The northlondonhippy

Archive for July, 2008

My cat died sud­denly yes­ter­day. She was old and in decline for the last few months and I did know the end was near­ing, but it was still a shock to have it hap­pen like this.

One minute before she died, she was eat­ing. I’d helped her to her dish in the kitchen and left her there, hap­pily munch­ing away and returned to the liv­ing room. All of the sud­den, one of my other cats leapt with a start and I heard the sound of some­thing falling over in the hall­way. I thought it was just some post com­ing through the let­ter slot in the front door. I was wrong.

It was my cat, she’d fallen over with what I am fairly sure was a stroke. She was gone in about 2 min­utes, but I was there with her.

She was around 16 years old, but its pos­si­ble she could have been older. Mrs. H got her in 1994 as a fully grown cat, I knew her for over 11 years.

Before Mrs. H got her from the local shel­ter, she had been liv­ing in the local mar­ket, exist­ing on scraps and hand-outs from the traders. She loved peo­ple food and if it was good enough to be on your plate, it was good enough for her — she’s eat any­thing, fruit, veg, meat, cheese, bread, you name it, though of course we mainly fed her cat food.

On Mon­day night, she had cheese from a pizza and licked the rem­nants of a bowl of choco­late ice cream, which was her absolute favourite.

I appre­ci­ate if you’re not a pet lover that this post is prob­a­bly tedious read­ing for you. I am a pet lover, I’ve had dogs and cats my entire life. The rela­tion­ships you have with your pets are some of the most hon­est rela­tion­ships you can have.

My cat hadn’t been well for the last few months. She gone mostly blind, her appetite was decreas­ing and her back legs were get­ting weaker. I would be lying if I said I didn’t con­sider putting her down and my one real regret is that I didn’t trust my instincts. The day before she died I thought about it and even yes­ter­day it crossed my mind more than once. I could have spared her a brief, yet hor­ri­ble death.

Dying is hor­ri­ble and wit­ness­ing my cat’s pass­ing was dis­tress­ing. While it was mer­ci­fully brief, my cat fought and strug­gled to her very last breath, but that’s what she was like. She was a fighter and didn’t take shit from any­one, not even Death, though in the end, Death always wins.

I spent the last cou­ple of days talk­ing to my cat, telling her how much I would miss her when she was gone. I really did sense that the end was extremely near. My other three cats were all dis­tressed as well when she died and could sense some­thing was very wrong. And even though I cleaned up the spot in the hall­way where she passed, they are still sniff­ing around it. They know, even if they don’t understand.

Pets are part of your fam­ily, they have per­son­al­i­ties and strong char­ac­ters and are loyal and faith­ful com­pan­ions, dogs and cats alike. When you lose one, it hurts and hurts deeply.

I can remem­ber when I was a child and we lost a pet, my mother being so very dis­traught that she would always announce with great author­ity and final­ity, that this was the end and she would have no more pets, ever, because los­ing them is so painful. It’s not fair that they have such brief life spans!

I’ve lost 2 cats in the last year and it doesn’t get any eas­ier. I’m lucky now, the three I have are all quite young and I hope it will be a good long time before I have to face los­ing any more.

I’m going to miss my sweet lit­tle girl so much, I already do now and she hasn’t even been gone 24 hours.

In truth, she was partly gone already, as I watched her health decline, espe­cially over the last week or so. I know its a cliché, but she is at peace now. Every day was increas­ingly becom­ing a strug­gle for her. She doesn’t have to strug­gle any more.

I hate death. It sucks, but I think the dying part is the worst of all.

After all the whing­ing and com­plain­ing over the last week about my prob­lems get­ting my new iPhone 3G from O2, I thought I would share some of my ini­tial impres­sions of it.

Yes, that’s right…I’ve got my brand new, shiny, lick­able, 16gb black iPhone 3G. I exclu­sively revealed this excit­ing bit of news on Face­Book last Thurs­day when it was deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair.

