The northlondonhippy

Hello. How’s tricks?

I’ve been off work for weeks and haven’t posted a goddamn thing here. The usual non-excuse, excuses apply.

I did have a list of fun things I wanted to write about while I was off, but I haven’t touched a single one.

I’m on Twitter a lot, so if you’re missing your regular hippy fix, you could always follow me there. You could try following me in the street, but Twitter is more reliable, I assure you.

I’ll be trying to give myself a kick in the ass soon, aiming to do a bit more around here. I’ve said this before and look how that worked out.

Just so you all know I’m still alive and accessible online, I haven’t disappeared up my own ass just yet.

Don’t give up on me, because I haven’t given up. I’ve just slowed way down to a near-stop, but there’s still a bit of momentum left in this old hippy.

Maybe all I need is a little push.

Took this photo this morning on my iPhone 3GS. Passed it through a couple of photo editing apps. Thought it looked cool.

I’m enjoying random, manic thoughts, induced by 25 hours of continuous consciousness. In my world, this is not uncommon.

I thought I would try to capture the spirit and essence of the experience, but as you would expect, now that I’m typing, the effect has disappeared. I’m focussing on being functional and typing words that might make some semblance of sense, rather than conveying the surreal nature of being me right now.

I’ve had special cookies. Its Monday morning, at 10:30am and I’m wide awake, sleep should come soon, but did I mention the heat?

Its hot here.

Glad that’s out of the way.

I really should be sleeping, I will be sleeping, once I wind down. I’ve had a rather busy and eventful 25 hours, and the week before that was a bit draining, literally, as I had a blocked one out back and it was a shitty ordeal dealing with it.

I need to blow off some steam, but its 10:33am on a Monday morning, normal people have things to do, people to see, places to be…but not me.

Also, said my sub-conscious, I got news yesterday of the sudden passing of an old friend. My friend was a couple years younger than me, just to add to the angst. I don’t deal well with death, unless obsessing about it in various abstract ways for decades counts as dealing with it, in which case I win.

Blame the internet for this sudden burst of random crap, if my download speeds were faster for my stories, I’d be watching them and not harassing the world with this stream of consciousness bullshit… because let’s face it, the deliberate act of typing this out removes any chance of sharing the state of my mind. Every word, every key stroke, forces a decision, which then forces another, which then predetermines my actions as opposed to just letting the stream of weird run free.

Or I could go check my downloads and leave all of you nice people alone. Sorry for the disturbance, please do call again.

I really did it, I spent the better part of yesterday trying to do good deeds on Twitter.

So how’d I do?

Well, I wouldn’t call it an unqualified success, but I wouldn’t count it as a failure either. I was able to give some genuine help to a handful of people, but I do feel like I could have done a lot more.

The hardest part was finding people in need of genuine help. I started by searching my own stream, ie people I follow, for questions or pleas for help – there weren’t many at all. So I switched to the public timeline and searched for “help me”.

Turns out, the only help most people on Twitter seek, falls into three categories:

- Help me get more followers
- Help me to get Justin Bieber to follow me
- Help me to get Miley Cyrus to follow me

I couldn’t help with any of those things, even if I tried. What this meant in real terms was that using the public timeline to find people in real need was like searching the proverbial haystack for the proverbial needle, and I don’t even shoot-up. I had to wade through literally thousands of tweets just to find one that was genuine.

So what did I actually help with? Here’s a rough list:

- I re-assured someone who was frightened by stormy weather
- I recommended the best places for a day of shopping in London
- I helped someone troubleshoot an iPhone/Twitter app
- I provided advice to someone looking to advertise adult education courses in the media
- I welcomed a new user to Twitter and gave them some basic advice

That’s just the highlights, I also retweeted loads of other people’s tweets and exchanged friendly tweets with loads of other people, including some I follow and some I don’t. Many of my #helpfulhippy tweets went ignored, but that’s to be expected. People are not accustom to strangers offering assistance without ulterior motives, especially online.

Overall, I found the entire experience provided me with a weird mix of frustration and satisfaction, much like real life. I was frustrated at how difficult it was to locate people I could help, but found it very satisfying when I was actually able to, in a very small way, make a difference to someone’s life.

I’ve come away from the day with the desire, not to do a #helpfulhippy day again, but to include this genuinely helpful approach into my life online on a more regular basis. It cost me nothing to help out strangers, my knowledge is free, so is my time frequently, so why not try to give something back all the time?

Life is indeed incredibly bleak, dreary and pointless, but it doesn’t take much to occasionally make it into something more, even in almost imperceptibly small ways. It felt good helping strangers and I’m going to try to do it more often.

