The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘media’ Category

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

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

I don’t think you can.

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

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

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

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

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

1 fol­lower = 3.66 fol­lowees (approximately)

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How so?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SKY ONE on Mon­day 24th May 2010 at 5am Lon­don time, its being broad­cast at the same time view­ers on the West Coast of Amer­ica will be watch­ing. How cool is that?

I will be awake and watch­ing, what about you?

You might not have heard, but there’s a gen­eral elec­tion here in the UK on Thursday.

That is, you might not have heard if you’ve been in a coma, but even if you’ve been semi-conscious, it would be dif­fi­cult to have missed it with the blan­ket cov­er­age avail­able on every media platform.

This has been one of the most inter­est­ing cam­paigns in decades and one of the most enter­tain­ing. With just a few days ago, there is no cer­tain out­come and pre­dic­tions vary widely on what sort of gov­ern­ment we might be wak­ing up to come Fri­day morning.

Cool by me, I enjoy uncer­tainty and I like the up-in-the-air-ness of the whole thing. I watch the daily polls rise and fall with amuse­ment, because any sen­si­ble per­son knows the only poll that mat­ters is the offi­cial one on Thurs­day. All the rest are just idle spec­u­la­tion and spin.

The truth is, you can’t really trust most of the polls, because the data is weighted and manip­u­lated before it is released, usu­ally to reflect the bias and opin­ion of the media out­let who com­mis­sioned it. Yes, I’m look­ing at you News Inter­na­tional, your stilted cov­er­age and unbri­dled analin­gus per­formed on the Tories has been shame­ful. Ol’ Rupert Mur­doch anointed David Cameron as the cho­sen one and all of his news­pa­pers and his TV news chan­nel went about craft­ing a nar­ra­tive that tried to assure an out­right Con­ser­v­a­tive victory.

How’s that work­ing out?

Pos­si­bly not as well as they had hoped, as the polls sug­gest the Tories are only slightly ahead, with strong pos­si­bil­ity of no out­right major­ity. Ooops.

I think one of the biggest sur­prises for me in the cam­paign is how dis­ap­point­ing Cameron’s per­for­mances have been, espe­cially at the leader’s debates. I really expected Dia­mond Dave to walk this elec­tion, but he is not nearly as charis­matic or mag­netic a speaker as I would have expected. Part of their poor show­ing in the polling is down to this.

This elec­tion isn’t about pol­icy, though of course it should be, but it is about per­son­al­ity. Cameron has revealed him­self as lack­ing in that department.

And speak­ing of some­one com­pletely void of per­son­al­ity, have you caught Gor­don Brown lately? Just look at his forced, fake, uncom­fort­able smile; I have a the­ory (that I’d be happy never prov­ing) that he has the same expres­sion on his face when he smiles as he does when he is tak­ing a dump.

I have never been a fan of Gor­don Brown.

OK, that’s an under­state­ment, I detest him and have him a vocal and vit­ri­olic critic of him since he assumed power. I can never for­give him for pub­licly labelling cannabis a “deadly drug”, prop­a­gat­ing other false claims about it and ignor­ing all the advice, sci­en­tific and oth­er­wise by re-classifying cannabis to Class B.

Gor­don con­tin­ues to go on and on about the “global finan­cial melt­down” which he claims can only be fixed if he remains in office. Well, there’s some logic to that, because as he was Chan­cel­lor for so many years, he must feel very respon­si­ble for the mess he cre­ated and he would like to mop it up. No thanks.

Brown really showed how deeply nasty he is to the core, with his shame­ful treat­ment of Gillian Duffy, who by all accounts seems to be the sort of salt-of-the-earth Labour Party sup­porter that has kept them in the game for a very long time. If he treats his base with this much con­tempt and scorn, imag­ine what he must think of the undecided.

I feel sorry for the poor saps who have to media-manage Brown on a daily basis. What­ever you’re get­ting paid, its prob­a­bly not enough by half. Wran­gling that sour­puss from appear­ance to appear­ance would destroy the soul of the strongest PR flack.

The one good thing about Brown’s piss-poor per­for­mance dur­ing this cam­paign has been my absolute vin­di­ca­tion that he would drag the Labour Party into the polit­i­cal wilder­ness for generations.

They had sev­eral chances to replace him and they lacked the courage and balls to do it. Now they will suf­fer and get what they deserve, a com­plete dec­i­ma­tion at the polls on Thurs­day. It will be the worst show­ing by Labour in his­tory, any other MP from the party wouldn’t have done as badly as Gor­don. They really only have them­selves to blame.

I like being right and I love say­ing “I told ya so”.

Hey Labour.… I told you if you stuck with Gor­don, you’d be fucked. Yep, I TOLD YA SO!

Oh that felt good!

I’ve always been a big fan of the Lib­Dems, if not an out­right sup­porter. Their poli­cies seem to be anchored in real­ity, with a healthy dose of com­mon sense. We could use both of those qual­i­ties in government.

The best exam­ple I can site is their drug pol­icy, which in their man­i­festo, loosely says that they would take a sci­en­tific and evi­dence based approach. In prac­tise that would mean they would fol­low closely the advice of their advi­sors, in this case the ACMD.