And again, yes, you read that right, I posted it on my Face­Book pro­file, as a sta­tus update.

Sta­tus updates on Face­Book are a lot like Twit­ter posts. It’s another rea­son why you should be my Face­Book friend!

Even though it was 6 days later than expected, I was still very pleased to be receiv­ing iPhone 3G and couldn’t wait to unbox it and fire it up.

I didn’t buy the orig­i­nal iPhone, as it was only released offi­cially here in the UK around 8 months ago. My rea­son­ing was sound, or so I thought. As I expected a 2nd gen­er­a­tion of iPhone to come out around now, I didn’t want to be in a posi­tion of want­ing to buy it so soon after get­ting the 1st gen.

How was I to know that O2 were going to be hand­ing out cheap (or free) upgrades to exist­ing cus­tomers? Doh!

I was bit dis­ap­pointed that Apple left out a cou­ple of good­ies that shipped with the orig­i­nal iPhone — the dock and the microfi­bre cloth to wipe the screen. The lack of the microfi­bre cloth is a real silly miss, they can’t cost that much when you’re buy­ing a mil­lion of them.

The touch­screen does pick up a lot of fin­ger­prints, though they are only really notice­able when the the screen is off. When the screen is illu­mi­nated, its very bright and you really don’t see any.

The screen is actu­ally glo­ri­ously bright, extremely crisp and pin sharp. I could eas­ily watch a full length film or tele­vi­sion pro­gramme on it and prob­a­bly will. The multi-touch con­trol of the device is noth­ing short of astound­ing. It’s extremely intu­itive and very accurate.

The iPod func­tions are also impres­sive and it blows away my old 60gb 5th gen iPod with video.

I’ve also set up sev­eral email accounts on my iPhone. If you want to reach me when I am on the go, you can con­tact northlondonhippy@gmail.com or northlondonhippy@yahoo.co.uk and I’ll receive them pretty god­damn quickly! You might even get a mobile reply…

I’ve also got the Face­Book mobile appli­ca­tion, AIM for instant mes­sag­ing and I’ve been play­ing around on Twit­ter with that cool app called Twin­kle. I’m northlon­don­hippy on all of those ser­vices too, though Twit­ter reg­is­tered my user­name as n_londonhippy because they don’t give you enough char­ac­ters for my full online name.

Surf­ing the web on the iPhone is some­thing else I’ve spent a good deal of time doing and its the first hand-held device that gives you any sort of use­ful inter­net expe­ri­ence. I’ve accessed the net from var­i­ous mobile phones and an old Palm Pilot of mine and I’ve always found it sorely lack­ing. Spend ten min­utes doing the same on the iPhone 3G and you will won­der how you lived with­out it. I’ve used both wi-fi and the 3G net­work and pages load very quickly too.

I read that the new iPhone 3G has about as much com­put­ing power as a lap­top made in 2003; sim­i­lar pro­cess­ing power and stor­age is what I took that to mean. Think about it — I’m now car­ry­ing some­thing as pow­er­ful as a five-year-old lap­top in my pocket now. It blows my mind!

There really are only 2 major dif­fer­ences between the new iPhone 3G and the orig­i­nal iPhone (and yes, I know there are plenty of minor changes, just humour me, please). The inclu­sion of 3G net­work access and GPS.

The GPS is noth­ing short of amaz­ing. Even sit­ting here , deep inside my north Lon­don lair, not near any win­dows and it still knows where I am with fright­en­ing accu­racy. The map soft­ware lets you know how cer­tain it is of your loca­tion, by using var­i­ously sized cir­cles to indi­cate your approx­i­mate loca­tion, until it is cer­tain and then places a push-pin like marker where you are. Out­side with no obstruc­tions, when the iPhone can see the sky, you get a remark­ably accu­rate read­ing of your loca­tion, so much so that if you walk a bit, the blue dot adjusts to your new position.

The loca­tion data isn’t only utilised by the map appli­ca­tion, but any app can grab it. This includes geo-tagging of your pho­tos and with some Twit­ter apps, can include your loca­tion so you can track peo­ple nearby. Spooky!