So if there’s ever anything I can do online to help you, just ask. I might surprise you with the perfect answer. Or not.

I’ve just woken up, parked myself down in front of my desktop computer and I am ready to begin my experiment in social media engagement. I’m aiming help anyone online, in any way I can.

If you need anything today and you think I can help, just ask. I’m not long awake, so no heavy duty math-based equations for at least an hour, but anything else is cool.

Ladies, gentlemen and any one in between, welcome to #helpfulhippy day.

Go on, tweet me, I’m here to help.

Hello. My name is the northlondonhippy and I’m here to help.

As I mentioned a few days ago, on Weds 16th June, I will be mostly spending the day online, trying to offer help and assistance to as many people on Twitter as I can, whether its trying to answer questions, retweeting important and worthy messages, or, well, pretty much anything else I can think of that might help.

I’m calling it #helpfulhippy day and that will be the hashtag I use on all my attempts at being helpful. If you would like to play along at home, you can also tag things with #helpfulhippy or you can just tweet me old school-style to my Twitter name, @nthlondonhippy – either way, I’ll hopefully see it and respond quickly and helpfully.

I’m doing this because I want to give something back to Twitter because I get so much from it. I’m hoping that by trying to engage with people on a positive, life-affirming level will help alleviate my perceived debt to you all.

I’ll give you a small example. There are lots of people I follow on Twitter, who I think follow me, yet I’ve never (or rarely) tweeted them directly. That’s my fault, what with being a somewhat shy, withdrawn, socially awkward misanthrope, who lives in his own make-believe hippy world. On #helpfulhippy day, I hope to let these people know I enjoy following them. If I played along with #followfriday, I could have done it already, but I don’t, remember the whole misanthrope thing?

What I am not really aiming to do is exploit #helpfulhippy day as a way to raise my online profile or increase my followers. For a change this is not about shameless self promotion, its about genuinely helping others. If anything, I’ll probably lose followers because I plan on being a very full-on, #helpfulhippy – searching for unanswered questions and pleas for assistance.

Tomorrow’s the big day, I’ll either fall flat on my face or in some small way, I’ll make the world a better place for a short time. Either way, I’ll know I’ve tried my best to pay something back and maybe, just maybe I’ll despise myself just a little less.

Nah. Self-loathing is for life, you can’t shake it like you shake the common cold.

See ya on Weds!

This is a post mainly about Twitter.

I like Twitter, I find it incredibly useful. Its become my go-to source for current information and you’ll often find me getting my tweet-fix periodically throughout the day.

I’ve been using it that way for about 2 years, since I got my iPhone 3G and played around with the early Twitter clients available at the time. I had a different account back then, one that I subsequently deleted.

Why?

Because like many people, I really didn’t get Twitter at first. I didn’t know where to start. I tried to dive into the deep end, before even reading a pamphlet on how to swim. I expect this experience is not uncommon.

I did continue to flirt with Twitter, searching for topics of interest, or using the iPhone GPS to search for tweets local to me. It worked, to a point, but I really wasn’t that engaged or connected to any of it.

Around 6 months after my initial exploration, Twitter started to make more sense. It didn’t hurt that the mainstream media was starting to get on the Twitter bandwagon. I learned more about Twitter and it started to make sense to me and in January 2009, I signed up for another account, which is my current one: @nthlondonhippy

I now follow over 1,000 accounts. I thought about tweeting to mark this milestone, since people are always tweeting when they reach big round numbers of followers, I thought it would ironic and amusing to tweet the exact opposite by bragging about the number of accounts I follow. Its funny, because all numbers on Twitter are unimportant, how many followers you have, how many you follow, the number of tweets you’ve sent, it doesn’t matter.

What matters is what you get out of Twitter.

When people I know ask me about using Twitter, that’s usually my first question back to them: What do you want to get from Twitter? Most of them don’t know, because they don’t know what Twitter can offer.

It offers a lot, it offers everything. It offers far more than you could ever want or need and without some sort of focus on what you hope to gain, you’ll never get any where with it.

I take a lot from Twitter, but that which I take is willingly given. What I really mean by that is that many of the 1,000 plus accounts I follow belong to websites and are tweeted, not by people, but by services such as TwitterFeed.

When a website updates with a new story, or blog post, a tweet is generated by TwitterFeed via the website’s RSS feed. My website does this and these days most do. When I post this finely crafted and imminently relevant bit of copy to my website, it automatically updates its RSS feed, which is then picked up and tweeted within 15 minutes or less via my Twitter account. I’m not going to get any more technical than this, so don’t worry.