Tak­ing it fur­ther, in pre­vi­ous state­ments, the Lib­Dems have sup­ported decrim­i­nal­is­ing or legal­is­ing cannabis, though with all the bull­shit media non­sense over the dis­cred­ited research into the (very much unproven) link between weed and psy­chosis, they haven’t men­tioned it recently. I don’t blame them as it would only be used against them as a sign of weakness.

The Lib­eral Democ­rats are not a weak party, they are actu­ally the strongest on sen­si­ble poli­cies that work towards the com­mon good and ben­e­fit the most peo­ple. It takes strength to fly in the face of con­ven­tional (media) wis­dom and openly declare that the “war on drugs” is an absolute fail­ure that does more harm than the drugs them­selves. The Lib­Dem party is the one party that’s not afraid of speak­ing the truth.

They’re also not aligned with big media or big cor­po­ra­tions, they seem to be more inde­pen­dent of the estab­lish­ment and there­fore more able to do good for the coun­try, rather than serv­ing spe­cial interests.

Nick Clegg has impressed every­one and made them sit up and take notice of his party. Its about time they get taken seri­ously. Clegg has also fright­ened the two “old par­ties”, which has been fun to watch as they both mount attacks him.

The leader’s debates have truly changed the face of pol­i­tics in this coun­try, see­ing Clegg go toe-to-toe with the other two showed the nation in a very tan­gi­ble way that there is an alter­na­tive to old-style pol­i­tics. After thir­teen years of Labour gov­ern­ments, this coun­try is in des­per­ate need of a change.

The Lib­Dems are the only party that really offers that change.

The Tories won’t change any­thing so much as bring back a same­ness. They don’t have any new ideas or energy or per­son­al­ity. Don’t vote for them.

Gor­don Brown is a mega­lo­ma­niac dic­ta­to­r­ial buf­foon and embar­rass­ment to the nation, but the rea­son not to vote Labour is sim­ple, one word: Iraq. This is the party that dragged this nation into an ille­gal and point­less war, for absolutely no good rea­son. And they lied to us about it, repeat­edly and they still do. They deserve to come in third or worse.

A vote for the Lib­Dems is a vote for change and a vote for a brighter future.

Peo­ple say they can’t win with an out­right major­ity, but they could if every­one voted their heart. If you think the Lib­Dems are the best choice, and I believe a lot of you out there do, then vote for them. You are NOT throw­ing your vote away on a minor party, real change comes from peo­ple hav­ing the strength of will and con­vic­tion to not fear change. If every­one who sup­ports them fol­lows through on elec­tion day, then Nick Clegg could be the next Prime Minister.

More likely, if you believe the polls, is that we are headed for a hung par­lia­ment and the pos­si­bil­ity of a coali­tion gov­ern­ment. There are worse things that could happen.

Many other coun­tries have coali­tion gov­ern­ments, formed by oppos­ing par­ties. Guess what hap­pens? They learn to work with each other and com­pro­mise and things get done. You have noth­ing to fear from this out­come and maybe we all might even ben­e­fit from the mix of the strongest ideas from both par­ties involved.

But which par­ties? That’s the real question.

If I was going to gam­ble on the out­come, I would say a Tory-LibDem coali­tion, with Cameron in charge and a healthy mix of both par­ties in the cab­i­net. I could live with that.

Less likely and cer­tainly less appeal­ing would be a Labour-LibDem gov­ern­ment with some­one other than Brown as PM.

And at the very out­side and many would say implau­si­ble, a Tory-Labour gov­ern­ment. I have this weird the­ory that these two polar oppo­sites (who really aren’t that dif­fer­ent) could do a deal with each other to lock the Lib­Dems out. Maybe its not as impos­si­ble as it sounds and if it does hap­pen, won’t I look like the poly-sci genius?

What­ever hap­pens, of one thing I’m cer­tain, come Fri­day, Gor­don Brown will no longer be Prime Min­is­ter and will go down as one of the most unpop­u­lar, unsuc­cess­ful, worst PM’s in history.

Remem­ber the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld?

“No soup for you!”, he would exclaim when he deter­mined some­one was unwor­thy of his tasty broth.

Ever won­der what hap­pened to the Soup Nazi since the TV show went off the air?

He works for Apple, reject­ing iPhone app sub­mis­sions. “No app for you!”, he exclaimed as he con­sid­ered an app from your favourite inde­pen­dent blog­ger and inter­net god.

I mean me.

I don’t get to have my very own iPhone app, the App Nazi says so.

Apple’s recent pol­icy change ban­ning inde­pen­dent blog­gers from sub­mit­ting apps to for pub­li­ca­tion on iTunes is still piss­ing me off.

And here’s the thing, it would still piss me off even if I wasn’t directly effected by their deci­sion. Its wrong to silence any voice, how­ever big or small. We all have a right to express our­selves, on any plat­form we choose, on any sub­ject we choose.

I chose to put an app together to bring my con­tent to the iPhone plat­form. Apple, as the provider of the plat­form, have locked me out.

