The northlondonhippy

Archive for November, 2007

I grant you per­mis­sion to prod my neck or clasp my wrist. Indeed, I do still pos­sess a pulse for I remain alive and nearly well.

I haven’t been ill, not really. I’ve been suf­fer­ing from a mal­ady known as overwork-itis and I am the cause of this afflic­tion. I’ve worked 10 out of the last 13 nights, with tonight being my final night — num­ber 11. Go me. After that, I’m off for a cou­ple of weeks to catch my breath and catch up with you guys.

So much for my 100 post thing, you might pos­si­bly be think­ing. Well, I am here to tell ya that 100 days hasn’t passed yet. I can still catch up. How do you know I won’t snort a shit load of crys­tal meth and stay up for 6 days and nights, doing noth­ing but blogging?

You know this, because I’m telling you, I shan’t be ingest­ing any hor­ri­ble, crappy, man-made shite! This hippy don’t do class A drugs no more, anyway!

But I can still catch up. I haven’t counted to see how behind I am, but I’m sure its not an insur­mount­able num­ber. This hippy is a hippy that can do! And does! And will…!

Fuck, I might start buy­ing into my own hype. Naw, I’m far to cyn­i­cal and clever for that. Besides, its not like I’m actu­ally sell­ing any­thing. Every­thing I do, I do for you, for free! When’s the last time you got an invoice from this hippy?

I wouldn’t know how to charge for this shit, any­way. Just send me your credit card num­bers (and don’t for­get the 3 digit sig­na­ture strip num­ber too) and I’ll buy myself some­thing pretty, on you.

Wouldn’t you like to buy me some­thing pretty? Like a Porsche? Noth­ing says you love me like a finely engi­neered Ger­man sports car. And I’m going to be 45 years old in Jan­u­ary, don’t you think I’m ready for a mid-life-crisis mobile?

And speak­ing of gifts, I’m sure I’m not the only one who you’re shop­ping for because it’s Christ­mas soon. That means this hippy’s hol­i­day shop­ping guide will be com­ing soon too. As a fer­vent con­sumer of every­thing, I am well-placed to help you choose gifts for peo­ple I’ve never met…as long as they are cool peo­ple, but if you’re read­ing my blog, you must be cool and every­one you know is cool too. It’s sim­ple math, really.

Are you dig­ging it? Groovy!

As many of you who fol­low my blog know, I usu­ally hate other people’s blogs, but recently I’ve dis­cov­ered one I quite like.

You all should check out trannyfattyacid.blogspot.com

I’ve been read­ing this blog for a few weeks now and I’m very impressed with the stan­dard and qual­ity of the mate­r­ial posted there. The author spends a lot of time research­ing his sub­jects and check­ing his facts; more so than most of the news­pa­pers I read daily and you know I read nearly all of ‘em!

What drew me into the TFA blog were his posts about the dis­ap­pear­ance of Madeleine McCann.

I expect there aren’t many peo­ple left on the planet who haven’t heard the tale of the lit­tle British girl who went miss­ing in Por­tu­gal last May. And that’s just about the only fact sur­round­ing this case that any­one can agree on…that this lit­tle girl disappeared.

The cir­cum­stances of Madeleine’s dis­ap­pear­ance, how­ever are entirely another mat­ter and opin­ions and rec­ol­lec­tions dif­fer on this wildly.

The Por­tuguese police believe that lit­tle Maddy died in her par­ents’ hol­i­day apart­ment that night, while her par­ents would like us to believe she was kid­napped by a stranger.

I didn’t like the par­ents from the get-go. I thought their expla­na­tions for leav­ing three very young chil­dren alone in their room every night, while they dined were lame and self-serving. I don’t have kids, but if I did, I would never, ever think of leav­ing them unat­tended, espe­cially in a hotel room, in a strange coun­try! Back in June, this was my opin­ion and I couldn’t under­stand why they hadn’t been charged with will­ful neglect of their children.

As the sum­mer went on, and they were paraded daily for photo-ops in front of the world’s media, vis­it­ing the pope and tour­ing the globe, their holier than thou atti­tude really started to piss me off. Also, I had been con­sid­er­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of their involve­ment, prior to them being named as offi­cial sus­pects in their daugh­ter disappearance.

