The northlondonhippy

Archive for June, 2009

I haven’t put anything new up here in a couple of weeks, so I guess I should just post something.

This is that something, or rather it will be when I finish it.

I’ve only just started and I don’t know where this is going, so how will I know when its finished?

I’m still not feeling 100%, so this could turn into a hippy health bulletin. There’s a little bit to report.

After countless treatments with my chiropractor, my back is now 99.9% pain free. I’m sleeping well and moving well.

I’m still feeling listless and occasionally a bit breathless, but I saw an endocrinologist this week who explained why and made a recommendation that should help.

With thyroid problems, like my Hashimoto’s Disease, your blood is tested for two things, your T4 levels, which is the actual thyroid hormone and your TSH, which is Thyroid Stimulating Hormone and made by your pituitary gland.

While my T4 level was good, my TSH level is still on the high side and should be lower. Lowering it involves increasing my dose of medication again and another blood test in a month or so. I’m going to go see my GP next week to sort all that out and hopefully I’l be feeling some benefits in a couple of weeks.

That wasn’t much of an update, was it?

How about an update on my site?

If you haven’t noticed, even when I’m not putting new posts up here, I am still adding quality content…well quality if you are interested in my musical tastes or what I had for breakfast. I’m talking about my Last FM playlist and my most recent Tweets.

The Last FM widget on the right, shows you the last handful of songs I’ve listened to from my home media centre, my iMac and my iPhone. It also tells you when I was listening, so you can keep up with it in real time. I don’t know why you would want to, but you can if you like.

I’m still enjoying Twitter and I do tweet a fair amount daily, often at weird times, like the middle of the night or early morning. I’m sometimes around during the day and at night, it depends on my weird schedule. I tweet all sort of random crap, from interesting links to odd and surreal jokes.

Today, just for fun, I started using a hashtag for a virtual Glastonbury festival online – #virtualglasto – for people like me who will watch from my sofa, shielded from the elements and poorly cooked veggie burgers. I’m actually looking forward to Springsteen on Saturday night and I hope the BBC don’t fuck me over and only show a couple of songs. We want the whole goddamn set, goddamn it!

Mainly, I’m posting today because I’ve been getting so many new visitors. I’ve had another significant rise.

This is to let all you new visitors know that I’m alive and well and living in north London, just like always. Keep bookmarking me or grabbing the RSS feed and before you know it, I’ll post something amazing that will inform, entertain and amuse.

Just not today.

I think I’m finished now.

I’m angry.

I’m pissed off.

I’m hopping, fucking mad.

Apple showed off the new iPhone 3GS a couple of days ago and it is a desirable piece of kit. While not a huge leap in technology, the new hardware-based features of this new model make me want one.

You’d think, in the middle of a deep recession, that spending my hard earned cash would be easy.

Think again.

O2, the mobile network here in the UK that has exclusive rights to sell iPhones are being quite foolish about upgrades to existing customers like me. They seem to think its sensible for me to take out a 2nd mortgage to upgrade to the new model.

Existing subscribers are gold dust to companies like O2 or at least they should be, but it seems this time that is not the case.

In the cell phone industry, networks refer to it as “churn”, or the loss of customer to other networks.

There was a lot of “churn” here in the UK last summer, when loads of people dumped their existing networks to move to O2, so they could have an iPhone 3G. I was amongst that large group of switchers myself.

I love my iPhone, its easily the coolest device I’ve ever owned. I have no regrets about changing networks to get one.

Early adopters, like myself and many of my friends and work colleagues, drive technology sales in that we buy first, pay full whack, then show it off to our mates who end up buying them too.

I can think of half a dozen people right off the top of my head, who bought an iPhone because I personally introduced them to mine. I’m sure the same is true for many other early adopters; we should all be on commission really.

Instead, O2 don’t respect us and are actually going out of their way to penalise people who bought their iPhone 3G’s last July. Do you think that makes me keen to persuade others to get an iPhone from O2 now?

O2 want to sell me a 32gb iPhone for the same cost they’re selling them to new subscribers, £269 I believe. I could just about wear that, if I had to, but they also want me to pay the remainder of my contract as a penalty.

A penalty?

I want the latest handset from my current network provider and they want to charge me a penalty? Why not just smack me in the face and get it over with?

I have 6 months left on my current contract and I am on the £45 a month tariff.

£45 x 6 = £270 (it doubles the cost of the phone).

Its stupid beyond belief.

They want me to pay £539.00 to upgrade my handset, when someone off the street just signing up to O2 would get it for half that.

Its madness!

I’m an existing customer, I should be treated better than a new customer. Show me a little love and I’ll show you some back, but try to screw me over and I’ll cost you money.

How?

I’m still working on that, but I have a couple ideas.

Everyone who wants to upgrade their iPhone should each spend at least one hour on the telephone with O2 customer services.

You’re not going to get any joy, but you are going to waste their time and in business, time is money.

For every minute you keep one of their sales reps occupied, that’s another minute they are not selling a brand new phone.

Be polite and just keep repeating yourself, its what the O2 rep is going to do, so you might as well do the same.

Escalate too, they hate that. Ask to speak to a supervisor, then the supervisor’s supervisor, then the department manager. The key is to keep them on the phone as long as you can. And call them from your iPhone, because the call is free to you, but it does cost O2 in network bandwidth.

