed in my collection.
Best Film: Serenity. In a 2-3 weeks period spanning moving house I watched all of Firefly and Serenity. Everyone that likes TV needs to do likewise. Holds up very well.
Futurama "ended" for the second time with the "Into the Wild Green Yonder" feature. Nobody really believed it was the end this time, and it wasn't. New TV season in 2010.
Late February out of nowhere I saw an apartment I liked on Rightmove, viewed it and rented it, all in the space of 12 hours, though it felt like a week.

March

* BT in 2009
* QUICK: The Sky is Falling. Pun at 11!
* QUICK: English Food

The month I moved house, leading me to eat too much takeaway whilst pondering the concept of English food, squeezing an insanely good deal out of Sky and sitting at home whilst I should have been working whilst BT screwed up very literally every single aspect of my first ever customer relationship and line installation with them.

First Film: Logans Run. A classic which I should have seen years ago.
Bought more Philips Earhook SHS8000 earphones, then £12. Only ones i've ever truly liked and now sell for £20, which is still a good price.
Continued to waste money on soon to be disused Nokia N800, buying a 16GB SDHC card. No doubt i'll find a use for that before too long though.
Best Film: Chasing Amy, though this was a close thing with Logans Run.

April

* Not QUICK - Android Netbooks...
* Chemical Inbalance
* Red Dwarf: Back to Earth - Part Three
* Facebook Exploitation
* Red Dwarf: Back to Earth - Part Two
* QUICK: Not Bad 4 - 1 Not Good
* Red Dwarf: Back to Earth - Part One
* QUICK: Android - Compete!
* QUICK: Android - Second Time Lucky?

Easter brought further sighs about Android appearing to gain no traction, lacking handsets and being misaligned with netbooks, a detailed look at the first new Red Dwarf episodes in ten years, some rare eBay gains and a look at the growing shift of facebook towards exploitation. Somewhere in there was also a "low end diatribe" which though slightly embarassing to read, i think is quite honest and well written.

First Film: Hancock. Not bad.
IKEA dining chairs found on eBay for bargain price saving approx £60. Good as new. Best eBay purchase ever.
5m HDMI cable purchased to replace fraying 3m one. Still in use, though has loose connection somewhere. Spend a little more perhaps.
Best Film: Funny Games - horrifying though.
Finally saw Chinatown, the non-Bollywood version. Not as amazing as expected, but still good.
Dell extended 2 year warranty purchased - not something i'd normally do. Knocked down the price a little. Questionable worth. We'll see.
Notable Film: Sex, Lies and Videotape.
Music: Kings of Leon's Only by Night album. Like a little but haven't listened to most of it much.
First ever pair of adult slippers purchased. These are now used for cross trainer workout.
Cross Trainer purchased. A very, very good decision. A wagon I haven't even come close to falling off yet. *

May

* adult acceleration syndrome
* Light Bites for a Lingering Hangover
* My LOST Predictions - Keep the theory simple and g...
* QUICK: End of the World Music
* QUICK: More.
* QUICK: So VERY FUCKING CLOSE Sweatband Fitness
* Bank Holiday Bank Schmoliday (A Good Weekend)

The marriage month kicked off with a high/low holiday weekend of weddings and engagements. Next came courier woes relating to my now much loved cross trainer followed by a nod to the agnostic and the associative powers of the mind. By the end of the month I was having a final look at season 5 of Lost and firing off fairly random shots at ministers, divorces, empty walls and things that break, capping off with another rare not so poetiic piece.

First Film: Rear Window
Best Film: Rear Window
Wireless N card for desktop machine purchased - failed dismally to make good use of. Became disillusioned with Linux for weak driver support compared to Windows.*
Watched Natural Born Killers as if unseen, realising in the last few minutes that I'd seen at least some of it. Still weirds me out.
Music: 21st Century Breakdown by Green Day. I can't deny liking it, much as it's flawed, though I overplayed it in the summer so it's been on the back burner lately.
Mass pack of guitar picks finally purchased after making do with stubby worn ones for too long.
Trainers ordered online for first time ever. Very good saving.

June

* Tethering (Pie and Shakes)
* deja vu
* Nobody Is Interested in Hearing About Your Dreams!...
* Green

The half-way point in 2009 marked a downturn in my blogging. The year ends with more written than in 2007 but only 2/3 as much as in 2008.

In June I loosely reviewed Green Day's new album, had a very strange dream, worried about my memory and gaped in disbelief at what cell/mobile companies thought tethering was worth on top of already unlimited data plans.

First Film: Jackass 2.5
New Nokia car charger purchased - foreshadows the last Cornwall trip with the N800 as my entertainment device.
First trip to Cornwall - last time staying in the hostel and practically no surf anywhere.
Red Dwarf back to earth DVD disappointing with editing flaws and barely distinguishable director's cut.
Best Film: Silence of the Lambs, finally saw it! Pleased to know i'm not so desensitised as to not find this a freaky film.
iPhone purchased Pay as You Go for £440. Regrets, i've had a few, but not choosing PAYG or spending £440. Android remains my future, i'm quite sure. For now, iPhone is a fantastic device well worth what it cost.
Best Film: The Sting

July
* Sunday Review
* QUICK: How to Shoe-Horn a Celebrity into a Simpson...
* Nice Ideas That Don't Pan Out... iPhones and OpenZ...

Early on this month I wrote more than needed to be written about BT Openzone, a very dull subject. Once that was out of the way I took the piss out of the increasing instances of unattempted writing on The Simpsons before seeing how I was doing so far on my goals set in January.

First Film: Jackie Brown. Need to see this again and pay proper attention. Not my favourite QT.
Second trip to Cornwall - some surf. First time camping in years and first trip ever to Newquay.
Finally bought some wall art for my new place.
RSS Player for iPhone purchased, cutting my ties with the Nokia N800 and gPodder (much love though both deserved). RSS Player is infuriatingly bug riddled and response from the developer seems very selective, but it is more fit for my purposes because it's on the phone. Nokia N800 now in a box, disused.*
Office 2007 purchased legally for £9. Great deal! Saw the future, the ribbon, the confusion and to this day barely used it. Office 2003 is rich featured and well laid out. When 2007 gets pushed to large companies like the one I work for, it'll cause major pain. Forget Office 2010 - is any large enterprise really using Office 2007 yet?
Windows 7 pre-ordered for £44. Great deal. The EU, which will ultimately destroy/segregate Europe or perhaps destroy the entire world, actually saved me some money here with it's over-zealous anti-competition bullshit.
Curtain rail fell down.
Best Film: Ghost Dog.

August

* Nokia Internet Tablets Past and Present - Half bak...
* Friday Focus: Windows 7, BT and Ubuntu

In the late summer month I wrote very little. I do recall at this point I was actively engaged in a footsteps challenge which led me to walk around the local area many nights each week. It seems that all i had time to write about was the bargain price of Windows 7 in the EU, the resiliance of Ubuntu and the lack of resiliance of the BT ADSL network to provide anything like the service promised.

First Film: Man on the Moon. Saw it years ago. Had an impact then, and now.
Third trip to Cornwall. Much more surf but very strong winds making the sea difficult.
Windows 7 pre-ordered for £69. Good deal, not great. Realised i'd need a second copy and i'd never get it legally for less after release. Technically wrong as I can today upgrade my Vista for £63, but that wasn't going to be an option originally. Full version now £90.
Best Film: Jerry Maguire, which i'd never seen before. Loved it.
LoveFilm envelope saga - a lesson in not spending too much time on something so trivial, even if you sort of win in the end.*
Dell XPS M1530 battery died about 14 months in. Replaced for approx £70 which was somewhat less than quoted after much negociation. Almost put me off Dell, but am now somewhat more accepting of the reality of laptop batteries constantly on charge.
Boxee tried and liked. Looking forward to beta in early January 2010.
Notable Film: 21

September
* Emptying the Mental Crap Shoot - Volume.. 3?
* Brain Stew 2009
* Linux is not ready for the Desktop part 8192
* QUICK: 4GB iPhone Smelling Wrong

September began with me boasting about calling the 8GB iPhone model rather than the rumoured 4GB one, despite the fact that my lack of courage in my own convictions meant I didn't post it when I actually thought of it. Oh well. We then visited Ubuntu with some apt animal analogies, culminating in the usual point about Linux and the desktop. An old point was then made about the tech media failing to own up to it's own tendancy to over-hype the unknown, before a bunch of other smaller points were recalled from the drafts folder.

