The northlondonhippy

Archive for September, 2007

I have to admit it, like my most peo­ple last Jan­u­ary, when Steve Jobs showed off the very first iPhone, I wanted one. Badly! I had deep gad­get lust of the strongest variety!

I fol­lowed his keynote speech, almost live via web­sites offer­ing blogged cov­er­age and before he was fin­ished, I was clutch­ing my credit card in awe of this new device, ready to plunk down what­ever was required to have one in my hot lit­tle hands, as soon as humanly possible.

And then real­ity kicked in and the dis­tor­tion field lifted and he pissed all over my party by telling me they would go on-sale in Amer­ica only, some­time in June. As a north Lon­don based hippy, that was no good to me!

I could have imported one, while pray­ing for an unlock solu­tion so I could use it on a net­work here, but that seemed quite risky. Prayers were answered and unlocks were made avail­able, but Apple has already turned the key, relock­ing all the iPhones with one lone update. More on this in a moment.

They said the iPhone would launch in Europe towards the end of 2007 and sure enough, Uncle Steve came to Ol’ Blighty and announced you could get one on O2 in November.

My cur­rent con­tract runs out in Jan­u­ary and is on another net­work, which is no big deal. I don’t mind switch­ing net­works and I’ve done it before, just to get the hand­set I wanted. If I was that des­per­ate, I could buy myself out of my cur­rent con­tract a cou­ple months early, so I could make the big switch.

So what’s hold­ing me back? What’s changed since last Jan­u­ary when I was sali­vat­ing so much for an iPhone that I needed to wear a drool-bucket under my chin?

Over time, I’ve iden­ti­fied a few key things that I would need the iPhone to do, before I switched to one.

1) 3G — for me, this is a deal breaker. My cur­rent phone is 3G and I do use it to occa­sion­ally surf the web, using the Opera Browser. No walled-gardens for me! As great as the iPhone’s browser and user inter­face is, and it looks amaz­ing, surf­ing over Edge at slower speeds would piss me off. And while I know I could surf over Wi-Fi, when avail­able, the fact is that where it is mainly avail­able in my life, my home and my office, I’ve already got access to com­put­ers. Out­side of those two key loca­tions, Wi-Fi is not that read­ily accessible.

2) Stor­age — What really mud­died the waters for me is the iPod Touch. I’ve spent the last cou­ple of weeks weigh­ing up the options between these two devices. The main strik­ing dif­fer­ence is the amount of stor­age avail­able in both the iPhone and the Touch, with the Touch offer­ing twice the flash mem­ory, in a thin­ner form fac­tor. When the iPhone reaches 16 or 32mb, then I would be far more tempted.

3) Installing 3rd party appli­ca­tions — When Ste­vie J said that devel­op­ers could only cre­ate app’s using Web 2.0 non­sense, I had hoped this was meant to be mis­lead­ing and in time, the iPhone would be cracked and hacked, much like the AppleTV and the Sony PSP and it wasn’t too long before 3rd party app’s started appear­ing. The iPhone dev com­mu­nity has been very busy cre­at­ing some very use­ful and fun pro­grams to run on the iPhone, which cer­tainly made the plat­form much more appeal­ing. Apple slammed the door shut on these hacks this week. Even more wor­ry­ing is that the iPod Touch seems even less prone to open­ing up, and this to me, defeats the pur­pose of both devices. By crip­pling them and lock­ing them down to Apple-only app’s, they are being lim­ited to such a high degree that it is putting me off.

What’s the point of hav­ing a multi-function, multi-touch, magic device in my pocket if I can’t make it do all the things I want it to do, that I know it can do. It’s my new toy and if I want to expand its capa­bil­i­ties, I should be allowed to! I take the same risk when­ever I install an open-source or beta pro­gram on my com­puter! Why can’t I do the same on my pocket computer?

That’s what these new devices really are, they are pocket PCs, being sold to us under other i-friendly names! Don’t we deserve the right to do what we want with it and not have the mother-ship brick them with an inten­tion­ally con­structed update!

That’s what hap­pened this week, when Apple released its most recent iPhone update.

Look, I can under­stand Apple want­ing to lock the iPhones to the car­ri­ers that have exclu­sive deals with them. I have had cell­phones which were locked to a car­rier, though after the con­tract period, it is fully within my rights to have the phone unlocked. Apple should be offer­ing the same func­tion­al­ity, with iPhones. Once your con­tract period has elapsed, they should offer an unlock­ing ser­vice, so you can move the phone with you to another car­rier, if you so choose. Don’t worry, Apple, you could always charge for this unlock, do it through iTunes and it would be like get­ting free money, every­one wins!

