The northlondonhippy

Archive for August, 2008

I’m sit­ting here watch­ing TV, await­ing con­fir­ma­tion that Gov Sarah Palin of Alaska is to be John McCain’s run­ning mate.

Who?

I’ve never heard of her either, but I can already tell you she is 44 years old, a first term gov­er­nor and the mother of 5 chil­dren. She’s a “hockey mom” what­ever that is; she loves guns and is conservative.

And?

And its a fuck­ing mas­ter­stroke of polit­i­cal the­atre. With this one slick move, McCain has just stolen Obama’s post con­ven­tion thun­der. Not only that, but Palin’s gen­der will pull in lots of for­mer Hillary Clin­ton sup­port­ers — and she prob­a­bly shouldn’t, since she most likely has noth­ing in com­mon with Hillary or her positions.

I bet the Obama cam­paign is col­lec­tively shit­ting them­selves right now. They shouldn’t be.

The Repub­li­can party is hardly the party of fem­i­nism and this very cal­cu­lated maneu­ver by McCain should not fool any­one. It shouldn’t, but it will.

All any­one needs to know is that both McCain and Palin are “pro-life”, a term I despise. What they really are, are anti-choice on the sub­ject of abor­tion and they don’t think a woman has the right to decide what is best for her body and her life and that’s just plain wrong.

If you don’t agree with hav­ing an abor­tion, then don’t have one, but fuck off if you think you should be able to dic­tate the same to any­one else.

Palin is from Alaska, a favourite state for big oil com­pa­nies. Think Bush and Texas, its about the same.

Who knows? Maybe I’m wrong and Palin will bring in a new sense of fem­i­nism to the GOP. And pigs might fly!

All of this smacks cyn­i­cally of fear and pan­der­ing and the sort of des­per­a­tion I never expected to see from the Repub­li­cans. She may be per­fectly qual­i­fied to be a heart­beat any­way from the pres­i­dency, any­thing is pos­si­ble. Who even knew she was on the short list?

The one thing I am cer­tain of is that this cam­paign just got really fuck­ing inter­est­ing and the next cou­ple of months are going to be fun fun FUN!

After my recent flurry of posts about my new iPhone 3G, I’ve noticed lots of new vis­i­tors attracted to my site by this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject. With the rumours of Apple plan­ning on shift­ing 45 mil­lion more of them next year its likely to remain a pop­u­lar topic for some time.

And with good rea­son as the iPhone is the most pow­er­ful pocket-sized device avail­able so far thanks to the abil­ity to add addi­tional appli­ca­tions that extend the func­tion­al­ity nearly to infin­ity. It truly is a Swiss Army Knife of gadgets.

As a result of my recent health prob­lems, I’ve pretty much had the last month with noth­ing but time on my hands and my iPhone in my hands. I’ve barely put it down, its the first thing I fon­dle when I wake up in the morn­ing and the last thing I stroke before drift­ing off to sleep.

As much as I adore my iPhone, and believe me I do, I’m not going to lie to you about the smooth­ness of the expe­ri­ence. I’ve been suf­fer­ing with some of the issues and prob­lems you may have read about; apps crash­ing on launch, apps and updates not installing prop­erly and the dreaded poor sig­nal on the 3G net­work, but even with these nig­gles, it is still an amaz­ing piece of kit.

I believe the prob­lems I’ve had are address­able and Apple will be able to fix them through soft­ware updates. The last update, to 2.0.2 has already stopped the crashes on the phone itself and since installing it, I haven’t had a spon­ta­neous restart.

I did have to do a full restore though, as I had lost some apps when iTunes tried to install their updated ver­sions. It took a cou­ple of hours and the most recent back-up I had done was around a week old, so I lost some SMS mes­sages and a few other bits of data, but the phone is now work­ing well.

The 3G issues per­sist for me and it could be that the cov­er­age where I live isn’t that great, but I have trou­ble believ­ing that, since I live in Lon­don. I hope it improves and soon.

I’ve installed dozens of apps already, stretch­ing across 5 home screens and I thought I would share a few inter­est­ing ones with you, that you might not have heard of yet.

Sim­plify Media
Sim­plify Media is very cool, it allows you to stream your entire iTunes col­lec­tion (unpro­tected tracks only, noth­ing with iTunes DRM), over wi-fi, Edge and 3G to your iPhone and it really works. In real terms, it means there is no stor­age limit on your iPhone, it will hold as much as your Mac or PC at home. You install a small piece of soft­ware on your net­worked com­puter, install the app on your iPhone, log into both devices with the same account and your entire musi­cal col­lec­tion mag­i­cally pops up on your iPhone and you can play any track! The app is cur­rently free, but after 100,000 down­loads, they will start charg­ing for it. Grab it while you can!

