The northlondonhippy

Author Archive

Its true, I really do love take­aways. I have them quite often.

With my weird and uncon­ven­tional lifestyle and hours, there’s noth­ing eas­ier and more con­ve­nient than hav­ing a stranger bring freshly cooked food to my front door. With­out fail, I must have them at least 3 times a week.

For the last cou­ple of years, I’ve been using Hun­gry House to order my take­aways online. I’ve tried all the major take­away web­sites and Hun­gry House is my favourite.

Their web­site is easy to use, they offer a wide selec­tion of restau­rants that deliver to me, but most of all, I like their service.

Using Hun­gry House is a breeze, you just pro­vide your post­code and it returns a list of restau­rants that deliver to you. You can browse the menus to your heart’s con­tent, then when you choose one, you can put your order together quickly and easily.

You check out like you would on any shop­ping web­site, pro­vid­ing your deliv­ery details and con­firm­ing your order, but unlike other shop­ping web­sites, you can pay by credit card, or cash and reg­is­tra­tion isn’t required — though it does sim­plify the process if you’re going to order again.

Once you place your order, you receive the first of two emails, con­firm­ing the details of your order, but what really sep­a­rates Hun­gry House from other take­away web­sites is the sec­ond email you receive. That sec­ond email is sent when the restau­rant acknowl­edges and accepts your order, so you know that your food is being pre­pared. Hun­gry House mon­i­tor every order, so you never have to wait very long for con­fir­ma­tion that its all cool.

Hun­gry House offers user pro­vided reviews of the restau­rants as well, and they share the good with the bad. Their cus­tomer ser­vice is also very good, if you do have a prob­lem with an order, they are there to help and will make sure things are resolved to your satisfaction.

I really do use Hun­gry House all the time, I have it set up with both my home and work addresses. I can’t remem­ber the last time I tele­phoned an order through to a restau­rant. It would just seem old fash­ioned now.

You might have noticed, I’ve added an advert for Hun­gry House to the right side­bar of my site. I wouldn’t have put it there if I wasn’t 100% sat­is­fied with them.

I hope you try out Hun­gry House, I think you will be glad you did.

If you would like to check out their site, please CLICK HERE.

Hey. Remem­ber me?

I used to be a some­time blog­ger who some­times blogged here, some­times, but I haven’t posted did­dly in nearly 2 months.

Go me.

The usual non-excuse, excuses apply. I’ve got no good rea­son for doing so lit­tle here, except that I am eas­ily dis­tracted by shiny things.

Appar­ently, being attracted to shiny things is hard­wired into our DNA, and is com­mon to many crea­tures, not just us. Evo­lu­tion favoured off­spring that under­stood shiny usu­ally meant fresh drink­ing water. If you could find the fresh water, you could have a healthy drink and live long enough to pass on your water dis­cov­ery skills to the next generation.

My water comes out of a plas­tic bot­tle (oh the shame) or the tap, so I have no real need to be drawn in by shiny things. Damn you evolution.

I am digress­ing like a moth­er­fucker now.

I’ve toyed with shut­ting my web­site down in the past, but I don’t really want to; I like hav­ing a site where I can spew and vent when I feel like it. I just don’t feel like it very often.

Decem­ber and Jan­u­ary are shitty months for me any­way, what with xmas and the anniver­sary of my mother’s untimely demise and my birth­day all around the same time, I’d really rather just hiber­nate until Feb­ru­ary. I’m not sure how that would work, exactly, but fat­ten­ing up for a long nap is some­thing I think I could really handle.

There are cou­ple of per­sonal mile­stones com­ing up in 2011 that I am look­ing for­ward to already: my 20th anniver­sary of mov­ing to Lon­don and my 30th anniver­sary of smok­ing weed every day. I look for­ward to reflect­ing on both of those things in the future.

Espe­cially the 30th anniver­sary of smok­ing dope every day, because once that passes, I’ll be able to say things like “as some­one who has smoked cannabis every day for over 30 years…” blah, blah, blah. I can feel the smug self-satisfaction com­ing on already.

They still lie to us about weed on a reg­u­lar basis, so isn’t it nice to know your old uncle hippy is here to tell you noth­ing but the truth about it?

Weed is why I am still around, its saved my life in count­less ways on count­less occa­sions. That shit should be legal for adults to pos­sess and con­sume and in some cases its con­sump­tion should be mandatory.

I haven’t given up on com­mon sense pre­vail­ing, but I cling to com­mon sense and truth the way a baby clings to its favourite com­fort blan­ket. If you try to take it away from me, I just might cry and wail.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Twit­ter recently intro­duced a new fea­ture you might have noticed if you access the ser­vice via their web­site. This new fea­ture is called “Who to Fol­low” and it gen­er­ates a list of sug­gested users and accounts Twit­ter thinks you should fol­low based on some algo­rith­mic com­puter magic voodoo.