The other thing this update did, was it closed the back­door used by the dev com­mu­nity to install app’s on the iPhone. This was totally unnec­es­sary and point­less. Why have they deval­ued the iPhone this way? They say its to pro­tect users from sub­stan­dard soft­ware that could harm the iPhone. What a load of crap!

Hello, Apple spies. I know you keep track of what’s being writ­ten about you on the inter­net, even by weird hip­pies like me, so here goes: Why not cre­ate an approved developer’s kit for the iPhone? Even bet­ter, let peo­ple sub­mit app’s to you and if they don’t harm the iPhone, make them avail­able via iTunes. Cre­ate a new sec­tion, called iPhone add-ons, which are made up of approved app’s, cre­ated by the dev com­mu­nity. You could take dona­tions for some, charge for oth­ers, share the rev­enue with the cre­ators. Who knows…I bet there are peo­ple out there in Cuper­tino, who have writ­ten some cool shit for the iPhone that would love to share them with the world! Give them the chance!

Look, I’m going to buy an iPhone, even­tu­ally, but the iPhone I want is 3G, with more stor­age and an open archi­tec­ture that allows for me to install addi­tional app’s as I see fit.

You should open up the iPod touch as well, it shouldn’t be crip­pled and it should offer all the func­tion­al­ity pos­si­ble. Why can you edit con­tacts on the touch, but not iCal events? You can do both on the iPhone and it just seems arbi­trary and stingy.

Apple, I am one of you biggest fan­boys, I have tons of your kit already and think its some of the coolest stuff I’ve ever owned. If I’m ques­tion­ing my pur­chases, then some­thing is indeed very wrong. I should be at the head of the queue to buy an iPhone and I am drag­ging my feet until the next gen­er­a­tion and maybe not even then!

Sort it out! Give every­one the iPhones and iPod Touches they deserve!

Some­times, I feel the need to post some­thing even when I’ve got noth­ing to say.

Of course, that’s not strictly true, because being a bit of an opin­ion­ated loud-mouth, I always have some­thing to say.

What I mean is, I’ve got no par­tic­u­lar topic in mind today, but I still feel I should make my pres­ence felt.

Can you feel me?

If you can, I’ll have to charge you extra. Did you think all of this hippy good­ness was for free?

Noth­ing in this world is totally free! Right now, as you read my page, my nanobots are copy­ing your hard drive to my array of servers in my hid­den, under­ground lair. Soon, all your secrets will be mine and I’ll just have to charge you a small, monthly stor­age fee to keep them safe. You wouldn’t want any­one to know about all those size 17, lady’s shoes you’ve been order­ing from the inter­net. No one’s going to ever believe they’re for your mum!

I don’t want you all to be dis­ap­pointed when you bop over to my site and find the same crap you already read. I want to be able to greet you with some crackin’ new content!

Its not like there aren’t plenty of sub­jects wor­thy of men­tion­ing here and now, like the sit­u­a­tion in Burma, the defacto ban on cig­a­rette smok­ing in your car, or even my long wait for my new iMac, but I just can’t be bothered.

Well, actu­ally, I could briefly men­tion my new iMac. I ordered a 24″ 2.8Mhz Intel Core Duo Extreme, with 2gb’s of RAM and 1 terrabyte of hard drive, with a new wire­less key­board and wire­less Mighty Mouse. It’s going to be very shiny and fast. I can’t wait! And as you can see, I have my pri­or­i­ties straight!

It shipped around 6 days ago and still no sign of it. What’s even more annoy­ing is the track­ing web­site I used appears not to be work­ing! I wish it would arrive!

Like I said, I don’t really have much to say. I bet you believe me now!

Get­ting to the truth about cannabis these days is not easy. The exag­ger­ated scare sto­ries con­tinue apace in most of the news­pa­pers. They are so chock full of fal­lac­ies and mis­in­for­ma­tion that I am not going to high­light them any more. Yes, Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day, I am look­ing right at you!

There is one news­pa­per that con­tin­ues to deliver the truth about cannabis, regard­less of how these truths fit into the main­stream media’s pre­med­i­tated pat­tern of lies and hys­te­ria in the lead-up to the government’s review of weed’s classification.