First Film: Man on Wire. Spectacular to see. Vertigo inducing.
Best Film: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
Built a new desktop PC to replace old Athlon 64 machine with a Core 2 Duo, about 6 months before they become end of line and no doubt a new socket appears. Impeccible timing.
DPD lost package saga - well meaning people eventually turn it around to minimise inconvenience, both OcUK and DPD lost and gained points here. Came out about even.
Notable Film: Rachel Getting Married.
Broke down and got a Tesco clubcard! Seems quite lucrative given I only buy lunch there at weekendds.

October
* Fake Sunday Night
* Vuze - Look What Happened/Former Friend/Fall From ...
* Competitive Nature
* Content Overload Worsening
* From the "A morning Radio DJ shouldn't be able to ...

With the leaves turning red for about 3 days before being sludge on the ground (notice these get longer each passing month) I talked about why I like Chris Moyles (mostly about me), the then fact that I was trying to consume entirely too much media, and a confession of my competitive nature. Before it was all over I swore off Vuze for it's Ask Toolbar bullshit and wasted a little more time worrying about wasting time.

First Film: Tropic Thunder. Good, not great.
A (the band) announce reunion tour - tickets for Birmingham bought.
windows 7 arrives, twice as ordered. One still remains in the box as the Release Candidate continues to hum away on the new machine. Must get around to that soon.
Asked to be an Usher at wedding next year. Nothing wrong with that!
Home diabetes test reveals i'm perfectly normal. I just drink a lot, and piss a lot.
Finally got some headphones for studio setup.
Finally got some monitors for studio setup.
Have become disillusionied with my studio abilities and with sampled sounds. New setup still very handy though.
Best Film: Lakeview Terrace, better than Crash.

November
* 29
* IMDB comments vs YouTube comments - Both Bad.

In my birthday month I first tried to work out whether Youtube or IMDB led to more inane comments. It's really still too close to call. I also discussed turning 29, mostly in a positive light.

First Film: Love Actually. I like these RC things. Why pretend I don't.
Finally ordered enough socks that I won't ever run out in the course of normal life.
Finally got rid of old bed linen for something new.
Best Film: In Bruges
Music: Saw A (the band) in Birmingham. Fantastic.

December
* Personal Finance. Skip if you Wish!

So, in the final month of the year I blogged only once about my new personal finance tracking. That's not quite true of course because i'm also posting this which is huge.

Music: Saw A (the band) in Nottingham. Even better.
First Film: Role Models. This one worked really well.
Best Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. How did this stay off my radar until now?
Notable Film: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
Uncomfortable Film: Notes on a Scandal. Most peoople don't need to see this.
Amazon Prime trialed. Like the idea, but don't spend enough with Amazon themselves as opposed to their Marketplace to be worthwhile. Worked for getting Christmas gifts in time.
Music: Paramore, Brand New Eyes
Last Film: Wanted - Better than Expected.
Tonight: Avatar in 3D at the DeLux.
Next DVD: American Teen
Portable speaker egg called X-Mini purchased. Perfect solution to showing drowning out iPhone speaker, yet in all my searching these never popped up until now.

Trends?

I'm still mostly writing when I want to complain about something rather than when I like something. That still needs work, but at least i'm complaining less now, even if it means not writing anything.

Overalls?

Not terrible. I don't need to give myself a score. Still something of a holding pattern, that much is clear. Need to break some habits. I have some ideas, but this is the 31st, not the 1st.

Personal Finance. Skip if you Wish!

Some time in mid-November, I decided it was about time I understood how much money I have, rather than just guessing. I remembered a blogger I read suggesting two pieces of software, one which he used and cost money, the other which was more complicated and free. Naturally I chose the free one, GNUCash. It's crazy watching finances properly for the first time.

If you're anything like me, until now at least, you think of yourself as earning the amount that hits your bank account each month, and you think of yourself as having spent what disappears between that time and next time. The crude indicator of being cashflow positive or negative tended to be whether the balance after the pay went in was getting higher or lower month after month. This is far from being a bad way of doing it, but there are so much better ways.

In the world of tracking finance, you track everything on gross, that magic number of the left before all the bad stuff, but in your mind you'll still think of yourself as earning just the net pay, the smaller number.

The upshot of this is you're seeing that you've spent over £1600 by the 15th of the month when you take home a little over £1400. It scares the shit out of you.

The reality of course is the £1600 includes over £600 in income tax and national insurance, not to mention over £100 to the student loan company - a repayment plan that seems to move far more slowly than the size of the payments would suggest. It always seems about 5 years from being paid off.

So, far from having spent hundreds over what I earn this month, i've actually saved a few hundred (also deducted from gross, pension or otherwise) and still have something to spare with most major expenses for the month including Christmas gifts taken care of.

Even with all this data, it still feels somehow hard to tell just how cashflow positive you are. The report I look at as I write this would suggest it's close, but if you factor in the savings, it's not close at all and i'm doing fine. Not money for a house deposit within a year fine, but moving in the right direction.

I'm new to this, so no doubt it gets clearer, and hopefully the need to accurately track the smallest cash units will wane, as I think it takes too much time to be worth it. I even have my change jar listed as a current asset, and I counted it as exactly £20.01.

One thing the increased visibility does is piss you off. If you think you're taxed about 20% of your income because that's the income tax rate after your allowance, you're sorely mistaken. Try dividing income tax + national insurance + council tax over your gross pay. You're at over 25% in real terms and that's before you factor in the £10 a month TV tax that you can't really opt of of and of course the 17.5% VAT (come Jan 1st) on damn near everything you buy . You're easily at or past 30% by now, but wait there's more. Do you drive? You know that fuel duty is over 50%, yes?

When people say that tax accounts for nearly half of a person's income, don't dismiss them.. They're getting close. Consider whether you get a measure of value for that money compared to the value you get for the money you actually spend as you choose. It's all YOUR money that YOU earned. The company that employs you REALLY DOES pay YOU that gross income - it isn't a trick. The tax you pay is part of your spending, and a lot of it's not well spent!

So, what else is new?

29

I'm older again. No problem with that.

Lately i'm in a great mood. I know from old that it won't last forever but i'll gladly ride it whilst I can and i'll sure as shit stop analysing it cos that's the easiest way to kill it.

At some point in the last few years I definitely decided to be a more positive person and it's one of the few things that seems to have stuck. I know this because I find myself listening to other people banging on about mundane self-inflicted non-problems and realise that I just don't do that any more. Excellent.

That's not to say i'm not still sarcastic, sometimes rude or even mean. I'm only human. The comedy I enjoy the most, you may remember, are Internet radio shows that make fun of people.

365 days until I hit 30. I look forward to them all.

IMDB comments vs YouTube comments - Both Bad.

IMDB comments are almost as bad a YouTube comments. Everyone knows what comments on the latter look like, so i'll gloss over that.

On IMDB, one guy asks, "why didn't the guy just shoot the guy". The answer is obviously that people don't just fucking shoot people in real life.

Another guy responds that "many people would clam up in that situation. Killing a man can be a hard thing to do".

I find myself thinking that guy number two is more of a moron. Okay, so the first guy is caught up in his movie bubble where the life of a man is worth little and killing somehow has no consequence, but who is this second guy that offers the obvious answer in this manner, as if he'd stood over a foe and chosen to pull the trigger at any point in his life before deciding to join the imdb forum. Do you know that? Maybe if you're of the right mindset, killing a man is a piece of piss? Just saying.

In case you care, the film in question here is Lakeview Terrace, which is better than Crash.

Fake Sunday Night

It's fake Sunday. I've had a four day weekend.

Today is the last day off I have in this holiday year. The new one starts in about 5 days but I never take days early on, so effectively this marks the end of the more carefree summer holiday season and the start of the more work oriented winter.

The next few weeks promise to be busy, so being done with days off is a good thing, but I also know it's going to be hard yet uninspiring work, trying to make huge slabs of data meaningful.

Once again I feel i'm wasting too much time. I had no intention of allowing this four day break to pass without a single trip somewhere. I meant to go to London but frankly it's far too expensive on a train unless there's an actual reason to go, and i'd really be going to wander around.