I should have tried to pub­lish a fart app. Appar­ently, you can’t have too many of them.

It could be argued that my con­tent is already avail­able on the iPhone plat­form, via Safari, the iPhone’s browser. You’d win that argu­ment, its true.

All my app did was present this web­site, along with some other enter­tain­ing con­tent pro­vided and owned by me in a very iPhone friendly for­mat, via a cus­tom designed app. One tap on the northlon­don­hippy icon on your Home Screen and you’d be here, hang­ing out vir­tu­ally with me. No book­marks or URLs, just a clean, easy to read inter­face, with groovy NLH graphics.

It would have cost Apple pen­nies to host my free app. Its not like they’re strapped for cash, they’ve got bil­lions just lying around, doing nothing.

They could shut me up with a cou­ple of mil­lion. Or a free iPad.

But they don’t need to shut me up. Nobody seems to give a shit. I emailed a few tech web­sites and news­pa­pers with my sad tale of Apple app woe. Nobody bit.

Links to my pre­vi­ous entry did get tweeted around Twit­ter and buzzed across Google Buzz, or what­ever the kids are doing these days but I am still wait­ing for a groundswell of pop­u­lar sup­port which would push Apple to recon­sider this very fool­ish, point­less and spite­ful decision.

Apple began in Steve Wozniak’s garage, with Woz and Steve Jobs knock­ing together the first Apple com­puter. Blog­ging is not much dif­fer­ent than that, we’re all out here just knock­ing stuff together. Some make it into the main­stream, some toil in rel­a­tive obscu­rity, but most just seem to give up. Many blogs lie dor­mant after a brief, unsat­is­fy­ing flurry of activ­ity, but not this one.

I know I’m not the most pro­lific blog­ger, but I’m still here and have been for 6 fun filled years. Ok, they haven’t been that much fun, but I am still here.

I’ve been toy­ing with the idea of hang­ing up my hippy hat. This isn’t meant to be a threat or some drama queen strop. I’ve con­sid­ered giv­ing up before, but I’ve always man­aged to find rea­sons to keep going and ended up rein­vig­o­rated at the end of it.

Right now, I just feel tired.

The iPhone app was meant to re-inspire me and it would have, if only briefly. But isn’t that the way this works? You are con­stantly search­ing for new inspi­ra­tion to keep you going.

The weird thing is, for a niche blog that doesn’t get updated very often, I do some good busi­ness. When I look at a graph of my vis­i­tor lev­els, its always an upward incline. I make a bit of dosh too, with my lim­ited adver­tis­ing and solo affil­i­ate scheme.

I’ve recently been spec­u­lat­ing that would still be the case, even if I didn’t post any­thing new. There’s a lot of con­tent on my web­site, six years of spew­ing dri­vel will do that. I could prob­a­bly just let this web­site sit here, do noth­ing and still main­tain my reach.

Yes, I’ve been giv­ing seri­ous thought to giv­ing up and quite stu­pidly, mainly because Apple refused to pub­lish my app. Maybe there is no place for inde­pen­dent blog­gers in the world any more and Apple is just ahead of the curve. If your web­site doesn’t have a staff of 30, then no one takes it seri­ously and you might as well not exist.

What’s a self obsessed weed­head and middle-aged fail­ure at life to do?

If I knew the answer to that one, fuck­ers, I wouldn’t be sit­ting here typ­ing out this shit, would I?

My iPhone app was rejected, again. That’s twice in the last month.

I heard back yes­ter­day. This time, the app has been rejected on the basis that Apple have changed their sub­mis­sion pol­icy and no longer allow apps that “…are solely intended for an indi­vid­ual blog­ger with a small audience…”.

Isn’t that most inde­pen­dent bloggers?

I’ve been blog­ging for 6 years, my anniver­sary is next week. My web­site was never going to be main­stream, but that’s kind of the point of its exis­tence and the exis­tence of most blogs. We cater to niche audi­ence, but an audi­ence none the less.

Are my read­ers less impor­tant than the read­ers of the New York Times web­site? Every reader counts, whether its one thou­sand or one million.

Why does Apple hate me? Why does Apple hate my audience?

Why does Apple hate inde­pen­dent bloggers?

Let’s put this into a bit of per­spec­tive. I invested time and money into cre­at­ing an app that I thought would be of inter­est to my read­ers. The app is quite sim­ple, but well designed, effec­tively cre­at­ing an iPhone-optimised inter­face linked to all my online northlon­don­hippy related content.

There’s noth­ing wrong with my app, it all works smoothly, the design is clean and sim­ple, and the graph­ics are slick and pro­fes­sional. The price, there was none, I wanted to offer it via the iTunes store for free, I wanted to give it away to any­one who wanted it.

So why do Apple hate me?

They shouldn’t, I am an unashamed Apple fan boy.

