The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘consumerism’ Category

With apolo­gies to the Marx Brothers.…

Check out this photo I took of a shop­ping mall Santa Clause:

Santa Clause has a giant rub­ber head!

Did you notice Santa is wear­ing a giant rub­ber head?

Why do you think that is?

When I was a kid, Santa was an old man, with a fake beard, smelling faintly of booze and piss. And when you sat on his lap, it some­times felt like he had a pep­per­oni in is pocket.

Gross.

Today’s mod­ern Santa is noth­ing like that, with his giant rub­ber head, clean cloth­ing and A WOMAN play­ing him!

That’s right, my money is on a per­son of the female per­sua­sion inside that par­tic­u­lar Santa suit.

It makes sense hir­ing a woman, no booze, no piss, no erec­tions and no expen­sive defence lawyers to defend against costly civil law suits.

And if Santa wants to take a break from the air­less rub­ber mask, no prob­lem, she can just switch cos­tumes with the Elf. Every­body wins.

Except your kids, who will for­ever think Santa has a giant rub­ber head. How will he ever fit down the chimney?

There’s only ten days left till xmas and if you haven’t fin­ished your shop­ping yet, I’m here to help.

Its a short list of poten­tial gifts, but ones that will be cer­tain to impress and daz­zle the recip­i­ent. Also, you can order them online and have them ready to dole out on xmas with­out hav­ing to leave the com­fort of your home. That’s the best way to xmas shop!

Kodak Zi6 HD Video­cam­era
Ama­zon UK: £ 89.99

The Kodak Zi6 HD Video­cam­era is an impres­sive lit­tle piece of kit. While pocket sized, this lit­tle mar­vel shoots in glo­ri­ously rich and detailed 720p High-Def, while record­ing onto cheap and read­ily avail­able SD cards.

The Zi6 also shoots in stan­dard, YouTube friendly VGA, has a built in USB con­nec­tor and works like a dream. On my Mac, it just appears as a hard drive on the desk­top, you drag the files onto your desk­top, then into iMovie, which can han­dle them in HD quality.

On a PC, the Zi6 includes built in edit­ing soft­ware, that you can run from the cam­era. Sweet.

It also shoots stills, has a 2x opti­cal zoom and works off stan­dard or rechar­gable AA bat­ter­ies. I am so impressed with this cam­era already.

I bought mine a few weeks ago and paid £119.99, which means at £89.99, its already a major bar­gain! If you’re look­ing for a sim­ple to use pocket video­cam­era that won’t break the bank, this is the cam­era for you.

iPod Touch
Ama­zon UK: £149-£254 depend­ing upon stor­age (8gb, 16gb or 32gb)

I know I go on and on about my iPhone, but what if you are already happy with your cur­rent mobile deal, but still want to play with the coolest hand held gad­get ever? The iPod Touch is for you!

The iPod Touch is basi­cally an iPhone with­out the phone. It does nearly every­thing an iPhone can do except make and receive tele­phone calls, send and receive SMS mes­sages, take pho­tos and have proper GPS. Other than that, it does every­thing else.

You can run most apps on an iPod Touch, you can surf the net, send and receive emails, it does have some loca­tion aware­ness based on wi-fi posi­tion­ing. Oh and it plays music and videos and dis­plays pho­tos too.

I bought one for Mrs. Hippy last xmas and she absolutely loves it. She used it for music until the Apple App Store opened and that’s when she really got hooked. She now uses it for surf­ing, for gam­ing and its rarely not in her hands.

The 2nd gen­er­a­tion iPod Touch is even slim­mer than the first and its added a small speaker and the abil­ity to input audio via an exter­nal micro­phone, mak­ing it even more flex­i­ble than the orig­i­nal model.

The only neg­a­tive Mrs. H has come up with on it is it makes her wish she had an iPhone. The lack of con­nec­tiv­ity when there is no wi-fi avail­able is a real stick­ing point. Other than that, its nearly a per­fect device, guar­an­teed to be used daily by who­ever you might give it to.

Vol­cano Vapor­iser
everyonedoesit.com — £279.75 for the stan­dard model

I bought one of these a few months ago, but it is some­thing I’ve cov­eted for ages. Near as I can tell, its the only vape that really works and con­sis­tently deliv­ers good results.

The Vol­cano Vapor­iser does one thing and does it very well, it takes your favourite herb (like weed) and turns the active bits into vapour, while leav­ing the nasty bits alone.

When you smoke weed, you burn every­thing, includ­ing the carbon-based bits which con­tain the known car­cino­gens and other nas­ties. You also burn a good chunk of the THC, before it reaches your lungs.

A vapor­iser only burns the THC. leav­ing the other com­po­nents alone. The weed doesn’t actu­ally burn, but it does get a bit toasted and turns brown.

The Vol­cano works by fill­ing a small cham­ber, which holds your weed between two screens. You place this cham­ber on top of the base unit, where it is heated to the proper tem­per­a­ture. You then engage a small fan, which blows air up through the cham­ber, fill­ing an attached bal­loon with very sweet, pure vapour.