Can some­one please release some turn-by-turn, good enough to work in my car, nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware? I’ve read that Tom­Tom have already writ­ten the app, so why can’t I buy it already? My old Tom­Tom is mas­sive, com­pared to my tiny, slim lit­tle iPhone, if I didn’t have to carry the Tom­Tom with me, it would be a real bonus and my pock­ets would thank you.

And while I’m at it with a wish­list, could some­one please design, man­u­fac­ture and sell the following:

A pow­ered dock for use in my car, that has a suction-cup wind­screen mount, so I can posi­tion the iPhone like a Sat­Nav, plus a built-in, sophis­ti­cated FM trans­mit­ter that scans to find the best fre­quency and then beams audio to my in-car stereo, in high quality.

My super-dooper in-car dock/transmitter/mount is not actu­ally such a big ask and it would sell like prover­bial hot­cakes. Bun­dle it with a code to get a nav­i­ga­tion app and you would prob­a­bly sell 500,000 of them in the first year alone. I’m giv­ing you a mul­ti­mil­lion pound idea here, for free, so if one of you do this, at least cut me in for a slice of the pie. Or just send me one of these cool in-car suction-cup, FM-transmitter thin­gies for free. It’s the least you could do!

There is a third thing that sep­a­rates the new iPhone 3G from its pre­de­ces­sor, though you can upgrade the orig­i­nal to the new 2.0 soft­ware and enjoy it as well. I’m talk­ing about third party appli­ca­tions which you can access via iTunes or on the iPhone itself. Some apps are free, oth­ers cost. So far, I’ve only installed the freebies.

I’m not being cheap, its just none of the pay apps have really appealed to me and the best ones seem to be games and I’m not that both­ered. When I see one I like the look of (nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware!!!!!), I’ll hap­pily part with my readies.

There are so many appli­ca­tions avail­able already that I’m not going to actu­ally talk about any of the spe­cific ones now, but I’d rather come back at another time to give them proper attention.

What can’t be denied is that this is the real game changer with the iPhone 3G, the abil­ity to do so many cool things with it. And that’s just today, who knows what tomorrow’s killer appli­ca­tion for the iPhone might be…perhaps one of you out there in inter­net­land is already work­ing on the next HUGE thing! Just whis­per it in my ear, before your start-up has its IPO, so I can get in on the ground floor and make a lit­tle dirty lucre too…!

The one thing no-one seems to ever men­tion when they write about the iPhone is the phone itself. I think that shows you how far we come with per­sonal tech­nol­ogy and gad­gets, that the voice-communication func­tion of some­thing with the word “phone” in its name, is taken for granted and doesn’t mat­ter that much.

It does to me and one of my con­cerns about the iPhone was how it per­formed as a basic mobile telephone.

It turns out I had noth­ing to fear, the iPhone is a very robust cell­phone. Calls over my net­work on 3G are clear and the con­nec­tion seems strong. The speak­er­phone func­tion really works too, dialling a con­tact or a phone num­ber is also very sim­ple and works very well.

What’s inter­est­ing about the iPhone is the many stan­dard mobile phone func­tions it DOESN’T do. There’s no MMS mes­sag­ing, so no send­ing pho­tos as text mes­sages. There’s no way to for­ward a text mes­sage either. The iPhone has Blue­Tooth, but the only thing it uses it for is to con­nect a wire­less head­set. You can’t send a photo to your com­puter, or to another phone, you can’t exchange con­tacts with another phone, you can’t even Blue­jack strangers!

I don’t really under­stand why Apple has locked these func­tions out. At the very least, let us send pho­tos over blue­tooth. And synch­ing notes from my Mac would be use­ful too!

