I’ve been properly on Twitter for about two and a half years. To be more precise, as of this writing, I have been using Twitter since the 31st of January 2009, which works out to 931 days. I used howlongontwitter.com to calculate that, I didn’t count it up myself.

In that time, I’ve found Twitter to be indispensable and addictive and while I am not the most prolific tweeter you will meet, I constantly read my timeline. I must dip in and out of it a thousand times a day.

What I don’t do is tweet or interact with other people enough. That’s why I suck at Twitter.

My tweets tend towards feeble and offensive (but original) jokes that probably make people laugh uncomfortably, if at all.

I also tweet, or rather retweet stuff about legalising cannabis and other drugs, because that is my pet cause.

Occasionally I may tweet something that I feel strongly about, like the recent riots in London.

I tweet about what I’m watching on TV sometimes and the weather occasionally and even the odd food-related tweet too.

In other words, I’m not unpleasant or rude, just probably not that interesting. That’s why I suck at Twitter.

I’m anonymous online, by choice, mainly because I am so open about my own cannabis use and as its status is currently illegal, anonymity allows me the luxury of honesty. I like to pretend this stance furthers the cause of legalisation, but I’m not always convinced it does and that’s a subject best explored another day. This post is about Twitter.

The other reason I remain anonymous is I prefer to be unknown. I am not seeking attention for myself. If you Googled my real name, you wouldn’t find me anywhere online; I’m not on Facebook, Linked-In, nothing. And while I have worked in the media for more than two decades, I’ve managed to avoid having a byline, screen credit, nor any mention of my real name and that has been intentional.

What it means on Twitter is I don’t use my real name or a photograph of myself as my avatar. That is why I suck at Twitter too.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I suck at Twitter for the rather silly reason that I have been sucked into thinking about follower numbers, something I have managed to avoid until now.

I’ve never really been bothered by how many people are following me, I haven’t done anything ever to intentionally gain them, never asked for them, begged for them, nothing like that. I’ve just tweeted when I felt like it, followed people (and accounts) that have interested me and that’s about it.

I’ve always found it a bit distasteful when people tweet about the number of followers they have, in whatever context.

“I need 27 more followers to reach 500, help!”

“Please RT this [insert celebrity here] I really need more followers urgently!”

“I gained 57 followers today, all because [insert celebrity here] retweeted me.”

Worse, is seeing celebrities tweeting each other and exaggerating their worth by bragging they have the most followers. I find this rather tragic.

Worrying about follower numbers is a mug’s game and sadly in the last week or so, I have become that mug. Here’s why: I’ve recently noticed a few people I know online, who started on Twitter when I did, now have double or treble the followers I have. I am a victim of comparative maths.

I know its silly, I know its meaningless, but its been on my mind recently

This is not meant to be a moan or a complaint, everything I’m telling you is observational and self-critical, but not a whinge or backhanded plea for more people to follow me. I’m just trying to understand what I am doing wrong on Twitter.

What am I doing wrong on Twitter? Loads, it would seem.

There are quite a few people I follow on Twitter, who don’t follow me back. I don’t mean celebrities, but normal people, like you and me. Well, more like you probably as I don’t come anywhere near being normal.

The lack of follow-backs from people I like perplexes me.

Sometimes, I scroll through my own tweets and read them back, to see if there’s something in them that makes people not want to follow me. Nothing leaps out.

I think I’m fairly pleasant, thoughtful and I’m true to myself. So what could it be?

The lack of a photo and a name is off-putting, but my anonymity policy is not going to change until weed is legal. End of, as the kids today say. Its a reason, but that alone can’t be the only reason.

I don’t interact or tweet enough, but guess what? I’m probably the same in real life, being mostly a loner and misanthropic with it.

If you’re shit at life, you are going to be shit at Twitter. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to me, but it does.

How can I be more socially successful on Twitter than I am in real life? Answer: I can’t.

Quite oddly, I think I am probably more shy on Twitter than I am in real life.

Often I do think about responding to other people’s tweets, then I think better of it and don’t. I don’t like tweeting negatively, if I disagree with someone, however strongly, I tend not to say anything. And if I do agree with someone, I don’t want to seem sycophantic, so I don’t tweet.

On the rare occasion when I do tweet someone and they don’t respond, even with the simplest of acknowledgement, then I am crestfallen and I think the fear of that often prevents me from interacting with people too. Maybe you know what I mean, maybe you think that’s a lame reason, but its true.

