The northlondonhippy

Archive for December, 2007

Happy fuck­ing xmas, fuckers!

I hope you all stuffed your faces and got got every­thing on your wish list; not lim­ited to, but prob­a­bly includ­ing: an iPhone, an iPod Touch, an iPod nano, a Mac­Book, a PSP, a PS3 and if you are seri­ously lucky, a Wii and if you are super lucky, nat­u­rally you found an nlh deluxe under your tree!

I’ve had a fairly nor­mal xmas, well nor­mal for me, because I’ve worked right through the hol­i­days and I ain’t fin­ished yet! I worked xmas eve, xmas day and I am work­ing tonight, box­ing day too.

Appar­ently, loads of peo­ple have to work over xmas, only I didn’t “have” to. I chose to and given the chance, I will prob­a­bly choose to again next year.

Next year is a long way, away. Who knows what the next 12 months may bring? Do you? If you answered yes, then email me with some horse rac­ing results for next week, or bet­ter yet the lot­tery num­bers for the next giant rollover. Please?

The first xmas I ever sold was 18 years ago. I was offered the chance to do a shift in a news­room in NYC for dou­ble pay, 400 cool dollaroonies.

Did I just type “dol­la­roonies”? I must be stoned.

I am.

I remem­ber ring­ing up my mother and inform­ing her that I was going to be a newswhore for xmas and I’d be miss­ing the usual fam­ily gath­er­ing. That was 1989. She was less than impressed, but ka-ching! That was a lot of money! It still is!

As a kid grow­ing up, xmas was a big deal and in my (now estranged) extended fam­ily, there was much cel­e­brat­ing to do with both my mother’s and father’s side of the family.

As I got older and we fell out with var­i­ous branches of our fam­ily tree, xmas’s were down­scaled, but still big events in my imme­di­ate family.

I liked it mainly for the gifts.

Xmas stopped being fun when I stopped get­ting bicycles.

The last xmas I shared with my par­ents was 1991 and every year since, I’ve either worked or just not gone. My dad died in Sept 2004, my mother is very dis­abled and has been con­fined to a bed, fol­low­ing a stroke in 2003 and now lives in a nurs­ing home. That’s 13 xmas’s avoided.

I tried to write about all of this last year and I couldn’t fin­ish it. I went into far more detail and skip­ping down mem­ory lane was dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble and I gave up. I still have what I wrote, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it again. Hey ho.

For most peo­ple, I think the hol­i­days are pure stress. All you need to do is visit your local high street or shop­ping dis­trict and watch how cunty every­one is to each other to see proof of this. Expec­ta­tions have to be met at all costs, even if it means elbow­ing some old lady out of the way, so you can get the last copy of Nigella Express.

Xmas for me, has come to mean my fam­ily, my imme­di­ate fam­ily. When I think about xmas, I think about the four of us, my par­ents, my younger brother and me.

I can remem­ber spend­ing many xmas eve’s unable to sleep, because I was so excited; adren­a­line cours­ing though my veins, mak­ing it impos­si­ble to rest.

I can remem­ber the smell of my mother’s home-baked xmas cookies.

I can remem­ber my dad swear­ing when he thought I couldn’t hear him, as he tried valiantly to assem­ble some crappy toy that wouldn’t sur­vive in one piece for more than a week.

And I can remem­ber my younger brother, just as excited as me, check­ing to see if our par­ents were awake at ridicu­lously early times, because we weren’t allowed to go down­stairs until they were ready to accom­pany us for the rit­ual rip­ping of the wrap­ping paper.

I can remem­ber more, much more, but it all just depresses me now because I’ll never have those times with my fam­ily again. I can’t.

These days, I don’t get excited about xmas, instead I count the sec­onds until it’s the 2nd of Jan­u­ary. Then its all over and I can exhale.

Though when I think about that first xmas I sold, back in 1989, for 400 dol­la­roonies, I wish I could give them a refund. Four hun­dred bucks for one more xmas with my fam­ily would be the bar­gain of the millennium!

