The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘home electronics’ Category

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!

Well fuck me, look who it is!

I mean me. Where the hell have I been?

I’ve been nowhere, doing noth­ing. Hon­est, offi­cer, I swear.

That’s not strictly true, because I am still the part time lib­er­tyc­i­ty­hippy, so you know where I’ve been hang­ing out sometime.

I’ve also been work­ing a fair bit, but my sched­ule has been all over the place with­out any sort of pat­tern, rhyme or reason.

I’ve been dis­tracted, I’ve been unfo­cused, or as it say in the larger, yel­low font above, I’ve just been “coast­ing through life.” That means any­thing requir­ing the slight­est of effort has been rel­e­gated to another day…and when another day comes, I am gonna be one busy hippy.

I wish I could be telling you oth­er­wise, that I’ve been busy record­ing my album, or writ­ing another book, or pro­vid­ing sex­ual favours to a small gang of vora­ciously demand­ing 16 year old glam­our mod­els. I wish I could tell you lots of things, but I won’t lie to you.

I can’t lie to you. It would be eas­ier if I could.

I get up every­day and seem to be busy, I don’t actu­ally just sit in a dark room all the time, yet I couldn’t tell you what eats my time away. Maybe its some time-eating mon­ster from another dimension.

How cool would that be? To be a time-eating mon­ster from another dimen­sion, trav­el­ling to north Lon­don to eat hippy time. I won­der what time tastes like?

Prob­a­bly time tastes like chicken. Every­thing tastes like chicken.

Never mind time mon­sters, now its just time to meander…

I was very dis­heart­ened and sad to read of the pass­ing of George Car­lin, yet another big influ­ence on me when I was younger. Along with Hunter S and Kurt V, George Car­lin was a hero of my youth.

I used to lis­ten to George Carlin’s albums end­lessly with an absolute obses­sion. His humour, on the sur­face, could be seen as crude, but when you explored what he was actu­ally say­ing, it was gen­uinely pro­found. His com­edy dealt with word-play and idea-play and noth­ing in this life escaped his crit­i­cal gaze.

Just off the top of my head:

Words that go together, yet are contradictory:

Jumbo Shrimp
Mil­i­tary Intelligence

But the words he’s most famous for are the fol­low­ing seven:

shit
piss
fuck
cunt
cock­sucker (not a bad man, but a good woman!)
moth­er­fucker
tits (sounds like a snack. I’ll have the cheese tits)

And later on he added:

fart
turd
twat

And one that still makes me laugh, “You can prick your fin­ger, but you can’t fin­ger your prick.”

Car­lin con­tin­ued to per­form prac­ti­cally right up to his death on Sun­day, his final gig was the pre­vi­ous week­end. While in the busi­ness for nearly 50 years, his jokes never went stale and he never, ever ran out of mate­r­ial. How could he? The human race excels in stu­pid­ity and that could have con­tin­ued to fuel his humour for centuries.

Sorry to see you go, George. You left your mark on this world and we won’t ever for­get you. Some­thing tells me that another gen­er­a­tion will be dis­cov­er­ing you very soon, thanks to your untimely demise.

Speak­ing of death (and inap­pro­pri­ate segues), my Log­itech Har­mony 885 remote bit the big one this week. It thinks its work­ing, when you press the but­tons, but it doesn’t seem to be trans­mit­ting any infrared sig­nals. This is a bum­mer of enor­mous pro­por­tions, as it it is the cen­tral com­mand for my small, yet per­fectly formed media cen­tre. My life is now awash with too many device-specific remote controls.

The upside to this is that the remote is still under war­ranty and I am wait­ing for a call back from Log­itech sup­port which I hope will result in them send­ing me a replace­ment. The first guy I spoke to tried to help me sort it out over the phone, but his reme­dies didn’t do did­dley. I’m missed their return call yes­ter­day, but they should phone me back again later today.

And stay­ing with my elec­tronic theme, I can­celled my Voda­fone con­tract today, in antic­i­pa­tion of hav­ing a brand new, shiny, lick­able iPhone 3G on launch day, which is 11th July, just over a fort­night from today. Voda­fone were sur­pris­ingly mel­low about my depar­ture, no hard sell, the phone call was brief and pain­less. Actu­ally, the guy was so nice, I told him I was switch­ing to O2 for the iPhone — usu­ally I don’t tell these peo­ple any­thing, so this is out of char­ac­ter for me. I’m a marketer’s worst nightmare!

Once I get my fancy new iPhone, I’m going to exper­i­ment with blog­ging from it. I’m not sure how it will go, but I like the idea of pro­vid­ing short posts on the fly. We’ll see if the real­ity keeps up with the fantasy!

I did con­sider play­ing around with Twit­ter, but I got frus­trated at the reg­is­tra­tion phase. The char­ac­ter limit of your screen name on Twit­ter is far too short and I couldn’t fit northlon­don­hippy into the tiny lit­tle box. None of that mat­ters any­way, I mean who in their right mind would sign up to fol­low me around on Twit­ter? How many times can you read: “had a piss, now smok­ing a spliff”, over and over every day?