Cur­rently, in the room I’m sit­ting in, there’s a 27” Quad Core iMac, a Core Duo Mac Mini, A Core Duo black Mac­Book, an iPhone 3GS, an iPod Touch, an Air­port Extreme, sev­eral Air­port Expresses, I use Final Cut Express and Logic Stu­dio and iWork, I buy apps, music and films.…

You get the idea, I own a lot of Apple kit and just because they hate me, doesn’t mean I won’t con­tinue to pur­chase their toys. iPad, you are next on my list.

And I don’t just buy a lot of Apple stuff, I rec­om­mend it to my friends and am respon­si­ble for count­less sales to many recent converts.

Apple should love me, like I love them, they’re like that girl who gave you a drunken pity hand­job once, but now looks at you with dis­gust when­ever you run into her sober and you keep hop­ing you’ll catch her a bit pissed again, but you never do. The desire is all one way and it only ever ends in bit­ter disappointment.

I praise Apple on my web­site and won’t stop just because they hate me. I can han­dle rejec­tion, I’m used to it.

In short, there’s noth­ing wrong with my con­tent, includ­ing all my weed related entries. Apple don’t have a prob­lem with cannabis and there are sev­eral mar­i­juana related apps avail­able on iTunes, includ­ing one that will direct you to the near­est med­ical dis­pen­sary. Mine’s appar­ently in Ams­ter­dam, last time I checked.

So why do Apple hate me?

Why does Apple hate all inde­pe­dent bloggers?

I’ve writ­ten a cou­ple of nov­els, and was watch­ing with great inter­est to see if Apple would have a route for inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers to get books on to their upcom­ing iBook Store for the iPad, but now I am not so sure.

If Apple are cen­sor­ing iPhone apps to the point where they won’t con­sider sub­mis­sions from inde­pen­dent blog­gers, is there any point to me invest­ing more time and money devel­op­ing my eBooks for the iPad, only to have Apple change their poli­cies suddenly.

Maybe you think a northlon­don­hippy iPhone app is a bit point­less, maybe I do too, but that’s not what’s impor­tant. What’s impor­tant is free­dom of speech and expres­sion and if I wish to bring my mes­sage as an inde­pen­dent blog­ger to an estab­lished, pop­u­lar mobile plat­form, I should be able to do so, with­out any imped­i­ment from the cor­po­ra­tion who sup­plies the plat­form. What’s wrong with giv­ing the lit­tle guy a chance?

It would be like Sony ban­ning you from watch­ing home­made videos on your tele­vi­sion, only Sony Pic­tures DVDs would dis­play on the screen, but not your hol­i­day or wed­ding videos.

Maybe no one would have down­loaded my app, maybe mil­lions of peo­ple would have, but I’ll never know. Apple have killed it, dead in its tracks for no good rea­son other than on a whim they have decided to lock all inde­pen­dent blog­gers out of the app store.

Will Apple recon­sider? If peo­ple make enough noise they might. It wouldn’t be unprece­dented, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

All I wanted to do was expand my online reach, just a lit­tle. I invested time, I invested money, but more impor­tantly I invested my hopes and dreams on a lit­tle iPhone app that I could call my own. I would never have guessed that this lit­tle dream would become a night­mare of cen­sor­ship and unchecked cor­po­rate power.

Does Steve Jobs know about this? If he finds out, he’s going to be mighty pissed off.

I bet hav­ing a recipe as my top post con­fused a lot of my new vis­i­tors and that was the case until I posted this par­tic­u­larly unplanned foray into shar­ing my thoughts.

This is not a food blog. A recipe is some­thing out of the ordi­nary. Nor­mal ser­vice has now resumed.

As I sit here, typ­ing away, we are around 9 hours from the expected Apple Tablet announce­ment. Its pretty big news so I expect you’ve already heard all about it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on about it too much.

I’ve got 2 pre­dic­tions, one is an easy one that’s prob­a­bly true, the other is a long shot.

Pre­dic­tion one: It will be a pre­mium prod­uct with a pre­mium price for early adopters. Yes, I mean it will be very expen­sive, but will be cheaper in a year.

Pre­dic­tion two: It will be called ‘iBook”, which used to be the name of one of their best sell­ing lap­tops. They already own it, so it would be an easy yet inven­tive choice. I am far less cer­tain of this one and will be pleas­antly sur­prised if I am right. I’ll also brag a lot about it too.

I’ve wanted some­thing like what’s expected today for years. Yes, I will buy one as soon as they are avail­able though I am guess­ing it will be like the orig­i­nal iPhone, sold is the USA exclu­sively for 6 months, then launched in the UK. That will be frustrating!

Today isn’t just tablet day. Had my mother still been alive, today would have been her 80th birth­day, but she missed it by around 13 months. I miss her, a lot.

At least Apple were nice enough to sched­ule their announce­ment on the same date as my mother’s birth­day, its a wel­come distraction.

So roll on 18:00gmt, when the big show starts in Cal­i­for­nia. I’ll be online, fol­low­ing the announce­ment live as best I can and I’ll be tweet­ing my impres­sions as well. That is, assum­ing the entire inter­net doesn’t come crash­ing down to a screech­ing halt under the weight of all that Apple Tablet hype.