When you inhale it, you can def­i­nitely taste the weed, but your throat and lungs don’t feel any­thing at all. The vapour is at room temp, so its not hot and dry like smoke, and it is very light, though you can see it when you exhale.

The head on vapour is also dif­fer­ent from smok­ing and is hard to describe. It is decep­tively strong, clean, clear and every enjoyable.

By far the most impres­sive thing about using a Vol­cano is how lit­tle weed you actu­ally need to get high. A week’s worth of what I would smoke, would prob­a­bly last 5–6 weeks in the vol­cano. A spliff’s worth in the cham­ber is enough to get 4 peo­ple pleas­antly stoned and then some.

And when you are done vap­ing the weed, don’t throw it away, there’s still some THC left in it, which you can extract by mak­ing cannabut­ter. You could even smoke it if you were des­per­ate, though that would kind of defeat the pur­pose of vaping.

I know the Vol­cano is expen­sive (and I bought the even pricier dig­i­tal ver­sion), but it will more than pay for itself with the money you will save on weed. Add the health ben­e­fits and you’ve got a really use­ful, ben­e­fi­cial device that will change your life.

I bought mine because I am plan­ning on giv­ing up cig­a­rettes in the new year. When I do, I’m going to want to cut down on my spliffs as well and I think this will help loads.

That’s it for this year, just three hi-tech toys which will amaze any­one you might decide to give them to. And if you’re shop­ping for your­self, even bet­ter, you’d love them all too!

Back in 1992, it was the “econ­omy, stu­pid”, but here in the future, its the stu­pid economy.

The econ­omy is stu­pid because it has been built on credit, not actual assets. That’s stu­pid and its no won­der its tank­ing now.

The peo­ple run­ning big busi­ness are stu­pid too, for let­ting things get to this unbe­liev­able state.

But worst of all are the col­lec­tive gov­ern­ments dump­ing tax money into pri­vate com­pa­nies to bail them out. That, my friends is the wrong answer yet every­one is still won­der­ing why the stock mar­kets con­tinue to drop.

Sim­ple, investor con­fi­dence is non-existent. How could it be any­thing else, when gov­ern­ments are reward­ing badly run firms with bailouts. That’s not how busi­ness works and investors won’t respect it.

CEOs and MDs are used to mak­ing dif­fi­cult and painful deci­sions, that’s why they make the big bucks. They don’t hes­i­tate to decide to cut 10 or 20% of their work­force, if it makes their com­pa­nies more prof­itable in the longer term and screw the poor saps who lose their jobs. Life is tough. I don’t think this is a good thing, I just think it is a true thing.

So these tough, hard-assed man­agers are used to exe­cut­ing painful edicts for the good of their firms and they’re not accus­tom to throw­ing good money away. When a gov­ern­ment throws good money away, it wor­ries everyone.

That’s what all this bailout bull­shit is, just plain throw­ing good money away. It’s not going to save any reg­u­lar folks, its not going to pre­vent the stock mar­ket from plung­ing and in the long term, its not going to pre­vent any of these poorly run com­pa­nies from going under.

Its not going to do any­thing except make things worse.

They should have let all of these poorly run, badly man­aged, shitty com­pa­nies fal­ter. Eco­nomic Dar­win­ism and sur­vival of the finan­cially fittest would have been the sen­si­ble response. That would have prob­a­bly resulted in the com­plete restruc­tur­ing of the world’s economies into some­thing sus­tain­able and work­able. Most of all, it would have sent the right mes­sage and let the captalist-pig world know that if you fuck up, you lose.

And then we wouldn’t all be fucked.

Except me, I’m not fucked. I’ve been gath­er­ing shells, beads and berries. I reckon I’ll be able to trade them for weed and junk food when the time comes. That’s all I really need to survive.

Don’t throw away all those bills and bank notes just yet, though, as they’ll still be use­ful as toi­let paper.

After all the whing­ing and com­plain­ing over the last week about my prob­lems get­ting my new iPhone 3G from O2, I thought I would share some of my ini­tial impres­sions of it.

Yes, that’s right…I’ve got my brand new, shiny, lick­able, 16gb black iPhone 3G. I exclu­sively revealed this excit­ing bit of news on Face­Book last Thurs­day when it was deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair.

And again, yes, you read that right, I posted it on my Face­Book pro­file, as a sta­tus update.

Sta­tus updates on Face­Book are a lot like Twit­ter posts. It’s another rea­son why you should be my Face­Book friend!

Even though it was 6 days later than expected, I was still very pleased to be receiv­ing iPhone 3G and couldn’t wait to unbox it and fire it up.

I didn’t buy the orig­i­nal iPhone, as it was only released offi­cially here in the UK around 8 months ago. My rea­son­ing was sound, or so I thought. As I expected a 2nd gen­er­a­tion of iPhone to come out around now, I didn’t want to be in a posi­tion of want­ing to buy it so soon after get­ting the 1st gen.