I debated writ­ing about the case here and had to restrain myself from doing so on sev­eral occa­sions. Its not really appro­pri­ate mate­r­ial for my blog and I doubt any of you would disagree.

Instead, I chan­nelled my inter­est in the case to other online out­lets, specif­i­cally the Mir­ror news­pa­per forums, where up until recently, views and infor­ma­tion on the case were freely shared and expressed. They’ve since cracked down on what peo­ple post and it is far less free than it was a week ago.

One of my dis­cov­er­ies on the Mir­ror Forums was the TFA blog. He writes exten­sively on the McCann case and is far more infor­ma­tive, fac­tu­ally accu­rate and bal­anced on the sub­ject than the national news­pa­pers. I’ve rec­om­mended his blog to a few peo­ple I know and they’ve also liked it, so I decided to big TFA up here on my site.

It’s not often I rec­om­mend blogs, I think this is only the 2nd one I’ve endorsed since I started blog­ging, the first being the rather excel­lent Post Secret blog. I know your surf­ing time is valu­able, but check out TFA’s blog. If you’re inter­ested in Madeleine McCann, it’s an excel­lent place to get the real story that the main­stream media is ignoring.

The ques­tion we should all be ask­ing is: “why is the MSM so unbal­anced when it comes to the McCanns?” I wish I had the answer for you, but I’m in the dark on this one too.

The UN’s Inter­na­tional Panel on Cli­mate Change, or IPCC as it is known, has issued the stark­est warn­ing so far on the expected effects of cli­mate change. Check out what the “news­pa­per of record”, the NYT has to say about it by click­ing RIGHT HERE.

The group, who were co-winners of the Nobel Peace Prize this year, along with Al Gore, have said that if we don’t get our shit together and soon, we’re all going to die.

Ok, per­haps those weren’t the exact words the panel used in their report, but trust me, that’s what they meant. Our con­tin­ued con­sump­tion of all the resources mother earth has to offer is screw­ing up the planet and we won’t be able to recover from this one.

The report says that we all have to take some dra­matic action to avert this loom­ing envi­ron­men­tal disaster.

As if!

Sure, China will stop build­ing their coal-burning pow­er­plants at the rate of a new one every week.

Of course, peo­ple will junk their gas-guzzling SUVs and sports cars in favour of bicycles.

And we’ll all charge our iPods less fre­quently and sit around in dark rooms, not watch­ing TV.

Let’s face facts; no one is going to change their lifestyle in the slight­est to pre­serve the future of life on the planet. Why would we? We like our mod­ern con­ve­niences, our cen­tral heat­ing, our air-conditioning, our refridger­a­tors. We love our com­put­ers and tele­vi­sions. We love noth­ing bet­ter than tak­ing a joy ride in our big, com­bus­tion motor pro­pelled vehi­cles and our cheap Easy­jet flights that cost less than train jour­neys. We like our fresh sea­sonal fruit and veg, flown in from what­ever coun­try is cur­rently in sea­son. I had some fresh sugar snap peas last week that came from Latin Amer­ica – who would want frozen or tinned?

The IPCC should be com­mended for the work they are doing, but let’s not live under any illu­sions that the rec­om­men­da­tions they’ve made will be widely adopted. They won’t be. We’re fucked. Seri­ously. Fucked.

Some of you will be fright­ened by this, but most of us will take it in our stride and go about our days like noth­ing is wrong. Works for me!

What’s the point of wor­ry­ing about some­thing you can’t pre­vent? Cli­mate change, global warm­ing, what­ever you want to call it, seems as inevitable as death and taxes, though once we’re all dead, there will be no more taxes. See, there is a bright side.

I would sug­gest you all turn your cen­tral heat­ing (or air­con) up to full blast, fill up your tank with super-premium petrol and go for a long drive. Leave your lights on at home and throw all your glass, paper, plas­tic and card­board in the non-recycling bin. If we’re all going to have to die, we might as well enjoy the ride while we can, so smoke ‘em if you got ‘em and that includes fos­sil fuels!

Recently, I pur­chased a Sling­box Solo. I ordered it from Ama­zon and set it up a cou­ple of weeks ago.