Oh yes, that’s my last pre­dic­tion, Twit­ter is going to crash like Oceanic Air 815 as soon as Steve Jobs takes the stage. Maybe I should just plan on tweet­ing again tomorrow.

As part of my never-ending quest to seek noth­ing but the truth, I’ve decided to pro­vide the only gen­uinely hon­est review the decade that’s nearly finished.

It fuck­ing sucked. Really, it did. I’ll be glad to see the back of it.

Besides iPods, name one good thing about the noughties? Even its nick­name is pathet­i­cally lame.

The decade started with the Mil­len­nium, which was sup­posed to be the biggest cel­e­bra­tion of all time. I spent the night in cen­tral Lon­don, on the River Thames, broad­cast­ing live to all over the world. Maybe you saw me there, I was in charge of a broad­cast tent near Lam­beth Bridge, block­ing people’s views of the fire­works and River of Fire.

Ha, the River of Fire was the first major dis­ap­point­ment of many in the noughties, a damp squib rather than spec­tac­u­lar and a giant let down for those who braved the cold to wit­ness it. I’ve never heard such a loud, col­lec­tive, “is that really it?” in my life.

Lon­don crowds can be drunken and angry and the night of the Mil­len­nium was no excep­tion. As the clock struck mid­night and I was trans­mit­ting live on behalf of four dif­fer­ent for­eign broad­cast­ers, some­one unplugged our gen­er­a­tor cable and every­thing went dark.  

Don’t worry, one of the tech­ni­cians man­aged to get it recon­nected and it all worked, though the cables were cov­ered with human urine, which wasn’t so pleas­ant for the engi­neer. On top of that, the crowd attacked us and tried to steal our expen­sive TV gear. I can remem­ber smack­ing peo­ples’ arms and hands away from tripods and lights as the fire­works began.

We were all ready for the Y2K bug, a pecu­liar glitch in some older com­put­ers that pre­vented it for han­dling 4-digit years, mean­ing some unpatched com­put­ers would think it was 1900, not the year 2000. We expected the tele­phone net­work to col­lapse, the power grid to crash, along with all the jumbo jets fly­ing overhead.

It didn’t hap­pen, noth­ing hap­pened, cri­sis averted.

But that didn’t mean the noughties were cri­sis free, because less than a year later, George W. (for What the fuck?) Bush stole the elec­tion and became the most pow­er­ful sub-normally intel­li­gent per­son in his­tory. His pres­i­dency dom­i­nated the decade and his poli­cies made the world a much shit­tier place.

Think for a sec­ond, if Al Gore had claimed the pres­i­dency instead. He should have won it, he did win it, but the Supreme Court had other ideas.

Do you think we’d be in Iraq if Gore had two terms in the White House? Prob­a­bly not, but then we most likely wouldn’t have Barack Obama now.

Who’s to say?

The Bush pres­i­dency was built on the foun­da­tion of the Neo-Conservative moment and the Project for a New Amer­i­can Cen­tury. How’d all that turn out?

Let’s see, the entire econ­omy melted down to near col­lapse and we seem to be engaged in George Orwell’s never-ending war while his Big Brother keeps track of our every thought and action.

Cool.

Bush was stu­pid, his advi­sors no smarter. They dug one stu­pid hole after another, each a lit­tle deeper than the last.

When the attacks of 11th Sep­tem­ber 2001 took place, you couldn’t imag­ine a worse com­man­der and chief to have at the helm, unless you enjoy children’s books about pet goats, in which case he would be your num­ber one choice.

9/11 changed every­thing, but the real shock and awe was how we felt as we watched the twin tow­ers come crash­ing to the ground.

I’m old enough to remem­ber when the World Trade Cen­tre was built. I’d been lucky enough to visit the obser­va­tion deck more than once, its a view you wouldn’t be able to dupli­cate again today with­out a helicopter.

We were dev­as­tated by those attacks, fiendishly sim­ple, yet exe­cuted to max­i­mum effect. I remem­ber think­ing that this was the begin­ning of the end of west­ern civil­i­sa­tion and soon we would all be crawl­ing through noth­ing but rub­ble, drink­ing brack­ish water from pud­dles in the streets.

How wrong I was!

9/11 was a blip, a lucky shot, a once in a life­time ter­ror strike from a group whose suc­cess exceeded even their own expec­ta­tions. I’m sure they didn’t think the entire world would change so rad­i­cally as a result of their actions, but change it did.

Keep­ing us secure became the num­ber one pri­or­ity, the cost being a dra­matic reduc­tion in our lib­erty and per­sonal free­doms. Any extreme, rad­i­cal action taken by a gov­ern­ment could and would be jus­ti­fied by tag­ging it with an anti-terror bent.

Do you want to mon­i­tor all tele­phone calls and email mes­sages? No problem.

Do you need my bank­ing and credit his­tory before I get on a plane? Sure thing!

How about my shoes, should I take them off too? Gosh, hope I don’t have holes in my socks!

Think how quickly we all sim­ply adapted to these new real­i­ties, we made hardly a peep as our civil lib­er­ties were sys­tem­at­i­cally stripped away.