Some­thing else I don’t under­stand is the lack of cut & paste. It couldn’t be that hard to get a clip­board like func­tion­al­ity run­ning on it. It’s sup­posed to be the same soft­ware that runs on Macs, so what’s the prob­lem? I know some Apple big-wig men­tioned that it was on their list of things to do and they just didn’t have time to get to it, but that comes off sound­ing lame. There’s got to be some mar­ket­ing rea­son for with­hold­ing this func­tion, I just haven’t a clue what it could be!

All of these cool things do come at a cost and I don’t mean your monthly bill, though they might sting a bit too. I mean bat­tery life, or the lack of it. Surf­ing the net, check­ing emails, play­ing with apps, all drain the bat­tery far faster than you would like and its very easy to see it drop 50% in a cou­ple of hours.

I could see car­ry­ing a spare dock cable and attach­ing it to the near­est PC at every oppor­tu­nity. It’s another rea­son why I want a pow­ered dock for the car. I don’t see how I would get through a full day of seri­ous usage with­out top­ping up the bat­tery a cou­ple of times.

So am I happy with my new iPhone?

What do you think? It’s eas­ily the coolest, most pow­er­ful device I’ve ever had the plea­sure of own­ing. I’m look­ing for­ward to 18 months of deliri­ous joy as I find new and fun things to do with it.

And at the end of 18 months, I can only imag­ine what sort of iPhone I will be upgrad­ing to then! It will prob­a­bly trans­port me to a vir­tual new real­ity where I’m the king of the uni­verse and every­one wor­ships me as a liv­ing god. Now, that’s a app I’d buy!

If you’re like me, you receive a lot of emails from bankers in Nige­ria, offer­ing you the con­tents of some­one else’s sub­stan­tial bank account after they died, leav­ing no heirs. All you need to do is send them enough of your money to cover the trans­fer fees and a bazil­lion quid will be all yours.

It’s called advanced fee fraud, oth­er­wise known as the “419 Scam” and its believed to have orig­i­nated in West Africa.

I have many email addresses and a fair few of them are pub­lished on the inter­net, which means I get dozens of these emails every day. It always amazes me how many of them get past the myr­iad of spam fil­ters allegedly pro­tect­ing my inboxes.

That’s why I found the results of the fol­low­ing BBC inves­ti­ga­tion so very interesting:

“I was vic­tim of a Niger­ian foot­ball conmen”

They’ve started to scam money from peo­ple closer to home.

They’ve also started scam­ming poor people.

I can only guess that less of us rich peo­ple in the West are falling for these scams, so they’ve had to turn to aspir­ing young foot­ballers to compensate.

Read­ing that report just made me sad.

It’s easy to exploit people’s dreams. You would be amazed how sim­ple it is to con­vince some­one of almost any­thing, as long as you wrap it in the words they need to hear the most.

There’s a pop­u­lar scam involv­ing aspir­ing mod­els and actors, where some­one pre­tend­ing to be an agent, offers to rep­re­sent them but first they need to get a photo port­fo­lio (or audi­tion video) pro­duced for lots of money. Nat­u­rally, the agent can arrange every­thing, because his brother-in-law is the photographer.

No agent would ever charge you money or force you to get pho­tos done through them. A real agent would offer to rep­re­sent you for a per­cent­age of future earnings.

Of course, they sell it all bet­ter than I just did, by telling you how beau­ti­ful or tal­ented you are and how they have an eye for spot­ting future stars and baby, that’s you!

Where do I sign? How much for the pho­tos? Do you really think I will be famous?

Fame is so over­rated. Given the choice, I’d much rather be seri­ously wealthy and anony­mous, than famous and poor.

I don’t think I have to worry about being rich or well known. At least not at this rate.

Unless you’re an eccen­tric bil­lion­aire who’s taken a bit of a shine to a cer­tain north Lon­don based hippy of ques­tion­able moral fibre…? I could do with a patron. How about a cou­ple of hun­dred grand a year, plus expenses?

Weed and high end elec­tron­ics ain’t cheap, you know!

Man, am I pissed off!

I’m still sit­ting here with­out an iPhone and I think every sin­gle one of the many peo­ple I’ve spo­ken to at 02 have lied to me about it, repeatedly.

