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.