The northlondonhippy

Archive for April 29th, 2008

The entire month of April slipped quickly and effort­lessly through my fin­gers. I say “effort­lessly” because that is pre­cisely how much effort I’ve put into my site this month and for that I am ashamed.

You shouldn’t have to pay the price for this and you won’t, which is why I am extend­ing the dead­line on my “bub­bler con­test” until the 1st of June, so there is still plenty more time to enter. And don’t worry if you’ve already entered, your email still counts very much so and you will con­tinue to have an equal chance with every­one else.

I’ve had loads of emails with ques­tions about the con­test, which I will answer here in a mini-FAQ:

Is the con­test for real? YES

What’s in it for you? SELF PROMOTION

Do I just send you an email to enter? YES

Will you really post me the bub­bler if I win? YES

How will you choose the win­ners? LITTLE PIECES OF PAPER WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS WILL BE PUT IN A BOWL AND I WILL WITHDRAW 16 OF THEM, ONE FOR EACH PRIZE, FROM 1ST ON DOWN.

Will you announce the win­ners? JUST THEIR INITIALS AND WILL CONTACT EACH ONE INDIVIDUALLY TO ASK FOR THEIR MAILING ADDRESS

And that’s it for now. Get entering!

While I’m here, a quick update on why I haven’t been here. I’ve been work­ing too much, I’ve been dis­tracted by other things, most notably a book which I will review at some point here, because it deserves to be read and I’ve been sort­ing out the usual bull­shit at my north Lon­don lair.

My SKY+ box died a cou­ple of weeks ago and I thought it was gone for good, but I was able to give it a mas­ter reset and get­ting it going again…for about 2 more weeks before it well and truly went to that great gad­get shop in the SKY. It was around 5–6 years old, an orig­i­nal V1 Pace box and I’m sur­prised it lasted as long as it did.

I booked a call out with SKY, which costs £65 and included a replace­ment box and I really didn’t have a choice. Well, I did, I could have used this as an oppor­tu­nity to upgrade to SKY HD, but I’m still not con­vinced its worth the extra dosh with so lit­tle proper HD con­tent available.

The SKY engi­neer was cool and it took him all of ten min­utes to swap the boxes and pair the new one up with my card. The box he installed is a PACE V3, with an 80gb hard drive, though I think that some of it is par­ti­tioned for SKY Any­time, which is where SKY choose pro­grammes they think are the best of the week and record them to your hard drive in the back­ground. It can be dis­abled if you don’t like it, but I thought I would give it a go and see what its like. I’m not con­vinced if you switch it off that it will free up the other half of the hard drive for my record­ings, but its worth look­ing into if the SKY selected shows are crap.

The new box is about a third the size of my old one, its really dinky. It’s also a bit nois­ier than the old one, either because of the fan or the hard drive and I’m not cer­tain which. It seems to work well so far and isn’t much dif­fer­ent from the old one, except for the afore­men­tioned ANYTIME feature.

It’s not just a device that died, but I found out last night that one of my mother’s sis­ters, my favourite aunt passed away over the week­end. She was nearly 84 and it sounds like she was sur­rounded by loved ones and went peace­fully. What­ever the fuck that means.

I don’t like many of my rel­a­tives, and to be hon­est I down­right despise quite a few of them, but not this par­tic­u­lar aunt. She was really spe­cial and yes, I know peo­ple always say nice things about the dead, but I would have said the same last week, when she was among the liv­ing. She was con­sis­tently kind, gen­er­ous and lov­ing and was beloved by many, myself and my younger brother among them.

I hadn’t seen her in years, as is true of 99% of my fam­ily and its prob­a­bly been 4–5 years since I spoke to her on the tele­phone. I would have liked to chat with her, but she’d become quite deaf and the tele­phone wasn’t really an option.

One of my ear­li­est child­hood mem­o­ries, which is vague and hazy as I would expect of a minor event prior to my 3rd birth­day, over 40 years ago to be, is of my aunt vis­it­ing us in a house we lived in, in 1965. She took me for a walk up to a nearby super­mar­ket and I can just remem­ber being excited by this unusual out­ing with an aunt that I loved and trusted. It’s just a small mem­ory, but I still carry it around with me to this day.

Good bye my dear, sweet aunt, you will always be remem­bered fondly by the many peo­ple whose lives you touched, includ­ing mine.