The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘consumerism’ Category

A-hoy hip­py­fans, there be hip­pies here!

Well, one hippy, actu­ally and I’m not even a real hippy. Sue me for false adver­tis­ing and then request a full refund!

My month of lit­tle work­ing isn’t pan­ning out as I had planned. Who’s sur­prised? No mat­ter how much free time I have, its never enough, but then it’s never really free either.

How do nor­mal peo­ple do it? You know, peo­ple who work Mon­day through Fri­day, 9–5, every week. How do they man­age to keep it all together with noth­ing but the week­end to do their real life stuff? It bog­gles my mind.

For the bet­ter part of the last 20 years, I’ve man­aged to avoid the Mon-Fri rou­tine. The life of a shift­worker is much more fun and there’s noth­ing I like bet­ter than hav­ing days off dur­ing the week. Except maybe easy sex and hard drugs, but then they go hand in hand with lots of free time and the soul of a junior-satan.

Don’t you have the soul of a junior satan? Guess its just me then!

You see, I under­stand the inher­ent dif­fer­ence between good and bad, I’m just a bit capri­cious when it comes to decid­ing which side of the line to choose. I make up my own mind, using my own moral com­pass for guid­ance and my “true north” prob­a­bly dif­fers from most people’s.

I often choose the path of least resis­tance, but then at my age and so lack­ing in ambi­tion and direc­tion, what else would I do?

I spent an entire day this week swap­ping out my shitty, cheap old stereo for a brand new, shiny sil­ver AV Amp. I bought a Pio­neer VSX-917v and saved 60 quid wait­ing until after xmas. That’s when I first scoped it out, back in Decem­ber, but elected to wait and it was a wise decision.

My old stereo, an 8 year old Tech­nics, was a combo CD player, cas­sette deck(!!) and radio receiver, but all I really used it for is the amp, which had SKY+, a DVD player and my mac mini con­nected to it, all with stereo ana­logue con­nec­tions. For the last cou­ple of months, the sound has been cut­ting out, only restored by a well placed, mea­sured slap on the top of the unit with a flat palm. I’m sure that’s the best way to fix any­thing, anyway.

The cut­ting out was steadily wors­en­ing, so I ordered the Pio­neer unit a cou­ple of weeks ago and finally got around to installing it last week.

I bought some dig­i­tal audio cables, TOSlinks for the mini and SKY+ and a dig­i­tal coax­ial for the DVD player. The new amp was too big to go on the shelf where the old stereo lived, which meant I had to tear down the entire set-up and re-cable it all from scratch. Yawn.

It took me a few hours to rip it all apart and clean out the years of dust trapped in the inac­ces­si­ble bits and a cou­ple more hours to rein­stall, con­fig­ure and test every­thing, but even­tu­ally I had it all work­ing well.

The new amp will sup­port 7.1 audio, but my liv­ing room won’t. I can’t even fit 5.1, because I have no space for the rear sur­round speaker. Right now, it only has 2 speak­ers con­nected, but I have a sub­woofer ordered and the space cleared for it when it comes.

Every­thing worked great the first day it was con­nected and I was very pleased with the sound qual­ity. I kept the Tech­nics speak­ers from the old set-up because they are small, but decent and are bi-amped, which the Pio­neer also sup­ports. I am very happy with the sound and expect the sub­woofer will make it sound even better.

On the sec­ond day, Mrs. Hippy dis­cov­ered a burn­ing smell com­ing out of the amp. It turns out, the amp runs ridicu­lously hot and needs to be well ven­ti­lated. It’s cur­rent home, under­neath the shelf where my TV lives, has pre­cious lit­tle space between the top of the Pio­neer and the shelf. Ut-oh. I have to move the Pio­neer. Yawn.

My house is small, and my liv­ing room is smaller. I don’t have any other options for plac­ing the Pio­neer amp. I have to magic up a 50cm x 50cm space, and I think I’ve found it, all I need is a small table to put the amp on…and IKEA sells one for £7.99. Now, I just have to get myself to IKEA, which is hell on earth with extra-added yuppies.

I don’t want my new amp to burn up, it sounds far too good. Right now, I have a small fan aimed at it, which doesn’t really help with the ambi­ent noise lev­els, but does keep things cooler and smelling less like an elec­tri­cal fire! Hope­fully, I’ll have the whole thing sorted out in the next day or so.

I meant to wake up really early this morn­ing and visit IKEA, but I didn’t. Maybe I’ll go later today, if the spirit moves me.

I also need to buy another set of cables…longer ones. Repo­si­tion­ing the amp puts it out of range of all the new cables I bought.

Noth­ing in my life is ever easy, not even the sim­plest of tasks. Swap­ping out an old stereo for a new ampli­fier shouldn’t become a major engi­neer­ing project. And I should be taller, too!

I’m still dig­ging excel­lent cof­fee every day, though, which soft­ens the blow on every­thing. Right now, I am sip­ping a freshly made cap­puc­cino, crafted by my own hand not five min­utes ago, from freshly ground beans that were grown in El Sal­vador and roasted 10 days ago. Yumm.

This week’s cof­fee bat­tle has been over frothed milk. Froth­ing milk prop­erly takes prac­tise and skill and I woe­fully inad­e­quate at cre­at­ing micro­foam, which is the goal of baris­tas. Micro­foam has a vel­vety tex­ture and is pourable, you should never need to spoon it into the cup. It shouldn’t have peaks either and shouldn’t be stiff like whipped egg whites.

I’ve yet to work out the secret to per­fect micro­foam, though I am try­ing all the tricks sug­gested online, from chill­ing the metal jug, to using full-fat milk. Actu­ally, and this makes no sense to me at all, I am hav­ing bet­ter luck with skimmed milk, which defies logic and every­thing I’ve read online. Go figure.

Don’t laugh, one day my cof­fee brew­ing skills may save my life. When TV news finally chews me up and spits me out, Star­bucks here I come!

I men­tioned recently that I bought a brand new cof­fee mak­ing rig. It’s true.

Before xmas, I decided it was time to get a proper espresso maker. I’d rid myself of my old mon­stros­ity; a com­bi­na­tion steam dri­ven espresso maker and 8-cup drip pot together in one ugly, black plas­tic casing.

I never used the drip pot and the espresso maker churned out drink­able, yet not quite right cap­puc­ci­nos and lattes and I’m a bit of a cof­fee obses­sive, espe­cially now.

I started doing what I usu­ally do when I’m inter­ested in some­thing, I surfed the inter­net and I found three really good websites:

www.coffeegeek.com

www.homebarista.com

www.toomuchcoffee.com

Each site is chock full of extremely use­ful infor­ma­tion about cof­fee, from equip­ment reviews to bean rec­om­men­da­tions and tips and tricks on how to get the best from your cof­fee. I learned loads, but still have lots more to learn. If you look care­fully, you might even find some posts from me on one of the forums.

Grow­ing up, I wasn’t into cof­fee. My par­ents either drank instant, or weak and watery fil­ter cof­fee and all of it decaf.

It wasn’t until the early 80s that I had my first proper cap­puc­cino. From then, I was hooked.

It wasn’t as easy as it is now to get a good cof­fee, this was in the days before there was a Star­bucks on every cor­ner, you had to look around to find places that made them right.