How was I to know that O2 were going to be hand­ing out cheap (or free) upgrades to exist­ing cus­tomers? Doh!

I was bit dis­ap­pointed that Apple left out a cou­ple of good­ies that shipped with the orig­i­nal iPhone — the dock and the microfi­bre cloth to wipe the screen. The lack of the microfi­bre cloth is a real silly miss, they can’t cost that much when you’re buy­ing a mil­lion of them.

The touch­screen does pick up a lot of fin­ger­prints, though they are only really notice­able when the the screen is off. When the screen is illu­mi­nated, its very bright and you really don’t see any.

The screen is actu­ally glo­ri­ously bright, extremely crisp and pin sharp. I could eas­ily watch a full length film or tele­vi­sion pro­gramme on it and prob­a­bly will. The multi-touch con­trol of the device is noth­ing short of astound­ing. It’s extremely intu­itive and very accurate.

The iPod func­tions are also impres­sive and it blows away my old 60gb 5th gen iPod with video.

I’ve also set up sev­eral email accounts on my iPhone. If you want to reach me when I am on the go, you can con­tact northlondonhippy@gmail.com or northlondonhippy@yahoo.co.uk and I’ll receive them pretty god­damn quickly! You might even get a mobile reply…

I’ve also got the Face­Book mobile appli­ca­tion, AIM for instant mes­sag­ing and I’ve been play­ing around on Twit­ter with that cool app called Twin­kle. I’m northlon­don­hippy on all of those ser­vices too, though Twit­ter reg­is­tered my user­name as n_londonhippy because they don’t give you enough char­ac­ters for my full online name.

Surf­ing the web on the iPhone is some­thing else I’ve spent a good deal of time doing and its the first hand-held device that gives you any sort of use­ful inter­net expe­ri­ence. I’ve accessed the net from var­i­ous mobile phones and an old Palm Pilot of mine and I’ve always found it sorely lack­ing. Spend ten min­utes doing the same on the iPhone 3G and you will won­der how you lived with­out it. I’ve used both wi-fi and the 3G net­work and pages load very quickly too.

I read that the new iPhone 3G has about as much com­put­ing power as a lap­top made in 2003; sim­i­lar pro­cess­ing power and stor­age is what I took that to mean. Think about it — I’m now car­ry­ing some­thing as pow­er­ful as a five-year-old lap­top in my pocket now. It blows my mind!

There really are only 2 major dif­fer­ences between the new iPhone 3G and the orig­i­nal iPhone (and yes, I know there are plenty of minor changes, just humour me, please). The inclu­sion of 3G net­work access and GPS.

The GPS is noth­ing short of amaz­ing. Even sit­ting here , deep inside my north Lon­don lair, not near any win­dows and it still knows where I am with fright­en­ing accu­racy. The map soft­ware lets you know how cer­tain it is of your loca­tion, by using var­i­ously sized cir­cles to indi­cate your approx­i­mate loca­tion, until it is cer­tain and then places a push-pin like marker where you are. Out­side with no obstruc­tions, when the iPhone can see the sky, you get a remark­ably accu­rate read­ing of your loca­tion, so much so that if you walk a bit, the blue dot adjusts to your new position.

The loca­tion data isn’t only utilised by the map appli­ca­tion, but any app can grab it. This includes geo-tagging of your pho­tos and with some Twit­ter apps, can include your loca­tion so you can track peo­ple nearby. Spooky!

Can some­one please release some turn-by-turn, good enough to work in my car, nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware? I’ve read that Tom­Tom have already writ­ten the app, so why can’t I buy it already? My old Tom­Tom is mas­sive, com­pared to my tiny, slim lit­tle iPhone, if I didn’t have to carry the Tom­Tom with me, it would be a real bonus and my pock­ets would thank you.

And while I’m at it with a wish­list, could some­one please design, man­u­fac­ture and sell the following:

A pow­ered dock for use in my car, that has a suction-cup wind­screen mount, so I can posi­tion the iPhone like a Sat­Nav, plus a built-in, sophis­ti­cated FM trans­mit­ter that scans to find the best fre­quency and then beams audio to my in-car stereo, in high quality.

My super-dooper in-car dock/transmitter/mount is not actu­ally such a big ask and it would sell like prover­bial hot­cakes. Bun­dle it with a code to get a nav­i­ga­tion app and you would prob­a­bly sell 500,000 of them in the first year alone. I’m giv­ing you a mul­ti­mil­lion pound idea here, for free, so if one of you do this, at least cut me in for a slice of the pie. Or just send me one of these cool in-car suction-cup, FM-transmitter thin­gies for free. It’s the least you could do!

There is a third thing that sep­a­rates the new iPhone 3G from its pre­de­ces­sor, though you can upgrade the orig­i­nal to the new 2.0 soft­ware and enjoy it as well. I’m talk­ing about third party appli­ca­tions which you can access via iTunes or on the iPhone itself. Some apps are free, oth­ers cost. So far, I’ve only installed the freebies.