To say this new fea­ture has been con­tro­ver­sial would be an under­state­ment. I’ve seen scores of tweets from peo­ple who hate the idea of being told what to do and who to fol­low. Most have dis­missed this new fea­ture as a dis­trac­tion. Many wish to know how to remove it.

I don’t think you can.

Instead of shun­ning this new fea­ture, I decided to embrace it fully, by mind­lessly fol­low­ing every account Twit­ter sug­gested to me.

Every day, I vis­ited the page with the sug­gested users and sim­ply fol­lowed them all.

Some days, Twit­ter would only have a hand­ful of accounts, other days they could have sev­eral pages worth for me. They’d even refresh it later in the day, with more accounts for me. There was no pat­tern or rea­son to the way they popped up and I just relent­lessly clicked on the fol­low button.

From the first day it went live for me, I started adding accounts. When I began, I had around 1,200 accounts that I fol­lowed and I added around 800 more, reach­ing the exact total of 2,001 fol­lowees, which is my limit.

One les­son I learned from this lit­tle exper­i­ment, is that there is a limit to the num­ber of accounts you can fol­low. Every­one has a limit which is cal­cu­lated based upon the num­ber of accounts fol­low­ing you. My ratio, if it has any mean­ing or rel­e­vance to any­one else, is:

1 fol­lower = 3.66 fol­lowees (approximately)

The point is, there’s a limit and it didn’t take me that long to reach it.

If I wanted to fol­low more peo­ple, I had to either: a) gain more fol­low­ers of my own so my ratio changes or b) unfol­low some accounts.

Here’s the funny thing, even though I had reached my limit of accounts to fol­low, Twit­ter con­tin­ued to sug­gest users to me and it was dri­ving me crazy that I couldn’t fol­low them.

When I hit my limit, I also couldn’t fol­low back any­one new who had fol­lowed me. I like to fol­low back if the account seems like it has a gen­uine per­son behind it and I felt bad that it wasn’t possible.

So what were my new 800 close friends like? They’re mainly polit­i­cally minded or politi­cians, but not exclu­sively. Many of them were British Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment, or for­mer MPs, or unsuc­cess­ful can­di­dates from the last election.

Why?

Twit­ter sug­gests users by look­ing at who the peo­ple you fol­low, fol­low them­selves. Every account sug­gested has a lit­tle foot­note, list­ing three peo­ple you fol­low, who also fol­low the account.

One of the ben­e­fits of this is it increases the num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions you can see, if your new fol­lowees inter­act with your old ones. I’ve noticed a big increase in crosstalk in my time­line, between two or more peo­ple that I follow.

It cer­tainly is engag­ing, being able to fol­low the con­ver­sa­tions of oth­ers, but the reverse of that is you can end up feel­ing a bit left out too, if you’re not par­tic­i­pat­ing in the discussion.

And you’re prob­a­bly not par­tic­i­pat­ing in any dis­cus­sions, because just about every­one Twit­ter sug­gests is impor­tant, famous, pop­u­lar or all three.

I’ve had very few, if any users sug­gested that were just plain ol’ reg­u­lar Twit­ter­ers, like me. That’s a big flaw in the sys­tem, as I would much rather be inter­act­ing with real peo­ple, who share com­mon inter­ests with me, than the great and the good.

What skewed my expe­ri­ence in this exper­i­ment is the recent gen­eral elec­tion in the UK.

How so?

As a con­cerned cit­i­zen and news junkie, I had a keen inter­est in the elec­tion. That meant I fol­lowed lots of accounts related to it, from news sources, to jour­nal­ists, to can­di­dates and sit­ting MPs that I was inter­ested in already.

When Twit­ter looked at that, it gen­er­ated a list of sug­gested users that included more of the same. But the more I fol­lowed, the more the sug­gested user list became a haven for MPs, polit­i­cal activists and think tank members.

My fol­lowee list read like a who’s who from the British polit­i­cal scene. Clearly that wasn’t what I was aim­ing for with this exper­i­ment, but its what I ended up creating.

After reach­ing my fol­low­ing limit, I ended the exper­i­ment and the great unfol­low­ing ensued.

I have now purged around 400 accounts, mainly MPs from obscure con­stituen­cies, but I also used an online tool to find the most inac­tive accounts and unfol­lowed them as well. Sur­pris­ingly, many of the accounts sug­gested hadn’t gen­er­ated a new tweet in months, which actu­ally made it eas­ier than I expected to rid myself of them.

I’m still check­ing the sug­gested user list daily, but I am much more selec­tive in who I choose to fol­low. There’s usu­ally one or two accounts that appeal to me, many turn out to be peo­ple I’ve heard of, but didn’t know were on Twitter.