I hope wher­ever you are, all your hol­i­day dreams came true and you spent it with peo­ple far less mis­er­able than me. Maybe hav­ing me trapped behind a desk over the hol­i­days is good for every­one, not just me. We’ll never know…

I pur­chased a full copy of Logic Stu­dio, Apple’s audio pro­duc­tion suite of appli­ca­tions and loops, at the end of Octo­ber, when I bought my copy of Leop­ard. Around a week after that, I started installing Logic Stu­dio; yes­ter­day I finished.

Yes, you are read­ing that cor­rectly, it took me 6 weeks to get all of the soft­ware prop­erly installed and func­tion­ing on my iMac.

Why?

Sim­ple, because one of the instal­la­tion DVDs was no good.

The first time I tried to install the entire pack­age, the sixth DVD of seven was spit out by my com­puter, around 7 hours into the process. The DVD in ques­tion, Jam Pack Con­tent 2, had some prob­lem and my drive couldn’t read it.

Being the resource­ful sort, I decided to give it another try before con­tact­ing Apple. At the same point, around 7 hours in, the 6th DVD crapped out again. I phoned Apple.

Phon­ing Apple is never fun, they are always busy, you need to wait a while before you speak to the first human being and rarely can the first per­son you speak to, help you, neces­si­tat­ing a fur­ther wait. I was more relaxed this time, because I was armed with a fresh ser­ial num­ber and a recently pur­chased, boxed copy of Logic Studio.

After leap­ing suc­cess­fully through all the right hoops, I finally got to speak to some­one from the Logic depart­ment. I described my prob­lem to him in detail and he agreed I had a duff DVD. He con­firmed my details and said that a replace­ment DVD would be with me in 3–4 days. This was six weeks ago.

Like a twat, I sat by my front door, day in and day out, await­ing the knock of the post­man or courier with my replace­ment DVD and every day, it did not arrive. I stayed cool, I stayed calm, I waited a cou­ple of weeks and phoned again.

On sub­se­quent calls to Apple, you are armed with some­thing even bet­ter than a ser­ial num­ber, some­thing they call a case num­ber. A case num­ber from Apple refers to the spe­cific inci­dent you’ve con­tacted them about and it makes it much quicker to nav­i­gate through the hoops to get to the per­son who can help you.

I got the same guy in the Logic depart­ment, he has quite a dis­tinc­tive accent and that’s how I knew. He put me on hold to check on the sta­tus of my replace­ment and after a few min­utes, he returned to tell me that it would be with me in 3–4 days. This was five weeks ago.

I con­tin­ued to press my runny nose against my front win­dow, patiently wait­ing for the deliv­ery to come and mak­ing nasty, gloopy marks on the glass. I remained chilled, I was relaxed and as the hol­i­days approached, I for­mu­lated a plan of action.

I also did a bit of research on the inter­net and dis­cov­ered I was not alone with a dam­aged instal­la­tion DVD. It turned out many peo­ple had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence to mine, with the instal­la­tion fail­ing at the same point.

I’m guess­ing Apple had a seri­ous qual­ity con­trol issue with DVD num­ber 6 and get­ting them remade took a lot longer than expected. Or they just lied to me. Or both. It’s all very un-Apple.

I waited four more weeks, before decid­ing to phone Apple again and that was yes­ter­day. Just as I was look­ing up their num­ber on the ‘net to phone them again, there was a loud knock on the door and guess what it was! A courier with the replace­ment DVD. Yipppppeeeee!

I spent five more hours installing all the con­tent for Logic Stu­dio and at the end of it I was rewarded with a fin­ished instal­la­tion and all the loops and sounds in their proper fold­ers on my hard drive. Result!

Though, to be hon­est I was hop­ing to have a long, drawn out argu­ment with Apple which resulted in me receiv­ing some form of com­pen­sa­tion for my lengthy wait, but they stole my thun­der with their well-timed deliv­ery. If only I had phoned them a week before, per­haps I could have beat them out of some credit, or a free copy of Final Cut Express 4. Now, we’ll never know.

Now that I’ve got a full, work­ing copy of Logic Stu­dio cook­ing on my iMac, I can start think­ing about my next big exer­cise in futil­ity; my first northlon­don­hippy album.

Ladies, gen­tle­man and ston­ers, I’m pleased to announce that com­ing some­time in the 2nd half of 2008, I will be releas­ing the come­back record from a career that never was!