For those of you who don’t know what a Sling­box is, please allow me to explain. A Sling­box is a device which you con­nect to your audio/video sources and to your home net­work and it allows you to place-shift your view­ing on a com­puter, in your home, or any­where in the world where you have an inter­net con­nec­tion and it also allows you to con­trol the source device.

I’ll elab­o­rate: I have a SKY+ satel­lite receiver and DVR (Dig­i­tal Video Recorder) in my liv­ing room, con­nected to my flatscreen TV. I’ve con­nected the Sling­box to the SKY+ and my net­work and the Sling­box takes the raw TV sig­nal and com­presses it, then streams it onto my home net­work, to be received by, say by my lap­top, wire­lessly in any other room in the house.

Are you get­ting the idea? In the­ory, I should be able to view my Sling­box out­side of my house, but I am hav­ing some port for­ward­ing issues which I’ve yet to resolve, because it goes through two dif­fer­ent routers before reach­ing the internet.

The Sling­box Solo is a very sim­ple look­ing device, with con­nec­tors on one side and some blinky lights on the other side. There are no but­tons or con­trols, the idea is to con­nect it, con­fig­ure it and for­get about it, every­thing else is done via the soft­ware you down­load, called SlingPlayer.

I con­nected my Sling­box Solo to my SKY+ via an S-video cable, as its the high­est qual­ity out­put sig­nal avail­able. My SKY+ is an orig­i­nal V1 Pace unit, feed­ing my TV via SCART, but the S-Video out­put mir­rors it. This means the Sling­box Solo only sees what­ever the SKY+ sees. If some­one is watch­ing the TV at the same time, you both have to watch the same programme.

I used a nor­mal RCA stereo phono cable to con­nect up the audio from the SKY+ to the Slin­box Solo and con­nected the power sup­ply. I also put the IR blasters above and below the SKY+ IR receiver as these pro­vide the remote con­trol functionality.

Finally, I had to con­nect the Sling­Box to my net­work. The Sling­Box only out­puts eth­er­net, there is no built in wi-fi, which is fine if your router is next to your tele­vi­sion. Mine isn’t, which meant using some sort of bridge.

My first try was an Air­port Express from Apple. They are nor­mally very robust and depend­able units and this was a cost effec­tive way to do it, but it didn’t work very well. I don’t know why.

I con­nected the AE to my net­work in WDS mode, con­nected the Sling­box Solo to it and within a minute, the Sling­box was con­nected to my net­work. I was able to con­fig­ure the Sling­box quickly and was watch­ing my SKY+ on all my Macs in fairly good quality.

It didn’t last, the band­with dropped dra­mat­i­cally, and at least once a day, the Sling­box would lose its net­work con­nec­tion, though it appeared the Air­port Express was still con­nected to my net­work. I had other net­work prob­lems as well, los­ing con­nec­tions to my dif­fer­ent com­put­ers and other Air­port Express units, used for music stream­ing, were hav­ing dropouts too. Reset­ting the Sling­box and asso­ci­ated AE unit restored my con­nec­tion and got the net­work work­ing again, but the same prob­lem hap­pened every day.

When I dis­con­nected the Sling­box and AE, my net­work per­formed fine, so I decided to con­nect the Sling­box another way.

I bought a set of Net­Gear Home­Plugs, which do eth­er­net over pow­er­lines and they are a total rev­e­la­tion. You plug them both into the elec­tri­cal mains and they find each other auto­mat­i­cally and cre­ate a durable and robust eth­er­net bridge between the two loca­tions. Once plug is con­nected to my Air­port Extreme, the other is con­nected to the Sling­box. Within sec­onds, they were con­nected and so was the Sling­box and its held the con­nec­tion con­tin­u­ously since I con­nected them. These things are very cool!

I’m still hav­ing slight prob­lems with my net­work; it grinds to a halt and loses the inter­net about once a day, but then comes back. I think I need to set it all up again, as my base unit is still look­ing for an AE in WDS mode and its not there any­more. When I have the time, I’ll reboot all the units and reset them up from scratch. That’s how it was before the Sling­box, so it should go back to being per­fect again.

I’m also deter­mined to sort out the port for­ward­ing, as it would be cool to watch SKY+ from out­side my home, either live TV or recorded pro­grammes. The Sling­Player soft­ware includes a vir­tual remote for the SKY+, which means you can dupli­cate any remote com­mand with a sim­ple click of your mouse. Very clever!