Its become such a farce now, here in Lon­don you prac­ti­cally can’t even take a pho­to­graph in a pub­lic place with­out the police swoop­ing down on you like you’re Mohammed Atta, scop­ing out another attack.

Think that’s good for busi­ness and tourism? Think again?

Ter­ror is not the only thing that’s been scar­ing us in the last ten years, as the environment’s been on our minds too. You won’t see any gov­ern­ment declar­ing war on cli­mate change, even though its prob­a­bly more of a threat to more peo­ple than ter­ror­ism could ever be.

The effects of cli­mate change are appar­ent to any­one who can be both­ered to look, yet there are peo­ple out there in the world who try to deny this inevitabil­ity. If you tried to deny the threat of ter­ror, you would be labelled a trai­tor, but being a climate-change doubter will not earn you the same label.

Its prob­a­bly too late to slow down cli­mate change because we pissed away the last decade argu­ing about it. It would be funny, if it weren’t so damn tragic as the recent Copen­hagen Cli­mate Sum­mit heartily illustrated.

The wars in the last ten years have been quite tragic too, espe­cially the two major con­flicts insti­gated by the West, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The war in Iraq was jus­ti­fied with false pre­tences and bla­tant, pre-meditated lies. I knew there were no weapons of mass destruc­tion in Iraq and I had no access to any of the intel­li­gence avail­able to our lead­ers. They knew it too, but made up a bunch of non­sense any way.

I can remem­ber being the only idiot in the world who thought that Amer­ica and Britain wouldn’t go to war in Iraq. I gen­uinely believed they had no grounds to ini­ti­ate a con­flict and that they would back down at the last minute. I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong, but not as wrong as launch­ing that ille­gal and point­less war.

George W (for War Crim­i­nal) Bush and Tony Blair should both be sit­ting in prison cells in The Hague, await­ing their tri­als for crimes against human­ity, but no one has the fuck­ing balls to send them both there. The Inter­na­tional Court should have charged them already, even if extra­di­tion would never hap­pen. They both should pay for their crimes and sins.

But they won’t.

How many inno­cent lives have been lost in that point­less war? Iraq was far from per­fect before the “allies” invaded, but the elec­tric­ity flowed, the streets were safe and Iraq still had an edu­cated, func­tional mid­dle class.

I’m not a Sad­dam Hus­sein apol­o­gist, the guy was a nasty piece of work, repres­sive, iron fisted, unpleas­ant and vicious. But so what? Lots of coun­tries are lead by shit­bags, we don’t invade them and impose regime change just because we feel like it.

Regime change on its own is not a valid rea­son for war. In the case of Iraq, it turns out it was the only reason.

Sad­dam Hus­sein got strung up in a hastily organ­ised hang­ing. There’s mobile phone video of it on the inter­net, that I’m sure you’ve seen by now. It was a very undig­ni­fied end for an odi­ous, hor­ri­ble man. Though back in the 1970s, Sad­dam was friendly with Amer­ica and funded by them, because he opposed Iran.

Things change, shit happens.

Afghanistan is a dif­fer­ent shade of grey.

After 9/11, there was some sense in going into Afghanistan since that’s where the ter­ror bases and train­ing camps were. That’s also where the leader of the bad guys lived, oh what’s his name again?

Osama some­thing or other.

They had the chance to cap­ture or kill him in Tora Bora and blew it. He’s still allegedly alive and on the run in the bor­der area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The prob­lem with Afghanistan is after they chased Al Qaeda out, they were left fight­ing the Tal­iban. Big coun­tries like Amer­ica are crappy at fight­ing insur­gen­cies and guer­rilla wars, see Viet­nam for proof. They’ve been dragged deeper into a civil con­flict than they need to be.

Today, Afghanistan is a law­less basket-case of a nation, with a cor­rupt, inef­fec­tual gov­ern­ment at its cen­tre and pow­er­ful war lords scat­tered through­out the country.

Pres­i­dent Obama seems to think more troops will help and the decade is end­ing with him announc­ing fur­ther deployments.

When will they ever learn?

How’s never sound?

And speak­ing of America’s first black pres­i­dent, Barack Obama is one of the good things to come out of the noughties, but he wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble if it weren’t for George W. (Where’d he go?) Bush. Bush paved the way for Obama, with his stu­pid­ity, mis­takes and far right ideals.

Whether you agree with Obama’s poli­cies or not, hav­ing a mixed race pres­i­dent in Amer­ica is good for the entire world. I never thought I would see it in my life­time, and like most peo­ple I was moved deeply by his election.

Do I think he’s doing a good job? Its way too early to tell. He hasn’t even been in office for an entire year yet. We should give the guy a chance. Ask me again in 3–7 years, when he’s fin­ished and I’ll have enough infor­ma­tion to form an opin­ion. Clearly, I wasn’t a vot­ing mem­ber of the Nobel panel, because I never would have given the prize to Barack, at least not yet, anyway.

Per­son­ally, it wasn’t such a hot decade for me either. Both of my par­ents passed away, my father in 2004 and my mother in 2008. I miss them both every day.