This long weekend consisted of me consuming podcasts, movies and TV. I figured out a little more aobut Ableton Live which was good, but it doesn't feel like enough.

I did find my first ever version of what this is. A Word document in which I remember writing some 20,000 words. Unfortunately this was 7 years ago and I can't remember the password for the document. I must have used a long one too, because I can't seem to crack it. I'd really like to read it, despite it probably being fairly cringe worthy.

That's all. Random brain spray.

Vuze - Look What Happened/Former Friend/Fall From Grace... you get the picture. Good becomes Evil.

Vuze may not be the best Torrent ápp, but i've always liked it in both it's current and previous incarnations.

That ends today. I'm not talking about the fact that the version updater has been hanging on my machine for weeks and i've just been cancelling it. That's a bug and acceptable. My stupidity told me that reinstalling would be the way around this bug, and it was. How ridiculous is it that it turns out i'd have been better off leaving things as they were rather than fixing the problem. Read on.

As of right now, 11:25am GMT on 16/10/2009, if you install Vuze on your machine like a normal person and pay no real attention to how you might be being tricked, poor excuse for a search engine Ask.com will invade your Firefox settings without any prompting.

It's not that Vuze hasn't been shipped with a shitty Ask.com customised toolbar for some time now. No sir. It's the fact that they have gone completely off installation Wizard convention and implemented an unticked "Customize" checkbox at the very start of the configuration process. If you don't tick this you are simply thrust through the entire setup process without any choices to make. How fucking handy for getting a few hundred thousand unwanted toolbar installs. Needless to say from my anger, the shitty toolbar and all it's unwanted configuration changes are part of the default.

I genuinely can't figure out how to undo the mess this has made. I will find out, but that's time I have to spend.

I also have to find time to find a different client.

Competitive Nature

Okay last one was too long. Faster.

Am I competitive? I thought not overly but I lost bad at Laser Tag last night and I have a burning desire to understand why I finished deep into the negative scoring.

Why should I care? I shouldn't. I bowled a good game an hour earlier.

I think I just suck at things with guns.

But yes, I am competitive. People at work that started after me and even worked for me briefly are now starting to rise to the levels above me and as much as I can be genuinely happy for them and feel it's deserved, I find myself burnt up about it despite telling myself I didn't want to go where they're going.

I probably still don't, and that's the point. Should I follow the competitive nature and hope it indeed leads to advancement? I'm almost certain that if I set myself a goal and worked at it I could get myself a few levels higher at work in not too long a time frame, but apart from wanting a bit more money, and at this stage a bit is all it really amounts to, what's the point?

I'll leave it there for fear of this becoming the last post. One more to do.

Content Overload Worsening

Podcasts. I now subscribe to 24. That's more than when I last mentioned it and wanted to drop a few.

One of my favourite (though recently less so) comedy shows is now going 5 days a week. I should be pleased but i'm not. My not quite OCD nature means I need to treat these shows as all or nothing. I can't bring myself to just listen to episodes when I feel I have the time, but I also can't imagine finding yet another 2 hours in a week to listen to the two extra shows. Maybe they'll do me a favour and put the new shows behind a pay wall.

Current favourite show - Red Bar Radio. This has been in fantastic form recently. Much better than the show that's about to go 5 days a week which has developed a weird obsession with describing YouTube videos that I can't see. They also seem to see themselves as implicitly superior to Red Bar, which may have been true at one time, but at this point it's misguided arrogance. I'm not sure these show wars really exist in the hosts minds most of the time but this was brought up briefly in the last few weeks and for some reason it annoyed me.

Don't bother with these types of show if you've ever been offended by anything though. Incidentally who are these idiots that get offended?

So yes, content overload. Too much audio and too many unread stories in Google Reader.

Today I posted three times and all three posts largely fell apart towards the middle. I haven't been doing this enough recently to be good it it I guess.

From the "A morning Radio DJ shouldn't be able to make me contemplate my life this much damn it!" department.

I've been back in the Chris Moyles camp in the last month or so. That podcast eventually sucked me into listening in the mornings after abandoning the afternoon show a few years before he got the big job - the morning show I never listened to for 5 years. Mission accomplished, I would imagine. I could try to figure out why i'm suddenly into this again after what I suppose must be about 8 years but that's not really the point here..

The dude gets a lot of stick from far and wide. Strangely enough most of the things that people used to say about him largely don't seem true any more. His show is far more positive now. Clearly that may relate to having reached the top. Hard to be negative when everything's going well.

This isn't really specifically about him, anyway. Like most of this blog, it's more about me. I followed @chrisdjmoyles on twitter for a while and it struck me how interspersed with the celeb trappings there was a lot of fairly normal life thrown in. Being content with sitting watching TV for entertainment, going for a drink, and so on. Looking forward to these things!

It got me to wondering why I feel like i'm wasting my time when I do them and it always seems to come back to being content with your job. I'm not saying I want to be a DJ. I don't have the quick wit, and although I love radio as a medium, in about 5 minutes of searching you can see the huge gap between people that love the medium like me and people who eat, sleep and breathe it, and these are the people that should be doing it. Stands to reason.

It's more that i'd like to get to a point where my day of accomplishment (work or otherwise) feels meaningful enough that a relaxing evening doesn't feel like a waste. I have a friend who manages to feel this way, although he works around 60 hours a week, around 1/3 longer than me, and that's going to lead to valuing the relaxation time more. Working an extra 20 hours isn't something I want to do, or at least not in my line of work.

It's all been said a million times before - do something you're passionate about. I can get passiontate about creating MI for a large company to an extent, but it feels increasingly like that's going to become more restrictive, plus it's not something I intended to do forever.

This line from Baz Luhrmann's Sunscreen has been stuck in my head now for ten years:

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. the most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't.

It's a great line which i'd like to apply to me, but I don't find myself all that interesting any more, or at least not to other people. I increasingly come back to realise that most of the things that I like the most aren't things that other people like, and those that they do like, I like too much to be able to relate with them on the topic. I am still the geek I always was but I decided to try to forget it for a few years. Doesn't work.

I never felt guilty about not knowing either. I don't have parents that pressure me to progress as many people do, and I still think this is a good thing. Having said that, without being pushed it's easy to stand still. Standing still is what i've been doing for a few years now. I have progressed in my career a little but where that was an easy stroll up a hill, the next bit is much steeper. I can't move on where I am without compromising and narrowing my focus, and like many others I like to have choices, doors, avenues.. Escapes routes.

Yeah so that's about it. Sorry if you assumed i'd find a way to tie that all together but I think this one's beyond that. If I had the punchline I wouldn't need to write the rest to begin with.

Still feeling pretty good in general!

Emptying the Mental Crap Shoot - Volume.. 3?

Remember I occasionally pull saved drafts and see what I wrote and didn't post? I'm doing it again this evening before going out for a drink. A few good ones here, which i'll post in full, and some... other stuff... which I guess gets summarised then deleted.

Bites

Bad vibes about the way Chrome OS was being discussed as a competitor without any evidence. Thankfully that one did die down, but it'll be back, and there will be people touting it as the savior long before it's running on John Doe's machine.

Good vibes about Win 7 E, now irrelevant. Me wondering if the rotating backdrop in Win 7 RC1 will turn out to be an Ultimate only feature. I still wonder about this one. It'd be ridiculous, but backdrop stuff certainly made up part of Vista Ultimate.

Good vibes about RSS Player on the iPhone. That remains. Looking forward to version 2 to see what gets improved. Top of my head... Surely there's a way to resume videos and enhanced podcasts? If we want, let us choose to do all our deleting manually. Fix the way the first few ms get cut off an audio podcast. Test resuming weirdness with lots of people's servers and make it consistent. It's a great app though, no question.

Empty Vessels

Me whining about the number of fan pages on Facebook that are just a slogan that when clicked on reveal just a bunch of fans and no actual discussion. That hasn't changed.

Me whining about suggestions feature now including such fan pages. Still don't like that.

I Like My iPhone

Me lamenting that immediately after I bought an iPhone people of note said it wasn't cool anymore. So what? I like it.

Natural Born Killers

Me in disbelief that I watched NBK for what I thought was the first time and realised 10 minutes from the end that in fact i've seen it before. I still can't work this weirdness out.

Is L ready for the D?