My Ital­ian grand­fa­ther, my mother’s father, who came from just out­side Naples, used to make espresso using a tra­di­tional stove-top, Moka pot and I can remem­ber my par­ents say­ing that it was far too strong and bit­ter for their taste. I never got to try any, even though I wanted to. They said I wouldn’t like it. At that age, they were prob­a­bly right, but I’ll never know. Grandpa’s been in heaven for a very long time.

I’ve owned a cou­ple of steam dri­ven espresso machines, besides the old one I recently binned. I bought my first one in the early 90s and used it for sev­eral years before it gave up the ghost. Another one fol­lowed and that lasted a few more years, but now, I own a proper machine.

It turned out, before I started my manic online infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing exer­cise, I knew less than did­dly squat about coffee.

For starters, the online cof­fee com­mu­nity refers to those steam dri­ven espresso machines as “steam toys” as they don’t make real espresso. By steam dri­ven, what I mean is that the water is heated to the tem­per­a­ture of steam and the steam pres­sure forces the over­heated water through the ground cof­fee. That would make the water far too hot for brew­ing coffee.

Cof­fee should be brewed at just below boil­ing point; steam is water heated to beyond boil­ing point. That’s not good.

Proper espresso machines come in three vari­eties, all of them pro­duce water at “brew tem­per­a­ture” plus steam for froth­ing milk, but each accom­plishes this in dif­fer­ent ways.

The most basic machine is called a sin­gle boiler-dual use machine and it works like this: Inside it is a a sin­gle boiler, with two user con­trol­lable ther­mostats, one heats the water to brew temp, the sec­ond brings it up to steam temp. The catch is, you have to wait for the machine to tran­si­tion from one temp to the next, which can take a minute or so, depend­ing upon the machine. You have to time what you are doing very care­fully to get the most out of this machine. These are the least expen­sive as well and include most Gag­gia home mod­els and the Ran­cilio Sil­via I con­tem­plated buying.

At the other end of the scale are dual boiler machines; one at brew temp and a 2nd at steam temp. With this sort of sys­tem, you can pull shots and steam milk at the same time, with­out any wait­ing or tran­si­tion­ing. Most pro­fes­sional machines work this way.

And in the mid­dle, the third cat­e­gory is what I bought, a heat exchanger (HX) machine. These are clever devices, they use one boiler which only comes up to steam temp, and the brew water is flash heated via a heat exchanger that passes through the boiler. This set up gives you con­tin­u­ous steam and brew capa­bil­ity, but with­out the extra com­pli­ca­tion of 2 boilers.

Have I bored the bejeezus out of you yet?
I’ll stop being tech­ni­cal now.

All of these machines are fairly sim­ple to oper­ate, but it takes a cer­tain amount of knowl­edge and as I am learn­ing, expe­ri­ence to max­imise their potential.

By far the most impor­tant info I picked up from my new found cof­fee web­sites con­cerned beans and grinders. You need a seri­ously good grinder and you need freshly roasted beans.

Decent grinders, like any­thing good, aren’t cheap and my cof­fee expert pals all sug­gest you bud­get 50% of the cost of your espresso machine, for the grinder. Espresso machines can be quite finicky about how finely ground the cof­fee is, too fine and the machine will choke and you’ll get noth­ing out of it and if it is too coarse, your shot will pour too fast and you’ll have a cup of sour tast­ing swill.

Being a com­plete begin­ner at this, it took me a cou­ple of hours of exper­i­men­ta­tion before I got my first drink­able shot from my new kit. Thank­fully, the peo­ple I bought it from sent me a free kilo of roasted beans because I burned through half it on that first day and all but the last 2 shots went down the drain.

A proper espresso, sin­gle (1 oz) or dou­ble (2 oz), should take approx­i­mately 20–25 sec­onds to pour. Using lined shot glasses, marked at the 1 oz level and a stop watch, you aim for this magic tim­ing and amount by adjust­ing the fine­ness of your grind. It took me a while to get a feel for all this, but since then I have used dif­fer­ent beans, which required adjust­ments and have been able to fine-tune the grinder to improve my results. Today, I’ve made myself two cap­puc­ci­nos and the espres­sos that went into them were the best I’ve made so far. They weren’t per­fect, but I’m on my way!

By far, what has made the biggest dif­fer­ence to my cof­fee is fresh beans. I really wish some­one share this key fact with me ages ago. Cof­fee beans need to rest for about 2 days after roast­ing, to allow for the CO2 gasses to be released, don’t ask me why. After that, its fresh for around 2 weeks, before it begins to go stale. Oh and it needs to be ground just prior to brew­ing, as its starts to go off within min­utes of being turned to brown dust.

I didn’t know any of that shit! And its all true!

For the last few years, I’ve been using a cafetière, or press pot or French press, if you pre­fer, but I’ve been putting pre-ground, super­mar­ket bought cof­fee into it. Drink­able, but noth­ing like the cof­fee I’ve been enjoy­ing since I bought the new set-up.

Freshly ground beans are a rev­e­la­tion, with flavours so rich and com­plex that I don’t have the vocab­u­lary or knowl­edge to really express it in any mean­ing­ful way. I can say, with­out ques­tion, that in the last week or so, I’ve had some of the best cof­fee I’ve ever tasted, anywhere!

Even Mrs. H noticed when I switched to the freshly roasted beans, that it tasted bet­ter. The place I’m get­ting them from is an online shop, which roasts them to order and ships them out, the same day. You receive them the next day, well pack­aged, with the date of roast­ing printed on the pack. And it’s not that expen­sive, either.

The espresso machine I bought is an Izzo Vivi, which is made in Italy, and is very shiny and heavy. The orig­i­nal design of this type of machine was patented in 1961 and it has a very dis­tinc­tive group­head, which if you visit cof­fee bars, you would prob­a­bly recog­nise. It’s called an E61 group­head; the group­head is the bit they lock the portafil­ter into, just before brew­ing. Oh and the portafil­ter is the handle-thing which holds the fil­ter bas­ket, filled with ground cof­fee. I bet you know what I mean!

It took me ages to decide on which machine to buy and while my deci­sion was guided and informed by those web­sites I men­tioned, the per­son who helped me the most was the sales­per­son I spoke to at the online com­pany where I bought it.

I spent nearly an hour on the tele­phone with this sales­per­son, ask­ing as many ques­tions as I could, includ­ing “which one do you own?” and “which one has the least returns?” The Izzo Vivi was the answer to both ques­tions and I was sold. It was one of the mod­els I was con­sid­er­ing, any­way, so it wasn’t a com­plete sur­prise. Actu­ally, the one I was lean­ing towards was sig­nif­i­cantly more expen­sive than the Vivi, but my sales­per­son friend said it wasn’t as well con­structed and it was made of infe­rior components.

The Vivi is based on a com­mer­cial design and uses many of the same parts and com­po­nents as its big­ger, pro­fes­sional broth­ers. That means if and when it ever needs repairs, the new bits won’t be that expensive.

The place I bought it from is really cool, they give you a 2-year war­ranty plus they unbox, check and cal­i­brate the machine, before ship­ping it to you. I was very impressed. They also dou­ble box it, which meant it arrived in pris­tine condition.