I’m not being cheap, its just none of the pay apps have really appealed to me and the best ones seem to be games and I’m not that both­ered. When I see one I like the look of (nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware!!!!!), I’ll hap­pily part with my readies.

There are so many appli­ca­tions avail­able already that I’m not going to actu­ally talk about any of the spe­cific ones now, but I’d rather come back at another time to give them proper attention.

What can’t be denied is that this is the real game changer with the iPhone 3G, the abil­ity to do so many cool things with it. And that’s just today, who knows what tomorrow’s killer appli­ca­tion for the iPhone might be…perhaps one of you out there in inter­net­land is already work­ing on the next HUGE thing! Just whis­per it in my ear, before your start-up has its IPO, so I can get in on the ground floor and make a lit­tle dirty lucre too…!

The one thing no-one seems to ever men­tion when they write about the iPhone is the phone itself. I think that shows you how far we come with per­sonal tech­nol­ogy and gad­gets, that the voice-communication func­tion of some­thing with the word “phone” in its name, is taken for granted and doesn’t mat­ter that much.

It does to me and one of my con­cerns about the iPhone was how it per­formed as a basic mobile telephone.

It turns out I had noth­ing to fear, the iPhone is a very robust cell­phone. Calls over my net­work on 3G are clear and the con­nec­tion seems strong. The speak­er­phone func­tion really works too, dialling a con­tact or a phone num­ber is also very sim­ple and works very well.

What’s inter­est­ing about the iPhone is the many stan­dard mobile phone func­tions it DOESN’T do. There’s no MMS mes­sag­ing, so no send­ing pho­tos as text mes­sages. There’s no way to for­ward a text mes­sage either. The iPhone has Blue­Tooth, but the only thing it uses it for is to con­nect a wire­less head­set. You can’t send a photo to your com­puter, or to another phone, you can’t exchange con­tacts with another phone, you can’t even Blue­jack strangers!

I don’t really under­stand why Apple has locked these func­tions out. At the very least, let us send pho­tos over blue­tooth. And synch­ing notes from my Mac would be use­ful too!

Some­thing else I don’t under­stand is the lack of cut & paste. It couldn’t be that hard to get a clip­board like func­tion­al­ity run­ning on it. It’s sup­posed to be the same soft­ware that runs on Macs, so what’s the prob­lem? I know some Apple big-wig men­tioned that it was on their list of things to do and they just didn’t have time to get to it, but that comes off sound­ing lame. There’s got to be some mar­ket­ing rea­son for with­hold­ing this func­tion, I just haven’t a clue what it could be!

All of these cool things do come at a cost and I don’t mean your monthly bill, though they might sting a bit too. I mean bat­tery life, or the lack of it. Surf­ing the net, check­ing emails, play­ing with apps, all drain the bat­tery far faster than you would like and its very easy to see it drop 50% in a cou­ple of hours.

I could see car­ry­ing a spare dock cable and attach­ing it to the near­est PC at every oppor­tu­nity. It’s another rea­son why I want a pow­ered dock for the car. I don’t see how I would get through a full day of seri­ous usage with­out top­ping up the bat­tery a cou­ple of times.

So am I happy with my new iPhone?

What do you think? It’s eas­ily the coolest, most pow­er­ful device I’ve ever had the plea­sure of own­ing. I’m look­ing for­ward to 18 months of deliri­ous joy as I find new and fun things to do with it.

And at the end of 18 months, I can only imag­ine what sort of iPhone I will be upgrad­ing to then! It will prob­a­bly trans­port me to a vir­tual new real­ity where I’m the king of the uni­verse and every­one wor­ships me as a liv­ing god. Now, that’s a app I’d buy!

Man, am I pissed off!

I’m still sit­ting here with­out an iPhone and I think every sin­gle one of the many peo­ple I’ve spo­ken to at 02 have lied to me about it, repeatedly.

I’m fuck­ing fuming!

Imag­ine if I had to take Fri­day off because I was told IT was com­ing, only to be told on Fri­day that IT was com­ing on Mon­day. Imag­ine if today was my sec­ond day of miss­ing out on work, to wait for a deliv­ery that’s near as I can tell, not coming.

Now imag­ine I was look­ing at tak­ing a third day off to actu­ally receive my iPhone. Wouldn’t you be feel­ing homicidal?

I have the urge to crush, kill and destroy! Thanks O2!

Luck­ily, I haven’t had to take any time off work; I was off on Fri­day any­way and while I am work­ing tonight, Mrs. H is off today, so it wouldn’t have been a prob­lem if it was com­ing today.

But its not grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

This morning’s O2 liar is “inves­ti­gat­ing” why my order hasn’t been shipped yet. She says the “stock hasn’t been released”, which is bull­shit, because I was told on Weds that it was fol­low­ing my credit check. She says it could be still sit­ting in their ware­house, await­ing clear­ance for shipment…

As fuck­ing if!