Me crying about not being able to get my freshly bought 802.11n card working with Ubuntu with WPA . It wasn't too bad but not worth posting. I reached the conclusion that the problem is driver related, not Ubuntu related. After all, when my HDD died I distinctly remember using an Ubuntu live disc to continue using my laptop with full internet access for days, and there was no ethernet cable involved.

Asexual

Me exclaiming that this word gets misused... That's literally what I wrote. Then I looked it up and found out it actually has both meanings, so I decided against going any further with the rant.

Why Blogger?

In which I began to discuss why I host this blog on Blogger, without much insight. It's fine for this purpose, I guess.

Bailouts Fail

Where I gave poorly constructed opinions about the "badness" of bailouts. They don't work, for sure, but I had nothing useful to add to the conversation that night.



Really, the better stuff in the drafts posts are the ones I decided to post in full rather than the ones in this post, which is a little lightweight now I read though it. Scroll down and look at those... 3 I think. Ok, pub.

Brain Stew 2009

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Linux is not ready for the Desktop part 8192

I clearly worked hard on metaphors in this post but decided to leave it because I felt maybe I was letting my frustration cloud my judgement about Ubuntu. This was definitely a good call as I more recently posted somewhere, though I forget where, that I was impressed by Ubuntu's ability to fix itself when it got screwed up. This applies to failed upgrades as much as anything else. So, enjoy the post, and don't call me on the last few paragraphs - I don't really feel that way any more.

---

There was a monkey, a heron and an ibex. Before those there were other animals, fawns and the like, but I never met them.

The monkey was something I had never expected. An effective, efficient companion.

When the heron showed up it offered promise. I was perfectly happy with the monkey for company, but curiosity got the better of me. Somehow the heron and monkey had words and knocked each other out. In real terms thats a win for the heron. He shouldn't really have been expected to win, size wise.

The heron came around first, and although I couldn't really see anything in him to make him a better companion, the monkey wasn't getting any younger, so I decided to hang with the heron, and in time grew to like him as I had liked the monkey. In fact, apart from their different looks, they were essentially the same.

This ibex showed up some time later. I wasn't even sure what an ibex was or what he might do for me. For quite some time I ignored him. When you have a heron tending to your needs just fine, why stray?

Then one day when the I was asleep the Ibex started making all kinds of noise. I'd tied him to a tree but he'd eaten the rope. I hadn't told him to do this, but I could have stopped him had I been thinking straighter.... Saved the heron, for now at least.

Sadly, turning to the heron, well, there was no heron. The bird was gone. I knew what had happened, but it was hard to swallow. For me at least. The Ibex is a goat like creature it turns out, and has no trouble swallowing birds whole. What happens after that is a different matter...

The Ibex vomited up the heron, dead of course, and slumped to the floor, now looking a little worse for wear. I tried to feed him a boot (a hard one I found by a stream) but he wouldn't swallow it.

What's the moral to this story of three animals? Simple. Ubuntu is really fucking bad at upgrading itself. Both times I've let it try, it's failed half way through. Last time it left a mess, whereas this time it's left me with a console and a read only file system. I can say quite categorically that not one Microsoft Windows Update or OS upgrade has ever left me with a broken OS. This would be a crime of enormous magnitude from MS. Last time I badmouthed Ubuntu I got a rare comment telling me I was wrong. Let's see if i'm wrong this time too. If the response is that I shouldn't expect the update not to kill my machine because Ubuntu is open source and free, you're dumb. If the response is that I should find the problem and fix it rather than complain, you're also dumb. The first idea is bad publicity for the entire concept, and the latter is unrealistic. Not everybody that finds problems are going to either be able to fix them, or in many cases even be able to afford the time to get involved in helping.

I'm sorely tempted not to bother to figure out what went wrong here, but no doubt I will.

QUICK: 4GB iPhone Smelling Wrong

I held back on posting this for fear of looking like an idiot. I go through phases of caring. Right now I don't, but if I was wrong who knows if i'd post this. In this case, I wasn't wrong. This was written a few days before the iPhone 3GS was announced.

---

Surely you're looking at this all wrong.

Because a standards board approves 4GB iPhones and 32GB iPhones you draw the conclusion that it's a low end $100 model. There's a shitload of stuff in that little box that contributes to the overall price. 4GB of memory is not going to chop a hundred from production.

Wouldn't a sensible model to do this loss leading thing (aside, chances are in real terms it wouldn't actually be a loss leader, but that's generally the concept of a price cut of this size) offering a cheap 8GB model, a standard 16GB model and a high end 32GB model? Why for the sake of very little money talk poorer people into buying a piece of hardware that will run out of space for music and apps?

Nokia Internet Tablets Past and Present - Half baked post.

If you've read this blog before you'll be familiar with half written thoughts not being posted. This was one of them. The only reason I held back was because I realised that the point I was trying to make got lost in a more general commentary. Fix it..? can't be arsed, but i'll post it as it is.

----

Complaints about Nokia not supporting Internet Tablets beyond a couple of years don't seem well founded to me. I was an avid user of the N800 with Maemo (2008 Diablo) until I bought an iPhone 6 weeks ago. The only thing i've done with the tablet since the day I bought the iPhone is install Mer to see what it's like because I no longer fear it might screw up the thing, meaning I no longer care *if* it screws up the thing.

Mer, for what it's worth, looks like a good early effort with a fair way to go, and didn't in any way screw up my existing Maemo setup. I don't really see how it's money (time) well spent for developers at this point, but I feel like an arsehole for saying it because until 6 weeks ago I certainly wanted it to continue for my benefit.

Therein lies the harsh reality. I was jazzed about it until something better came along.

Call me selfish if you want but we all paid a premium price for a Nokia Internet Tablet at some point, and i'm not going to be told that I don't deserve a say because I don't contribute to the OSS efforts. I'm not sure I have the skill and I don't want to spend the time. It's still a commerical product and note though that I said "wanted it to continue" a few moments ago. I have no sense of entitlement, which is entirely the point here.

These tablets, the N800/810 (forget the older one, seriously) simply don't have the processing power to come anywhere near to competing in the current market. It's painfully wonderful to see how effortlessly Safari renders a complicated site on a 3GS as I zoom in and out. On an N8x0 i'd have already waited 2 seconds to see anything, then be trying to drag to scroll, getting no response and getting pissed off as my effort eventually got interpreted as a tap on a link I didn't want to tap and the browser moved on to rendering that page before deciding to abort itself with no verbose reasoning leaving me staring at the weather applet which for some reason hasn't updated even though i'm frequently connected to a network.

The N8x0 tablets were great until something better came along. Good things can be made poor when they're replaced with better things. They're no worse in themselves, but the universe has moved on. Too simple? No - simple is the point.

Some people support a refresh of the N8x0 range. This actually could be interesting, but it absolutely won't happen. Not a chance in hell. I believe they're not even making the WiMax N810 anymore. The latest version of the device became obselete before the original.

How about the N900/RX-51/Rover? It's a whole new angle by the look of it. New OS to take advantage of faster hardware, and more importantly the feature that finally changes the answer to the question "is it a phone" to "yes"... But it looks like a phone now anyway...

It's often said there was no market for the Internet Tablet range. This new model doesn't really look much like one. It looks more likely to compete with Android devices. This also seems like the most logical step for Nokia to take.

At this point there's a clear lack of conflict in my thinking, and that again is the point. The old devices were handled correctly and the new one probably will be too. There's very little sense in Nokia spending time maintaining the OS support for the N8x0 range, because already few are going to want to continue using a device with this little power.

Take a step back and look at how long you can use a new PC before it becomes too slow to continue with and these mobile devices perhaps look a little less resiliant over time, but that's not a good enough reason to hang back with laggy devices. There's probably no conspiracy here.

---

Afterthoughts... this was written before the N900 was properly unveiled. I'm a lot more positive about the N900 than I was when I wrote this, which just further reinforces my disinterest in trying to make continued use of my N800. It's not going to happen.

I said before that I eventually see myself with an Android phone some time after this iPhone period. Now it could just as easily be a Maemo phone. Not yet though. For now i'm with the brainwashed masses. Sorry.

Friday Focus: Windows 7, BT and Ubuntu

Damn it. It's saturday!