I also bought my grinder from this com­pany, a Macap M4D, but I won’t bore you with too many details, except to say it is a pro­fes­sional piece of kit and should last for years, as should the espresso machine. They told me with care and main­te­nance, the Vivi should keep going for at least 20 years.

I’m not going to post a link to this com­pany, as I don’t know if they would appre­ci­ate being asso­ci­ated with some drugged up weird-o like myself, but if any­one is inter­ested in find­ing out more, please email me and I’ll gladly pro­vide you with the link; just don’t tell ‘em the hippy sent you! I am very impressed with them and would heartily pro­vide them with my seal of approval and rec­om­men­da­tion. I don’t think I would have bought a machine in this price range, from any­one else.

Like­wise for my source for cof­fee beans; I would love to throw some busi­ness their way, the cof­fee from them has been orgas­mic and the ser­vice has been first class too, but I don’t want to piss them off because of who I am. I’m happy to pro­vide the link pri­vately, should you wish to try some for your­self and they’ll grind it for you, if you wish.

Some com­pa­nies, like my good friends at EDIT are happy to be asso­ci­ated with me, oth­ers might find me a bit too con­tro­ver­sial. That’s fair enough, I know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, or rather coffee.

In my world, cof­fee is a drug, just like any­thing else that effects your mood or cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem. Caf­feine is a seri­ous stim­u­lant and I am very sen­si­tive to it, always have been. That means I have to stop drink­ing cof­fee fairly early in my day, or sleep will be elu­sive come bed­time. It doesn’t mat­ter, because I really love the stuff, never more than I do now!

My cof­fee jour­ney? The title of the this entry, comes from a phrase I’ve seen often repeated, to new­bies such as myself on cof­fee forums and it refers to the route you take to get the best cof­fee expe­ri­ence imag­in­able. With fresh beans, my new grinder and my new espresso machine, my jour­ney has moved sev­eral light years ahead in a very pos­i­tive direction.

Bot­toms up!

We’re already over a week into 2008 and I haven’t posted a thing. In that case, belated New Year greet­ings and sea­sonal wishes to you. I hope that this brand new year brings you every­thing you’ve ever hoped and dreamed for.

This is a shitty time of year for me, as I am not a fan of the hol­i­day sea­son, cold, grey weather, or my birth­day which is also falls this month. Another year down the drain is all I can think.

I’m going to be 45 this month, which is unde­ni­ably middle-age, or at least how we define it. The real­ity of me actu­ally mak­ing it to 90 is laugh­ably ludi­crous, which makes the term middle-aged a total sham in my case.

I don’t feel 45, not that I even know what 45 should feel like. I still feel 15, which could say more about my stunted emo­tional growth than any­thing else. Age­ing is the phys­i­cal process, matu­rity refers to your men­tal age. Maybe I am 15?

Some­times I think I am obsessed with age­ing and grow­ing old; it’s even a cat­e­gory on my blog. I do think about it too much. It’s the pas­sage of time that really gets me, not the grow­ing old.

My life is finite. I only have so much time and with each day that slips by, I have less. If I am really hop­ing to accom­plish any­thing with my life, I bet­ter get my skates on or come to terms with the real­ity that my dreams will never come true. I’m not sure which one is worse.

The change in the cal­en­dar, com­bined with a mile­stone birth­day is really bum­ming me out. You see, even hip­pies get the blues. Forty-five years of under­achieve­ment and fail­ure can have that effect on even the cheeri­est of souls and trust me fuck­ers, the last thing I am is cheery!

What’s a poor hippy to do?

The usual, just keep plod­ding along, doing what­ever it is I do and dis­tract­ing myself as best I can. If it weren’t for soft drugs and con­sumer pur­chases, my life would be as empty as a void in deep space!

Oh and don’t for­get my exer­cises in cre­ative futil­ity! I am going to record that album of orig­i­nal northlon­don­hippy music!

And I am going to work on my novel. My real novel, the one I have been plan­ning for over a decade. I did knock out 2 other nov­els in the last few years, the sec­ond one will be pub­lished soon I hope. They’re not under my real name, they’re not even under my hippy ban­ner. I don’t really count them, but they were fun to write.

My real novel will actu­ally be done under my REAL NAME. I don’t do any­thing under my real name, so that should tell you how seri­ous I’m tak­ing it. It’s also why I’ve been tak­ing so long with it, I want to get this one 100% right. I want it to be a lit­er­ary mas­ter­work, which per­fectly cap­tures the human condition.

I want a lot of things.

Like right now, what I want is a high-end, pump dri­ven, espresso machine and this has become my lat­est obses­sion. I’ve been hang­ing out on a cou­ple of coffee-obsessive web­sites, Cof­feeGeek and Home­Barista are my two cur­rent favourites. If you’re seri­ous about cof­fee, you should really have a look.

Don’t laugh. The pur­suit of the per­fect espresso is right up this hippy’s street. After all, caf­feine is a drug and we all know I dig drugs and I also adore a good rit­ual as pre­req­ui­site to enjoy­ing any drug. Espresso extrac­tion is a skill and at the hob­bi­est level and beyond, it becomes a religion.

There are some seri­ously seri­ous peo­ple out there mak­ing some amaz­ing cof­fee at home and I want to be one of them. I’ve been doing research online for the last month or so and am now ready to take the plunge.

The first thing I learned is that the grinder you buy is every bit as impor­tant as the espresso machine you choose. And if you’re seri­ous about cof­fee, you will only want beans freshly roasted, they start to go stale after around 2 weeks. You need to spend at least 50% of what you spend on the espresso machine, on a decent grinder.

Pulling the per­fect shot of espresso isn’t sim­ple, it requires knowl­edge, prac­tise and skill, but if you can mas­ter this, you will be rewarded with excep­tional cof­fee every time.

The home espresso scene is nowhere near as big in the UK as it is in north Amer­ica, but there are sev­eral com­pa­nies spe­cial­is­ing in high-end kit. After a lot of research and care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, I’ve decided to go with the Ran­cilio Sil­via espresso machine, paired with Rancilio’s Rocky grinder — the doser­less model. It has quite a good rep­u­ta­tion with afi­ciona­dos online, but is not an easy machine to mas­ter. I think that’s part of the appeal, that I will have to work hard to get the best results.

That’s what hob­bies are; dis­trac­tions from real­ity. My new found cof­fee obses­sion is a healthy diver­sion from the things that bring me down. Once I have per­fected my extrac­tion tech­nique and I am reg­u­larly fuelled with the finest cap­puc­ci­nos, expertly crafted, I will be buzzing with caf­feine. That in turn should inspire me to spend more of my increas­ing lim­ited free time, writ­ing. Every­one wins!

I’ll be order­ing my new machine hope­fully this week, as soon as they come back in stock fol­low­ing a rush on them for xmas. I’m hop­ing that by next week, I’ll be brew­ing my own, right here in my north Lon­don lair. How fuck­ing cool with that be!

My life might not be per­fect, but at least my cof­fee soon will be!

Happy fuck­ing xmas, fuckers!

I hope you all stuffed your faces and got got every­thing on your wish list; not lim­ited to, but prob­a­bly includ­ing: an iPhone, an iPod Touch, an iPod nano, a Mac­Book, a PSP, a PS3 and if you are seri­ously lucky, a Wii and if you are super lucky, nat­u­rally you found an nlh deluxe under your tree!