There are other mod­els of Sling­Box avail­able, some offer­ing more con­nec­tions for more devices, oth­ers offer­ing dig­i­tal and ana­logue TV tuners. For my needs, with one main TV source, the Solo was per­fect. I’ve got shitty free­view recep­tion here, so a tuner was point­less and there’s no need to con­nect it to a DVD player, because most com­put­ers are already DVD players!

If I wanted to watch SKY in another room, I could have a sec­ond box installed, which I would have to pay for and I would be charged a ten­ner a month for the priv­i­lege. It wouldn’t be con­nected to my main SKY+, which means it would only receive live tv. Also, it would be in one fixed loca­tion, like my bed­room. What if I wanted to keep an eye on the news, while cook­ing dinner?

The Sling­box is a cheaper, more flex­i­ble solu­tion, it offers great pic­ture qual­ity, at full screen res­o­lu­tions, any­where inside my home. When I can view it over the inter­net, which I am cer­tain I will do one day soon, it will com­plete the pack­age. It’s a wel­come addi­tion to my A/V arsenal!

Thank you for drop­ping by tech-geek corner!

I know, I know. I haven’t been here in a fair few days.

No excuses, except for my catch all; “I’m rub­bish”. Fur­ther expla­na­tions will not be offered.

I’ve squan­dered a fair bit of time this week, being a bit of a tech-geek, sort­ing out some things around the house. One of those things was my Sling­box, which is now reli­ably work­ing on my home net­work, but I still haven’t sorted view­ing out­side of the house. More on this later.

I’ve also had a bit of a play around with Logic Stu­dio, or rather the bits of it that I have installed. I still haven’t received my replace­ment instal­la­tion DVD, so much of the included extra con­tent is out of my reach. Today’s post hasn’t come yet, so there’s still a chance it might arrive before the day is out.

Add to that the nor­mal bull­shit I have to do every day and you’ll see that I’m pretty busy most days.

I did get to screen an excel­lent film yes­ter­day, “Amer­i­can Gang­ster” and I can highly rec­om­mend it. It’s the story of Frank Lucas, a Harlem based busi­ness­man, who’s busi­ness was heroin impor­ta­tion, mar­ket­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion. Lucas basi­cally re-invented the heroin trade in the late 60s/early 70s in a very inno­v­a­tive and cre­ative way. He was also quite bru­tal, but only out of necessity.

If Lucas had used his con­sid­er­able intel­li­gence and busi­ness skill in any other indus­try, he would prob­a­bly be star­ring as the boss on the TV show, The Appren­tice, as he was truly an entre­pre­neur, but he didn’t. He chose heroin and the film does not shy away from show­ing the harm that smack does to its users, but it also makes the point that the anti-drug stance is almost as big an indus­try as the drugs trade and if black mar­ket trade in ille­gal drugs went away, so would the asso­ci­ated law enforce­ment and other ancil­liary businesses.

The film tells a com­plex story in many shades of grey and cer­tainly you will admire a lot about Lucas, though his bru­tal out­bursts never let you for­get the path he chose. It opens here in the UK tomor­row, if you get the chance, it’s worth seeing.

It comes back to some­thing I’ve said on here more than once, that the world wide black mar­ket in drugs is cap­i­tal­ism at its most basic; sim­ple sup­ply and demand. There is a huge, never-ending demand for sub­stances which alter your con­scious­ness, always has been, always will be. Cig­a­rettes and alco­hol, the legal drugs, just don’t cut it for some peo­ple and where legit­i­mate sources don’t deliver, ille­gal sup­ply lines will emerge. As long as peo­ple want some­thing, some­one will be there, ready to pro­vide it. This is about as basic a tru­ism as you can find about capitalism.

Our econ­omy and polit­i­cal sys­tem is build upon the foun­da­tions of cap­i­tal­ism, yet when it comes to the issue of ille­gal drugs, we are in deep, orches­trated denial. Pro­hi­bi­tion doesn’t work and if I can site the usual exam­ple of when Amer­ica banned liquor, the result was an organ­ised crime struc­ture that still exists today. Peo­ple wanted booze; peo­ple got booze. They’ll realised then, you couldn’t stop free trade, so they opened the doors to a reg­u­lated, taxed and legal system.