I present to you for the first time any­where, the title of my upcom­ing release:

“the northlon­don­hippy & the seven deadly sins — songs about sex and death”

My back-up band, “the seven deadly sins” are actu­ally only a six-piece…Sloth keeps miss­ing rehearsals.

I’ll be writ­ing and record­ing the record over the next sev­eral months, aim­ing to release it for free on my web­site some­time this sum­mer. I already have the bare bones of 5 songs in the works and ideas for the rest. The whole thing will be down­load­able, along with cover art.

If 1 mil­lion peo­ple down­load this puppy, besides bank­rupt­ing my band­with for a decade, I promise I’ll take my band and go on tour. No joke, no lie. I reckon if one mil­lion copies of this album are out there, spon­sor­ship for a tour would be a piece of piss.

No DRM, no credit card num­bers, it will be com­pletely and totally free. I might make you han­dover your email address, so I can keep you up to date with a newslet­ter or some­thing, but I would never sell, loan or give your details to anyone!

Here at Hip­pyCo Indus­tries Ltd (a divi­sion of Hip­pyCo Enter­prises plc), your pri­vacy is impor­tant to us, just as is ours. For that rea­son, we’ll never phone you up at home for a chat or show up unan­nounced for a cup of tea.

Do you need some cool gifts for some cool peo­ple? This hippy is here to help!

Xmas is less than 2 weeks away and if you haven’t fin­ished your hol­i­day gift shop­ping, then you are just like every­one else! But you’ve got some­thing they haven’t got…a cer­tain north London-based hippy with a ques­tion­able char­ac­ter. I’ve got a few sug­ges­tions to help you out.

I find xmas stress­ful, every­thing is busier, peo­ple are ruder and noth­ing pisses me off more than queue­ing up to spend my hard earned money.

Let me share a tale with you from last Saturday.…

Last Sat­ur­day after­noon, I made the rather unfor­tu­nate mis­take of vis­it­ing my local super­mar­ket in my car. It’s a large chain super­mar­ket, with a large car park. I needed to pick up a few things and didn’t have a choice.

When I arrived at the super­mar­ket, I noticed the queue of cars depart­ing, but didn’t really think too much of it. The car park was quite full, but I man­aged to find a space with­out any stress. I decided to abbre­vi­ate my shop­ping list, grabbed a hand bas­ket and swept through the shop quite quickly. I even found a till with no one wait­ing and was checked out in record time. And then the real fun began.

I returned to my car to dis­cover the car park had filled up even more and the queue of depart­ing cars stretched to the very end of the car park. It took me around 10 min­utes just to get out of my space, because of being blocked by other pass­ing cars, arriv­ing or departing.

After get­ting out of my space, I joined the queue of depart­ing cars, head­ing towards the exit and that’s when the real fun began. The line of traf­fic was barely mov­ing and after 15–20 min­utes, I phoned Mrs. H to warn her I would be a bit later than I expected.

After 30 min­utes of not mov­ing, other peo­ple were start­ing to get rest­less and I began to see exam­ples of road-rage, or rather, car-park rage. Cars, were try­ing to cut into the queue of cars head­ing for the exit, oth­ers were try­ing to merge from unex­pected direc­tions. Then cars arriv­ing, started queu­ing up for lim­ited park­ing spaces, cut­ting off depart­ing cars and allow­ing merg­ing cars to jump in front. It was total car-park chaos!

Being the resource sort and main­tain­ing my calm through the reg­u­lar inges­tion of cig­a­rettes and choco­lates from my shop­ping, I got the num­ber for the super­mar­ket and rang it from my mobile phone. I asked to speak to the man­ager, iden­ti­fy­ing myself as a cus­tomer trapped out­side in my car. After a few min­utes wait­ing, I was con­nected to the duty man­ager and I explained the predica­ment fac­ing his val­ued cus­tomers just out­side the doors of his shop. He was sym­pa­thetic, but blamed the local coun­cil for not allow­ing them to build more access to the car park. That was hardly going to help me out at 2pm on a Sat­ur­day after­noon, 2 weeks before xmas!