I’ve had a fairly nor­mal xmas, well nor­mal for me, because I’ve worked right through the hol­i­days and I ain’t fin­ished yet! I worked xmas eve, xmas day and I am work­ing tonight, box­ing day too.

Appar­ently, loads of peo­ple have to work over xmas, only I didn’t “have” to. I chose to and given the chance, I will prob­a­bly choose to again next year.

Next year is a long way, away. Who knows what the next 12 months may bring? Do you? If you answered yes, then email me with some horse rac­ing results for next week, or bet­ter yet the lot­tery num­bers for the next giant rollover. Please?

The first xmas I ever sold was 18 years ago. I was offered the chance to do a shift in a news­room in NYC for dou­ble pay, 400 cool dollaroonies.

Did I just type “dol­la­roonies”? I must be stoned.

I am.

I remem­ber ring­ing up my mother and inform­ing her that I was going to be a newswhore for xmas and I’d be miss­ing the usual fam­ily gath­er­ing. That was 1989. She was less than impressed, but ka-ching! That was a lot of money! It still is!

As a kid grow­ing up, xmas was a big deal and in my (now estranged) extended fam­ily, there was much cel­e­brat­ing to do with both my mother’s and father’s side of the family.

As I got older and we fell out with var­i­ous branches of our fam­ily tree, xmas’s were down­scaled, but still big events in my imme­di­ate family.

I liked it mainly for the gifts.

Xmas stopped being fun when I stopped get­ting bicycles.

The last xmas I shared with my par­ents was 1991 and every year since, I’ve either worked or just not gone. My dad died in Sept 2004, my mother is very dis­abled and has been con­fined to a bed, fol­low­ing a stroke in 2003 and now lives in a nurs­ing home. That’s 13 xmas’s avoided.

I tried to write about all of this last year and I couldn’t fin­ish it. I went into far more detail and skip­ping down mem­ory lane was dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble and I gave up. I still have what I wrote, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it again. Hey ho.

For most peo­ple, I think the hol­i­days are pure stress. All you need to do is visit your local high street or shop­ping dis­trict and watch how cunty every­one is to each other to see proof of this. Expec­ta­tions have to be met at all costs, even if it means elbow­ing some old lady out of the way, so you can get the last copy of Nigella Express.

Xmas for me, has come to mean my fam­ily, my imme­di­ate fam­ily. When I think about xmas, I think about the four of us, my par­ents, my younger brother and me.

I can remem­ber spend­ing many xmas eve’s unable to sleep, because I was so excited; adren­a­line cours­ing though my veins, mak­ing it impos­si­ble to rest.

I can remem­ber the smell of my mother’s home-baked xmas cookies.

I can remem­ber my dad swear­ing when he thought I couldn’t hear him, as he tried valiantly to assem­ble some crappy toy that wouldn’t sur­vive in one piece for more than a week.

And I can remem­ber my younger brother, just as excited as me, check­ing to see if our par­ents were awake at ridicu­lously early times, because we weren’t allowed to go down­stairs until they were ready to accom­pany us for the rit­ual rip­ping of the wrap­ping paper.

I can remem­ber more, much more, but it all just depresses me now because I’ll never have those times with my fam­ily again. I can’t.

These days, I don’t get excited about xmas, instead I count the sec­onds until it’s the 2nd of Jan­u­ary. Then its all over and I can exhale.

Though when I think about that first xmas I sold, back in 1989, for 400 dol­la­roonies, I wish I could give them a refund. Four hun­dred bucks for one more xmas with my fam­ily would be the bar­gain of the millennium!

I hope wher­ever you are, all your hol­i­day dreams came true and you spent it with peo­ple far less mis­er­able than me. Maybe hav­ing me trapped behind a desk over the hol­i­days is good for every­one, not just me. We’ll never know…

Do you need some cool gifts for some cool peo­ple? This hippy is here to help!

Xmas is less than 2 weeks away and if you haven’t fin­ished your hol­i­day gift shop­ping, then you are just like every­one else! But you’ve got some­thing they haven’t got…a cer­tain north London-based hippy with a ques­tion­able char­ac­ter. I’ve got a few sug­ges­tions to help you out.

I find xmas stress­ful, every­thing is busier, peo­ple are ruder and noth­ing pisses me off more than queue­ing up to spend my hard earned money.

Let me share a tale with you from last Saturday.…

Last Sat­ur­day after­noon, I made the rather unfor­tu­nate mis­take of vis­it­ing my local super­mar­ket in my car. It’s a large chain super­mar­ket, with a large car park. I needed to pick up a few things and didn’t have a choice.

When I arrived at the super­mar­ket, I noticed the queue of cars depart­ing, but didn’t really think too much of it. The car park was quite full, but I man­aged to find a space with­out any stress. I decided to abbre­vi­ate my shop­ping list, grabbed a hand bas­ket and swept through the shop quite quickly. I even found a till with no one wait­ing and was checked out in record time. And then the real fun began.

I returned to my car to dis­cover the car park had filled up even more and the queue of depart­ing cars stretched to the very end of the car park. It took me around 10 min­utes just to get out of my space, because of being blocked by other pass­ing cars, arriv­ing or departing.

After get­ting out of my space, I joined the queue of depart­ing cars, head­ing towards the exit and that’s when the real fun began. The line of traf­fic was barely mov­ing and after 15–20 min­utes, I phoned Mrs. H to warn her I would be a bit later than I expected.

After 30 min­utes of not mov­ing, other peo­ple were start­ing to get rest­less and I began to see exam­ples of road-rage, or rather, car-park rage. Cars, were try­ing to cut into the queue of cars head­ing for the exit, oth­ers were try­ing to merge from unex­pected direc­tions. Then cars arriv­ing, started queu­ing up for lim­ited park­ing spaces, cut­ting off depart­ing cars and allow­ing merg­ing cars to jump in front. It was total car-park chaos!

Being the resource sort and main­tain­ing my calm through the reg­u­lar inges­tion of cig­a­rettes and choco­lates from my shop­ping, I got the num­ber for the super­mar­ket and rang it from my mobile phone. I asked to speak to the man­ager, iden­ti­fy­ing myself as a cus­tomer trapped out­side in my car. After a few min­utes wait­ing, I was con­nected to the duty man­ager and I explained the predica­ment fac­ing his val­ued cus­tomers just out­side the doors of his shop. He was sym­pa­thetic, but blamed the local coun­cil for not allow­ing them to build more access to the car park. That was hardly going to help me out at 2pm on a Sat­ur­day after­noon, 2 weeks before xmas!

The man­ager sug­gested I phone the local police sta­tion, which I was only too happy to do. After get­ting passed the first oper­a­tor, I was con­nected to the despatch desk at the local nick and I again explained the sit­u­a­tion, point­ing out the it could eas­ily turn nasty and as well as near acci­dents with cars, I’d seen a cou­ple of dri­vers leap out of their vehi­cles and nearly trade blows. The despatcher took my details and said she would send some offi­cers as soon as pos­si­ble. I didn’t see any before I left, around AN HOUR LATER!