Say anything, use some of my arguments, sing them a song, tell bad jokes, whatever will keep them talking.

Then use the word “churn”, that will scare them.

Keep telling them existing customers are getting a raw deal.

O2’s line is that the iPhone 3G was subsidised, which is why they want to force people to see out their contracts before getting a new handset. Its bullshit, but that’s the tack their taking.

Like I give a shit about their profit!

If they did a bad deal with us last year, tough. Don’t try to fix it by screwing us over a year later. That’s not smart.

I don’t want the new iPhone in 6 months, because it will be a six month old phone then.

And I know 6 months after that, a better iPhone will be released. And here’s the thing, the differences between the iPhone 3G and the 3GS aren’t that huge, but that might not be true with next year’s model. Who knows? And who wants to gamble on it?

The really smart thing to do is buy the new iPhone 3GS privately once an unlock is available, then switch networks. O2 are being so myopic about this, I am very tempted to follow this path and show others how to do it too!

O2 are going for short term profit, when success in customer relations only comes by playing a long game.

People are seething over this, check out mobile phone forums or Twitter. Every newspaper has had a story on this massive O2 cock-up too.

I’m definitely not the only one who wants to push back hard at O2.

I can’t do this alone, we need every other iPhone owner looking to upgrade to take action.

“Brand management” is a marketing buzzword these days and O2 have done some real damage to themselves. They might be able to put a ridiculously high price on upgrading, but having a well-respected brand is priceless.

Can you hear that, O2? Its the sound of your stock price dropping fast. I don’t see a net to catch it, do you?

O2 can either work out a better plan for us to upgrade, or they will start to haemorrhage subscribers. If O2 don’t make us all happy and soon, its going to cost them plenty.

( #O2fail – search for it on Twitter! )

This is a little warning from your friendly, neighbour hippy.

Do you tweet from your iPhone? Are you broadcasting your location with every tweet when you are at home? Do you know what I am talking about?

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, especially that last one, you really need to pay attention to this.

Your iPhone is location-aware, so to an extent is your iPod touch. You probably know this already. It means it can work out your location using GPS, wi-fi and/or cell phone tower information to a reasonably accurate degree. That feature is built right into the core architecture of your iPhone.

Having that information at the core, means applications like many iPhone Twitter clients, can magically grab your exact location (expressed in latitude and longitude) and attach it to your tweets and Twitter account.

If you look at people’s Twitter profiles, occasionally you will see two sets of numbers where their city would normally be…if you cut and paste those numbers into Google Maps, it shows you their exact location.

Perhaps there are times when you want to broadcast your location, for example, you are visiting a famous landmark and want your tweets to reflect that. Or maybe you are out on a Saturday night and you want your friends to easily be able to find you, because its your round. That’s all cool.

But what if you are at home, merrily tweeting away about your two-week holiday abroad that starts tomorrow and you’re not aware you’re sending out your home address with every message? Suppose you have a photo of yourself on your account, or hundreds of them on your linked Facebook page.

What would it take for some enterprising criminal to park up on your street and watch for you to leave, knowing your flat will be empty for a fortnight?

Very little.

Think I’m being paranoid? Think again, because something like this happened recently in Arizona. Here, check out this local report.

So what can you do to avoid this happening to you?

Simple, become more aware of location awareness.

If you tweet from your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or any other location aware device, if one exists), go into the settings of your preferred Twitter client and turn off location services. The setting is someplace different in every app, and if you can’t find it in the app, look on the main settings section from your home screen.

When the app asks you to turn them on again, like it did the first time you used the app, say “no”, unless you want to broadcast your location. And if you are home, or where you work, this should probably always be “no”.

You can re-enable this feature if you do want to use it, when you are out and about, but I really recommend keeping it switched off as your default setting.

Also, check your own Twitter profile, to see what you have listed as your location. You might discover a little surprise.

If you wish to change it, log into your account from the web and go to Settings, then find the little box for location and type something suitably vague. Mine says: “north London, UK, Earth”, in case anyone confuses it with the Venusian version.

There’s one more simple thing you can do to protect yourself, when you send tweets, don’t give out too many specific track-able, real-world details about yourself.

I realise if you are tweeting under your own name, and can be found by directory enquiries or (gasp) in the white pages, it may already be too late, but if you are at all privacy minded, neither of those things will be true of you. They are certainly not true of me, but I am extremely protective of my privacy online and off.

If you’re someone who didn’t realise you’ve been practically attaching your home address to every tweet sent from your iPhone, this advice is especially for you. Just send me what you saved in the increase to your home contents insurance post-burglary and we’ll call it even.

Nice people take drugs (courtesy Release)

That’s an actual photo of a London bus advert placed by Release, an organisation committed to reforming UK drug laws.

Here’s Release’s mission statement, from their website:

“Release is the national centre of expertise on drugs and drugs law – providing free and confidential specialist advice to the public and professionals. Release also campaigns for changes to UK drug policy to bring about a fairer and more compassionate legal framework to manage drug use in our society.”

Release have launched this new public awareness campaign, please visit their site for more details. Its sensible, logical and very true.

And click here for the The Guardian’s take on the campaign.

Could this be the first step in the right direction? Let’s hope so!

Update 10th June 2009:
Since posting this a few days ago, the ad campaign has been censored by advertising regulators and taken down. Click here to read more.