The northlondonhippy

Archive for December 9th, 2007

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.