Any­one I don’t wish to fol­low, I click on the “Hide” but­ton and I don’t see them sug­gested again. The whole process only takes a minute or two each day and has become part of my daily online routine.

The sug­gested user sys­tem is far from per­fect, but it is worth a look. If you can spare a cou­ple of min­utes each day, have a peek. While you might not fool­ishly fol­low every­one as I did, I am pretty sure you will find a hand­ful of inter­est­ing accounts that might appeal to you.

Oh and don’t wait for Twit­ter to tell you to fol­low me, you’ll be wait­ing a long, long time. Just add @nthlondonhippy to your time­line and you can in share my every thought and action. Lucky you.

Here are 3 videos I shot and edited on my iPhone 4, using the cam­era app and iMovie. I also used an app called Cin­ema FXV to adjust lev­els and add video effects.

I was test­ing the kit more than any­thing else. All three were uploaded via the YouTube web­site, so they are all 720p, but to see them at that res­o­lu­tion, you’ll need to go to YouTube. The embed­ded ver­sions here are smaller.

Oh and all the videos are of my cats. They’re all going to need equity mem­ber­ship after this.

Hello. How’s tricks?

I’ve been off work for weeks and haven’t posted a god­damn thing here. The usual non-excuse, excuses apply.

I did have a list of fun things I wanted to write about while I was off, but I haven’t touched a sin­gle one.

I’m on Twit­ter a lot, so if you’re miss­ing your reg­u­lar hippy fix, you could always fol­low me there. You could try fol­low­ing me in the street, but Twit­ter is more reli­able, I assure you.

I’ll be try­ing to give myself a kick in the ass soon, aim­ing to do a bit more around here. I’ve said this before and look how that worked out.

Just so you all know I’m still alive and acces­si­ble online, I haven’t dis­ap­peared up my own ass just yet.

Don’t give up on me, because I haven’t given up. I’ve just slowed way down to a near-stop, but there’s still a bit of momen­tum left in this old hippy.

Maybe all I need is a lit­tle push.

Took this photo this morn­ing on my iPhone 3GS. Passed it through a cou­ple of photo edit­ing apps. Thought it looked cool.

I’m enjoy­ing ran­dom, manic thoughts, induced by 25 hours of con­tin­u­ous con­scious­ness. In my world, this is not uncommon.

I thought I would try to cap­ture the spirit and essence of the expe­ri­ence, but as you would expect, now that I’m typ­ing, the effect has dis­ap­peared. I’m focussing on being func­tional and typ­ing words that might make some sem­blance of sense, rather than con­vey­ing the sur­real nature of being me right now.

I’ve had spe­cial cook­ies. Its Mon­day morn­ing, at 10:30am and I’m wide awake, sleep should come soon, but did I men­tion the heat?

Its hot here.

Glad that’s out of the way.

I really should be sleep­ing, I will be sleep­ing, once I wind down. I’ve had a rather busy and event­ful 25 hours, and the week before that was a bit drain­ing, lit­er­ally, as I had a blocked one out back and it was a shitty ordeal deal­ing with it.

I need to blow off some steam, but its 10:33am on a Mon­day morn­ing, nor­mal peo­ple have things to do, peo­ple to see, places to be…but not me.

Also, said my sub-conscious, I got news yes­ter­day of the sud­den pass­ing of an old friend. My friend was a cou­ple years younger than me, just to add to the angst. I don’t deal well with death, unless obsess­ing about it in var­i­ous abstract ways for decades counts as deal­ing with it, in which case I win.

Blame the inter­net for this sud­den burst of ran­dom crap, if my down­load speeds were faster for my sto­ries, I’d be watch­ing them and not harass­ing the world with this stream of con­scious­ness bull­shit… because let’s face it, the delib­er­ate act of typ­ing this out removes any chance of shar­ing the state of my mind. Every word, every key stroke, forces a deci­sion, which then forces another, which then pre­de­ter­mines my actions as opposed to just let­ting the stream of weird run free.

Or I could go check my down­loads and leave all of you nice peo­ple alone. Sorry for the dis­tur­bance, please do call again.

I really did it, I spent the bet­ter part of yes­ter­day try­ing to do good deeds on Twitter.

So how’d I do?

Well, I wouldn’t call it an unqual­i­fied suc­cess, but I wouldn’t count it as a fail­ure either. I was able to give some gen­uine help to a hand­ful of peo­ple, but I do feel like I could have done a lot more.

The hard­est part was find­ing peo­ple in need of gen­uine help. I started by search­ing my own stream, ie peo­ple I fol­low, for ques­tions or pleas for help — there weren’t many at all. So I switched to the pub­lic time­line and searched for “help me”.