There prob­a­bly isn’t a 16gb iPhone 3G to be had right now in the entire coun­try. The chances of a stray one, just sit­ting on a shelf in a ware­house with my name on it, await­ing someone’s green light is laugh­ably absurd.

I’ve just had a call back from O2…they still don’t know if I have an iPhone wait­ing for me. Their “sys­tem” is giv­ing them mixed sig­nals and its not clear what’s going on. How impres­sive is that?

The woman who phoned me back says she will keep an eye on my order all day and will phone back if it is shipped out today for deliv­ery tomorrow.

Put it this way, I’m not going to sit by the tele­phone wait­ing for that call.

I don’t think I’ve ever put so much effort into spend­ing my own money. This is beyond a joke. I wish I could go to another net­work and get one, O2 appear to be shite!

I have iWor­ries over my brand new, shiny, lick­able iPhone 3G.

iDon’t think its com­ing today.

And ok, ok, enough with the iWord jokes. They are wear­ing a bit iThin now.

As I pre­vi­ously posted, I was assured on Wednes­day that my iPhone would be deliv­ered today, but that now appears not to be the case.

Accord­ing to O2’s web­site, I should have had a text mes­sage before 6pm yes­ter­day, con­firm­ing deliv­ery today. I didn’t get that text. Fur­ther more, a mate of mine who is get­ting an iPhone 3G as an upgrade has been able to track his pack­age all the way to DHL. My order is show­ing online as still “in progress”.

I’ve already phoned O2 this morn­ing. Yes I am sad.

The rep I spoke to told me they are still hav­ing prob­lems with their web­site and data­base and she couldn’t con­firm if it was com­ing today or Mon­day. She said the stock had been allo­cated, but it didn’t appear to be shipped yet, but because of their inter­nal prob­lems, she couldn’t be sure. Her feel­ing was that a Mon­day deliv­ery was much more likely, but again she assured me I was def­i­nitely get­ting one and told me not to buy one at the shop.

As if the shops have any left by now! I’ve had reports from my spies of small (10–30 peo­ple) queues at every O2 and Car Phone Ware­house shop they passed this morn­ing. With the very lim­ited stock num­bers, I’m not the only poten­tially dis­ap­pointed per­son in the UK today.

Of course, I could be pleas­antly sur­prised by the arrival of my brand new tech-toy, but I am not feel­ing con­fi­dent at all.

It seems like O2 screwed this up roy­ally and they should never have attempted to pre-sell them online. If they kept all the stock they had for the shops, I’d prob­a­bly be stroking mine right now. Instead, I fool­ishly believed that pre-ordering as soon as they went on sale would secure me one on launch day. Oh what a twat I am!

Instead of hav­ing a huge cel­e­bra­tion of gadgetery-geekery, I’ve spent the bet­ter part of this week suf­fer­ing from a bad case of tech-stress and cus­tomer ser­vice rage.

So there you go, its 9:30am on the 11th of July, inter­na­tional iPhone day and rather than play­ing with my new toy, I’m sit­ting here play­ing with myself and that’s no where near as sat­is­fy­ing as it sounds!

Please Mr. iPhone man, deliver mine today! I’ve waited oh so long and I’ve been oh so patient! I deserve to have all my iPhone 3G dreams come true!

Don’t I?

Doesn’t every­one?

That’s not wish­ful think­ing, the title up there. That’s what O2 told me on the phone today.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I man­aged to get a real live human on the phone, pro­vided the info they needed for my credit check and had it con­firmed that a black, 16gb iPhone 3G will be deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair on Friday.

I’ll believe it when I see it, and so will you, because I’m going to post some pic­tures of it once its here.

Tune in again on Fri­day to see if O2 make one par­tic­u­larly demand­ing cus­tomer in north Lon­don very happy. I’m count­ing the sec­onds already.

Back in Sep­tem­ber, I wrote a lit­tle piece on why my phone was not an iPhone, yet.

But soon, my phone will be an iPhone.

iHope.

iPray.

iDream.

iPre-registered…

…for the brand new, shiny lick­able iPhone 3G just as soon as O2 let me. Yes­ter­day, I received an email advis­ing me that I could pre-order one of these lit­tle babies online and it would be deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair on Fri­day, which is the offi­cial launch day for this lat­est ver­sion of the world’s favourite touch­screen mobile.

Sorted!

Or so I thought.

I placed the order before 8:30am yes­ter­day, put in all my details and saw the con­for­ma­tion screen with my order num­ber. They said I would receive an email with all of these details as well.

I’m still wait­ing for that email to arrive.

In O2’s FAQs, they say you can email them your PAC code, from your pre­vi­ous net­work and they can add it to your account, so I did.

The reply I received was a bit surprising.

I need to men­tion that this reply to my email wasn’t spot­ted by me until many hours later, because I slept all day, because I was between shifts.

I still am, so there will be another snooze very soon.

While I was sleep­ing, O2’s entire online order­ing sys­tem was melt­ing down into a steam­ing pud­dle of poo.