While you pon­der that, I’m going to go for a piss, then smoke a spliff.

See, I told ya it would be lame…

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?

The entire month of April slipped quickly and effort­lessly through my fin­gers. I say “effort­lessly” because that is pre­cisely how much effort I’ve put into my site this month and for that I am ashamed.

You shouldn’t have to pay the price for this and you won’t, which is why I am extend­ing the dead­line on my “bub­bler con­test” until the 1st of June, so there is still plenty more time to enter. And don’t worry if you’ve already entered, your email still counts very much so and you will con­tinue to have an equal chance with every­one else.

I’ve had loads of emails with ques­tions about the con­test, which I will answer here in a mini-FAQ:

Is the con­test for real? YES

What’s in it for you? SELF PROMOTION

Do I just send you an email to enter? YES

Will you really post me the bub­bler if I win? YES

How will you choose the win­ners? LITTLE PIECES OF PAPER WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS WILL BE PUT IN A BOWL AND I WILL WITHDRAW 16 OF THEM, ONE FOR EACH PRIZE, FROM 1ST ON DOWN.

Will you announce the win­ners? JUST THEIR INITIALS AND WILL CONTACT EACH ONE INDIVIDUALLY TO ASK FOR THEIR MAILING ADDRESS

And that’s it for now. Get entering!

While I’m here, a quick update on why I haven’t been here. I’ve been work­ing too much, I’ve been dis­tracted by other things, most notably a book which I will review at some point here, because it deserves to be read and I’ve been sort­ing out the usual bull­shit at my north Lon­don lair.

My SKY+ box died a cou­ple of weeks ago and I thought it was gone for good, but I was able to give it a mas­ter reset and get­ting it going again…for about 2 more weeks before it well and truly went to that great gad­get shop in the SKY. It was around 5–6 years old, an orig­i­nal V1 Pace box and I’m sur­prised it lasted as long as it did.

I booked a call out with SKY, which costs £65 and included a replace­ment box and I really didn’t have a choice. Well, I did, I could have used this as an oppor­tu­nity to upgrade to SKY HD, but I’m still not con­vinced its worth the extra dosh with so lit­tle proper HD con­tent available.

The SKY engi­neer was cool and it took him all of ten min­utes to swap the boxes and pair the new one up with my card. The box he installed is a PACE V3, with an 80gb hard drive, though I think that some of it is par­ti­tioned for SKY Any­time, which is where SKY choose pro­grammes they think are the best of the week and record them to your hard drive in the back­ground. It can be dis­abled if you don’t like it, but I thought I would give it a go and see what its like. I’m not con­vinced if you switch it off that it will free up the other half of the hard drive for my record­ings, but its worth look­ing into if the SKY selected shows are crap.

The new box is about a third the size of my old one, its really dinky. It’s also a bit nois­ier than the old one, either because of the fan or the hard drive and I’m not cer­tain which. It seems to work well so far and isn’t much dif­fer­ent from the old one, except for the afore­men­tioned ANYTIME feature.

It’s not just a device that died, but I found out last night that one of my mother’s sis­ters, my favourite aunt passed away over the week­end. She was nearly 84 and it sounds like she was sur­rounded by loved ones and went peace­fully. What­ever the fuck that means.

I don’t like many of my rel­a­tives, and to be hon­est I down­right despise quite a few of them, but not this par­tic­u­lar aunt. She was really spe­cial and yes, I know peo­ple always say nice things about the dead, but I would have said the same last week, when she was among the liv­ing. She was con­sis­tently kind, gen­er­ous and lov­ing and was beloved by many, myself and my younger brother among them.

I hadn’t seen her in years, as is true of 99% of my fam­ily and its prob­a­bly been 4–5 years since I spoke to her on the tele­phone. I would have liked to chat with her, but she’d become quite deaf and the tele­phone wasn’t really an option.

One of my ear­li­est child­hood mem­o­ries, which is vague and hazy as I would expect of a minor event prior to my 3rd birth­day, over 40 years ago to be, is of my aunt vis­it­ing us in a house we lived in, in 1965. She took me for a walk up to a nearby super­mar­ket and I can just remem­ber being excited by this unusual out­ing with an aunt that I loved and trusted. It’s just a small mem­ory, but I still carry it around with me to this day.

Good bye my dear, sweet aunt, you will always be remem­bered fondly by the many peo­ple whose lives you touched, includ­ing mine.

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 pur­chased a full copy of Logic Stu­dio, Apple’s audio pro­duc­tion suite of appli­ca­tions and loops, at the end of Octo­ber, when I bought my copy of Leop­ard. Around a week after that, I started installing Logic Stu­dio; yes­ter­day I finished.

Yes, you are read­ing that cor­rectly, it took me 6 weeks to get all of the soft­ware prop­erly installed and func­tion­ing on my iMac.

Why?