As soon as Windows 7 was no longer available for £44 I wished i'd bought two copies. As soon as it stops being £69 i'll probably wish I bought a second copy at that price. Either way it's going to be depressing to wipe the Ultimate RC1 and replace it with the Home Premium version (the one that doesn't cost £200 or £100), but overall the OS seems to be able to drive this laptop quite nicely compared to Vista which after a year or so was finally beginning to show it's bad side that I was so convinced everybody else was just making up. I'll meet you half way Vista haters - it's not without it's issues, but most of the things you guys hit on are the wrong things, such as having to hit "Continue" occasionally or *gasp* changing the settings so you don't need to. Losers.

7 is less impressive on my leftover machine with one component dating back to the last millenium. For some reason I never let go of the idea that the Soundblaster Live was a high end card even though it's three generations old and part of a line that audio professionals have hated all along. Still, the chipmunk voice altering thing was fun for a few weeks way back and it's managed some fairly decent band related recordings over time. It just seems that the device has no driver support in 7 and using the KX Project drivers is throwing up blue screens fairly randomly now, usually it seems in the middle of video playback, which is incredibly frustrating given that this machine acts as a TV for my 30 minute constant cross trainer workout, and if it blue screens, or worse hangs on a repeating slice of audio I have to interrupt the workout or live without the entertainment, which makes the whole thing seem to take a lot longer.

On another topic, I finally called BT on my broadband speeds tonight. Longest hold in a really long time - probably in excess of 30 minutes with an almost constantly ringing phone and one standard message.

They seem to think I do have a fault on the line, but that being the case, where does that fault go at 6am when I wake up and download podcasts each morning at a fairly consistent 585KiB/s? It seems far more likely i'm being subjected to some shaping here. I've seen other files download slowly too, but I wonder if i'm being punished for downloading large MP3 files, most of which (and I must emphasise most here) don't contain any copyrighted material. My only hope is that when I finally get away from BT on to a better all rounder I don't find that their service is somehow also impacted by BT due to their overall involvement in the underlying system.

Final thought - I love that when all seems lost with Ubuntu a quick drop into recovery and a dpkg always seems to manage to fix everything. It's like a colonic for the OS. I have no idea what I did to cause what seems like hundreds of half installed packages resulting in X stalling at the login screen, but I know it knows how to sort itself out if I just let it. As far as being ready for the desktop - forget it. It barely seems to understand how to communicate using the most common wireless security protocol, WPA, and i'm NOT the only person that thinks so. Just do a search for Ubuntu WPA, or if you really want nightmares, WPA2.

Sunday Review

I just noticed it's after the end of June, which of course marks the half way point in 2009. Although they were intentionally NOT resolutions, I thought it fitting to look at what i'm doing by comparison to my "what i'll do" post from the start of the year, particularly as i'm in the directionless part of my life cycle right now.

- I said i'd eat better. At times I have and at times I haven't. Day to day I feel I eat well.

- I said i'd exercise. I am. The weights aren't getting touched but the cross trainer is more of what I need in any case.

- I said i'd play the piano. I haven't played it enough. I need inspiration to get back to it and learn some pieces other than those I learnt 10 years ago. Nonetheless, I bought the piano which was certainly a big step.

- I said i'd improve my guitar skill level. In general I think I am, although I still get frustrated on a day when I simply can't seem to play. It's like a jab telling me it'd be risky to attempt this on stage, which is something I like to do.

- I said i'd get a proper living room sound setup. This isn't that important to me right now, so i'm not doing it yet.

- I said i'd figure out my next career step. More confused than ever.

- I said i'd make more effort to understand important but far away happenings. Not much change here but I am trying to read more of the news, objectively as possible.

- I said i'd cook more varied meals. I've cooked better versions of the same sort of meals so far but I'm moving in the right direction. I have the kit I need now.

- I said i'd isolate myself less at work at lunch time. I haven't changed this and i'm still not sure I want to. I'll continue to think about this.

- I said i'd move into a terraced house giving me more space. Technically I did that although not in the way I meant. I semi regret not sticking to my guns here as my move to a first floor apartment within a terraced house has left me without a garden and downstairs neighbours. I miss having an outside of my own and I can't help be concious that every step I take is audible downstairs. Thankfully I don't seem to be annoying them yet and they're very friendly towards me. I certainly now have all the space I need and am making good use of it.

- I said i'd try harder to meet people. I can't say that i've done this, unfortunately.

- I said i'd try harder not to have "that argumentative tone" in friendly conversation. I think i've made progress here but I found myself doing it to quite an extent a few weeks ago. It's definitely a defensive defence mechanism. Will keep trying.

- I said i'd get into the local music scene. Good fortune meant I had friends gigs to attend regardless so I got to see some good bands. The scene in Leicester is very weak now though. I don't feel much urge to go out seeking new live music now. I think I may be going through a late 20s shift in interest.

- I said i'd visit more of the UK. Most of what i've done towards this has been within the last month, but I visited more of the Devon and Cornish coastline - Westward Ho! and Newquay. Planning to return to Newquay for a camp and bodyboard in August. Want to explore further north and the Welsh coast before too long. Running out of summer and running out of leave from work. Rediscovering camping has certainly been a positive too.

- I said i'd educate myself more on libertarianism but I didn't. First I came to understand that the term isn't specific enough. What I meant was the anarcho-capitalism, free marketeering etc. I never fully reconciled a belief in it and i'm less convinced that it's the only answer. I listen to Free Talk Live much less because as I may have mentioned before, I was finding listening to 6 hours a week of it was getting me down. I've recently started listening on a more occasional basis, certainly still agree with a lot of what is said, but I've come to see that touting these ideas whilst living firmly within the norm makes for a poor argument. Not the place to go into detail here though.

- I said i'd throw out every VHS cassette. I've done very well here although not quite there. I managed to give away all of my pre-recorded tapes to one person who seemed very pleased to be getting them. If they were for resale at a car boot sale I couldn't care less - very happy not to have binned them. What I did bin is about 2/3 of my recorded tapes. Felt great to throw away the tens of tapes holding stuff that I now have on DVD such as American Gothic and Red Dwarf. The remainder are things I don't have on DVD and don't really want on DVD, but maybe want to watch one more time before binning. I did however bin all the Friends tapes. Realistically I know that i'm never going to marathon through Friends at this point. Catching it occasionally on E4 and T4 on C4 is OK with me.

- I said i'd weigh less than eleven and a half stone. This morning I weighed 11, 13. Weight fluctuates with food and drink more than most people seem to realise, and by tonight i'll probably be 12, 4. In general the number is trending downwards and some muscle conversion is also definitely occurring. I'll be interested to see if I hit 11, 7 any time this year though.

- I said i'd drink less. Rather unintentionally, I have done. Not getting wasted much any more, which was more the point here. I will however almost certainly get wasted at a reunion style event next weekend. Swings and roundabouts people.

- I said i'd clean up more. I just can't stand doing it. I try to tidy more, but actual cleaning only really happens when it absolutely needs to.

- I said i'd find the best view in Leicestershire. I'm fairly sure it's Bradgate park looking down from the peak. It's dull compared to almost any view on the Cornish coast. I'm about done with Leicester, but I can't really move to Cornwall. Also, that's *too* remote. More on that i'm sure.

- I said i'd stop using stand by (on my TV) and I did until I moved, after which I forgot. It wouldn't hurt me to start doing that again now so i'll try.

- I said I wouldn't cave in to climate change propaganda beyond career supporting lip service. I am now involved in an environmental challenge. However that is career supporting, and i'm largely able to retain my genuine feelings on this publicly.

- I said i'd walk more and further. Absolutely am doing and will continue to.

- I said i'd code something outside of work. I haven't yet but i'm thinking about it again right now. Just don't know what to work on. Coding is a solution to a problem, not a starting point. Need to focus on *why* to code something first.

- I said i'd keep plants alive. None have died yet, to my credit, but I should still be watering them more and feeding them a bit.

- I said i'd visit Japan... Then I realised that the economy was in the shitter and visiting anywhere was prohibitively expensive at the moment, let alone somewhere that far away. Postponed.

- I said, finally, that i'd learn every country on the map. I didn't do that and I don't think it's very likely that I will, but I am trying to look at maps more.

Fair amount of tasks accomplished on that list. Not too shabby.

QUICK: How to Shoe-Horn a Celebrity into a Simpsons Episode:

Lisa: "Wow. <achievement and related verb>ing <occupation>ist/er <first name> <last name>. What brings you to Springfield Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms <last name>"?