They were over­whelmed by the num­ber orders being placed, or “vic­tims of their own suc­cess” as I am sure some O2 spokesper­son will be stat­ing in front of a TV cam­era very soon. That’s what all com­pa­nies say when they can’t keep up with demand; its an oldie but a goodie.

So any­way, I wake up and wait­ing for me is an actual reply from an actual human O2 employee, who apol­o­gised for the lack of a facil­ity to input my PAC code when I placed my order and then explained what I needed to do with it (all after I receive the iPhone 3G) AND then went on to share an extremely impor­tant fact…

“Your order (on-xxxxxxxxx) for the 16Gb (Giga­bytes) iPhone 3G is cur­rently out of stock. You’ll receive your order on or after 11 July 2008.”

The key words in that sen­tence are:
– out of stock
– on or after

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

FUCK!

You have no idea how deeply my lit­tle heart sank at this most dis­tress­ing and unpleas­ant turn of events.

I ordered my iPhone 3G less than 30 mins after they went on sale and it sounds like there’s a bet­ter than aver­age chance I will be sit­ting here all day on Fri­day, star­ing out my win­dow for a courier that will never come.

Oh the horror!

I’ve been wait­ing a seri­ously long time for my iPhone 3G, for­go­ing the orig­i­nal ver­sion which I could have had last autumn…and if I did get that one, I would be get­ting a free upgrade to the new model, just for sign­ing a new 18 month contract.

These ain’t tears of joy stain­ing my key­board, trust me.

So I wait and I won­der. Is there an iPhone 3G sit­ting in a ware­house some­where with “the northlon­don­hippy” on printed on the label!

I hope not, because there’s no way they’d know where to deliver it, but my real world name and proper address might be better.

You get the idea any­way, either I ordered early enough to have them allo­cate me one, or they have so few that they ran out in like 10–15 min­utes of online trad­ing and I’m screwed.

No one knows for cer­tain how many iPhone 3G’s are even avail­able, O2 and Apple have remained silent on this issue, at least accord­ing to the var­i­ous news­pa­per reports I read this morn­ing. The clos­est I got to any sort of detail was that one news­pa­per thought half the iPhone 3Gs were being pre-sold online and the other half were head­ing to O2 shops around the UK. How do you play the odds on that one?

So here’s my next quandary, do I can­cel my online order and gam­ble that I will have bet­ter luck at 8am on Fri­day at my local O2 shop? Will there be a queue? Will there be enough to go around? Will I get mugged on my way back home, because crim­i­nals read the news too?

I don’t have the answer to any of those ques­tions, except that last one…I would die or kill to pro­tect my brand new, shiny, lick­able iPhone 3G, so you best think twice before you attempt to pil­fer it from me!

I’ve got mixed feel­ings about O2 already and I’ve only been a (non active) cus­tomer of theirs for only 24 hours.

On the one hand, I’ve had a per­sonal reply to my emailed ques­tion, but on the other hand, they have not con­firmed my order by email, as they said they would, nor given me any sort of update on my order’s progress.

In light of the mas­sive media atten­tion this launch has seen and will likely see over the next week, you would think O2 would be pre­pared for a sit­u­a­tion like this. Hold­ing emails and press state­ments would be out there already to coun­ter­act all the neg­a­tive infor­ma­tion I’ve seen about short­ages and poor cus­tomer service.

Maybe they should hire me to do their PR.

Then again, they don’t have to do any­thing. It seems we’re all slaver­ing like rabid dogs at the prospect of own­ing the lat­est iPhone and no mat­ter how badly we’re treated, we still want one.

It’s not like we can get one else­where, thanks to O2’s exclu­sive deal with Apple, we have no real choice.

I’m no dif­fer­ent, I’m will­ing to jump through mul­ti­ple hoops of fire and swear an oath to satan if I have to, as long as I’m clutch­ing mine this Friday.

Ok, I know I’ve already sworn sev­eral oaths to satan, one more’s not going to make a blind bit of difference.

As long as I get my god­damn iPhone 3G on Fri­day, I don’t care about any­thing else!

Please oh great gods of high tech­nol­ogy, may you be smil­ing upon me, your most wor­thy and devoted disciple!

Just gimme my god­damn iPhone, goddammit!

There’s about one week left to enter my rock­ing Bub­bler con­test. You can really win a brand new Bush­mas­ter Bub­bler, plus other cool prizes. You want some cool shit from the hippy, don’t you? Click here, click now!

I took deliv­ery of a Playsta­tion 3 this week, along with a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA 4). I’ve aban­doned north Lon­don and am now a res­i­dent of Lib­erty City. Just call me the lib­er­tyc­i­ty­hippy from now on.

I’ve never been much of a gamer, the last con­sole I owned was a Nin­tendo NES, back in the early 80s. I haven’t really played any com­puter games since then.

I debated buy­ing a PS3 for a while as I think hav­ing one is the equiv­a­lent of giv­ing up on real­ity, though tech­ni­cally I gave up on it a cou­ple of decades ago. I’ve got friends who have been telling me how cool they are for a while and with the release of GTA 4, I thought it was time to take the plunge.