Whenever anyone tweets me and they are polite, I always make a point of responding. I always try to thank people for RTs too, as long as I’ve noticed they’ve done so. I guess I just try to treat people on Twitter as I would like to be treated.

I suck at Twitter because I suck at life. I’m starting to believe I’m not particularly good with either pursuit. That’s not a happy conclusion.

Or, I could take the tack that I’m not unpopular on Twitter, I’m just undiscovered.

The best lies I tell, are the ones I tell myself.

If you do follow me, well done you for finding Twitter’s best kept secret!

You are truly a person of excellent taste! You have keen, discerning eye for the hippest and coolest, that your average nobody tends to pass on by without a second thought! You’re a trend spotter and a trend setter!

Ah-hem.

I’ve pretty much accepted that I will continue to exist in Twitter obscurity, while others around me zoom ever higher. I’m ok with that.

I take a lot from Twitter, I’m quite greedy in my quest for knowledge, I just feel guilty sometimes that I don’t put enough back into it. I’d like to entertain and inform more people, but that’s not who I am, not in real life, not online. So it goes.

These truths should be self-evident, but its taken me nearly 1,300 words to get here.

So now you know why I suck at Twitter, and now I do too.

Like hello and whatnot. And ting. See, I’m down with the kids, innit.

For a change, I have a legitimate excuse for not posting anything here, my iMac died, twice.

I’ll spare you the tech bullshit and briefly sum up; the hard drive died, it went off to be repaired, it came back, the hard drive died again 8 hours later. It went back for a 2nd repair, this time the drive was wiped, but still working. It came back, the restore process was a mess, it took 3 days of fixing to get it back working properly.

Dealing with Apple and their authorised repair centre was straightforward and easy, and here’s a helpful tip: Always get the Apple Care on your Macs. Always. One serious problem or repair, it will more than pay for itself. With the problems I’ve had, it has saved me a fortune.

My current iMac is my third in the last 6 years, an 18 month old, 27” quad core LED screened beast and hadn’t given me any trouble till now, but when it died, it really died, while I was using it. I watched as icons dropped off my desktop, question marks appeared on the application icons in the dock, and running apps froze. I tried to restart my machine and when I did, the boot up screen showed nothing but a file folder icon with a question mark on it.

This is a bad thing.

A very bad thing.

I hope you never, ever see the dreaded, horrible, question mark-file folder boot screen icon and may god have mercy on your soul if you don’t have Apple Care.

I phoned Apple, who confirmed what I suspected, most likely the internal drive had failed. They asked if I had a back-up. I did, but it was 2 weeks old.

My bad, I only connected my Time Machine drive when the reminder came up, every 10 days — I had ignored it a few days before. Very stupid and lesson learned, my Time Machine drive is now always on and always connected.

This all happened on a Saturday and I had to wait until Monday for the repair shop to phone to arrange collection. They could have done it on the same day, ie the Monday, but it wasn’t possible on my part.

Long story short, they swapped out the dead drive for a new one, reinstalled the OS and tested everything. It was delivered back to me early the next week.

I was very happy to have it back and set about restoring everything from my Time Machine drive, which I was able to do, and I then began to fill in the gaps between my last back-up and the day of the crash, ie about a 2 week period of loss.

I was able to retrieve some recently purchased music via iTunes Home Share from another Mac of mine and I emailed myself all of the photos I last imported from my iPhone, then reimported them into iPhoto. I keep a lot of my current documents on iDisk, so they were easily obtained as well. I didn’t lose any important data, I was lucky.

I purchased two applications from the Mac App Store that I had to reinstall, though technically one of them was being installed at the time of the first hard drive crash. Can you guess where this is going?

When my hard drive died the first time, I was installing Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store. Its a hefty 4.5gb download and it was taking ages. The first thing I noticed as my system came apart at the seams was that the installation appeared to stall.

I was only installing it so I could activate the new multitouch gestures on my iPad, which requires Xcode 4 to put the device into developer mode. That’s it, a very lame reason.

I started to reinstall Xcode 4 on my repaired iMac, only this time, instead of doing the Mac App Store magic, it downloaded the installer package to my Applications Folder. I ran the installer and watched as it froze at about the same point it did before…and then my folders and icons started vanishing from my desktop.

Everything stopped working, I restarted the machine and low and behold, I was staring at the question mark-file folder boot icon again.

Apple arranged to have it collected again the following day, as a priority repair. Once the engineer had an initial look, he phoned me and said he was able to reinstall the OS and could see that the user data was gone. He said he would test the hardware and let me know the results, but on initial inspection, everything seemed fine.