Sim­ple, because one of the instal­la­tion DVDs was no good.

The first time I tried to install the entire pack­age, the sixth DVD of seven was spit out by my com­puter, around 7 hours into the process. The DVD in ques­tion, Jam Pack Con­tent 2, had some prob­lem and my drive couldn’t read it.

Being the resource­ful sort, I decided to give it another try before con­tact­ing Apple. At the same point, around 7 hours in, the 6th DVD crapped out again. I phoned Apple.

Phon­ing Apple is never fun, they are always busy, you need to wait a while before you speak to the first human being and rarely can the first per­son you speak to, help you, neces­si­tat­ing a fur­ther wait. I was more relaxed this time, because I was armed with a fresh ser­ial num­ber and a recently pur­chased, boxed copy of Logic Studio.

After leap­ing suc­cess­fully through all the right hoops, I finally got to speak to some­one from the Logic depart­ment. I described my prob­lem to him in detail and he agreed I had a duff DVD. He con­firmed my details and said that a replace­ment DVD would be with me in 3–4 days. This was six weeks ago.

Like a twat, I sat by my front door, day in and day out, await­ing the knock of the post­man or courier with my replace­ment DVD and every day, it did not arrive. I stayed cool, I stayed calm, I waited a cou­ple of weeks and phoned again.

On sub­se­quent calls to Apple, you are armed with some­thing even bet­ter than a ser­ial num­ber, some­thing they call a case num­ber. A case num­ber from Apple refers to the spe­cific inci­dent you’ve con­tacted them about and it makes it much quicker to nav­i­gate through the hoops to get to the per­son who can help you.

I got the same guy in the Logic depart­ment, he has quite a dis­tinc­tive accent and that’s how I knew. He put me on hold to check on the sta­tus of my replace­ment and after a few min­utes, he returned to tell me that it would be with me in 3–4 days. This was five weeks ago.

I con­tin­ued to press my runny nose against my front win­dow, patiently wait­ing for the deliv­ery to come and mak­ing nasty, gloopy marks on the glass. I remained chilled, I was relaxed and as the hol­i­days approached, I for­mu­lated a plan of action.

I also did a bit of research on the inter­net and dis­cov­ered I was not alone with a dam­aged instal­la­tion DVD. It turned out many peo­ple had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence to mine, with the instal­la­tion fail­ing at the same point.

I’m guess­ing Apple had a seri­ous qual­ity con­trol issue with DVD num­ber 6 and get­ting them remade took a lot longer than expected. Or they just lied to me. Or both. It’s all very un-Apple.

I waited four more weeks, before decid­ing to phone Apple again and that was yes­ter­day. Just as I was look­ing up their num­ber on the ‘net to phone them again, there was a loud knock on the door and guess what it was! A courier with the replace­ment DVD. Yipppppeeeee!

I spent five more hours installing all the con­tent for Logic Stu­dio and at the end of it I was rewarded with a fin­ished instal­la­tion and all the loops and sounds in their proper fold­ers on my hard drive. Result!

Though, to be hon­est I was hop­ing to have a long, drawn out argu­ment with Apple which resulted in me receiv­ing some form of com­pen­sa­tion for my lengthy wait, but they stole my thun­der with their well-timed deliv­ery. If only I had phoned them a week before, per­haps I could have beat them out of some credit, or a free copy of Final Cut Express 4. Now, we’ll never know.

Now that I’ve got a full, work­ing copy of Logic Stu­dio cook­ing on my iMac, I can start think­ing about my next big exer­cise in futil­ity; my first northlon­don­hippy album.

Ladies, gen­tle­man and ston­ers, I’m pleased to announce that com­ing some­time in the 2nd half of 2008, I will be releas­ing the come­back record from a career that never was!

I present to you for the first time any­where, the title of my upcom­ing release:

“the northlon­don­hippy & the seven deadly sins — songs about sex and death”

My back-up band, “the seven deadly sins” are actu­ally only a six-piece…Sloth keeps miss­ing rehearsals.

I’ll be writ­ing and record­ing the record over the next sev­eral months, aim­ing to release it for free on my web­site some­time this sum­mer. I already have the bare bones of 5 songs in the works and ideas for the rest. The whole thing will be down­load­able, along with cover art.

If 1 mil­lion peo­ple down­load this puppy, besides bank­rupt­ing my band­with for a decade, I promise I’ll take my band and go on tour. No joke, no lie. I reckon if one mil­lion copies of this album are out there, spon­sor­ship for a tour would be a piece of piss.

No DRM, no credit card num­bers, it will be com­pletely and totally free. I might make you han­dover your email address, so I can keep you up to date with a newslet­ter or some­thing, but I would never sell, loan or give your details to anyone!

Here at Hip­pyCo Indus­tries Ltd (a divi­sion of Hip­pyCo Enter­prises plc), your pri­vacy is impor­tant to us, just as is ours. For that rea­son, we’ll never phone you up at home for a chat or show up unan­nounced for a cup of tea.

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.