The man­ager sug­gested I phone the local police sta­tion, which I was only too happy to do. After get­ting passed the first oper­a­tor, I was con­nected to the despatch desk at the local nick and I again explained the sit­u­a­tion, point­ing out the it could eas­ily turn nasty and as well as near acci­dents with cars, I’d seen a cou­ple of dri­vers leap out of their vehi­cles and nearly trade blows. The despatcher took my details and said she would send some offi­cers as soon as pos­si­ble. I didn’t see any before I left, around AN HOUR LATER!

Yes, I spent 2 hours in the super­mar­ket car park, in my car, in the pour­ing rain. It was absolute hell and I wouldn’t wish an expe­ri­ence like this on any one, ever!

Which brings me to my main point, which is this…if you can, do all of your shop­ping online! Every­thing I’m going to sug­gest is avail­able on the inter­net, so grab your credit card and get­ting ready to shop!

My top rec­om­men­da­tion this year is an iPod Touch from Apple. I bought one for Mrs. Hippy and we’re both blown away by how good it is. The touch­screen is gor­geous, so user friendly and as I sus­pected, the killer app is def­i­nitely being able to surf the inter­net on it.

It’s actu­ally a very usable, read­able browser and its the first sat­is­fy­ing inter­net expe­ri­ence I’ve ever had on a hand-held device. To put this in per­spec­tive, I’ve surfed on var­i­ous mobile phones and a high-end Palm Pilot and none have come close to this. The iPod Touch found my home net­work, let me put in the pass­word and joined it instantly. The mobile ver­sion of Safari rocks, its fast, respon­sive and ren­ders pages beautifully.

Oh and did I men­tion it plays music? And the video daz­zling too, so is the photo browser. I haven’t hacked it yet, because it’s Mrs. H’s, not mine and I don’t want to end up brick­ing it on her. I’m hold­ing out for a 2nd gen­er­a­tion iPhone, hope­fully that will come in the next few months.

I bought the iPod Touch from Ama­zon, £243 for the 16gb model, which is a real sav­ings com­pared to other retail­ers, but your mileage may vary, so look out for the best deal. Also, don’t leave it too long as its con­sid­ered one of the hot gifts this hol­i­day season.

In gen­eral, I can rec­om­mend Ama­zon, they’re nor­mally very reli­able and they are good with deliv­ery too. I shop with them so much that I signed up for Ama­zon Prime, which costs 50 quid for a year, but in return you get upgraded to next day deliv­ery on every­thing you buy. I usu­ally pay for next day deliv­ery any­way, because of my erratic lifestyle, that way I never miss any­thing. I’ve already placed a few orders with it, so it will pay for itself in no time.

The other online retailer I can rec­om­mend is everyonedoesit.com or EDIT. The adverts you see on my site are from EDIT, as my endorse­ment of them is long­stand­ing. They are also the exclu­sive dis­trib­u­tors of the NLH Deluxe, the bong I designed, made by RooR in Germany.

EDIT stock a wide vari­ety of good­ies, from pipes and bongs to a wide selec­tion of legal highs and one of the best stocks of cannabis seeds on the inter­net. If you like to party, or know some­one who does, they’re cer­tain to have some­thing desirable.

Of course, you can check out the entire shop for your­self RIGHT HERE, I do have a few rec­om­men­da­tions for you.

Check the Bush­mas­ter Dou­ble Bub­blers on this THIS PAGE. I’ve got the mid­night blue one and I can’t rec­om­mend this pipe enough. It’s only 20 quid and its a real bar­gain, pieces this good nor­mally cost lots more.

I cleaned mine out the other day and it reminded me what a use­ful piece of kit the SPACE CASE GRINDER is…I put all my bud through mine and around twice a year, I scrape out the crys­tals inside. You will be amazed how much you can col­lect, if you use it reg­u­larly to break up your weed. And if you think about it, every­thing you’re col­lect­ing, would prob­a­bly just have been lost. I can’t believe every­one doesn’t use one!

I’ve heard lots of peo­ple com­plain­ing about the cost of RooR glass­ware and I won’t deny that some of their pieces are pricey. That said, you get what you pay for and RooR qual­ity is the best you’ll ever find. But if you don’t want to spend a for­tune, here are a bunch of RooR pieces that all cost under 100 pounds, includ­ing one (that I own) that costs under a ten­ner! That means you can give some­one a piece of pure RooR qual­ity, no mat­ter what your bud­get may be!