This was the decade I well and truly entered mid­dle age. I’m going to be forty-fucking-seven next month. The last decade saw me diag­nosed with a stu­pid ill­ness and I had a sus­tained period of unem­ploy­ment while I was between jobs.

The ill­ness, Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, is allegedly under con­trol and I did man­age to secure gain­ful employ­ment, for which I am very thank­ful, but nei­ther period was par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant for me.

The progress of tech­nol­ogy is one good thing to come from the last decade, I’ve got the some of the coolest toys I’ve ever owned cur­rently in my possession.

I’m on my 3rd iMac, the lat­est a 27” beast with a quad-core proces­sor that is light­en­ing fast, its like hav­ing a styl­ish super­com­puter parked on my desk.

By far, the most amaz­ing thing I own is my iPhone 3GS, it is a gad­get of unri­valled beauty, power and use­ful­ness. If I had to choose one piece of kit that’s rev­o­lu­tionised my life, its my iPhone. It does more than I could have ever imag­ined and its abil­i­ties just keep grow­ing with every app I install.

Cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism came of age in the noughties, with web­sites sim­i­lar to this one spring­ing up at a rapid rate. The word “blog” didn’t even exist ten years ago and now there are mil­lions of them.

Blog­ging came along when I needed it most, I started this one nearly 6 years ago dur­ing my dark and depress­ing period of unemployment.

Blog­ging gave me some­thing to do, some­thing to focus on, some­thing to make me feel like I was still a func­tion­ing mem­ber of soci­ety. I had a way to con­tribute, a way to par­tic­i­pate. Some­how, I still mat­tered, even if I felt like I didn’t.

Blog­ging may have saved my life. I would have con­tin­ued to sink deeper had I not dis­cov­ered Blogspot back in 2004. 

And that’s where you all come in.

With­out an audi­ence, blog­ging is a bit point­less and while I am still not and will prob­a­bly never be main­stream, I’ve had a level of sup­port and inter­est that still astounds me. I’m thank­ful for every vis­i­tor I’ve ever had who has dropped by and hung out with me virtually.

With­out all of you, I’d just be some guy writ­ing long­winded essays for my own amuse­ment. Ok, even with you all around, that state­ment is true, but its still bet­ter for hav­ing you all here.

Thanks very much for stop­ping by, you’ll always find a warm wel­come here and I always put out on the first date.

I wish each and every one of you the very best of the hol­i­day sea­son. I hope the next decade sees all your hopes and dreams come true.

PS
I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff I left out of my review of the decade, but this short video review from Newsweek Mag­a­zine should fill in many of the gaps. Its quite US-centric, but its only 7 min­utes long, so enjoy!

Nearly 5 years ago to this very day, I wrote a lit­tle some­thing here on the hippy that is one of my favourite posts ever. Back when I had a top-ten favourite list, this par­tic­u­lar post was fea­tured prominently.

Its called ASS BOMBS

Don’t worry if you can’t be both­ered to re-read it right now, I’ll sum­marise it for you: I spec­u­lated on the lengths future ter­ror­ists would have to go through to sneak explo­sive devices on to planes and the addi­tional secu­rity mea­sures that would have to be put in place to main­tain safety. This wasn’t long Richard Reid tried to blow up his shoes.

I the­o­rised that a ter­ror­ists’ rec­tum would become a com­part­ment for hid­ing plas­tique and air­port secu­rity screen­ers would have to play proc­tol­o­gist to make sure all air trav­ellers were not car­ry­ing any­thing up their bot­toms. Instead of “take off your shoes and remove all metal objects”, their instruc­tion would be to “bend over and spread those cheeks.”

It would cer­tainly put fly­ing into a brand new per­spec­tive. Mak­ing sure you wear clean socks with­out any holes wouldn’t seem so impor­tant any more.

It turns out, I was par­tially right. An alleged Al Qaeda fanatic tried to blow up offi­cials at a meet­ing in Saudi Ara­bia with some TNT shoved up his ass, only the idiot left it stuck up there when it det­o­nated and it only killed the bomber. You’re sup­posed to take it out of your bot­tom before it goes off.

You can read the report here in The Sun news­pa­per, under their clever head­line; “Sui­cide Bum­mer”. Did you see what they did there?

Its unlikely as fuck that Al Qaeda visit my web­site, so they prob­a­bly worked this one out on their own. Now that this fright­en­ing and icky tech­nique is out there, how long before air­ports imple­ment new secu­rity pro­ce­dures? Not long is my guess.

Still, there’s an upside. If you’re going to have to dis­play your ring­piece in air­ports for all to see, anal bleach­ing is set to be the next big growth indus­try. They’ll even have a new slo­gan: “Anal Bleaching…its not just for porn stars any more!”

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

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

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

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

I was kind of hop­ing you could tell me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven’t done much of any­thing since.

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

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

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

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

The National Health Ser­vice (NHS) here in the UK has been in the fir­ing line this week as Amer­i­cans “debate” over­haul­ing their health­care sys­tem in an attempt to extend access to their 50 mil­lion res­i­dents who have absolutely no cover or access to care.