Yes, I spent 2 hours in the super­mar­ket car park, in my car, in the pour­ing rain. It was absolute hell and I wouldn’t wish an expe­ri­ence like this on any one, ever!

Which brings me to my main point, which is this…if you can, do all of your shop­ping online! Every­thing I’m going to sug­gest is avail­able on the inter­net, so grab your credit card and get­ting ready to shop!

My top rec­om­men­da­tion this year is an iPod Touch from Apple. I bought one for Mrs. Hippy and we’re both blown away by how good it is. The touch­screen is gor­geous, so user friendly and as I sus­pected, the killer app is def­i­nitely being able to surf the inter­net on it.

It’s actu­ally a very usable, read­able browser and its the first sat­is­fy­ing inter­net expe­ri­ence I’ve ever had on a hand-held device. To put this in per­spec­tive, I’ve surfed on var­i­ous mobile phones and a high-end Palm Pilot and none have come close to this. The iPod Touch found my home net­work, let me put in the pass­word and joined it instantly. The mobile ver­sion of Safari rocks, its fast, respon­sive and ren­ders pages beautifully.

Oh and did I men­tion it plays music? And the video daz­zling too, so is the photo browser. I haven’t hacked it yet, because it’s Mrs. H’s, not mine and I don’t want to end up brick­ing it on her. I’m hold­ing out for a 2nd gen­er­a­tion iPhone, hope­fully that will come in the next few months.

I bought the iPod Touch from Ama­zon, £243 for the 16gb model, which is a real sav­ings com­pared to other retail­ers, but your mileage may vary, so look out for the best deal. Also, don’t leave it too long as its con­sid­ered one of the hot gifts this hol­i­day season.

In gen­eral, I can rec­om­mend Ama­zon, they’re nor­mally very reli­able and they are good with deliv­ery too. I shop with them so much that I signed up for Ama­zon Prime, which costs 50 quid for a year, but in return you get upgraded to next day deliv­ery on every­thing you buy. I usu­ally pay for next day deliv­ery any­way, because of my erratic lifestyle, that way I never miss any­thing. I’ve already placed a few orders with it, so it will pay for itself in no time.

The other online retailer I can rec­om­mend is everyonedoesit.com or EDIT. The adverts you see on my site are from EDIT, as my endorse­ment of them is long­stand­ing. They are also the exclu­sive dis­trib­u­tors of the NLH Deluxe, the bong I designed, made by RooR in Germany.

EDIT stock a wide vari­ety of good­ies, from pipes and bongs to a wide selec­tion of legal highs and one of the best stocks of cannabis seeds on the inter­net. If you like to party, or know some­one who does, they’re cer­tain to have some­thing desirable.

Of course, you can check out the entire shop for your­self RIGHT HERE, I do have a few rec­om­men­da­tions for you.

Check the Bush­mas­ter Dou­ble Bub­blers on this THIS PAGE. I’ve got the mid­night blue one and I can’t rec­om­mend this pipe enough. It’s only 20 quid and its a real bar­gain, pieces this good nor­mally cost lots more.

I cleaned mine out the other day and it reminded me what a use­ful piece of kit the SPACE CASE GRINDER is…I put all my bud through mine and around twice a year, I scrape out the crys­tals inside. You will be amazed how much you can col­lect, if you use it reg­u­larly to break up your weed. And if you think about it, every­thing you’re col­lect­ing, would prob­a­bly just have been lost. I can’t believe every­one doesn’t use one!

I’ve heard lots of peo­ple com­plain­ing about the cost of RooR glass­ware and I won’t deny that some of their pieces are pricey. That said, you get what you pay for and RooR qual­ity is the best you’ll ever find. But if you don’t want to spend a for­tune, here are a bunch of RooR pieces that all cost under 100 pounds, includ­ing one (that I own) that costs under a ten­ner! That means you can give some­one a piece of pure RooR qual­ity, no mat­ter what your bud­get may be!

I’ll start with the CLASSIC THREE PIECE WATER PIPE, which is a piece that I own. It’s a great look­ing water pipe, well con­structed and it smokes so sweetly, you will love every hit!

How about a RooR gift set, includ­ing a RooR bong for only 65 quid? Check out ROOR GIFT SET 5! And check out the rest of the RooR gift sets RIGHT HERE.

And if you want a full sized, proper RooR? No prob­lem, we can still do that for you and here’s 4 mod­els from the RooR red range, with 3.2mm glass, that cost between 85–100 quid! Go on, check ‘em out RIGHT HERE.

And remem­ber, I said there are RooR pieces under a ten­ner? Check out the MINI-STEAMROLLER, for only £5.95. I’ve got one of these too and its my favourite tiny pipe. It’s per­fect for a quick blast, when you need a lit­tle hit to take the edge off life.

But what RooR gift guide from me could ever be com­plete with­out a shame­less plug for my pretty lit­tle baby, the “RooR Cus­tom 5.0 — northlon­don­hippy deluxe” — the best bong in the world! Of course, I’m biased, because I designed it and it car­ries my name, but trust me I’ve smoked out of loads of pipes and noth­ing hits as well as my bong. It costs a bit more than other bongs, but trust some­one who’s smoked out of it a lot now, its worth every god­damn penny! Treat your­self, or treat some­one you love, you won’t be disapppointed!

The best news about all the good­ies I’ve men­tioned from EDIT is that they have it all in stock right now for imme­di­ate ship­ment and that includes the NLH Deluxe! I know the NLH Deluxes have been hard to come by, since the ini­tial ship­ment sold out, but they’ve got ‘em now!

Xmas doesn’t have to be stress­ful. If you can visit my site, then you can visit Ama­zon or EDIT, or any one of a num­ber of sites which will ship things to you quickly. If you can avoid the shops, the malls and the high street, you’ll make your life a lot eas­ier and isn’t that what we all want? Trust me, you don’t want to lose 2 hours of your life in a car park!

It’s become very clear to me that I’ve already blown my “100 posts in 100 days” chal­lenge. It’s time to aban­don ship, because this captain’s not going down with it.

My inten­tions, as always, were admirable, but as usual I let myself down in the deliv­ery. As much as I would like to post some­thing every sin­gle day, my erratic lifestyle just doesn’t make it pos­si­ble to sit down with the pre­req­ui­site focus and inspi­ra­tion as often as I would like.

To put it more bluntly: I suck.

If this blog was my full time job, then yes I could make sev­eral posts a day. But until this blog can pro­vide me with a six-figure annual income, it won’t be my main focus.

To put this in per­spec­tive, one of the things dis­tract­ing me from blog­ging over the last week was putting together my long-overdue account­ing for my media empire, for tax pur­poses. Hav­ing done the sums this week, I can tell you that I am run­ning my empire at a loss. Being a media tycoon costs me money and not a small amount either. Any rev­enue this blog gen­er­ates is quickly swal­lowed by my expenses.

This is not a cry of poverty, my full time job pro­vides me with ample income and I can afford my media empire losses with­out any hard­ship. I won’t be seek­ing dona­tions to my pay­pal account. I don’t even have a pay­pal account!

As I am the chief spon­sor of my own blog, per­haps I should replace my ban­ner adver­tis­ing with some of my own, but that would be silly, because if you’re already on my site, you don’t need to see adverts for it — you’re already here!