There is so much useful information available on Twitter, whatever your particular interest, its just a question of starting an account for yourself and looking for interesting sources to follow. This takes time and some perseverance, but the rewards are immense.

But Twitter’s not just about the latest news, its also about what real people, like you and me (I’m not actually real) had for breakfast. This is where I fail at Twitter.

I’m nowhere near as engaged with individuals on Twitter as I should be or as I would like to be. I’ve come to the conclusion that social media is just an extension of normal, real world society and if you are socially awkward in the real world, then you’re going to be socially awkward online.

I don’t mean I am some sort of unwashed pariah, farting and belching whenever I’m in the company of normal folk, I save that for when I’m in the company of supermodels. What I mean is, I’m quite a loner in real life, happy with my own company and the world inside my head. I only really have a few people close to me and that’s probably been true my whole life.

I don’t actively seek out individuals with similar interests to follow on Twitter, and I should. I would say most of the people I follow on Twitter, I didn’t find, they found me and I followed them back. I don’t actively look for people to follow with the same vigour I seek out news and information sources. I’m coming to realise this is a mistake.

By my own admission, I take a lot from Twitter, but now I would like to try to give something back.

Here’s my cunning plan:

On Weds 16 June 2010, I will be conducting the very first #helpfulhippy day. For the entire day, I will be available on Twitter to help other users in any way I can, whether they follow me or not. I will be actively, possibly even aggressively, searching for unanswered questions and other pleas for assistance and doing my best to help out.

I won’t be directly providing cash, drugs, hookers or anything else people really need, but it is my sincerest hope to, in whatever small ways, lend support, offer assistance, expertise and advice to anyone I can.

Maybe you need someone to retweet a charity plea because you’re looking for sponsors for your 10K run, or perhaps you’re struggling to remember the name of an actor from an obscure film you saw. Maybe you just need someone to tweet with you, I can do that. If its within my abilities and I can help via a tweet or two, I will.

I don’t know if this will be successful and at the point I’m not too worried about that, I am going to be here ready to help regardless of how it goes. I’m not going to be shy, either. I’m aiming for positive, life-affirming interactions with as many people as possible. I want to contribute something, I want to pay back something to Twitter, because I think my debt is too high.

Playing along at home couldn’t be easier, if you think I can help with something, tweet me (any time, not just next Weds) at @northlondonhippy and I’ll see it. Or you can use my special hashtag that I will be tagging all of my tweets that day with: #helpfulhippy

Think of this as not only me trying to give something back, but also an experiment in social engagement. If it does work, this won’t be the last time I attempt something like this.

So remember, this is happening next Wednesday, 16th June, from whenever I wake up, till whenever I go to bed, excluding breaks for the toilet and paying for take-away deliveries. You didn’t think I was going to cook too, did you?

I just want to share a few observations about the iPad, now that I’ve had a couple of days to fondle mine. Believe the hype.

I’m not going to give you a full review of it, there’s already been countless detailed run-throughs of the iPad from people who’ve had them for ages. I got mine on Friday, UK launch day, so I know I’m late to the iPad party.

The first thing I really noticed was how ridiculously thin it is, its easy to hold but a little heavier than you might expect. Its also easy to sit in a comfortable normal position on the sofa with it propped in your lap, balanced with a light one handed grip.

What I foresee is a market for lap-pillow like stands, that keep it at a comfortable viewing angle, while letting it rest securely without using your hands. For watching films and videos, something simple like that would be ideal.

The screen is bright and extraordinarily sharp, hi-res colour photographs look unbelievably crisp and clear with vivid, deep colours. Video also looks good, though its all been in standard def for me so far.

Websites fill the screen smoothly, there’s no need to pinch and zoom to see or read anything. Like the iPhone, the interface is responsive and smooth.

It is a fingerprint magnet, more so than my iPhone 3GS, which shares the same oleophobic coating, but doesn’t seem to be as noticeable because of its smaller size. Keep a microfibre cloth nearby, or a lens cloth from any camera shop.

Apple’s case (or something similar) is absolutely an essential accessory. The Apple Case for iPad is very well designed, its simple to secure the iPad inside it. It is very thin and doesn’t add much additional weight, but provides extra protection and flexibility, allowing you to position the iPad for upright, wide screen viewing, or angling it on a desk for more comfortable typing. Its folio-style, with a flap that covers the screen while doubling as a sort of reenforced kick-stand. Its very good.

There are already a lot of iPad optimised apps out there, I’ll mention a few quickly that have grabbed my attention:

- Wunder Radio – an internet radio station aggregator that seems to offer just about every internet station in the world. It also uses GPS to generate a list of local stations and it did very well finding them around me. The audio streams are high quality, there’s iTunes tagging for stations that support it and the interface is clean and easy to use.