I’m fuck­ing fuming!

Imag­ine if I had to take Fri­day off because I was told IT was com­ing, only to be told on Fri­day that IT was com­ing on Mon­day. Imag­ine if today was my sec­ond day of miss­ing out on work, to wait for a deliv­ery that’s near as I can tell, not coming.

Now imag­ine I was look­ing at tak­ing a third day off to actu­ally receive my iPhone. Wouldn’t you be feel­ing homicidal?

I have the urge to crush, kill and destroy! Thanks O2!

Luck­ily, I haven’t had to take any time off work; I was off on Fri­day any­way and while I am work­ing tonight, Mrs. H is off today, so it wouldn’t have been a prob­lem if it was com­ing today.

But its not grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

This morning’s O2 liar is “inves­ti­gat­ing” why my order hasn’t been shipped yet. She says the “stock hasn’t been released”, which is bull­shit, because I was told on Weds that it was fol­low­ing my credit check. She says it could be still sit­ting in their ware­house, await­ing clear­ance for shipment…

As fuck­ing if!

There prob­a­bly isn’t a 16gb iPhone 3G to be had right now in the entire coun­try. The chances of a stray one, just sit­ting on a shelf in a ware­house with my name on it, await­ing someone’s green light is laugh­ably absurd.

I’ve just had a call back from O2…they still don’t know if I have an iPhone wait­ing for me. Their “sys­tem” is giv­ing them mixed sig­nals and its not clear what’s going on. How impres­sive is that?

The woman who phoned me back says she will keep an eye on my order all day and will phone back if it is shipped out today for deliv­ery tomorrow.

Put it this way, I’m not going to sit by the tele­phone wait­ing for that call.

I don’t think I’ve ever put so much effort into spend­ing my own money. This is beyond a joke. I wish I could go to another net­work and get one, O2 appear to be shite!

I have iWor­ries over my brand new, shiny, lick­able iPhone 3G.

iDon’t think its com­ing today.

And ok, ok, enough with the iWord jokes. They are wear­ing a bit iThin now.

As I pre­vi­ously posted, I was assured on Wednes­day that my iPhone would be deliv­ered today, but that now appears not to be the case.

Accord­ing to O2’s web­site, I should have had a text mes­sage before 6pm yes­ter­day, con­firm­ing deliv­ery today. I didn’t get that text. Fur­ther more, a mate of mine who is get­ting an iPhone 3G as an upgrade has been able to track his pack­age all the way to DHL. My order is show­ing online as still “in progress”.

I’ve already phoned O2 this morn­ing. Yes I am sad.

The rep I spoke to told me they are still hav­ing prob­lems with their web­site and data­base and she couldn’t con­firm if it was com­ing today or Mon­day. She said the stock had been allo­cated, but it didn’t appear to be shipped yet, but because of their inter­nal prob­lems, she couldn’t be sure. Her feel­ing was that a Mon­day deliv­ery was much more likely, but again she assured me I was def­i­nitely get­ting one and told me not to buy one at the shop.

As if the shops have any left by now! I’ve had reports from my spies of small (10–30 peo­ple) queues at every O2 and Car Phone Ware­house shop they passed this morn­ing. With the very lim­ited stock num­bers, I’m not the only poten­tially dis­ap­pointed per­son in the UK today.

Of course, I could be pleas­antly sur­prised by the arrival of my brand new tech-toy, but I am not feel­ing con­fi­dent at all.

It seems like O2 screwed this up roy­ally and they should never have attempted to pre-sell them online. If they kept all the stock they had for the shops, I’d prob­a­bly be stroking mine right now. Instead, I fool­ishly believed that pre-ordering as soon as they went on sale would secure me one on launch day. Oh what a twat I am!

Instead of hav­ing a huge cel­e­bra­tion of gadgetery-geekery, I’ve spent the bet­ter part of this week suf­fer­ing from a bad case of tech-stress and cus­tomer ser­vice rage.