I’ll start with the CLASSIC THREE PIECE WATER PIPE, which is a piece that I own. It’s a great look­ing water pipe, well con­structed and it smokes so sweetly, you will love every hit!

How about a RooR gift set, includ­ing a RooR bong for only 65 quid? Check out ROOR GIFT SET 5! And check out the rest of the RooR gift sets RIGHT HERE.

And if you want a full sized, proper RooR? No prob­lem, we can still do that for you and here’s 4 mod­els from the RooR red range, with 3.2mm glass, that cost between 85–100 quid! Go on, check ‘em out RIGHT HERE.

And remem­ber, I said there are RooR pieces under a ten­ner? Check out the MINI-STEAMROLLER, for only £5.95. I’ve got one of these too and its my favourite tiny pipe. It’s per­fect for a quick blast, when you need a lit­tle hit to take the edge off life.

But what RooR gift guide from me could ever be com­plete with­out a shame­less plug for my pretty lit­tle baby, the “RooR Cus­tom 5.0 — northlon­don­hippy deluxe” — the best bong in the world! Of course, I’m biased, because I designed it and it car­ries my name, but trust me I’ve smoked out of loads of pipes and noth­ing hits as well as my bong. It costs a bit more than other bongs, but trust some­one who’s smoked out of it a lot now, its worth every god­damn penny! Treat your­self, or treat some­one you love, you won’t be disapppointed!

The best news about all the good­ies I’ve men­tioned from EDIT is that they have it all in stock right now for imme­di­ate ship­ment and that includes the NLH Deluxe! I know the NLH Deluxes have been hard to come by, since the ini­tial ship­ment sold out, but they’ve got ‘em now!

Xmas doesn’t have to be stress­ful. If you can visit my site, then you can visit Ama­zon or EDIT, or any one of a num­ber of sites which will ship things to you quickly. If you can avoid the shops, the malls and the high street, you’ll make your life a lot eas­ier and isn’t that what we all want? Trust me, you don’t want to lose 2 hours of your life in a car park!

I’ve read a bit about Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. Ron Paul and his rather sen­si­ble, if con­tro­ver­sial views, but see­ing him effort­lessly field ques­tions about drugs with ratio­nal, intel­li­gent, informed replies is a won­der to behold.

My brother sent me this YouTube clip of Mr. Paul being inter­viewed by Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion net­work, ABC’s John Stos­sel and the first two min­utes are well worth your valu­able surf­ing time:

I hate to say it, but this guy hasn’t got a hope in hell of win­ning. I know he’s got loads of sup­port, I know he makes sense, but the pow­ers that be will never allow any­one who talks that straight any­where near the White House! If it looked like he had a chance, they would cook the elec­tion again. Any­way, the chances of him get­ting the nom­i­na­tion from the heavy christian-fundamentalist-ruled Repub­li­can party are slim to none.

It’s a real shame, because it sounds like Ron Paul could make a real dif­fer­ence and Amer­ica would never let some­one with that capa­bil­ity to run the show. Maybe we should all just elect him pres­i­dent of the world instead?

It’s become very clear to me that I’ve already blown my “100 posts in 100 days” chal­lenge. It’s time to aban­don ship, because this captain’s not going down with it.

My inten­tions, as always, were admirable, but as usual I let myself down in the deliv­ery. As much as I would like to post some­thing every sin­gle day, my erratic lifestyle just doesn’t make it pos­si­ble to sit down with the pre­req­ui­site focus and inspi­ra­tion as often as I would like.

To put it more bluntly: I suck.

If this blog was my full time job, then yes I could make sev­eral posts a day. But until this blog can pro­vide me with a six-figure annual income, it won’t be my main focus.

To put this in per­spec­tive, one of the things dis­tract­ing me from blog­ging over the last week was putting together my long-overdue account­ing for my media empire, for tax pur­poses. Hav­ing done the sums this week, I can tell you that I am run­ning my empire at a loss. Being a media tycoon costs me money and not a small amount either. Any rev­enue this blog gen­er­ates is quickly swal­lowed by my expenses.

This is not a cry of poverty, my full time job pro­vides me with ample income and I can afford my media empire losses with­out any hard­ship. I won’t be seek­ing dona­tions to my pay­pal account. I don’t even have a pay­pal account!