That news­pa­per is of course, The Guardian.

Last week, The Guardian pub­lished a story on a cou­ple of labs test­ing the potency of cannabis and guess what! It is nowhere near as strong as you are being lead to believe.

Here’s a link to the orig­i­nal arti­cle:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0„2170798,00.html

And here’s the arti­cle in full:

Skunk strength has dou­bled, stud­ies suggest

4% — Only 4% of skunk seized had THC of over 20%, one study showed

You see, the truth will always find a way! I just hope the peo­ple respon­si­ble for this point­less review into regrad­ing weed look at the gen­uine facts and not the ridicu­lous fab­ri­ca­tions of some news­pa­pers. Yes, I’m look­ing at you again, Inde­pen­dent on Sunday!

(read the hippy’s cannabis truth series!)

I still can’t believe it.

Sit­ting right next to me, on my desk, right now, is the best bong in the world.

I can’t believe it because this bong was made in the famous RooR fac­tory in Ger­many, espe­cially for me.

I can’t believe that this bong was designed to my exact­ing specifications.

I still can’t believe I designed this bong myself. Lit­tle ol’ me!

I can’t believe this bong car­ries my name!

Oh, my dear friends and beloved hip­py­fans, today is indeed an excit­ing day!

Every­one, please have your first look at the “RooR Cus­tom 5.0 — northlon­don­hippy deluxe”

Ain’t she a beauty?

Let me tell you a bit more about my bong, the NLH deluxe, which I can state cat­e­gor­i­cally, is the best bong in the world!

As you might have guessed from the name, my bong is 5mm thick, made of the finest borosil­i­cate glass. Each one is hand-blown by one of the tal­ented arti­sans at RooR.

It stands 35cm high, which for me is the per­fect height for a bong. It makes it very man­age­able to handle.

The main joint is 14.5mm and bistable, for added sta­bil­ity and durability.

The main sec­tion of the bong fea­tures two reduc­tions, for improved grip­pa­bil­ity. It gives the bong its dis­tinc­tive, sexy, curvy look.

The mouth­piece sports a Black Crown and the detail work on this is stun­ning. And the black crown bowl com­pli­ments the mouth­piece perfectly.

Because RooR is one of my favourite brand names in the world, I wanted their logo to be a spe­cial fea­ture as well, which is why I opted for the Flame Pol­ished one. It’s another dis­tinc­tive touch that sep­a­rates my bong from all the rest.

My bong is not just for look­ing at though, it’s meant for smok­ing, which is why, instead of a nor­mal, stock down­tube, every NLH deluxe ships with a fit-to-measure RooR dif­fuser. As the owner of sev­eral RooR pieces, I know that one of the things that makes RooR glass­ware smoke so damn sweet is the dif­fuser. That’s why I’ve got one in my Lit­tle Sista, my Clas­sic 3-piece Water Pipe and now the northlon­don­hippy deluxe! Take just one hit and you will under­stand exactly what I mean!

This bong smokes like a dream. Pack a bowl with your favourite herbal smok­ing mix­ture (mine’s always weed!), touch a flame to it, draw deeply and float off to nirvana.

Quite sim­ply, it’s the bong of my dreams and it could be the bong of your dreams too! That’s right, the NLH deluxe is avail­able to buy. If you want the best bong in the world, you don’t have to dream! You can own one your­self! Here’s how:

First of all, there is only one place in the world you can buy an offi­cial NLH deluxe and that is from my very good friends at EDIT.

EDIT stands for “every­one does it DOT com” and they are eas­ily the biggest and best online head­shop in the world. I’ve per­son­ally been an EDIT cus­tomer for over 4 years and they are fan­tas­tic! From the wide selec­tion of very cool stuff to their impres­sive cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment, they are an great exam­ple of a first class online shop. And if you order before 4:20pm on a week­day, they will despatch your order that day! So if you dig it online right now, you can be hold­ing it tomorrow…unless tomor­row is Sun­day, but you wouldn’t want the post­man knock­ing early then. You’d want a lie-in!

EDIT are the exclu­sive dis­trib­uters of the NLH deluxe, you can’t buy it any­place else, not even directly from me! EDIT have the mar­ket cor­nered! You can shop with them safely, securely and discreetly.