If heroin were legal, Frank Lucas would have been on the cover of busi­ness mag­a­zines as a hero and leg­end, in almost the same way that Star­bucks rein­vented cof­fee. He also prob­a­bly wouldn’t have shot all those peo­ple in the head. It’s some­thing to think about. Well, for me anyway.

Hey.

Yeah, you.

YES, YOU!

Hi there.

Thanks for drop­ping by.

You’ve reached the northlondonhippy’s hap­pen­ing web­site and that makes you very cool.

If you’ve come here today for some­thing gen­uinely enter­tain­ing, infor­ma­tive or inter­est­ing, you’re bound to be dis­ap­pointed. Today, all we are offer­ing is lame excuses and an invi­ta­tion to explore the rest of the site. There’s some good stuff buried just below this apol­ogy and even deeper if you can be both­ered to dig.

I’m let­ting the 100 posts thing get away from me, I can see my post count slip­ping away. I’m off for the next week, though and I’m bound to come up with some­thing in the next seven days. I’m aim­ing for 10 posts of an inde­ter­mi­nate length and sub­ject, but we all know how well my aims pan out.

I’m still adjust­ing to exist­ing in day­light and I’m still catch­ing up on my sleep. By the time I’m feel­ing nearly nor­mal, it will be time to get on the night­bus again, metaphor­i­cally speak­ing, of course.

I’ve just been chill­ing out for the last cou­ple of days, sort­ing out real life bull­shit that is as tedious as it sounds. I’ve still got more to do as well and I want to have some fun too.

I need to have some fun! I’ve earned it!

Fun, this week is not going to involve hard drugs and whores, no mat­ter how much you beg me, but play­ing around with my new copy of Logic Stu­dio. I spent most of yes­ter­day try­ing to install it, but one of the 8 instal­la­tion DVDs was cor­rupted, so I’m not there yet. Apple were cool when I phoned them and the DVD they think is dam­aged is to be replaced. I should have it in my hot lit­tle hands in a few days. Then, lucky me, I get to re-install most of it again. It will take around 4 hours, but once that’s done I’ll have all the con­tent I should have, loops, instru­ments, etc. Groovy!

Now, all I need is some tal­ent, but I’m sure they have a pill for that. They have pills for everything!

Perus­ing the inter­net, as I do, seek­ing inspi­ra­tion and of course, cannabis related news, I stum­bled upon this lit­tle gem, which can be found on quite a few news sites. I’ve opted to use a link to the Reuters News Agency web­site, as news agen­cies, espe­cially Reuters and AP, are nor­mally the most unbi­ased organisations.

Here’s the topline of the report:

“A study of more than 5,000 young­sters in Switzer­land has found those who smoked mar­i­juana do as well or bet­ter in some areas as those who don’t, researchers said on Monday.”

I told you it would do your head in! Just imag­ine how hard it will be for gov­ern­ments around the world to spin this one away!

The evi­dence in favour of cannabis con­tin­ues to mount, as wit­nessed in my “cannabis truth series”, but the fuck­ers with the power have no inter­est in truth and seek only to sup­press it. Luck­ily for you, you’ve got me and “truth” is my mid­dle name.

Ok, I don’t have a mid­dle name, my par­ents couldn’t be both­ered. See how god­damn truth­ful I am!

(Read the northlondonhippy’s cannabis truth series. Go on, learn some­thing cool!)

Wel­come to a lazy Sun­day with the hippy.

I fin­ished my last shift Sat­ur­day morn­ing, which tech­ni­cally means I worked the first 7 hours of my first day off. That, in my mind makes it an actual 1/2 day off. I’m off all day today, but back at work again tomor­row night. Does this make sense? I’ve got a day and a half off. So what am I doing with all that time?

Sleep­ing mainly.

I had a 4 hour nap on Sat­ur­day in the late after­noon into early evening, woke up for a few hours (and for a Japan­ese take­away) and then went back to sleep around mid­night and up again at 6:30am this morning.

If you are won­der­ing why I haven’t posted any­thing until now, I hope that answers your ques­tion. I also hope I’m not approach­ing proper blog­ging with detailed expla­na­tions of my fucked up sleep pat­terns and take­away menus. At least it wasn’t lunch!