As I am the chief spon­sor of my own blog, per­haps I should replace my ban­ner adver­tis­ing with some of my own, but that would be silly, because if you’re already on my site, you don’t need to see adverts for it — you’re already here!

The only money I gen­er­ate from this site is through my affil­i­a­tion with EDIT includ­ing their exclu­sive dis­tri­b­u­tion deal for my beloved “RooR Cus­tom 5.0 northlon­don­hippy deluxe”. If you’re going to shop at EDIT any­way, and you click through my site, you’re hand­ing me 10% of what­ever you spend, so if you want to say thanks the best way any­one can (with cash!), please feel free to do it. I know quite a few of you do that, any­way and I don’t often men­tion this, but again, prep­ping up my taxes has made me take a good look at my finances.

I know I could take on more adver­tis­ing, but I really don’t want to. I sup­pose for the right price, I would con­sider a sin­gle spon­sor with very deep pock­ets, but there’s a higher like­li­hood of me sprout­ing a tail and I don’t expect to be wag­ging one any time soon!

So what else have I been up to this week besides my dreaded taxes? I had a sight test and ordered my very first pair of middle-aged man read­ing glasses. It was either that, or have my arms stretched. Ask your par­ents to explain that one to you.

I also went to my den­tist and had the middle-aged crud scraped off my teeth. It was pre­cisely as pleas­ant as it sounds.

I’m really lucky, I’ve got a good, local NHS den­tist. He’s walk­ing dis­tance, his office is never busy and you can almost always get an appoint­ment. I know there’s sup­posed to be a short­age of NHS den­tists, but dig it I’ve got a groovy one and don’t email me ask­ing for his name. I like the fact that its never busy there, so it will remain my secret.

Tomor­row I’m tak­ing the Yaris in for its annual ser­vice (one year or 10,000 miles), which is tech­ni­cally a bit fucked, because I have only had the car for around six or seven months and I’ve only put less than 3,000 miles on it. Toy­ota say its due because it was new a year ago and they had it on the road as a com­pany car, for all of 1,600 miles. It’s not expen­sive and I can live with­out the car for a day, so what the fuck.

Today, Sun­day, I had a deliv­ery from IKEA. I finally got around to get­ting a new mat­tress. Our bed is around 10 years old and it was time. Luck­ily, you can now shop online with IKEA, which is a very good thing.

The bed frame is still in per­fect con­di­tion, so we saw no need to replace it, but our old mat­tresses were show­ing their age. The bed is a superk­ing size, orig­i­nally from IKEA, so the eas­i­est solu­tion was to get the replace­ments from them as well.

Their web­site was ok, noth­ing fancy and many of the items listed were not actu­ally avail­able to order online, but you could check the stock on the item at your near­est branch. Great, but that defeats the pur­pose of shop­ping online.

I hate going to IKEA, it’s always crowded, it’s always stress­ful and at the end of all that effort, you have to hand your pur­chases over to the inde­pen­dent deliv­ery peo­ple, who if you’re lucky, lug it to you within a few days. Even with the meat­balls from their restau­rant, I’d rather not go if I don’t have to. Thank­fully, the online gods of shop­ping were smil­ing upon me and every­thing I needed to order was avail­able for deliv­ery from the web­site and I checked out.

IKEA phoned a few days later to con­firm my deliv­ery, which was not the date I was given by the web­site at check­out, but a few days later. A Sun­day. That’s quite impres­sive, espe­cially for nor­mal peo­ple with Mon-Fri jobs, but for me it mat­ters far less because of my erratic lifestyle. The mid­dle of last week would have been bet­ter for me.

The deliv­ery was pain­less and the 2 guys who brought me the stuff were cool. Now, all I have to do is wait for the coun­cil to come col­lect the old mat­tresses and my work here is done!

Fol­low­ing on with my con­sumerism, I am being forced to buy some­thing unex­pected — a new sound sys­tem, sort of. My present stereo, a cheap Tech­nics mini-system is hav­ing some seri­ous prob­lems and is prone to cut­ting out com­pletely. A few gen­tle taps on the top and the sound returns, but this is not a sus­tain­able solu­tion. I’ve been forced to research AV amps and receivers.