Nice Ideas That Don't Pan Out... iPhones and OpenZones

One new feature of the iPhone 3GS is it's ability to automatically log in to hotspots. When I first heard about this being available it was in the US context and I assumed that the UK suppliers, The Cloud and BT Openzone wouldn't be likely to support it, as these services very much exist in spite of the iPhone, not specifically for it.

I was wrong of course, although I didn't realise until it bit me. Note that in the early few days I really had no idea what the icons in the status bar meant. Now that I do, this isn't that hard to spot if you're looking for it. Once you have logged in to BT Openzone once, and this means the secondary login that's normally web based as there is no WEP/WPA security on these, it will log you on automatically ever after.

This now means that every time I wander into the range of a BT Openzone hotspot, the iPhone puts 3G on the back burner and connects to it. So far this has only manifested itself in one way, and this will tend to happen in a busy shopping area likely to have strong 3G and hotspots - My connection will drop from excellent 5 bar 3G coverage running extremely well to a single bar failing WiFi connection.

For you see, BT Openzone for the most part is just some bar or coffee shop's router. I have spent more time than one man should trying to find sweet spots for BT Openzone and never once did I establish which business they were coming from or get 5 bars. They were also frequently unimpressive with 4 bars which normally is enough to sustain high speeds. My theory would be that these hotspots don't actually supply high speeds by design. The minimum of 2MBit/s that a good 3G signal is supposed to supply is in theory far superior to a weak WiFi signal, or a relatively strong one with a hypothetical cap of what felt like about 500KBit/s when downloading podcasts.

Something worse that I think's happening although I haven't confirmed it:

BT did a deal with a technology provider by the name of FON. In short, FON firmware loaded on to the BT Home Hubs and customers allowed to opt in or out of the scheme. Opting in opens a sandboxed Internet (sandboxed away from your home network, nothing else) up to others who have opted in and in return as an opter in you get to use theirs. BT could have been cool about this but must have seen the opportunity to boost the profile of their hotspot network, so the routers now messily broadcast not only the ssid for the "real" router connection and one called "BTFON", but also one called "BT Openzone".

As far as I can tell, an ssid is the only way to differentiate these hotspots, and at any rate it's all devices seem to use, therefore I have a feeling the iPhone will even try to log in to these hot spots, which it has no business doing. From testing at home (I am a BT FON opter-inner - it's a great idea and i've made use of it a lot already - plus realistically where I live nobody's gonna use mine ), the iPhone tries it's autoconnect, fails and then continues with the connection as normal, meaning stuck in pre-login, wider internet unavailable. For although it has connected to a BT Openzone hotspot, this type will only respond to BT FON authentication, not iPhone authentication.

Solution for BT which certainly won't happen - just use "BT FON" for the FON stuff.

Solution for Apple who never listen anyway - detect a login failure then disconnect from the hotspot. If it's the only one available, drop back to 3G. Simple.

Annoying things that I have to live with for now:
- When I'm going wandering away from home, WiFi needs to be turned off. Easily done.
- Can't use 3G to download Podcasts. No good Podcasts are under 5MB. Dumb limit.
- Can't even download as MP3 through Safari, but I can "stream" it in "Quicktime" - this is the same data I wanted to download, BEING DOWNLOADED. Why not let me save it for later?

I do like the iPhone though. No regrets. I do expect to eventually end up using an Android phone somewhere down the line for flexibility, although I remain aghast at how badly the overall initiative is still being handled. I've lost track of whether the Magic and Hero are the same phone or different phones, and I can't remember which one of them is also called a G2. This is how confused someone who has paid attention has got. It will eventually translate to lost sales.

Of all the long overly technical posts i've had, this has been one of them!

Tethering (Pie and Shakes)

I'm so glad I have little to no interest in using the iPhone I might buy tomorrow for tethering.

The concept of charging a monthly fee for tethering on top of a plan that already offers a hot slice of delicious unlimited internet access is not completely unreasonable, but to price it in such a way that it makes out to be selling the tethered access as an entirely separate hot slice of delicious unlimited internet access is completely unjustifiable. It's the same hot delicious slice!

As plenty have pointed out since O2 announced their price around a week ago, it's not even clear whether they'll be able to tell the data flowing through the tether from the data only flowing to and from the phone. This only clarifies the point - it's the same thing!

Is usage arguably higher when tethering? Perhaps, but it's not as if you're not subject to the same excessive usage policy already in place, and it's not like it's anything more than a 3G speed connection.

I've done the pie analogy a little, but I think the milkshake says it best.

Get your Milkshake - £1
Straw - £1

Nobody's going to buy that straw!

Prediction - In the UK at least, O2 will relent and cut this to a reasonable price, or hopefully realise charging for it is pointless. It looks like AT&T in the US might want even more dollar for this, but they probably won't relent. We'll see.

deja vu

I'm finding deja vu experiences different lately.

It now tends to come after the experience, whilst it used to come during it.

I'll have long conversations and then ten minutes later feel I've somehow had the conversation twice, and must have until that point forgotten having had it the first time.

It's oddly unsettling.

Finding evidence of forgetfulness doesn't help. I went to file a bug on a Maemo project last week and did a quick search to see if it had already been logged. I found not only had it been logged, but I did it, many months ago.

Just sayin'

Nobody Is Interested in Hearing About Your Dreams!

Just woke up. Ridiculous goings on before that though.

I was in some kind of car park.. open air.

Some other guy was there. I think the bald bearded guy from Iron Man who was Tony Stark's dad's business partner and who you could tell would be the ultimate bad guy within the first two seconds of seeing him. Okay I saw Iron Man last night. This is not the point.

I had to do a Google search. For what I forget but it was some simple two word search. For some reason in this reality it had to be done using some very oversized parking meter like device.

I clicked on a red area and somehow entered my terms. No keyboard and I didn't seem to speak so I guess telepathy.

The machine started to shake violently and I recall commenting to my companion that THIS was supposed to be progress.

The machine then stopped shaking and spat out a smart card and a dark sea green envelope with a slot for the card. I realise a slot in an envelope makes no sense in daylight but at the time it seemed to. I was supposed to slot the card into the envelope and then post it back into the machine which was now clearly a mailbox.

In my dystopia, and I assume by the company i'm keeping that's what it was, it appears that Google searches have to be carried out by mail.

So, then I got into my car and drove. On a narrow country lane a sideways original style Nissan Micra with a flat tyre blocked the road and the middle aged female driver asked for my help.

We (a few others turned up) chose to push the car off the road to fix the tyre. I commented to an elderly man assisting with the pushing that these old Micras were so light you could lift them, proceeding to lift my end with ease.

The elderly gentleman did the same, promptly dropped his end causing the whole car to roll over him and bend him backwards in two. He said he was okay but I don't think he was. He was alive at least, and I could hardly be blamed.

Then I woke up.

I often think back to whats i've dreamed about to identify what in my daily life my brain is attempting to make sense of. I can't really come up with anything to explain this one.

Green

First off Observer, these songs weren't penned since Obama showed up in January - settle the fuck down.

My relationship with these guys is odd but probably quite typical. I have everything since Dookie... except Warning. I don't know where I got Insomniac from and I generally ignore the songs on it. You couldn't call me a true fan, although you'd probably overlook these oversights and go straight for the lack of Kerplunk if you wanted to make a point of it.

I don't think these last two albums sound anything like the others, but I love them both in the same way.. as each other, which is in a different way to the rest.

New albums rarely make an immediate impression. I normally have to try hard to get into an album. I slid into 21st Century Breakdown without even trying. I am however not a music reviewer, so i'll just point out what I like and move on.

The introduction to the title track eventually being revealed to be the introduction to the final track, See The Light, is just the kind of thing I love for reasons I can't explain. That song is a little Kiss-like, although I can't see anyone else saying this anywhere.

Two part songs like American Eulogy are great. One of my favourite Less Than Jake songs is The Brightest Bulb (no shit!) Has Burned Out/Screws Fall Out, and this song has a very similar structure, coming in together at the end.

Peacemaker reminds me of Hang 'em High on My Chemical Romance's Three Cheers album, although a little less over the top. East Jesus is punky goodness that five years ago might have become a single but now probably won't. What might? Last of the American Girls maybe. Seems to be the only place they're able to top the charts any more. Last Night on Earth is also fairly ballad-tastic and likely to be a candidate, although it does sound a little Greatest Love of All, undeniably.