As today is my only proper day off in the last week, I’ve got to do all the real life shit I’ve neglected while I was work­ing. I’ve got to run a few errands, do some stuff around the house and I’m hop­ing to have the time to fin­ish installing the last of my big soft­ware pur­chase last week.

Specif­i­cally, I’ve got a full, boxed copy of the new Logic Stu­dio, pur­chased at the upgrade price, because I have Logic Express. I think there are 6 DVDs or so to install, which means its prob­a­bly going to take a cou­ple of hours or more to trans­fer all that on to my hard drive.

After my next 2 shifts, I’ve got 9 days off and my plan is to put a fair bit of time into learn­ing this new appli­ca­tion and lay­ing down a song or two. I even have a cou­ple of things in my head, so I won’t be start­ing from scratch.

I haven’t done any­thing prop­erly musi­cal in around 20 years, though I’ve recorded some inci­den­tal music which I’ve used in videos and things. For exam­ple, the back­ground music on my nlh deluxe graphic promo is taken from some­thing I recorded around 3 years ago, when I first got Logic Express. It was a test record­ing and not meant to be any­thing more than that, but it worked for my pur­poses and there were no copy­right issues, since I wrote it.

The cool thing about the music I am hop­ing to record next week is that I have some lyrics and melodies already that I want to play around with and I’m going to try to sing.

I’m not a singer and I can’t sing a note, so this should be fun. I’m going to attempt to find my voice.

The most inhibit­ing fac­tor to this is that singing, unlike gui­tar or key­boards, can’t be hid­den with head­phones; you have to sing out loud. That means my neigh­bours will prob­a­bly hear me, only with­out the ben­e­fit of any guid­ing back­ground tracks. Oh, they are going to get a right laugh out of me!

If I really do come up with any music, I’ll post it here, don’t worry and you all will be able to down­load it for free. It’s not like a record company’s going to give me a con­tract! I’m not that deluded.

Ok, so I took a cou­ple days off. Sue me! I’m still ahead on the post count!

I’ve also been work­ing lots this week and not sleep­ing enough. I could make loads of excuses, but none of them mat­ter. It doesn’t mat­ter why I haven’t been here; all that mat­ters is I haven’t been here.

Maybe I’ve bit­ten off more than I can chew, keep­ing up with this “100 posts in 100 days” doohicky. Who’s to say? The proof will be in the pud­ding, or you could insert your own cliché if you don’t like mine.

Yep, you’ve worked it out already. I don’t have a par­tic­u­lar topic today so I’m just going to ram­ble on.

“Ram­ble On” is a great Led Zep­pelin song and in only a cou­ple of quick clicks, iTunes is pump­ing it out of my speak­ers. Man, I wish I had tick­ets to see them for their big reunion con­cert! I bet some of you fuck­ers out there have tick­ets! Wanna bring along a crazy, north Lon­don based hippy of ques­tion moral standing?

Of course you do!

Or you could sell your spare ticket on eBay for like a a trillion-gazillion pounds! Though bring­ing me along would pro­vide you with a life­time of mem­o­ries and you can’t put a mon­e­tary value on that!

For me, Led Zep music and weed are for­ever linked. I didn’t really get their music until I first got high, then it all made sense and I was for­ever a fan.

Do any of you know any­one who scored Led Zep tick­ets legit­i­mately, through the online lot­tery? I’ve yet to come across a sin­gle per­son who did, per­haps you have? Answers on a post­card, please.

I’ve got a cou­ple of days off after tonight and I’m going to put some seri­ous energy into pro­vid­ing you with some high qual­ity con­tent. I’m going to have to, to make up for this abor­tion of an entry you’ve just suf­fered through.

On behalf of Hip­pyCo Indus­tries Ltd (a divi­sion of Hip­pyCo Enter­prises Inc), I would like to apol­o­gise for the sub­stan­dard prod­uct pro­vided to you today. Here at HCI, we strive to cre­ate amus­ing, infor­ma­tive and enter­tain­ing con­tent for you to enjoy and on this occa­sional, we have not suc­ceeded. If you would like to receive a full refund for the cost of your sub­scrip­tion, please get in touch with our cus­tomer ser­vices depart­ment. Unfor­tu­nately we can­not refund the time you wasted read­ing this shite. You’ll never get that back.