The only money I gen­er­ate from this site is through my affil­i­a­tion with EDIT includ­ing their exclu­sive dis­tri­b­u­tion deal for my beloved “RooR Cus­tom 5.0 northlon­don­hippy deluxe”. If you’re going to shop at EDIT any­way, and you click through my site, you’re hand­ing me 10% of what­ever you spend, so if you want to say thanks the best way any­one can (with cash!), please feel free to do it. I know quite a few of you do that, any­way and I don’t often men­tion this, but again, prep­ping up my taxes has made me take a good look at my finances.

I know I could take on more adver­tis­ing, but I really don’t want to. I sup­pose for the right price, I would con­sider a sin­gle spon­sor with very deep pock­ets, but there’s a higher like­li­hood of me sprout­ing a tail and I don’t expect to be wag­ging one any time soon!

So what else have I been up to this week besides my dreaded taxes? I had a sight test and ordered my very first pair of middle-aged man read­ing glasses. It was either that, or have my arms stretched. Ask your par­ents to explain that one to you.

I also went to my den­tist and had the middle-aged crud scraped off my teeth. It was pre­cisely as pleas­ant as it sounds.

I’m really lucky, I’ve got a good, local NHS den­tist. He’s walk­ing dis­tance, his office is never busy and you can almost always get an appoint­ment. I know there’s sup­posed to be a short­age of NHS den­tists, but dig it I’ve got a groovy one and don’t email me ask­ing for his name. I like the fact that its never busy there, so it will remain my secret.

Tomor­row I’m tak­ing the Yaris in for its annual ser­vice (one year or 10,000 miles), which is tech­ni­cally a bit fucked, because I have only had the car for around six or seven months and I’ve only put less than 3,000 miles on it. Toy­ota say its due because it was new a year ago and they had it on the road as a com­pany car, for all of 1,600 miles. It’s not expen­sive and I can live with­out the car for a day, so what the fuck.

Today, Sun­day, I had a deliv­ery from IKEA. I finally got around to get­ting a new mat­tress. Our bed is around 10 years old and it was time. Luck­ily, you can now shop online with IKEA, which is a very good thing.

The bed frame is still in per­fect con­di­tion, so we saw no need to replace it, but our old mat­tresses were show­ing their age. The bed is a superk­ing size, orig­i­nally from IKEA, so the eas­i­est solu­tion was to get the replace­ments from them as well.

Their web­site was ok, noth­ing fancy and many of the items listed were not actu­ally avail­able to order online, but you could check the stock on the item at your near­est branch. Great, but that defeats the pur­pose of shop­ping online.

I hate going to IKEA, it’s always crowded, it’s always stress­ful and at the end of all that effort, you have to hand your pur­chases over to the inde­pen­dent deliv­ery peo­ple, who if you’re lucky, lug it to you within a few days. Even with the meat­balls from their restau­rant, I’d rather not go if I don’t have to. Thank­fully, the online gods of shop­ping were smil­ing upon me and every­thing I needed to order was avail­able for deliv­ery from the web­site and I checked out.

IKEA phoned a few days later to con­firm my deliv­ery, which was not the date I was given by the web­site at check­out, but a few days later. A Sun­day. That’s quite impres­sive, espe­cially for nor­mal peo­ple with Mon-Fri jobs, but for me it mat­ters far less because of my erratic lifestyle. The mid­dle of last week would have been bet­ter for me.

The deliv­ery was pain­less and the 2 guys who brought me the stuff were cool. Now, all I have to do is wait for the coun­cil to come col­lect the old mat­tresses and my work here is done!

Fol­low­ing on with my con­sumerism, I am being forced to buy some­thing unex­pected — a new sound sys­tem, sort of. My present stereo, a cheap Tech­nics mini-system is hav­ing some seri­ous prob­lems and is prone to cut­ting out com­pletely. A few gen­tle taps on the top and the sound returns, but this is not a sus­tain­able solu­tion. I’ve been forced to research AV amps and receivers.

Fuck me, its con­fus­ing. Con­sumer audio has become a mine­field of com­plex­ity which has left my head slightly spin­ning. I’ve finally set­tled on a model from Pio­neer, which I haven’t actu­ally ordered yet, chiefly on its fea­tures, price and most impor­tantly, avail­abil­ity. It’s a VSX-917V if that means any­thing at all to you, 7.1, HDMI switch­ing, blah, blah, blah.

I haven’t even got the space for 5.1 sound, nev­er­mind 7.1, but I am think­ing I might opt for 3.1 — cen­ter, left, right and sub­woofer. I’m not sure yet, I haven’t really gone as far as speak­ers. My sim­ple plan is to use some old speak­ers ini­tially, as I expect my old stereo to die any day and I’ll need to make a quick swap to the new one. If we ever move house, this sys­tem can grow a bit.

I’ve got three audio sources, which are all dig­i­tal, SKY+, my Sony DVD recorder/player and my Mac mini. Oh wait, I have a fourth ana­logue sig­nal, which feeds out of my Bravia’s Free­view receiver.

My biggest prob­lem, as always, is space. My new amp, when it comes, won’t fit where my old mini sys­tem stereo is, which means I’m going to have to tear down my entire media cen­tre and rebuild it from scratch, includ­ing all the cabling. What fun!

On the plus side, the new AV Amp will do all my audio switch­ing for me. At the moment, audio switch­ing is the one weak link in my sys­tem as it requires you to get off the sofa, go to the media cen­tre and man­u­ally turn the dial. That means chang­ing sources will all hap­pen at the touch of a but­ton, audio and video because I have a Log­itech Har­mony 885 remote.

Oh shit, I will have to repro­gram the Har­mony when I install the new amp. Damn, this stuff is all so com­pli­cated, luck­ily for me, I’m very techno-friendly!

The other thing I have been research­ing is espresso machines. We cur­rently got a combo cof­fee maker, a big drip pot on one side and a steam espresso maker on the other. I’ve never, ever used the drip maker and the espresso side makes really lame coffee.

In doing my research I’ve dis­cov­ered that steam pow­ered espresso mak­ers burn the cof­fee because the water is too hot when it is forced through the fil­ter. What a true cof­fee lover wants, or rather needs, is a proper pump machine.

Pump espresso mak­ers aren’t cheap, but it sounds like if you want to make proper espresso, its your only choice. And if you are going to use it every day, which I would, it would pay for itself in no time.

Think about it, a decent cap­puc­cino costs around two quid or £2.50 from a cof­fee bar. Let’s say £2 which is on the low side I expect, for a tall one, every day for a year, would be £730 and the cof­fee mak­ers I’m look­ing at cost a lot less than that. I haven’t fac­tored in the actual cof­fee, milk or sugar costs, but they would not be that sig­nif­i­cant com­pared to the cost of the machine.

I’m very tempted by a Gag­gia, they are well reviewed and extremely pop­u­lar, but I haven’t decided yet.

This will sound silly, but nor­mally I con­sult Which Mag­a­zine on pur­chases such as this. I’ve yet to go wrong by fol­low­ing their Best Buy advice and as a con­sum­mate con­sumer, I’d like to con­tinue this guid­ance, but Which has not reviewed them in over 2 years! Times change, mod­els change, their Best Buys from two years ago just aren’t valid any more!