Sol Free Soli­taire
There are many ver­sions of this pop­u­lar solo card game, but I like this one, mainly because it is free. I’m not much of a gamer, but I used to play Soli­taire on Win­dows PCs and its nice to have a ver­sion to play on my iPhone. The inter­face is smooth, you tap the card you want to move, then tap the card you wish to move it to and it away it goes. There are sev­eral vari­a­tions to play, my favourite is Klondike 3,

Dual Level
This is another app that’s free, which makes it prefer­able to the paid ver­sions. Its a sim­ple idea, when you start the app, the screen turns into vir­tual hor­i­zon­tal and a ver­ti­cal spirit lev­els linked to the built in accelerom­e­ters. You can use it to level hang­ing pic­tures or any­thing else you might use a spirit level for — very cool!

iVote
This is a sim­ple app which lists poll ques­tions for you to respond to, rang­ing from pol­i­tics to per­sonal, with the results avail­able for you to break down in var­i­ous ways. It’s more geared towards Amer­i­cas (like almost every­thing online!), but it is a fun app and a real time waster. I like it!

WhosHere
Of all the social net­work­ing apps, this one shows the most promise with its sim­ple, yet focused func­tion. It’s a chat app that uses your loca­tion to show you other iPhone and iPod Touch users and their approx­i­mate prox­im­ity. In other words, its a loca­tion based chat appli­ca­tion which is very clever. You fill out a pro­file with as much, or as lit­tle (or noth­ing) and tap the near but­ton — you are then pre­sented with a list of peo­ple, their pro­files and the approx dis­tance from you. You can set the prox­im­ity of your search from as lit­tle as 5 miles up to 3000 miles. You can also blur your loca­tion, up to 2 miles from where you really are, so you do have options to main­tain some pri­vacy. The app’s user base seems to be grow­ing fast and yes, this one is free too.

Pho­to­Swap
Pho­to­Swap is very new, its only been avail­able for less than a week (at the time of my writ­ing) and I find it strangely addic­tive. The premise is sim­ple, you take a pho­to­graph on your iPhone and the app sends it to a ran­dom stranger, while you receive a photo from the same ran­dom stranger that receives yours — that’s the photo swap. Once you receive a photo, you have the option of reply­ing directly to that per­son with another photo, effec­tively hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with iPhone snaps. I’ve received all sorts of pho­tos; city sky­lines, beach views, people’s homes, pets, all sorts really. And before your sick imag­i­na­tion con­jures visions of body parts, I’ll dis­ap­point you — I have yet to receive any­thing offen­sive and there is a “report” but­ton to tap if you do. The app allows you to chose a user name, plus one line of descrip­tion for a mini-profile (accessed through the main set­tings via the home screen not directly from the app) and you can choose to show your loca­tion on a map. I would sug­gest turn­ing off the loca­tion stuff if you are at home and only use it when you are out in pub­lic. It might sound a bit strange, but try it, I think you will agree that there is some­thing very endear­ing about using it.

This is just a small selec­tion of apps that have caught my atten­tion, there are lit­er­ally over 1000 of them avail­able already, with more being added to the App Store every day. Have a look, I’m sure there are some that will appeal to you too.

And I’m still wait­ing for the two apps I’ll pay for, Tom­Tom nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware for the car and a Sling­Player client. I’d lay you odds I have both before the year is out!

Greet­ings and salu­ta­tions. Hello. Wel­come. Yes, I am still alive.

Well, I’m as alive as I can be, fol­low­ing my recent health troubles.

For the last 15 days I’ve been suf­fer­ing with seri­ous back trou­ble. I could barely walk for the first week or so, every step was pure agony. Sit­ting was agony too and lay­ing down was impos­si­ble. I was well and truly fucked.

I’ve been see­ing a chi­ro­prac­tor and I think he’s helped a lot. I’ve had count­less adjust­ments, start­ing with a home visit because I couldn’t get to his office. I’m walk­ing well now and have much less pain, I’m hop­ing to return to work later in the week.

This episode really freaked me out, I was prac­ti­cally crip­pled. I couldn’t even make it to the loo with­out assis­tance from Mrs. H, I couldn’t get dressed, pre­pare a meal, do any house­hold chores. I couldn’t even sit at my desk and use my iMac, I couldn’t use my lap­top for the first week or so. If it wasn’t for my iPhone, I would have been com­pletely cut off from the world.