Turns out, the only help most peo­ple on Twit­ter seek, falls into three categories:

- Help me get more fol­low­ers
– Help me to get Justin Bieber to fol­low me
– Help me to get Miley Cyrus to fol­low me

I couldn’t help with any of those things, even if I tried. What this meant in real terms was that using the pub­lic time­line to find peo­ple in real need was like search­ing the prover­bial haystack for the prover­bial nee­dle, and I don’t even shoot-up. I had to wade through lit­er­ally thou­sands of tweets just to find one that was genuine.

So what did I actu­ally help with? Here’s a rough list:

- I re-assured some­one who was fright­ened by stormy weather
– I rec­om­mended the best places for a day of shop­ping in Lon­don
– I helped some­one trou­bleshoot an iPhone/Twitter app
– I pro­vided advice to some­one look­ing to adver­tise adult edu­ca­tion courses in the media
– I wel­comed a new user to Twit­ter and gave them some basic advice

That’s just the high­lights, I also retweeted loads of other people’s tweets and exchanged friendly tweets with loads of other peo­ple, includ­ing some I fol­low and some I don’t. Many of my #help­ful­hippy tweets went ignored, but that’s to be expected. Peo­ple are not accus­tom to strangers offer­ing assis­tance with­out ulte­rior motives, espe­cially online.

Over­all, I found the entire expe­ri­ence pro­vided me with a weird mix of frus­tra­tion and sat­is­fac­tion, much like real life. I was frus­trated at how dif­fi­cult it was to locate peo­ple I could help, but found it very sat­is­fy­ing when I was actu­ally able to, in a very small way, make a dif­fer­ence to someone’s life.

I’ve come away from the day with the desire, not to do a #help­ful­hippy day again, but to include this gen­uinely help­ful approach into my life online on a more reg­u­lar basis. It cost me noth­ing to help out strangers, my knowl­edge is free, so is my time fre­quently, so why not try to give some­thing back all the time?

Life is indeed incred­i­bly bleak, dreary and point­less, but it doesn’t take much to occa­sion­ally make it into some­thing more, even in almost imper­cep­ti­bly small ways. It felt good help­ing strangers and I’m going to try to do it more often.

So if there’s ever any­thing I can do online to help you, just ask. I might sur­prise you with the per­fect answer. Or not.

I’ve just woken up, parked myself down in front of my desk­top com­puter and I am ready to begin my exper­i­ment in social media engage­ment. I’m aim­ing help any­one online, in any way I can.

If you need any­thing today and you think I can help, just ask. I’m not long awake, so no heavy duty math-based equa­tions for at least an hour, but any­thing else is cool.

Ladies, gen­tle­men and any one in between, wel­come to #help­ful­hippy day.

Go on, tweet me, I’m here to help.

Hello. My name is the northlon­don­hippy and I’m here to help.

As I men­tioned a few days ago, on Weds 16th June, I will be mostly spend­ing the day online, try­ing to offer help and assis­tance to as many peo­ple on Twit­ter as I can, whether its try­ing to answer ques­tions, retweet­ing impor­tant and wor­thy mes­sages, or, well, pretty much any­thing else I can think of that might help.

I’m call­ing it #help­ful­hippy day and that will be the hash­tag I use on all my attempts at being help­ful. If you would like to play along at home, you can also tag things with #help­ful­hippy or you can just tweet me old school-style to my Twit­ter name, @nthlondonhippy — either way, I’ll hope­fully see it and respond quickly and helpfully.

I’m doing this because I want to give some­thing back to Twit­ter because I get so much from it. I’m hop­ing that by try­ing to engage with peo­ple on a pos­i­tive, life-affirming level will help alle­vi­ate my per­ceived debt to you all.

I’ll give you a small exam­ple. There are lots of peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter, who I think fol­low me, yet I’ve never (or rarely) tweeted them directly. That’s my fault, what with being a some­what shy, with­drawn, socially awk­ward mis­an­thrope, who lives in his own make-believe hippy world. On #help­ful­hippy day, I hope to let these peo­ple know I enjoy fol­low­ing them. If I played along with #fol­lowfri­day, I could have done it already, but I don’t, remem­ber the whole mis­an­thrope thing?

What I am not really aim­ing to do is exploit #help­ful­hippy day as a way to raise my online pro­file or increase my fol­low­ers. For a change this is not about shame­less self pro­mo­tion, its about gen­uinely help­ing oth­ers. If any­thing, I’ll prob­a­bly lose fol­low­ers because I plan on being a very full-on, #help­ful­hippy — search­ing for unan­swered ques­tions and pleas for assistance.

Tomorrow’s the big day, I’ll either fall flat on my face or in some small way, I’ll make the world a bet­ter place for a short time. Either way, I’ll know I’ve tried my best to pay some­thing back and maybe, just maybe I’ll despise myself just a lit­tle less.

Nah. Self-loathing is for life, you can’t shake it like you shake the com­mon cold.

See ya on Weds!