I very nearly bought a PS2 and GTA San Andreas, but con­vinced myself my free time would be bet­ter spent pur­su­ing ran­dom acts of cre­ativ­ity. I’m feel­ing far less cre­ative at the moment and rather than try­ing to extract blood from a stone, I’ve elected to spend my leisure time in a vir­tual world where I can steal cars, shag whores and kill peo­ple. That’s bet­ter than explor­ing the same activ­i­ties in real­ity around north Lon­don, I guess.

Video games are time ban­dits and they will eat up your free time quite effec­tively and if you’re as crap at play­ing them as I am, they will take up even more of your time.

I thought long and hard about this pur­chase, see­ing it as a mini-surrender to hav­ing a life. In some ways, this is me giv­ing up, just a lit­tle. Not for­ever, not even until I fin­ish GTA 4 (which at the rate I am going will take years), but just enough to clear some of the cob­webs out of my skull. It was either this or some LSD and find­ing qual­ity acid these days seems like too much of a strug­gle, so I am now a gamer.

Set­ting up the PS3 was a breeze, I’ve con­nected it directly to my Bravia’s only HDMI input and I have the out­put set to 1080i, which is the best res­o­lu­tion my tv can deliver. The audio also goes via the TV and is then fed back to my ampli­fier via a stereo cable – not ideal, but ser­vice­able. I only have 2.1 audio, so its not like I am miss­ing out on the 5.1 sur­round sound – I don’t have enough speak­ers to ben­e­fit from it.

I was also able to get the PS3 straight onto my home wi-fi net­work, which means online game play and updates are already within my grasp. I’ve actu­ally run some updates already and my oper­at­ing sys­tem is bang up to date.

I bought 2 games with the con­sole, the affor­men­tioned GTA 4 and Gran Tur­simo 5 – The Pro­logue, on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a mate.

Gran Tur­ismo is pos­i­tively stun­ning, espe­cially the back­grounds. I’ve been doing laps around a track in Lon­don and it is pin sharp and photo-realistic. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I mean, it is pos­i­tively jaw-droppingly good! I’m still crap at con­trol­ling the car, though and I def­i­nitely need lots of practise.

GT5 is a taster of the full ver­sion of the game, which is due to be released next year and only cost me 17 quid, which I thought was a real bargain.

GTA 4 is unbe­liev­ably involved and has a scope and scale which is mind bog­gling. The game­play takes place in an expan­sive and extremely real­is­tic realm, which is mas­sive and has a level of detail which would thrill most fea­ture film mak­ers. I can’t get over how good it all looks.

The main rea­son I really bought all this is I’ve felt for a while that I was miss­ing out on a sig­nif­i­cant part of home enter­tain­ment by not hav­ing a games con­sole. Video games are big busi­ness, mak­ing as much or more annu­ally than most fea­ture films. I think I read GTA 4 took over 50 mil­lion dol­lars in its first week of release, mak­ing it the best sell­ing game of all time.

GTA 4 cost nearly 40 quid, which may sound expen­sive, but if you fac­tor in the num­ber of hours I’ll be play­ing it and the shear size of the play­ing field, you can see why they are that expen­sive. The amount of time and man-hours that go into devel­op­ing such a game is immense and they have to make it back somehow.

I also think there’s prob­a­bly work to be had in the world of gam­ing, for a middle-aged, make-believe hippy from north Lon­don. Some­one has to write the sto­ry­lines and cre­ate the char­ac­ters – I could do that! I would love to do that! Games prob­a­bly reach more peo­ple than films, so it’s a big audi­ence to sat­isfy and sat­isfy them, I would!

So who out there has any con­tacts with the major gam­ing devel­op­ers? Wanna hook me up with a highly paid, emo­tion­ally sat­is­fy­ing posi­tion com­ing up with con­cepts and sto­ries for future games? I promise you that given the chance, I could come up with the most com­pelling games imaginable!

Like how about this…a northlon­don­hippy videogame! You would get to be me, in an RPG sort of way. You could hang out in my vir­tual lair, roll and smoke vir­tual spliffs, watch TV and play PS3 games, as me. And then their would be mis­sions, like scor­ing weed on a Fri­day night, but still hav­ing time to get home and order a nice Japan­ese take-away, before the restau­rant closes.

You’d pay 40 quid for that, wouldn’t you?

You can still win my bub­bler. Go on, take a chance, its not like it costs you anything!

I’ve just fin­ished a mam­moth run of work. I col­lapsed in a heap yes­ter­day and stayed that way for around 12 hours until one of my kit­tens woke me up around 4:30am this morn­ing. Hey ho.

My kit­tens are now 10 months old and the lit­tle boy is already huge. He is going to be a giant, mon­ster cat when he is fully grown. He was the one who woke me this morn­ing, by sit­ting on my chest and star­ing me awake. His lit­tle sis­ter was lay­ing on my legs at the same time, sort of rolling around, also try­ing to get my attention.