What’s a cof­fee lov­ing hippy to do? I might actu­ally have to decide for myself with­out the ben­e­fit of advice from the experts who test all these machines side by side and report on the one that’s best value for money. I’m all about value for money, dammit! What if I buy one that comes up poorly in their next sur­vey? Then what? Do I just throw it away and buy the one they tell me to or do I suf­fer for years with a sub­stan­dard device?

These are the prob­lems that cur­rently plague me. It’s a tough old exis­tence, fraught with hard­ship at every turn. Mod­ern life presents many chal­lenges, but con­fronting my cof­fee conun­drum could just very well be the most sig­nif­i­cant dif­fi­culty ever faced by a cap­puc­cino sipping-hippy. Well, that or decid­ing whether or not to switch off my father’s life-support machine, I’d say its a toss up.

I grant you per­mis­sion to prod my neck or clasp my wrist. Indeed, I do still pos­sess a pulse for I remain alive and nearly well.

I haven’t been ill, not really. I’ve been suf­fer­ing from a mal­ady known as overwork-itis and I am the cause of this afflic­tion. I’ve worked 10 out of the last 13 nights, with tonight being my final night — num­ber 11. Go me. After that, I’m off for a cou­ple of weeks to catch my breath and catch up with you guys.

So much for my 100 post thing, you might pos­si­bly be think­ing. Well, I am here to tell ya that 100 days hasn’t passed yet. I can still catch up. How do you know I won’t snort a shit load of crys­tal meth and stay up for 6 days and nights, doing noth­ing but blogging?

You know this, because I’m telling you, I shan’t be ingest­ing any hor­ri­ble, crappy, man-made shite! This hippy don’t do class A drugs no more, anyway!

But I can still catch up. I haven’t counted to see how behind I am, but I’m sure its not an insur­mount­able num­ber. This hippy is a hippy that can do! And does! And will…!

Fuck, I might start buy­ing into my own hype. Naw, I’m far to cyn­i­cal and clever for that. Besides, its not like I’m actu­ally sell­ing any­thing. Every­thing I do, I do for you, for free! When’s the last time you got an invoice from this hippy?

I wouldn’t know how to charge for this shit, any­way. Just send me your credit card num­bers (and don’t for­get the 3 digit sig­na­ture strip num­ber too) and I’ll buy myself some­thing pretty, on you.

Wouldn’t you like to buy me some­thing pretty? Like a Porsche? Noth­ing says you love me like a finely engi­neered Ger­man sports car. And I’m going to be 45 years old in Jan­u­ary, don’t you think I’m ready for a mid-life-crisis mobile?

And speak­ing of gifts, I’m sure I’m not the only one who you’re shop­ping for because it’s Christ­mas soon. That means this hippy’s hol­i­day shop­ping guide will be com­ing soon too. As a fer­vent con­sumer of every­thing, I am well-placed to help you choose gifts for peo­ple I’ve never met…as long as they are cool peo­ple, but if you’re read­ing my blog, you must be cool and every­one you know is cool too. It’s sim­ple math, really.

Are you dig­ging it? Groovy!

Recently, I pur­chased a Sling­box Solo. I ordered it from Ama­zon and set it up a cou­ple of weeks ago.

For those of you who don’t know what a Sling­box is, please allow me to explain. A Sling­box is a device which you con­nect to your audio/video sources and to your home net­work and it allows you to place-shift your view­ing on a com­puter, in your home, or any­where in the world where you have an inter­net con­nec­tion and it also allows you to con­trol the source device.

I’ll elab­o­rate: I have a SKY+ satel­lite receiver and DVR (Dig­i­tal Video Recorder) in my liv­ing room, con­nected to my flatscreen TV. I’ve con­nected the Sling­box to the SKY+ and my net­work and the Sling­box takes the raw TV sig­nal and com­presses it, then streams it onto my home net­work, to be received by, say by my lap­top, wire­lessly in any other room in the house.

Are you get­ting the idea? In the­ory, I should be able to view my Sling­box out­side of my house, but I am hav­ing some port for­ward­ing issues which I’ve yet to resolve, because it goes through two dif­fer­ent routers before reach­ing the internet.

The Sling­box Solo is a very sim­ple look­ing device, with con­nec­tors on one side and some blinky lights on the other side. There are no but­tons or con­trols, the idea is to con­nect it, con­fig­ure it and for­get about it, every­thing else is done via the soft­ware you down­load, called SlingPlayer.

I con­nected my Sling­box Solo to my SKY+ via an S-video cable, as its the high­est qual­ity out­put sig­nal avail­able. My SKY+ is an orig­i­nal V1 Pace unit, feed­ing my TV via SCART, but the S-Video out­put mir­rors it. This means the Sling­box Solo only sees what­ever the SKY+ sees. If some­one is watch­ing the TV at the same time, you both have to watch the same programme.

I used a nor­mal RCA stereo phono cable to con­nect up the audio from the SKY+ to the Slin­box Solo and con­nected the power sup­ply. I also put the IR blasters above and below the SKY+ IR receiver as these pro­vide the remote con­trol functionality.

Finally, I had to con­nect the Sling­Box to my net­work. The Sling­Box only out­puts eth­er­net, there is no built in wi-fi, which is fine if your router is next to your tele­vi­sion. Mine isn’t, which meant using some sort of bridge.

My first try was an Air­port Express from Apple. They are nor­mally very robust and depend­able units and this was a cost effec­tive way to do it, but it didn’t work very well. I don’t know why.

I con­nected the AE to my net­work in WDS mode, con­nected the Sling­box Solo to it and within a minute, the Sling­box was con­nected to my net­work. I was able to con­fig­ure the Sling­box quickly and was watch­ing my SKY+ on all my Macs in fairly good quality.

It didn’t last, the band­with dropped dra­mat­i­cally, and at least once a day, the Sling­box would lose its net­work con­nec­tion, though it appeared the Air­port Express was still con­nected to my net­work. I had other net­work prob­lems as well, los­ing con­nec­tions to my dif­fer­ent com­put­ers and other Air­port Express units, used for music stream­ing, were hav­ing dropouts too. Reset­ting the Sling­box and asso­ci­ated AE unit restored my con­nec­tion and got the net­work work­ing again, but the same prob­lem hap­pened every day.

When I dis­con­nected the Sling­box and AE, my net­work per­formed fine, so I decided to con­nect the Sling­box another way.

I bought a set of Net­Gear Home­Plugs, which do eth­er­net over pow­er­lines and they are a total rev­e­la­tion. You plug them both into the elec­tri­cal mains and they find each other auto­mat­i­cally and cre­ate a durable and robust eth­er­net bridge between the two loca­tions. Once plug is con­nected to my Air­port Extreme, the other is con­nected to the Sling­box. Within sec­onds, they were con­nected and so was the Sling­box and its held the con­nec­tion con­tin­u­ously since I con­nected them. These things are very cool!

I’m still hav­ing slight prob­lems with my net­work; it grinds to a halt and loses the inter­net about once a day, but then comes back. I think I need to set it all up again, as my base unit is still look­ing for an AE in WDS mode and its not there any­more. When I have the time, I’ll reboot all the units and reset them up from scratch. That’s how it was before the Sling­box, so it should go back to being per­fect again.