There’s a sense of panic and des­per­a­tion that one is over­come with in these sit­u­a­tions and I was no excep­tion. As I sat upright on my sofa, for the fifth or sixth night, des­per­ately try­ing to snatch an hour or two of light, unsat­is­fy­ing sleep, dark and dan­ger­ous thoughts would bub­ble to the sur­face of my brain.

What if this is permanent?

What if this is the begin­ning of my slow, grad­ual health decline lead­ing to my pre­ma­ture death.

What if I don’t get better?

What if the excru­ci­at­ing pain never ends?

What if.…

I found myself hav­ing mini-panic attacks, hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing slightly and relief not com­ing through the codeine or spliffs.

Though my back may be improv­ing, I find myself filled with a lin­ger­ing, nag­ging depres­sion over my future.

Is this the begin­ning of the end?

They say that every sec­ond after your born, you are one sec­ond closer to death, so in the more gen­eral sense, the end has no begin­ning; or rather the begin­ning of the end, begins at the very beginning.

But that’s not what I mean. I just have this hor­ri­ble, deep feel­ing that my best years are well and truly behind me. It’s prob­a­bly true, as its undoubt­edly true that I’ve lived more than half my life already as the chances of me even com­ing close to 90 are slim to none.

I’m feel­ing my mor­tal­ity and I don’t like it. I feel like I’ve aged in the last fort­night, like my years have finally caught up with me. I don’t feel youth­ful, as I always have, instead I’ve felt like a decrepit old man.

The thought of a slow, painful slide towards death fills me with dread. I don’t want to suf­fer through a litany of minor and major health prob­lems until one of them finally snuffs me out. That just sounds horrible!

I sup­pose death is very much on my mind because of the death of my cat a few weeks ago, which I wit­nessed first­hand in all its mis­er­able, tor­tur­ous glory. While her death was mer­ci­fully quick, she didn’t go gen­tly into that goodnight.

Watch­ing her con­tort and strug­gle against the hand of the grim reaper has had a pro­found effect on me, though I am still try­ing to deci­pher what exactly what effect it has had. I’d never actu­ally been with any liv­ing crea­ture, human or ani­mal, at the point of death until her pass­ing three weeks ago.

My younger brother, who is far more spir­i­tual than I could ever hope to be, says I absorbed some­thing from this expe­ri­ence, which man­i­fested itself with my back trou­ble, or per­haps was this was the trig­ger for it. I can’t say I am convinced.

When the chi­ro­prac­tor was tak­ing my back­ground and his­tory, one of his first ques­tions was if I suf­fered any trau­mas recently; my cat died about a week before the real pain started, though I had sore­ness in my back a few days before it really hit me.

The chi­ro­prac­tor said that my back trou­ble was build­ing up over time, that the inflam­ma­tion had wors­ened to the point of spasms in my back mus­cles, caus­ing acute pain.

Is this a coin­ci­dence of tim­ing or defin­i­tive cause and effect? I couldn’t really say. You could con­vinc­ingly put across either side of this argu­ment and I just don’t know.

All of this has left me hat­ing aging and mor­tal­ity even more than before and I didn’t think that was pos­si­ble. What’s a self-confessed sociopath and ama­teur nar­cis­sist to do?

Keep hop­ing that some­one works out a way to down­load my brain into a com­puter after the death of my body, so I can con­tinue to exist, in dig­i­tal form. How else can I hope to keep post­ing dri­vel here through­out eternity?

I am in severe pain and have been for 5 days. I did some­thing to my back.

I have no idea what I’ve done, but I do know it hurts like a motherfucker.

It started on Mon­day morn­ing, when I woke up. My back was sore and stiff and I wasn’t mov­ing well. By Tues­day, I could hardly walk and by Weds I was glued to my sofa. Get­ting up is a strug­gle, walk­ing is nearly impos­si­ble. I’ve tried to get out to a chi­ro­prac­tor twice, but couldn’t man­age it. I’m get­ting a home visit tomor­row, he thinks he can help me.

I’m miss­ing out on loads of work, I’m not sleep­ing well or eat­ing. A trip to the loo takes 10 min­utes. This is seri­ously no fuck­ing fun.

Thank­fully, Mrs. H has been around to take care of me, or I would be roy­ally screwed.

It’s a strug­gle to even type this on my lap­top, and sit­ting at my iMac is not an option. I’ve been surf­ing lots on my iPhone though. I’m really glad I’ve got it.

I’m heav­ily dosed up on codeine and weed, which is keep­ing me chilled, but not touch­ing the pain. Please send me all your cool and groovy heal­ing vibes, because this hippy needs to get bet­ter and quick!