The northlondonhippy

Archive for September 7th, 2009

So Mrs. Hippy turns to me last night and says, “Don’t you post on your blog any more?”

She was surf­ing the inter­net on her iPod Touch, which she does quite a bit, pre­fer­ring it to using our iMac.

“Of course I do”, I said slightly defen­sively, try­ing to remem­ber when I last posted some­thing here. I had to check.

It was three weeks ago. That’s long, even by my some­what lax stan­dards. So what have I been up to in that time?

I was kind of hop­ing you could tell me.

I haven’t been work­ing that much. I haven’t been doing much of any­thing, if you must know. I think I am per­fect­ing the art of being and noth­ing­ness. I’m not even sure if I exist any more or even ever existed in the first place.

I might not even be fic­tional. I could just be imag­i­nary, liv­ing only in your mind.

You’re star­ing at a blank screen right now, only your mind thinks you are see­ing words writ­ten by some weird make-believe, north London-based hippy. How’s your imag­i­nary grammar?

See, this is what hap­pens when you start the day with a strong cof­fee and a skunky spliff pep­pered with bubble-hash. Every­one should start their day this way.

I spend inor­di­nate amounts of time sim­ply lost in thought. I dis­ap­pear into my own lit­tle Utopia, where I right the world’s wrongs and allow my cre­ativ­ity to flow freely.

I used to do all that in the real world, but at some point, I stopped.

Oh I’ve worked out when it stopped and why. It was when I first got sick with my stu­pid Hashimoto’s Dis­ease a cou­ple of years ago. I didn’t realise it at the time, it prob­a­bly took another year before I twigged that some­thing was actu­ally phys­i­cally wrong with me, but in ret­ro­spect, it all fits.

Between 2004 and 2007, I wrote 2 nov­els and was rea­son­ably pro­lific here on my web­site too. Towards the end of that period, the 2nd book fiz­zled out while I was writ­ing it and remains one chap­ter shy of being com­plete. The first book was pub­lished, but I didn’t do enough to pro­mote it and it lan­guishes on vir­tual shelves, unread.

The first book was nearly com­mis­sioned as a TV series too, but the media is a fickle and fucked up mis­tress. The guy who liked it and could have com­mis­sioned it with a flick of his pen, moved on; his replace­ments were far less enthu­si­as­tic and the pos­si­bil­ity of pro­duc­ing the series faded away.

Rather than con­tinue to plug away try­ing to do some­thing with it, I let it go too. At the time, I just thought I had lost my enthu­si­asm for the project, but in truth, it was prob­a­bly my ill health that robbed me of my fire.

I haven’t done much of any­thing since.

Of course, that’s not strictly true as I still work (mostly) full time and I do post the odd piece here, but my out­put is not even close to the lev­els I reached a few years ago.

I’m still being treated for the Hashimoto’s Dis­ease and my doc­tor is still adjust­ing my med­ica­tion lev­els. If they ever get it right, I should feel bet­ter and be back to my old self. That’s what they tell me, anyway.

In the mean time, I’ll con­tinue to dis­tract myself with my vivid imag­i­na­tion and soft drugs.

Now, aren’t you glad Mrs. Hippy asked if I still post here? Blame her for the 5 min­utes of your life I just wasted, not me.

I’ve had my geek on for the last week. I suc­cess­fully updated all three of my Macs to Snow Leop­ard and I swapped my iPhone 3G for the new 3GS.

Snow Leop­ard
——————–
The upgrades were very smooth and sim­ple, though I did have some hard­ware trou­ble with my three year old Mac Mini. The Snow Leop­ard instal­la­tion DVD would not mount in the Super­Drive, instead it would try to read it, then spit it out. A healthy dose of canned, pres­surised air sprayed into the DVD slot cured it and I was able to com­plete the installation.

The changes with Snow Leop­ard are sub­tle, but wel­come. Expose and Stacks are notice­ably improved and more use­ful, the Finder tweaks are also quite cool, espe­cially the icon siz­ing and pre­view func­tions. Mainly, every­thing is a lot faster, start-ups, shut­downs and espe­cially sleep­ing and wak­ing. When I wake up my iMac now, it recon­nects to my net­work almost instantly.

The best thing is the amount of hard drive space I got back on each com­puter, around 10-12gb. Stream­lin­ing is a good thing!

I bought the fam­ily pack ver­sion of Snow Leop­ard, which cost £39, so that’s thir­teen quid per com­puter. A bargain!

I haven’t had any seri­ous issues so far, all of my reg­u­lar soft­ware is work­ing fine. Safari seems espe­cially fast and launches like a rocket. Oh and maybe I’m crazy, but the screen seems sharper, like they’ve improved the graph­ics card dri­vers, or the way it ren­ders images, I don’t really know.

iPhone 3GS
—————–
I’ve had it in the back of my head that if I didn’t get a new iPhone by the end of the sum­mer, I would leave it until next July. I’ve tried to buy one a cou­ple of times, but they haven’t been in stock. They are appar­ently still in great demand.

I decided that if I was going to do this, I would buy the iPhone out­right, get­ting it on Pay As You Go, rather than get­ting it as a con­tract upgrade. By doing it this way, I will then be eli­gi­ble for a sub­sidised upgrade next Sum­mer, when the next model comes out.

What finally pushed me towards act­ing is a friend of mine lost his iPhone 3G and needed to replace it. O2 wanted silly amount of money from him for a new one and he offered to buy mine. I agreed, if I could find a black, 32gb 3GS on PAYG.

O2 didn’t have any, the Car Phone Ware­house didn’t have any, but the online Apple Store said they were ship­ping them on 5 days delay. I went ahead and ordered it last Tuesday.

It shipped on the Thurs­day and arrived in my hot lit­tle hands on the Fri­day. Wow, that was fast!

Swap­ping phones was an absolute breeze. I popped my con­tract SIM out of the old 3G iPhone, then popped it into the new 3GS. I con­nected the 3GS to my iMac and it instantly appeared in iTunes. It was acti­vated in sec­onds, then offer­ing to restore it from my most recent back-up, done an hour before. It restored and synced my media quickly. It was set up just like my old iPhone, even my apps were in the same places.

I did have to re-enter a few pass­words for email accounts and tweak a few set­tings, but I would say 98% of it hap­pened automatically.

Wip­ing the old phone took longer than set­ting up the new one. The old iPhone switched on and worked with­out a SIM card and I was able to reset all set­tings with a cou­ple of clicks. Be warned, it takes around 2 hours to wipe a 16gb iPhone.

So what do I think of my new iPhone 3GS?

I’ll say this right now, it is not an essen­tial must-have upgrade. I’ve gained a few use­ful and wel­come fea­tures and a lot of speed, but that alone is not worth the money.

The increase in speed is obvi­ous, the entire phone is faster and more respon­sive. Apps launch almost instantly, there’s no lag at all.

The video cam­era is good, not great, but bet­ter than no video func­tions at all. The tap-to-focus fea­ture is very cool and really works. The com­pass is also a nice thing to have, espe­cially if you use the Map app to get around on foot, it really helps to ori­ent your­self in new surroundings.

And who wouldn’t want extra storage?

I’m sure I will sell my 3GS next sum­mer when the next iPhone upgrade comes, it will still have con­sid­er­able value then. If the 3GS is con­sid­ered an evo­lu­tion­ary upgrade, then next sum­mer hope­fully we will see a rev­o­lu­tion­ary jump in iPhone tech­nol­ogy. At least, that’s what I’m gambling!