I’m also deter­mined to sort out the port for­ward­ing, as it would be cool to watch SKY+ from out­side my home, either live TV or recorded pro­grammes. The Sling­Player soft­ware includes a vir­tual remote for the SKY+, which means you can dupli­cate any remote com­mand with a sim­ple click of your mouse. Very clever!

There are other mod­els of Sling­Box avail­able, some offer­ing more con­nec­tions for more devices, oth­ers offer­ing dig­i­tal and ana­logue TV tuners. For my needs, with one main TV source, the Solo was per­fect. I’ve got shitty free­view recep­tion here, so a tuner was point­less and there’s no need to con­nect it to a DVD player, because most com­put­ers are already DVD players!

If I wanted to watch SKY in another room, I could have a sec­ond box installed, which I would have to pay for and I would be charged a ten­ner a month for the priv­i­lege. It wouldn’t be con­nected to my main SKY+, which means it would only receive live tv. Also, it would be in one fixed loca­tion, like my bed­room. What if I wanted to keep an eye on the news, while cook­ing dinner?

The Sling­box is a cheaper, more flex­i­ble solu­tion, it offers great pic­ture qual­ity, at full screen res­o­lu­tions, any­where inside my home. When I can view it over the inter­net, which I am cer­tain I will do one day soon, it will com­plete the pack­age. It’s a wel­come addi­tion to my A/V arsenal!

Thank you for drop­ping by tech-geek corner!

I know, I know. I haven’t been here in a fair few days.

No excuses, except for my catch all; “I’m rub­bish”. Fur­ther expla­na­tions will not be offered.

I’ve squan­dered a fair bit of time this week, being a bit of a tech-geek, sort­ing out some things around the house. One of those things was my Sling­box, which is now reli­ably work­ing on my home net­work, but I still haven’t sorted view­ing out­side of the house. More on this later.

I’ve also had a bit of a play around with Logic Stu­dio, or rather the bits of it that I have installed. I still haven’t received my replace­ment instal­la­tion DVD, so much of the included extra con­tent is out of my reach. Today’s post hasn’t come yet, so there’s still a chance it might arrive before the day is out.

Add to that the nor­mal bull­shit I have to do every day and you’ll see that I’m pretty busy most days.

I did get to screen an excel­lent film yes­ter­day, “Amer­i­can Gang­ster” and I can highly rec­om­mend it. It’s the story of Frank Lucas, a Harlem based busi­ness­man, who’s busi­ness was heroin impor­ta­tion, mar­ket­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion. Lucas basi­cally re-invented the heroin trade in the late 60s/early 70s in a very inno­v­a­tive and cre­ative way. He was also quite bru­tal, but only out of necessity.

If Lucas had used his con­sid­er­able intel­li­gence and busi­ness skill in any other indus­try, he would prob­a­bly be star­ring as the boss on the TV show, The Appren­tice, as he was truly an entre­pre­neur, but he didn’t. He chose heroin and the film does not shy away from show­ing the harm that smack does to its users, but it also makes the point that the anti-drug stance is almost as big an indus­try as the drugs trade and if black mar­ket trade in ille­gal drugs went away, so would the asso­ci­ated law enforce­ment and other ancil­liary businesses.

The film tells a com­plex story in many shades of grey and cer­tainly you will admire a lot about Lucas, though his bru­tal out­bursts never let you for­get the path he chose. It opens here in the UK tomor­row, if you get the chance, it’s worth seeing.

It comes back to some­thing I’ve said on here more than once, that the world wide black mar­ket in drugs is cap­i­tal­ism at its most basic; sim­ple sup­ply and demand. There is a huge, never-ending demand for sub­stances which alter your con­scious­ness, always has been, always will be. Cig­a­rettes and alco­hol, the legal drugs, just don’t cut it for some peo­ple and where legit­i­mate sources don’t deliver, ille­gal sup­ply lines will emerge. As long as peo­ple want some­thing, some­one will be there, ready to pro­vide it. This is about as basic a tru­ism as you can find about capitalism.

Our econ­omy and polit­i­cal sys­tem is build upon the foun­da­tions of cap­i­tal­ism, yet when it comes to the issue of ille­gal drugs, we are in deep, orches­trated denial. Pro­hi­bi­tion doesn’t work and if I can site the usual exam­ple of when Amer­ica banned liquor, the result was an organ­ised crime struc­ture that still exists today. Peo­ple wanted booze; peo­ple got booze. They’ll realised then, you couldn’t stop free trade, so they opened the doors to a reg­u­lated, taxed and legal system.

If heroin were legal, Frank Lucas would have been on the cover of busi­ness mag­a­zines as a hero and leg­end, in almost the same way that Star­bucks rein­vented cof­fee. He also prob­a­bly wouldn’t have shot all those peo­ple in the head. It’s some­thing to think about. Well, for me anyway.

Ok, so I took a cou­ple days off. Sue me! I’m still ahead on the post count!

I’ve also been work­ing lots this week and not sleep­ing enough. I could make loads of excuses, but none of them mat­ter. It doesn’t mat­ter why I haven’t been here; all that mat­ters is I haven’t been here.

Maybe I’ve bit­ten off more than I can chew, keep­ing up with this “100 posts in 100 days” doohicky. Who’s to say? The proof will be in the pud­ding, or you could insert your own cliché if you don’t like mine.

Yep, you’ve worked it out already. I don’t have a par­tic­u­lar topic today so I’m just going to ram­ble on.

“Ram­ble On” is a great Led Zep­pelin song and in only a cou­ple of quick clicks, iTunes is pump­ing it out of my speak­ers. Man, I wish I had tick­ets to see them for their big reunion con­cert! I bet some of you fuck­ers out there have tick­ets! Wanna bring along a crazy, north Lon­don based hippy of ques­tion moral standing?

Of course you do!

Or you could sell your spare ticket on eBay for like a a trillion-gazillion pounds! Though bring­ing me along would pro­vide you with a life­time of mem­o­ries and you can’t put a mon­e­tary value on that!

For me, Led Zep music and weed are for­ever linked. I didn’t really get their music until I first got high, then it all made sense and I was for­ever a fan.

Do any of you know any­one who scored Led Zep tick­ets legit­i­mately, through the online lot­tery? I’ve yet to come across a sin­gle per­son who did, per­haps you have? Answers on a post­card, please.

I’ve got a cou­ple of days off after tonight and I’m going to put some seri­ous energy into pro­vid­ing you with some high qual­ity con­tent. I’m going to have to, to make up for this abor­tion of an entry you’ve just suf­fered through.

On behalf of Hip­pyCo Indus­tries Ltd (a divi­sion of Hip­pyCo Enter­prises Inc), I would like to apol­o­gise for the sub­stan­dard prod­uct pro­vided to you today. Here at HCI, we strive to cre­ate amus­ing, infor­ma­tive and enter­tain­ing con­tent for you to enjoy and on this occa­sional, we have not suc­ceeded. If you would like to receive a full refund for the cost of your sub­scrip­tion, please get in touch with our cus­tomer ser­vices depart­ment. Unfor­tu­nately we can­not refund the time you wasted read­ing this shite. You’ll never get that back.