Amer­i­cans are being led to believe that the free health­care avail­able to all of us in the UK is no good. This is so far from the truth that it would be funny, except for the fact that people’s lives hang in the balance.

The UK has a much higher life expectancy than the USA. Check your sta­tis­tics and see that I’m not lying. The UK also spends less on health­care per per­son than they do in the states, yet they yield bet­ter results.

Go fig­ure!

The Amer­i­can health­care sys­tem is run like a for-profit busi­ness. Think about that, some­one prof­its from your ill­ness and the per­cent­ages of profit are obscenely high.

Insur­ance com­pa­nies, drug com­pa­nies pri­vate hos­pi­tals, pri­vate doc­tors are all in the game to make money from your mis­ery. That can’t be right, can it? Every test ordered that you don’t really need, every over-prescription is money in the bank for someone.

Just ask Michael Jack­son if pri­vate health­care on demand is a good thing. Oh wait, you can’t because it killed him.

In Amer­ica, health­care is seen as a priv­i­lege, not a basic human right. Should one only be enti­tled to health­care on the basis of qual­i­fy­ing for insur­ance, rather than qual­i­fy­ing for need? Shouldn’t every­one have access to healthcare?

Of course they should!

Some of the scenes I’ve caught on tele­vi­sion, of the so-called town-hall meet­ings have been very amus­ing, well amus­ing in as much as the igno­rance fuelled anger is sim­ply surreal.

It seems to me, that the loud­est voices at these town-hall meet­ings are com­ing out of the mouths of peo­ple with the least infor­ma­tion on the sub­ject. These sad, twisted, igno­rant peo­ple have an unjus­ti­fi­able hatred of Pres­i­dent Obama that is prob­a­bly rooted in their inher­ent racism rather than any actual dis­like of a new health­care system.

All you need to do is lis­ten to what they say, their buzz words, like “social­ism” and “this isn’t the Amer­ica I know” to under­stand just how mis­guided and ill-informed these folks are on the subject.

Ok, any subject.

At the heart of all of this is FOX News, the biased and unfair pseudo news net­work owned by Rupert Mur­doch. FOX News pro­vide the stilted talk­ing points and their legions of view­ers turn up at town-hall meet­ings, par­rot­ing the same lame shit.

I can’t say I’ve looked into it, but I am guess­ing a wealthy guy like Mur­doch must have busi­ness inter­ests out­side the media world, say per­haps insur­ance or drug com­pa­nies. In other words, he may have a vested finan­cial inter­est in how this debate plays out. And if not him, then some of his rich robber-baron mates have got invest­ments in the med­ical field. There’s a lot of profit to be protected.

Its funny how SKY News, the sis­ter sta­tion of FOX News, under the News­Corp cor­po­rate umbrella is tak­ing a dif­fer­ent tack here, right­eously defend­ing the NHS against the FOX News inspired attacks. Does one hand not know what the other is doing? Or is SKY sim­ply pan­der­ing to their UK-based subscribers?

I think we both know the answer to that one.

I’m in a fairly unique posi­tion, hav­ing lived con­sid­er­able lengths of time under both health­care sys­tems. Nei­ther the US or UK sys­tems are per­fect, both excel at some things and lack in oth­ers, but over­all, I know which sys­tem I would choose, if I had to…

The NHS all the way!

In the UK, I’ve never had any con­cerns about insur­ance, access to the med­ical sys­tem or being able to afford the costs. I’ve for the most part, had excel­lent care of a world class stan­dard cour­tesy of the NHS.

In Amer­ica I’ve been charged one hun­dred bucks for a wooden tongue depresser — you know what I’m talk­ing about, a wide wooden pop­si­cle stick.

Open your mouth and say “ahhh fuck, you just charged me a Ben­jamin to do that!”

In my world, life is usu­ally quite sim­ple and this unhealthy debate is no dif­fer­ent. What it boils down to is this: “I’ve already got mine, so screw you if you don’t have yours!” It all comes down to com­pas­sion and America’s appar­ent lack of it.

The Chris­t­ian right in Amer­ica preach some­thing known as “com­pas­sion­ate con­ser­vatism”, but sadly they don’t prac­tise it in any mean­ing­ful or tan­gi­ble way. Where’s the com­pas­sion? What would that guy Jesus do?

Jesus would move to the UK, sign on to the dole and get those holes in his hands and feet looked at for free, same for that nasty stab wound in his side.

Uni­ver­sal health­care is an unde­ni­able right, yet 50 mil­lion Amer­i­cans are being denied it. Any com­pas­sion­ate per­son would recog­nise the inequal­ity in the cur­rent sys­tem and want to do all they could to change it.

Where are all the com­pas­sion­ate folks in Amer­ica? Don’t they care about their fel­low man? Maybe if there are any, they could go to those silly town-hall meet­ings and shout down all the igno­rant idiots that are mak­ing Amer­ica look so stupid.

Oh and while I’m at it, lay off the NHS. Ill-informed opin­ion does not make a debate, it just makes you look even more like morons to the rest of the (bet­ter informed) world.