Indeed it was, and after full and extensive testing, the machine was returned to me and this is where the real fun began.

I restored from my backup and this time it wasn’t as smooth. There must have been remnants of the previous restoration, because my Home Folder and login name changed, with a number ”1” added to them, the system created a new identity for me, constructed from all my old files. I didn’t lose any data, what I lost were permissions and privileges.

There’s a relatively easy fix for this, via Disk Utility and the Repair Permissions command, but that can only get you so far if you are booted up from the internal drive. To really fix it, plus run the Repair Disk command, you need to boot from the OS X installation DVD. Booting from that DVD is a very basic part of troubleshooting and guess what, I couldn’t do it.

I tried every possible way to boot from the DVD, I even spent nearly an hour on the phone with Apple trying to troubleshoot it. I just wasn’t able to get it to work. I could read the DVD, have the system recognise it as a bootable drive, I could even start the software on it to the point where it needs to restart and then zip, nothing, the DVD would spin for a bit, then stop, while I got no further than the Apple Logo boot screen.

I cloned the install disk to a flash drive, that didn’t work either. With help from Apple, I booted the iMac into target disk mode, connected it to my laptop via FireWire, but Repair Permissions was greyed out. I was able to run Repair Disk though.

The Apple guy (who was great, patient and very helpful) said that I had 2 choices, send it off for another repair or he could send me a replacement installer DVD. His view was that if my install DVD was corrupted, that could be why it kept hanging when trying to boot and he also speculated that the same corrupt nugget of data was stopping the flash drive in the same place in the process. It made sense, was I decided to try the new DVD option, even though it would take a week to receive it in the post. Better that than boxing it up again and having it gone for another week.

I thanked the Apple guy and felt dejected. And then I had another idea, I used SuperDuper to clone my entire internal drive to an external, bootable, FireWire drive. It took 4 hours to copy over nearly 400gb of data, but in the end I was able to boot up my iMac using the FireWIre drive.

So my iMac is working, my internal drive is not mounted, I dove straight for Disk Utility. Repair Permissions was not greyed out, so I clicked on it and let it do its magic. This time, it ran for literally ages and I could see it repairing countless files and folders. At the end of the process, I rebooted back to the internal drive and waited to see if I could access everything with administrator privileges.

I could. It worked. Happy days.

I still don’t know why I couldn’t boot from the DVD, but could read the DVD otherwise and won’t know until the replacement DVD appears. If I can’t boot from it, it will have to go off for a 3rd repair, but if I can boot from it, I’m laughing.

But what about the initial problem and the subsequent second problem, both identical from my point of view?

I think in the first instance, they might have replaced my hard drive for no reason, on the basis that the paperwork instructed them to do so, rather than testing it to see if it would work again with a reinstall. I don’t know this for sure, but I think its likely that the drive was only wiped.

The more thorough testing during the second repair revealed the drive was wiped and since the symptoms of both crashes were the same, I am guessing everything else was the same too, but again its only a guess.

So what caused both problems?

The only common variable in both scenarios is the installation of Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store. It can’t be a coincidence that it was being installed both times the hard drive went ka-blooey.

I mentioned this to the helpful Apple guy, who said he’d never heard of such a thing. I’ve searched on Google, I can’t find anyone else who has had a similar problem, but sometimes things conflict, software anomalies happen and they are not widespread.

Could I reproduce this a third time? I don’t know and I’m not going to find out by trying to install Xcode 4 again. I don’t even want a 3 quid refund from Apple.

I just want my computer back…and I think I have it back now, but I’m not convinced just yet.

My iMac is the centre of my life. That may seem like an overstatement, but actually its not.

To say I have been a bit depressed by all this, now that would be an understatement. I’ve lost sleep, honest to god, lost sleep from the stress of all of this.

If you don’t relate to tech and a digital lifestyle, I’ll try to put it in a perspective you might appreciate:

The most expensive thing I own is my house.

The second most expensive thing I own is my car.

The third most expensive thing I own is my iMac.

The third most expensive thing I own died.

The third most expensive thing I own was put in a box and taken away by a stranger, twice.

The third most expensive thing I own spent the better part of 2 and 1/2 weeks, away from me.

The third most expensive thing I own was my only access to a life time’s worth of photos, all irreplaceable.

You get the idea.

My iMac is my workstation, my powerhouse for digital heavy lifting, the centrepiece of all my high tech kit and it was out of the picture for nearly 3 weeks.