Is it more "over-produced" than American Idiot. Only a little. Was American Idiot more so than the earlier albums? Yeah. I think though people are mistaking an improved singing voice and the use of more instruments with over-production though. I seem to be one of the few people that likes my music produced, and really, everyone uses compression - even the bands that produce the raw garage sound.

Also to reiterate the point many make but everyone should just accept - this band has evolved, they're not punk kids any more, and if they were writing and playing "real" punk you'd be wondering what the fuck experience they were drawing on (in the last ten years).

My life is richer for this album, and if they want to make a third like this in another 5 years... all in!

adult acceleration syndrome

it's happening. i can feel it. it's ramping up.
the working day stays about the same
but 4pm becomes 10pm, sleep a while, whole thing starts again.

doing nothing very important only makes it worse.
just over a week ago i was embarking on new exercise.
now i'm sitting eating pies.

okay i only said that to rhyme, though i did just finish a fruit pie.
that was true, you knows i don't lie.

Light Bites for a Lingering Hangover

- The ministers that claimed greedily within the rules are the ones that should leave themselves due to lack of public confidence. The ones that claimed greedily against the rules should not leave, not be forced to resign - they should be fired.

- Weird to see the largely unreported news about Adam Curry's divorce. Unlike the usual bullshit celeb stories (and they're not celebs in the UK in any sense), it grabs my attention because i've listened to the guy through probably 1000+ podcasts.

- Severe lack of new podcast episodes this week in general, No Agenda being one. Also noticed that Steve Gillmor is doing another of his fuck the audience/new way of doing things (pick one) experiments and not releasing his shows after the live recording. Annoying as they had become really good recently using the TWIT setup. I'd watch live but my shitty BT ADSL can't cope with pretty much anything. I will leave the hell out of BT at the end of this contract!

- I need to put some stuff on the walls. I made this mistake at my last place and waited over a year before really doing any decorating. As soon as I did it felt a lot more like home. Wall space here is much more plentiful though, and half of what I had up before i'm sick of. Stuff that's meant to hang on walls is quite expensive unfortunately.

- My crosstrainer is faulty after 2-3 weeks. Not good. This means i'm now involved in yet another customer services scenario. Based on recent trends I could either predict it will definitely go badly or I could assume that I simply must be due a win and it will go well. Will see.

- New water coolers at work look like space ships. Old ones were fine.

- Docks are quiet, no ships coming in. Where there once was a riot, there's a whole lot of nothing.

My LOST Predictions - Keep the theory simple and guess the outcome (yeah, right.. simple)

Trying to guess what specifically comes next is almost pointless. Better to just try to get inside the minds of the creators.

Two back to back episodes in this last season tell a story.

"Whatever Happened, Happened"
"Dead is Dead"

My theory is simply this. We were lead to believe that "Dead is Dead" didn't hold true for quite a while, and right at the last minute we find out that actually yes, dead indeed is dead. No resurrection. No magic.

This tells me that the concept of "Whatever Happened, Happened" is correct. Much as I liked Faraday, his plan didn't seem more than a shot in the dark. Miles was probably correct.

Swan and surrounding area explodes as it always did, caused by the bomb, gets concreted over. How that becomes what we saw in season 2 i'm most interested in and really hope we get to see it. I said just under a year ago that I had faith we'd see explanations for things we'd seen years earlier, in particular the Swan, and we certainly got some of it this season, but I still want the rest, although it's pretty hard to imagine it's relevant to closing out the story so somehow I now doubt it. We still don't really know what the computer did and what the failsafe did. You do kind of wonder if in fact that failsafe was an installed and ready to go version of Faraday's plan. We never found out how Desmond, Locke, Charlie and Eko escaped unscathed from whatever happened to the Swan when the key was turned. Time flashes, perhaps only temporary, seems a possbility. Main problem with this theory would be why the Jughead core didn't destroy the magnetism in '77. Perhaps, final stretch, it didn't go off at all. Maybe what we saw was simply a time flash.

Lots of thinking regarding what happened next in '77 there, but realistically I can't help but imagine that they're done telling that story now. We seem to have reached the point at which the relative importance of characters like Ben and Widmore are shrinking significantly. They, along with Richard and Eloise are the only really significant characters in that timeline once the others disappear, and we've seen Ben and Widmore's pivotal moments already. Can't imagine sticking around in '77 to see how the Widmore/Ellie thing progresses.

One wish for season 6 would be that they devote a whole episode to loose ends. Flash all the fuck over the place and answer questions. Frame it as a Richard episode since he's been there for so long.

I guess the incidental explosion comes coupled with a time jump for everybody that flashed around when the wheel got stuck, back to 2007, even those nowhere near, such as the retired cabin dwellers Rose and Barnard. The worst part about that happening is it's pretty hard to find an excuse for Juliet to be alive, which sucks.

The other fans say the 8 months is painful. It's not so bad. There's time to wind down from the season, forget the show for a while then later in the year start a lead-in Marathon which is now over 100 episodes. There's an entire season of a guy we thought was John Locke actually being somebody else which will make for interesting second viewings. There's the chance to hear all about Radzinsky from Calvin, this time knowing just what an arsehole he really was. A chance to see Jacob's people building the runway that Frank will later try to land 316 on. It's loads of fun watching the jigsaw.

Every time I think about rewatching the earlier seasons of Lost I expect the incessant back stories of all the characters to wear thin, but actually they don't tend to. I may geek out over the SciFi elements of the show but I wouldn't be this enthused about it after five years if I didn't love the vast majority of these characters. The original flashbacks are mostly responsible for this.

This was originally a QUICK post that became a very long rambling one lacking structure. Shit, how many posts do I do this end game apology on? Fuck it if you don't like it you won't read it. But you did, didn't ya!

QUICK: End of the World Music

End of the World Music is my name for something that no doubt others have their own phrase for. I'm talking about a piece of music that when played in the right place at the right time evokes extreme emotion. Not joy or sadness, more heightened sense. Something that momentarily makes you feel like you understand the world!

The music and it's lyrics don't need to relate in any way to this theme. For me it's more about the instrumental music behind whatever might be being sang. It's also not always a song, but a moment in a song.

The climb down to the piano two thirds of the way through November Rain just after what I think is the second chorus is a great example. It's not easy to put into words, but it does work. I can't imagine a life without music.

If you had to choose being either deaf or blind, which would it be? I honestly don't know.

QUICK: More.

Could there be more?

I'll never be able to accept a definite no.

The number of strange co-incidences that manifest themselves seem so very against the odds.

Then there's the gut feelings. The ones that allows us to realise something big has happened to someone else before we actually know it.

Science is awesome, but i'd rather not give it credit for absolutely everything.
I don't like any religious interpretation of God, but I like the idea of something.

What, I have no idea.

QUICK: So VERY FUCKING CLOSE Sweatband Fitness

Almost a good customer service experience. Almost the first in a really long time. After every utility fucking up during my move I actually believed I might be having a good... not just good, but feel good customer service experience with an online fitness equipment store called Sweatband Fitness. Everything they have said and done has been perfect. Unfortunately they must take full responsibility from the moment I engage them until the moment I have the goods and even beyond, and so they have now failed me dismally.

Unfortunately, companies such as Sweatband Fitness make bad courier decisions like TNT which apparently can't find my address. My address is a house on a public street in Leicester. There is simply no sound explanation for failing to find it. Why no call? They don't give their drivers phones. No explanation as to why; they just don't. Probably a moronic nod to the safety brigade.

So, if anybody from Sweatband is reading this: My order has exited the free next day delivery phase and entered the pick up from local depot 8pm at the earliest phase. I've had an unproductive day working from home that my employer would have every reason to dock me for half of. I have no idea whether the item will fit in my car when I go to get it. What can you do about it? Not much now. Even if you personally deliver the thing tomorrow I won't be home to receive it.

When are these companies going to realise that these deliveries to people working day jobs are one shot deals to be carefully arranged? Once they go wrong, it's damage thereafter, for the recipient, for the sender, and for the cocksucking couriers who without question are the worst player in this production.

The anger this crap instils in me and others like me is huge. Do companies like Sweatband and now any other company that openly admits to using TNT care that I simply won't be a repeat customer? You'd think so, but where's the evidence?