Fuck me, its con­fus­ing. Con­sumer audio has become a mine­field of com­plex­ity which has left my head slightly spin­ning. I’ve finally set­tled on a model from Pio­neer, which I haven’t actu­ally ordered yet, chiefly on its fea­tures, price and most impor­tantly, avail­abil­ity. It’s a VSX-917V if that means any­thing at all to you, 7.1, HDMI switch­ing, blah, blah, blah.

I haven’t even got the space for 5.1 sound, nev­er­mind 7.1, but I am think­ing I might opt for 3.1 — cen­ter, left, right and sub­woofer. I’m not sure yet, I haven’t really gone as far as speak­ers. My sim­ple plan is to use some old speak­ers ini­tially, as I expect my old stereo to die any day and I’ll need to make a quick swap to the new one. If we ever move house, this sys­tem can grow a bit.

I’ve got three audio sources, which are all dig­i­tal, SKY+, my Sony DVD recorder/player and my Mac mini. Oh wait, I have a fourth ana­logue sig­nal, which feeds out of my Bravia’s Free­view receiver.

My biggest prob­lem, as always, is space. My new amp, when it comes, won’t fit where my old mini sys­tem stereo is, which means I’m going to have to tear down my entire media cen­tre and rebuild it from scratch, includ­ing all the cabling. What fun!

On the plus side, the new AV Amp will do all my audio switch­ing for me. At the moment, audio switch­ing is the one weak link in my sys­tem as it requires you to get off the sofa, go to the media cen­tre and man­u­ally turn the dial. That means chang­ing sources will all hap­pen at the touch of a but­ton, audio and video because I have a Log­itech Har­mony 885 remote.

Oh shit, I will have to repro­gram the Har­mony when I install the new amp. Damn, this stuff is all so com­pli­cated, luck­ily for me, I’m very techno-friendly!

The other thing I have been research­ing is espresso machines. We cur­rently got a combo cof­fee maker, a big drip pot on one side and a steam espresso maker on the other. I’ve never, ever used the drip maker and the espresso side makes really lame coffee.

In doing my research I’ve dis­cov­ered that steam pow­ered espresso mak­ers burn the cof­fee because the water is too hot when it is forced through the fil­ter. What a true cof­fee lover wants, or rather needs, is a proper pump machine.

Pump espresso mak­ers aren’t cheap, but it sounds like if you want to make proper espresso, its your only choice. And if you are going to use it every day, which I would, it would pay for itself in no time.

Think about it, a decent cap­puc­cino costs around two quid or £2.50 from a cof­fee bar. Let’s say £2 which is on the low side I expect, for a tall one, every day for a year, would be £730 and the cof­fee mak­ers I’m look­ing at cost a lot less than that. I haven’t fac­tored in the actual cof­fee, milk or sugar costs, but they would not be that sig­nif­i­cant com­pared to the cost of the machine.

I’m very tempted by a Gag­gia, they are well reviewed and extremely pop­u­lar, but I haven’t decided yet.

This will sound silly, but nor­mally I con­sult Which Mag­a­zine on pur­chases such as this. I’ve yet to go wrong by fol­low­ing their Best Buy advice and as a con­sum­mate con­sumer, I’d like to con­tinue this guid­ance, but Which has not reviewed them in over 2 years! Times change, mod­els change, their Best Buys from two years ago just aren’t valid any more!

What’s a cof­fee lov­ing hippy to do? I might actu­ally have to decide for myself with­out the ben­e­fit of advice from the experts who test all these machines side by side and report on the one that’s best value for money. I’m all about value for money, dammit! What if I buy one that comes up poorly in their next sur­vey? Then what? Do I just throw it away and buy the one they tell me to or do I suf­fer for years with a sub­stan­dard device?

These are the prob­lems that cur­rently plague me. It’s a tough old exis­tence, fraught with hard­ship at every turn. Mod­ern life presents many chal­lenges, but con­fronting my cof­fee conun­drum could just very well be the most sig­nif­i­cant dif­fi­culty ever faced by a cap­puc­cino sipping-hippy. Well, that or decid­ing whether or not to switch off my father’s life-support machine, I’d say its a toss up.