So there you have it. “The RooR Cus­tom 5.0 — northlon­don­hippy deluxe” isn’t just a dream any­more. It’s real and I’ve got mine. When are you going to get yours?

To buy an NLH deluxe, please CLICK HERE!

Hey ho hip­py­fans! Howsit hangin’?

I’m just mak­ing a quick fly­ing visit to men­tion a cou­ple of quick, web­site related bits of news.

Firstly, you may notice 2 new links on my page; one to my stated com­ment pol­icy and a 2nd one to the NLH deluxe page.

A some of you may know, I had to dis­able the com­ments facil­ity on my site a while back, because of the over­whelm­ing amount of spammed com­ments I was receiv­ing from porn, Via­gra and poker sites. I was receiv­ing around 1000 of the lit­tle fuck­ers each day. This hippy wasn’t down with that shit!

After review­ing the sit­u­a­tion for a num­ber of months, I have finally decided that the com­ment­ing facil­ity will have to remain shut-off per­ma­nently, as I’ve now stated in my newly pub­lished COMMENT POLICY.

I’m not happy about it, you’re not happy about it and I bet the spam­mers are even less happy! Tough shit on the spam­mers, but I would like to apol­o­gise to you, my dear read­ers. Never hes­i­tate to email me though, as I will always, ALWAYS reply!

Now, on to the good news! I received my very own “RooR Cus­tom 5.0 – northlon­don­hippy deluxe” bong a few days ago! It is a com­plete work of art and I love it already!

As you will see, I’ve added a link called “NLH Deluxe” to the main page and once my bong is for sale, you will see that page updated with every­thing you ever wanted to know about the best glass bong in the world! You will also see a ban­ner advert added to my front­page for the “NLH Deluxe” too.

There will be only one place for you to buy my bong and that’s from everyonedoesit.com or EDIT as they are known. They are the exclu­sive dis­trib­u­tors of the “NLH Deluxe” which means this is one bong you can’t buy any­where else!

Each one is made, by hand by one of the arti­sans at the RooR fac­tory in Ger­many, which means the stan­dard of con­struc­tion is amaz­ingly high! It looks great, smokes great and will become your favourite bong ever after just one sweet hit!

Keep watch­ing my page for the big announce­ment of when the bong goes on sale to the gen­eral pub­lic. No one gets a pre­view of what it looks like, until then!

Wait till you see how gor­geous it is! You are going to want one so bad that it hurts!

Hi there. I just wanted to apol­o­gise for the tech­ni­cal prob­lems my site had yes­ter­day. I still don’t know what was going on, but things seem sorted now. My lay­out went a bit crazy, but it all seems back to nor­mal now. Spe­cial apolo­gies if your RSS reader went a lit­tle funny too.

Nor­mal ser­vice has now resumed!

- the northlondonhippy

This is the first year in the his­tory of Big Brother that I’m not feel­ing with­drawal after the series ended. I wasn’t as attached to the house­mates as I have been in pre­vi­ous years. I wasn’t as attached to the entire pro­gramme. I’m not really sure why.

Sorry I haven’t been quite as pro­lific as I could have been on the topic of BB. I did con­tinue to watch faith­fully though and now that it’s fin­ished, I thought I would share my final thoughts.

For me, Big Brother 8 was the most man­u­fac­tured, self-aware series so far. The for­mat has been around too long for it to be any other way. We all know what to expect, from the view­ers to the con­tes­tants, which means the pro­gram mak­ers have to work that much harder to con­found our col­lec­tive expectations.

This year, there were a lot of con­founded expectations.

“Fake Week” was a prime exam­ple of this as the pro­duc­ers twisted every­thing up into all sorts of point­less frivolity.

Except it wasn’t point­less, was it? It amused us. Ok, it amused me.

A lot this year amused me, it seems like the theme of “fun” really did weave itself through the series. Some of the fun was cruel and if I was on the receiv­ing end of the cru­elty, I would have a dif­fer­ent view of it.

Show­ing the Halfway-Housemates the entirety of nom­i­na­tions was a mas­ter­stroke of nas­ti­ness. Reveal­ing nom­i­na­tions in gen­eral inside the house is cruel, but there was a level of evil in this par­tic­u­lar move that sur­prised even me.

The quiz in the final week was also quite mean, as BB showed each house­mate some­thing both embar­rass­ing and pri­vate as part of the task.