To summarise: TNT - stay away at all costs from now on. Sweatband - misguided. Avoid unless they change courier.

To quote Stan Smith, what's so hard about doing it flawlessly first time?

EDIT: So, how did it all end? I drove to TNT at just after 8pm. The two guys that helped me at that time couldn't have done anything better, but on asking for a better explanation of the earlier problems I learnt that the reason they couldn't find my street was because they loaded my package on to the wrong truck, a truck not serving my area at all. In other words, an even bigger screw up.

The cross trainer package was impossibly heavy and if not for the help of my willing neighbour I simply wouldn't have got it up my two staircases. I'm pretty certain that had the thing been delivered, the delivery guy would have happily carried it up the stairs with me. No question, I lost hours yesterday, but i'm past it now. I might write a note to Sweatband if I get a chance, see if I can convince them to drop TNT. What I said earlier still stands regarding repeat custom.

The cross trainer is great incidentally. This might actually be the one piece of equipment that improves my general fitness level. It's readings also inform me that whilst i'm not very fit, i'm not anything like as unfit as the machine measures. It didn't occur to me that my arms would get such a work out, but I think I feel more there than in my legs. Most of it I feel in my arse cheeks, which I suppose makes sense. The only negative is a knocking sound on the right side with each revolution when my foot is in a certain position, but I expect i'll figure out how to fix that once I figure out where it comes from.

Bank Holiday Bank Schmoliday (A Good Weekend)

Awesome weekend. It started Thursday night although work on Friday happened as normal, with a friend's gig and continued into Friday with a BBQ. Saturday was the day of rest and Sunday was a friend's wedding.

And yet now it's practically over i'm a little subdued. When will I enjoy myself this much next? It's a horrible way to live and think and I wish I could avoid it but I guess I'll feel how I feel.

The wedding tangles nicely with the fact that I found out two other friends were now engaged (not to each other, both dudes) in the space of about 72 hours. There's not much chance that that isn't part of the mood.

No matter how much I try to convince myself I don't want a part of all this normalcy I can't really back it up. People need people, and to shy away from a fairly standard life seems to lead down a path of solitude. The idea that friends come before relationships is a crock. It's a feel-good ideal that never pans out in reality. The more I watch my friends continue down this path the less I see them. The two in question have been absolute case studies on this and this was even before they were engaged (again, not to each other). That said, I could make far more effort myself. I tend to wait to be invited rather than do inviting. Similar to my not having ever friend requested anybody on Facebook, just accepted others. And wouldn't you just know this ties perfectly into the fact that I rarely approach women. Fear of rejection and embarassment all around. Awesome.

What else is bothering me? I wonder if I might be diabetic. I certainly pee a lot, but then recently i've been drinking huge amounts of water in the interests of better health. I've considered it before but stopped thinking about it, then I got into a discussion about it with a friend at the wedding who told me she was just under the threshold. It's the first time i've ever experienced anybody seemingly healthy and fit, okay, not having it, but close. Definitely fitter than I am. Can't say that I particularly exhibit the other symptoms, but it seems worth getting checked out. I think it's probably just a tennis ball sized bladder in honesty. If I have somehow hit on type 2 i'll be irritated as I know plenty of people with far worse diets than myself. Day to day mine is, I think, pretty good.

This started out positive. Really enjoyed the weekend. Must try to have weekends like this more. I guess I have two more weddings to attend in the not too distant future so that's good! Self analysis done, I can now go back to enjoying the remainder of the weekend. First though, I need a piss.

Not QUICK - Android Netbooks...

The excitement that pundits seem to feel at the prospect of an Android Netbook is baffling.

It's an OS specifically designed for mobile hardware with less processing power than a full sized machine. It's as if the fact that it sort of but not quite fits on both points means it's a good idea. The power the Atom etc can provide is probably more than Android needs - it can run better featured platforms - and the type of mobile features that should be going into Android are the type that expect a small phone that can be constantly used, not a machine that sits in a man purse or purse being ignored much of the time.

Netbooks often run XP. Many can run fuller flavours of Linux than Android. I can't help thinking that Android powered Netbooks will lack purpose. If, as is widely touted, the tiny sub-laptops are purely for web use, i'm quite certain Ubuntu (actually, Kbuntu) would fit better. In fact I pretty much confirm it. My legacy desktop holds an Athlon roughly equivalent to an Atom in power, and it does a great job running Kubuntu and Firefox. It also does fine with XP and Firefox.

Although I've now given up on Android and plan to get an iPhone some time in the summer, the missteps are still irritating. The supposed main rival to Apple in this arena has managed one crappy handset after well over a year. The second handset which is clearly going to flop isn't even available yet, and the next job is to put the OS on small laptops. Lack of focus, lack of purpose, lack lack lack. Okay i'll take the QUICK marker off this it wasn't quick enough.

Bottom line, which I should put at the top, but I won't, is that nobody's steering this thing, and consequently it has no idea where it's going. Automobile analogies are popular in tech. It's our way of making out this is man stuff and not geek stuff. This is clearly geek stuff. Pointless post. Waaaah.

Chemical Inbalance

It's got to be something like that. The low feeling I have tonight can't just be a result of the events of my day which was largely fine. It's the same feeling i've had on other occasions on which i've written long diatribes about how my life is going nowhere and so forth. A day or two later i'm completely back to normal and I will be this time too, but hey, in the moment be in the moment I suppose.

What's changed? Technically nothing. I seem to have developed a new stupid crutch (I call it that cos using a similar sounding word which better describes it seems so teenage and ridiculous) which is consuming my mind more than makes sense. These things are less fun than they used to be. There was an element of magic to them at a younger age because it was possible to suspend disbelief and think they actually meant something. At this age it's all too apparant that they're more likely manifestations of my own frustration - more about me than the.. crutch.

Problem is I'm lying. I actually do still suspend disbelief. I don't even do it apologetically. I desparately want to believe that there's something to it. Some kind of magnetism. Something more than nothing. Something that many would ascribe to religuous but that I would rather call spiritual. Some meaningful version of "at first sight" but in this case not in any way at first sight. I have to look at it like that because I simply don't know this.. crutch, even quite at the acquaintence level.

And so I sit here listening to Jimmy Eat World songs, very much because they usually sum up my frustration. It's not quite mainstream emo but at the same time it's not far off. Am I suddenly consumed by loneliness? Maybe. I have a lot more space than I used to in this new place and it's not going unnoticed. Do I consider perpetual loneliness? Yes. Do I consider it a problem? Yes. Does it make me want to reach out and grab whatever I can get? Not even a tiny little bit. Do I have too high standards, and therefore high expectations? Probably. Is there any chance i'll get lucky and stumble into something I actually want? Whatever the odds of it I certainly don't do myself any favours in encouraging it lately.

A few hours ago I spoke to a friend on the phone and I mentioned I went for a walk in a particular park. His first question was "who with?". This puts me on the immediate defensive and I felt like screaming. It was as if i'd suddenly through no fault of my own been trapped into admitting that yes, i'm still walking alone.

How to turn this around so it's not just another low end diatribe? Back to the point. The short and sweet points which make so much sense to me when i'm relaxed and calm ellude me when under pressure. In particular, the simple fact that i'm talking about a person here, not some superhuman being. I relate perfectly well to plenty of other people (albeit somewhat awkwardly - i'm under no illusion) so there's no reason I shouldn't be able to do the same here. It's more than a little likely it could melt away in that case, leading me to consider whether I perhaps don't want it to? It's been some time since I was all that excited by anyone new. If i'm clinging to that, I need a better return on the investment cos today it's not working for me.

I now of course realise that the way i've written this calls my sexuality into question, and so I will point out that this is a female crush.. nooo. crutch.

Don't you fucking hate it when people write something, pretend it was a mistake, then next write what they allegedly meant to write as if they couldn't have edited the original? Me too. Things that annoy the crap out of me about other people's writing, tweets and status updates I notice myself doing. Here though I did it to throw a bone to anyone not clever enough to understand what I was talking about, or to view it another way, to ensure that if it wasn't clever enough to be clear it would eventually make sense.

Hey - this helped i'm feeling a bit better. Thanks vast network of people not reading my blog for storing something i'll enjoy reading myself again in a few months.

I started a non anonymous blog a few weeks ago and haven't posted anything on it yet. It's not as easy to be honest when accountable I guess.