So there you go, its 9:30am on the 11th of July, inter­na­tional iPhone day and rather than play­ing with my new toy, I’m sit­ting here play­ing with myself and that’s no where near as sat­is­fy­ing as it sounds!

Please Mr. iPhone man, deliver mine today! I’ve waited oh so long and I’ve been oh so patient! I deserve to have all my iPhone 3G dreams come true!

Don’t I?

Doesn’t every­one?

Hey ho hip­py­fans and inter­net surfers everywhere!

Wel­come to my hum­ble online home, though today I wanted to tell you all a bit about my sum­mer res­i­dence on Facebook.

I’m not on Face­book with my real name, but I am on there as the northlon­don­hippy — or as I am tech­ni­cally reg­is­tered on there: North Londonhippy.

I’ve been a mem­ber of Face­book for a few months now, but only recently have I decided to take a proper inter­est. I’ve joined a hand­ful of pro-cannabis groups and added the LastFM appli­ca­tion, so you can keep an eye my cur­rent musi­cal tastes.

LastFM is con­nected to iTunes on my Mac Mini, which is how I play my music through my ampli­fier and it keeps an eye on every track I play. You can see my top ten lists on my Face­book profile.

On LastFM, my login is n_londonhippy, if you want track me down there.

But if you’re a keen Face­booker and like mak­ing friends with (pseudo) internet-celebrities, I’m ready and wait­ing to accept all requests.

I don’t have many friends on there, but that’s because I haven’t been pur­su­ing them, but I am now.

This is a an open call to all of you to befriend me on Face­book! I’ll be pop­ping over there for the occa­sional sta­tus update and amus­ing com­ment on my wall. It’s also a place you can mes­sage me, if you pre­fer to con­tact me that way rather than via email.

So go, impress your friends, daz­zle your fam­ily when you pro­claim to the world that you are internet-friends with the world’s number-one, north Lon­don based hippy of ques­tion­able moral fibre! The pride that will fill your heart will be overwhelming!

That’s not wish­ful think­ing, the title up there. That’s what O2 told me on the phone today.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I man­aged to get a real live human on the phone, pro­vided the info they needed for my credit check and had it con­firmed that a black, 16gb iPhone 3G will be deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair on Friday.

I’ll believe it when I see it, and so will you, because I’m going to post some pic­tures of it once its here.

Tune in again on Fri­day to see if O2 make one par­tic­u­larly demand­ing cus­tomer in north Lon­don very happy. I’m count­ing the sec­onds already.

Back in Sep­tem­ber, I wrote a lit­tle piece on why my phone was not an iPhone, yet.

But soon, my phone will be an iPhone.

iHope.

iPray.

iDream.

iPre-registered…

…for the brand new, shiny lick­able iPhone 3G just as soon as O2 let me. Yes­ter­day, I received an email advis­ing me that I could pre-order one of these lit­tle babies online and it would be deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair on Fri­day, which is the offi­cial launch day for this lat­est ver­sion of the world’s favourite touch­screen mobile.

Sorted!

Or so I thought.

I placed the order before 8:30am yes­ter­day, put in all my details and saw the con­for­ma­tion screen with my order num­ber. They said I would receive an email with all of these details as well.

I’m still wait­ing for that email to arrive.

In O2’s FAQs, they say you can email them your PAC code, from your pre­vi­ous net­work and they can add it to your account, so I did.

The reply I received was a bit surprising.

I need to men­tion that this reply to my email wasn’t spot­ted by me until many hours later, because I slept all day, because I was between shifts.

I still am, so there will be another snooze very soon.

While I was sleep­ing, O2’s entire online order­ing sys­tem was melt­ing down into a steam­ing pud­dle of poo.

They were over­whelmed by the num­ber orders being placed, or “vic­tims of their own suc­cess” as I am sure some O2 spokesper­son will be stat­ing in front of a TV cam­era very soon. That’s what all com­pa­nies say when they can’t keep up with demand; its an oldie but a goodie.