- Air Video – I know this one is on the top of many people’s lists and for good reason, it works very well. Air Video let’s you stream just about any video file from a Mac on the same network, converting the video on the fly as you watch. I’ve streamed .avi’s, MP4’s and hi-def MKV’s from my Mac Mini to the iPad already without any lag or drop out. You do need to install a small piece of software on the host Mac to act as server and point it to your video directory in the Finder, but once you do that the iPad finds the server automatically. From there you navigate to your film or tv show, and after a very quick buffer time of 5-10 seconds, the video is delivered to your iPad. I already had this one for the iPhone and a recent update made it iPad friendly too.

- NewsRack – has been my RSS reader of choice for a while on my iPhone, with its simple interface and ability to sync with my Google Feed Reader account, it works very well. Now optimised for the iPad, the same app is serving double duty for me, at no extra cost. NewsRack uses the extra screen real estate to good effect, giving you a left column for your feeds and a large reading window on the right side. You can also open links within the app.

- PinBallHD – bought this one yesterday on the strength of the reviews and sales in the iTunes app store, glad I did. The graphics and gameplay blew me away and am finding it very addictive. Haven’t really played or bought many games for my iPhone, but I can see how much better the iPad is for playing anything because of its larger size.

The iPad is probably more disruptive than anyone has realised yet, its an entirely new class of device. Other manufactures will be trying to catch up, this form of computing is going to explode in popularity. It can replace so many different devices, not just laptops or netbooks, but portable radios, portable TVs and DVD players, MP3 players, portable game consoles, e-readers and probably a million other things I haven’t even thought of yet. It is so thin, so light, so easy to carry along with you, the temptation to never put it down is immense.

Is it an essential? No, not if you already have some sort of computer, but as luxuries go, it pretty damn useful. If you’re thinking about taking the plunge, all you need to do is spend 5 minutes using one and you will be ready to dive in deep.

SKY ONE on Monday 24th May 2010 at 5am London time, its being broadcast at the same time viewers on the West Coast of America will be watching. How cool is that?

I will be awake and watching, what about you?

You might not have heard, but there’s a general election here in the UK on Thursday.

That is, you might not have heard if you’ve been in a coma, but even if you’ve been semi-conscious, it would be difficult to have missed it with the blanket coverage available on every media platform.

This has been one of the most interesting campaigns in decades and one of the most entertaining. With just a few days ago, there is no certain outcome and predictions vary widely on what sort of government we might be waking up to come Friday morning.

Cool by me, I enjoy uncertainty and I like the up-in-the-air-ness of the whole thing. I watch the daily polls rise and fall with amusement, because any sensible person knows the only poll that matters is the official one on Thursday. All the rest are just idle speculation and spin.

The truth is, you can’t really trust most of the polls, because the data is weighted and manipulated before it is released, usually to reflect the bias and opinion of the media outlet who commissioned it. Yes, I’m looking at you News International, your stilted coverage and unbridled analingus performed on the Tories has been shameful. Ol’ Rupert Murdoch anointed David Cameron as the chosen one and all of his newspapers and his TV news channel went about crafting a narrative that tried to assure an outright Conservative victory.

How’s that working out?

Possibly not as well as they had hoped, as the polls suggest the Tories are only slightly ahead, with strong possibility of no outright majority. Ooops.

I think one of the biggest surprises for me in the campaign is how disappointing Cameron’s performances have been, especially at the leader’s debates. I really expected Diamond Dave to walk this election, but he is not nearly as charismatic or magnetic a speaker as I would have expected. Part of their poor showing in the polling is down to this.

This election isn’t about policy, though of course it should be, but it is about personality. Cameron has revealed himself as lacking in that department.

And speaking of someone completely void of personality, have you caught Gordon Brown lately? Just look at his forced, fake, uncomfortable smile; I have a theory (that I’d be happy never proving) that he has the same expression on his face when he smiles as he does when he is taking a dump.

I have never been a fan of Gordon Brown.

OK, that’s an understatement, I detest him and have him a vocal and vitriolic critic of him since he assumed power. I can never forgive him for publicly labelling cannabis a “deadly drug”, propagating other false claims about it and ignoring all the advice, scientific and otherwise by re-classifying cannabis to Class B.

Gordon continues to go on and on about the “global financial meltdown” which he claims can only be fixed if he remains in office. Well, there’s some logic to that, because as he was Chancellor for so many years, he must feel very responsible for the mess he created and he would like to mop it up. No thanks.