And that’s really all they wanted; atten­tion. There was plenty of food and water for them, they didn’t need me for that. They sim­ply required me to pay them atten­tion. That didn’t take very long.

Once up, I had to feed the older cats, a 3 year old and a 16 year old. The 3 year just needed me to pre­tend to feed her, so that she would think it was time for her to eat. Yes, she is slightly neu­rotic, but that’s OK.

The 16 year old, our old­est cat needs tinned food these days, as the dry stuff is a bit too hard for her to chew. She’s nearly com­pletely blind from cataracts, but still gets around the house very well. That’s not true out­side though and as of a cou­ple of days ago, I can no longer let her go out. She went under the fence into my neighbour’s yard and couldn’t find her way back — I had to go and res­cue her and she was car­ried home in my arms. She’s still quite feisty and is doing quite well con­sid­er­ing her age.

After sort­ing out the cats, I parked myself in front of my iMac and did some surf­ing. Between my RSS feeds and sites I visit reg­u­larly, I prob­a­bly vis­ited at least 30 of them before 6am.

I also down­loaded the lat­est episode of Lost. Yes, I know I could wait a few days and catch it on Sky One, but why would I do that? Then I would miss out on all the cool stuff on the inter­net that fol­lows, which is released at the Amer­i­can ABC pace.

I’m really into Lost, I think it is eas­ily one of the best pro­grammes on the box. It’s so com­plex and lay­ered and mostly it does my head in, but I know they are tak­ing it some­where. I am really look­ing for­ward to watch­ing the last 2 sea­sons play out, espe­cially as there are only 3 more hours of it left this series, before another ago­nis­ing 10 month wait for more.

I’ve also been watch­ing Mad Men, which I missed when it first aired and was eas­ily down­load­able, but thanks to BBC4, I’ve been able to see the entire series. Wow, its good and Don Draper has got to be the ulti­mate in cap­i­tal­ist anti-heroes. I’ve always liked anti-heroes and secretly like to think I’m one myself. You’re all root­ing for me, even though you know you shouldn’t.

After hang­ing out with the Losties, I made myself my first proper cof­fee of the day with my Vivi. I haven’t used it over a week, because of my erratic work sched­ule and sleep pat­tern, but I haven’t gone with­out excel­lent coffee.

My sec­ondary method of brew­ing fresh cof­fee is now a device called an Aero­Press.

It’s quick and easy to use and it cleans up in sec­onds. What’s not to love?

The cool thing for me about my Aero­Press is that I can use the exact same cof­fee I use in the Vivi, ground the exact same way, so no mess­ing around with the set­ting my grinder. The Aero­Press makes what I would describe as some­thing sim­i­lar to espresso, in strength and vol­ume, but not in tex­ture or com­plex­ity. That’s ok, because the Aero­Press costs sig­nif­i­cantly less than a proper pro-sumer espresso machine.

You can pick up an Aero­Press for as lit­tle as under 20 quid (email me if you want the site sell­ing them that low, they also sell the best freshly roasted beans in the UK) and it will make amaz­ing cof­fee for you too.

By far, the most impor­tant thing you need for mak­ing great cof­fee is freshly roasted, freshly ground beans. When I first started look­ing into cof­fee, this was the most dif­fi­cult thing to get my head around, mainly because of the cost of a decent grinder capa­ble of pro­duc­ing the qual­ity you need for a good espresso machine. Some peo­ple even say the espresso machine is an acces­sory for the grinder and that didn’t really make sense to me until I used my set-up for a while.

An espresso machine basi­cally has an on/off switch; you turn the pump on to force water through the ground cof­fee (at the right pres­sure and tem­per­a­ture) and then you switch it off when you’ve reached the required vol­ume or level of extrac­tion. That’s all the con­trol you really have, on and off. The grinder is what actu­ally gives you any say in how your cof­fee is pro­duced, the coarser the grinder, the faster the pour, the finer the grind, the slower the pour. You aim to pro­duce a dou­ble espresso in around 30 sec­onds, with the colour of the cof­fee stream going tan around that time as well.

Ok, this is tedious to you if you have no inter­est in cof­fee, but as you can prob­a­bly tell, I’ve really got into this in a big way. I’m drink­ing my 2nd cof­fee of the day right now and its every bit as good as my first. Con­sis­tency is what you aim for in mak­ing good cof­fee and I can pretty much repro­duce the same result over and over. That job in Star­bucks is look­ing more and more likely!

It’s just gone 8am, here in north Lon­don, the sun is shin­ing and its expected to be another warm day. I’ve been awake for 3 and 1/2 hours and I’ve pretty much told you every­thing I’ve already done. I’ve replied to a few emails and now I’ve writ­ten this post. You are fully and com­pletely up to date.

All that’s left to do now, is post this on my web­site and you’ll know that’s hap­pened because you’re read­ing it. I’ve got noth­ing left to share with you for now.