All of this self-referential stuff is send­ing every­one a mes­sage: Noth­ing is off lim­its, inside the house. Any­thing you say or do could poten­tially be used to upset your stand­ing in the house. In future, con­tes­tants might be more care­ful and guarded about what the say in their pri­vate chats or even the diary room!

As much as I don’t want to admit it, Charley was the star of the show this year and it was less enter­tain­ing after her depar­ture. Or rather, there was far less con­flict in the house which I equate with enter­tain­ment. Charley’s prob­lem will be con­vert­ing this into some sort of media career. Good luck to her, but I think she’s a bit of one-trick-pony and they will strug­gle to find suit­able vehi­cles for her.

Chanelle’s depar­ture also left a gap in my view­ing. Aside from being nice to look at, her tantrums were pure com­edy gold. They say she’s made £750,000 already, which is astound­ing. Now that Ziggy’s out too, I expect they will both clean up even more. I sure hope they got a lot of money for their rather embar­rass­ing photo-shoot in the Star on Mon­day. If you didn’t see it, they were both pos­ing together, in their undies, in a hotel bed. Cringe!

Poor Ziggy. I liked him. He isn’t a bad guy; he’s just very neu­rotic. He gen­uinely fan­cied Chanelle, it wasn’t just for the cam­eras. He eas­ily had the rough­est ride of any­one in the house this year and doesn’t deserve our scorn. We should all chip in a fiver each, so we can pay for his long-term Jun­gian analy­sis, which after a cou­ple of decades might get to the root of his neu­ro­sis. Until then, he’ll just have to make do with shag­ging Chanelle and mak­ing money off their celeb-value.

I was glad to see Brian Belo win. He’s the Essex ver­sion of For­rest Gump and peo­ple always go for the thick-o. Except I don’t think Brian is that thick, he’s just not edu­cated well. He’s your typ­i­cal Eng­lish lad and prob­a­bly the world’s biggest BB fan! I think its great that a proper fan won the show, instead of some­one who claimed not to really watch it much. Well done, Brian.

I was actu­ally expect­ing a twinny-win, as Sam and Amanda are just so like­able. They didn’t put a foot wrong in the house which explains why they didn’t have a sin­gle nom­i­na­tion through­out the series.

I was glad to see Tracey go a week before the final and I’m even hap­pier I’ll never have to hear her inane catch­phrases ever again. She was like a char­ac­ter from a bad novel writ­ten about real­ity tv; a poorly sketched car­i­ca­ture con­sist­ing of one shal­low dimen­sion. Yawn.

As for the rest, well they’re all pretty incon­se­quen­tial really. The one I liked the most that I thought should have had more time in the house is Amy. Aside from being a tasty bit of eye candy, Amy seemed bright and gen­uine. She should never have become such a fig­ure of hate within the house and if she had bet­ter taste in men and ignored Liam, she might have gone further.

The one thing I noticed this year was the num­ber of peo­ple who I’ve spo­ken with who have taken great pride in pro­claim­ing that they haven’t watched BB this year and that BB was a fail­ing, dying for­mat. It was as if peo­ple decided they were too good for it this year. How wrong they are!

BB con­tin­ues to be annual event tele­vi­sion, fill­ing Chan­nel 4’s cof­fers with loads of dosh. The rat­ings were down this year, but the pro­gramme con­tin­ues to deliver the right demo­graphic that adver­tis­ers love and in the younger age groups, inter­est remains very high. Maybe I just only talk to aging media-types. I need to get some cooler, younger new friends!

And if there were any doubts over the future of the next series of BB, Davina promptly put them to rest last Fri­day night, when she opened the audi­tion call for BB9. If you want to spend next Sum­mer inside the BB house, be ready to daz­zle the BB pro­duc­ers, start­ing in Novem­ber. Good Luck!

I do want to thank all 23 house­mates who spent time in the house this year. One way or another, each of you enter­tained me in your own spe­cial ways and for this I am grate­ful. And thank you to my hip­py­fans, who have put up with my spo­radic out­put and stuck with me for my thoughts on BB.

This will be my last for­mal BB col­umn, I’m not going to do it again next year. I won’t say I’m never going to com­ment on BB again, but I won’t be doing it in such an organ­ised way. I hope you’ve all enjoyed read­ing it all as much as I’ve enjoyed writ­ing it.

But fear not, this hippy still has plenty of other inter­est­ing things to bring you, so don’t be a stranger, OK?