Brown really showed how deeply nasty he is to the core, with his shameful treatment of Gillian Duffy, who by all accounts seems to be the sort of salt-of-the-earth Labour Party supporter that has kept them in the game for a very long time. If he treats his base with this much contempt and scorn, imagine what he must think of the undecided.

I feel sorry for the poor saps who have to media-manage Brown on a daily basis. Whatever you’re getting paid, its probably not enough by half. Wrangling that sourpuss from appearance to appearance would destroy the soul of the strongest PR flack.

The one good thing about Brown’s piss-poor performance during this campaign has been my absolute vindication that he would drag the Labour Party into the political wilderness for generations.

They had several chances to replace him and they lacked the courage and balls to do it. Now they will suffer and get what they deserve, a complete decimation at the polls on Thursday. It will be the worst showing by Labour in history, any other MP from the party wouldn’t have done as badly as Gordon. They really only have themselves to blame.

I like being right and I love saying “I told ya so”.

Hey Labour…. I told you if you stuck with Gordon, you’d be fucked. Yep, I TOLD YA SO!

Oh that felt good!

I’ve always been a big fan of the LibDems, if not an outright supporter. Their policies seem to be anchored in reality, with a healthy dose of common sense. We could use both of those qualities in government.

The best example I can site is their drug policy, which in their manifesto, loosely says that they would take a scientific and evidence based approach. In practise that would mean they would follow closely the advice of their advisors, in this case the ACMD.

Taking it further, in previous statements, the LibDems have supported decriminalising or legalising cannabis, though with all the bullshit media nonsense over the discredited research into the (very much unproven) link between weed and psychosis, they haven’t mentioned it recently. I don’t blame them as it would only be used against them as a sign of weakness.

The Liberal Democrats are not a weak party, they are actually the strongest on sensible policies that work towards the common good and benefit the most people. It takes strength to fly in the face of conventional (media) wisdom and openly declare that the “war on drugs” is an absolute failure that does more harm than the drugs themselves. The LibDem party is the one party that’s not afraid of speaking the truth.

They’re also not aligned with big media or big corporations, they seem to be more independent of the establishment and therefore more able to do good for the country, rather than serving special interests.

Nick Clegg has impressed everyone and made them sit up and take notice of his party. Its about time they get taken seriously. Clegg has also frightened the two “old parties”, which has been fun to watch as they both mount attacks him.

The leader’s debates have truly changed the face of politics in this country, seeing Clegg go toe-to-toe with the other two showed the nation in a very tangible way that there is an alternative to old-style politics. After thirteen years of Labour governments, this country is in desperate need of a change.

The LibDems are the only party that really offers that change.

The Tories won’t change anything so much as bring back a sameness. They don’t have any new ideas or energy or personality. Don’t vote for them.

Gordon Brown is a megalomaniac dictatorial buffoon and embarrassment to the nation, but the reason not to vote Labour is simple, one word: Iraq. This is the party that dragged this nation into an illegal and pointless war, for absolutely no good reason. And they lied to us about it, repeatedly and they still do. They deserve to come in third or worse.

A vote for the LibDems is a vote for change and a vote for a brighter future.

People say they can’t win with an outright majority, but they could if everyone voted their heart. If you think the LibDems are the best choice, and I believe a lot of you out there do, then vote for them. You are NOT throwing your vote away on a minor party, real change comes from people having the strength of will and conviction to not fear change. If everyone who supports them follows through on election day, then Nick Clegg could be the next Prime Minister.

More likely, if you believe the polls, is that we are headed for a hung parliament and the possibility of a coalition government. There are worse things that could happen.

Many other countries have coalition governments, formed by opposing parties. Guess what happens? They learn to work with each other and compromise and things get done. You have nothing to fear from this outcome and maybe we all might even benefit from the mix of the strongest ideas from both parties involved.

But which parties? That’s the real question.

If I was going to gamble on the outcome, I would say a Tory-LibDem coalition, with Cameron in charge and a healthy mix of both parties in the cabinet. I could live with that.

Less likely and certainly less appealing would be a Labour-LibDem government with someone other than Brown as PM.

And at the very outside and many would say implausible, a Tory-Labour government. I have this weird theory that these two polar opposites (who really aren’t that different) could do a deal with each other to lock the LibDems out. Maybe its not as impossible as it sounds and if it does happen, won’t I look like the poly-sci genius?

Whatever happens, of one thing I’m certain, come Friday, Gordon Brown will no longer be Prime Minister and will go down as one of the most unpopular, unsuccessful, worst PM’s in history.