So any­way, I wake up and wait­ing for me is an actual reply from an actual human O2 employee, who apol­o­gised for the lack of a facil­ity to input my PAC code when I placed my order and then explained what I needed to do with it (all after I receive the iPhone 3G) AND then went on to share an extremely impor­tant fact…

“Your order (on-xxxxxxxxx) for the 16Gb (Giga­bytes) iPhone 3G is cur­rently out of stock. You’ll receive your order on or after 11 July 2008.”

The key words in that sen­tence are:
– out of stock
– on or after

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

FUCK!

You have no idea how deeply my lit­tle heart sank at this most dis­tress­ing and unpleas­ant turn of events.

I ordered my iPhone 3G less than 30 mins after they went on sale and it sounds like there’s a bet­ter than aver­age chance I will be sit­ting here all day on Fri­day, star­ing out my win­dow for a courier that will never come.

Oh the horror!

I’ve been wait­ing a seri­ously long time for my iPhone 3G, for­go­ing the orig­i­nal ver­sion which I could have had last autumn…and if I did get that one, I would be get­ting a free upgrade to the new model, just for sign­ing a new 18 month contract.

These ain’t tears of joy stain­ing my key­board, trust me.

So I wait and I won­der. Is there an iPhone 3G sit­ting in a ware­house some­where with “the northlon­don­hippy” on printed on the label!

I hope not, because there’s no way they’d know where to deliver it, but my real world name and proper address might be better.

You get the idea any­way, either I ordered early enough to have them allo­cate me one, or they have so few that they ran out in like 10–15 min­utes of online trad­ing and I’m screwed.

No one knows for cer­tain how many iPhone 3G’s are even avail­able, O2 and Apple have remained silent on this issue, at least accord­ing to the var­i­ous news­pa­per reports I read this morn­ing. The clos­est I got to any sort of detail was that one news­pa­per thought half the iPhone 3Gs were being pre-sold online and the other half were head­ing to O2 shops around the UK. How do you play the odds on that one?

So here’s my next quandary, do I can­cel my online order and gam­ble that I will have bet­ter luck at 8am on Fri­day at my local O2 shop? Will there be a queue? Will there be enough to go around? Will I get mugged on my way back home, because crim­i­nals read the news too?

I don’t have the answer to any of those ques­tions, except that last one…I would die or kill to pro­tect my brand new, shiny, lick­able iPhone 3G, so you best think twice before you attempt to pil­fer it from me!

I’ve got mixed feel­ings about O2 already and I’ve only been a (non active) cus­tomer of theirs for only 24 hours.

On the one hand, I’ve had a per­sonal reply to my emailed ques­tion, but on the other hand, they have not con­firmed my order by email, as they said they would, nor given me any sort of update on my order’s progress.

In light of the mas­sive media atten­tion this launch has seen and will likely see over the next week, you would think O2 would be pre­pared for a sit­u­a­tion like this. Hold­ing emails and press state­ments would be out there already to coun­ter­act all the neg­a­tive infor­ma­tion I’ve seen about short­ages and poor cus­tomer service.

Maybe they should hire me to do their PR.

Then again, they don’t have to do any­thing. It seems we’re all slaver­ing like rabid dogs at the prospect of own­ing the lat­est iPhone and no mat­ter how badly we’re treated, we still want one.

It’s not like we can get one else­where, thanks to O2’s exclu­sive deal with Apple, we have no real choice.

I’m no dif­fer­ent, I’m will­ing to jump through mul­ti­ple hoops of fire and swear an oath to satan if I have to, as long as I’m clutch­ing mine this Friday.

Ok, I know I’ve already sworn sev­eral oaths to satan, one more’s not going to make a blind bit of difference.

As long as I get my god­damn iPhone 3G on Fri­day, I don’t care about any­thing else!

Please oh great gods of high tech­nol­ogy, may you be smil­ing upon me, your most wor­thy and devoted disciple!

Just gimme my god­damn iPhone, goddammit!