No joke, I had the same sick in the pit of my stomach feeling I’ve had when someone close to me has died.

Now that I have solved the major issues with my iMac, I’m trying to convince myself its back for good. Its a trust issue thing and clearly my toys and I enjoy an unnaturally close relationship.

And I said I wasn’t get too technical. Oooops

Update: Found THIS THREAD on the Apple Support Discussion Board, with many people who had exactly the same problems with Xcode 4 installation wiping their drive.

(If you’ve found this page because you suspect you’ve had problems resulting from trying to install Xcode 4 via the Mac App Store, I really want to hear from you. Please email me, my address is northlondonhippy@gmail.com)

Another year has flown by and I’m already celebrating my anniversary of being the northlondonhippy, again.

And by celebrating, of course I mean writing this.

Whoopeeee…

Seven years ago today I started my original website on Blogger. Its still there, though I moved everything to this, my own hosted website a few years ago.

Go me!

Back at the beginning, I posted quite frequently, mainly because I had nothing better to do.

Blogging sprouted from a relatively brief period of unemployment , it gave me something to do with my time, when I wasn’t getting high or gobbling magic mushrooms, which were legal at the time.

You didn’t think I was going to get through this without a mention of shrooms, did you? Shrooms played an important part in the early days and I was a regular consumer of them. Since the government tightened up the regulations, I’ve been without them. I miss them, a lot. Shroom reference ends.

Flash forward to seven years into the future, to this very day and you’ll see that I hardly post anything, any more. There’s probably more posts about my lack of posts, than any other subject.

I don’t even attempt to make excuses any more, I’ve just accepted that my participation here is sporadic and random. I pop up whenever I feel like it, I just don’t feel like it very often.

That’s not strictly true, as I seem to continue to maintain a running list of topics I want to cover, I just don’t seem to get around to doing it. Then, whatever the topic might be, becomes less interesting to me, or less relevant and I delete it from my list and it just never gets written.

I’m back to making excuses again. Sorry, I’ll stop now.

It would be easier if I could just beam my thoughts directly to the internet, I think that’s coming as a feature this summer in the iPhone 5, but don’t quote me on that. I wouldn’t want to be starting that sort of a rumour.

I know I bang on about Twitter a lot, but I do spend a lot more time there than I do on my own website. If you did want to bathe in the weird thoughts flowing through my head on a daily basis, that remains the best place to do it. Though again, my participation is random and sporadic. I consume far more than I contribute to Twitter, but I do suffer from information gluttony and tech addiction.

That’s probably one of the biggest changes to my life in the last seven years, the amount of technology in it. I’ve always liked tech and toys, but here in the future, they are more pervasive and useful than ever before and I find that I am always connected, always consuming media.

A typical day starts with me picking my iPhone up from the bedside table, switching off airplane mode and letting it check my email. I put it in airplane mode when I go to bed, so it doesn’t ding or buzz with new messages, but I leave it on because it is also my back up alarm clock.

I come downstairs and fire up my iMac, which is the hub of my technological existence. The hard drive in it died last week and its being repaired this very second. Don’t worry, I have a TimeMachine back up, so I don’t think I’ve lost very much at all, but I am missing my 27” beast very much.

I’ve been using my lifeboat computer in the meantime, an original black MacBook that I think is nearly 5 years old. While I’m thankful that I’ve got it to use now, its painfully slow, its got about 25% of the screen space of my iMac and the viewing angle of the LCD screen is not very good. Five years is a very long time in tech termss and my MacBook is definitely showing its age. Its better than nothing, loads better!

Anyway, my normal routine with the iMac is to switch it on as soon as I wake up, read the papers online, along with a few other websites, check my RSS feed reader, keep an eye on Twitter, do some work on some other websites I work on, deal with professional and personal emails, sync and charge my iPhone and control my Mac Mini.

My Mac Mini is around 4 and a 1/2 years old and is also showing its age. I use it as my media hub, its connected to my flatscreen tv and my A/V amp. I use it to play music (streamed around my house to two AirPort Express units, one in the kitchen, one in my bedroom), I also stream online radio stations the same way. I use the BBC’s iPlayer service, I download and playback videos from Bit Torrent, I use it to screen XVID films friends give me, or even just to playback videos I’ve shot myself. It gets used a lot. I mostly control the Mac Mini with a remote control, or I use OS X Screen Sharing to remotely use control it from the iMac.

My iMac is a powerful computer, I use it to edit video and I mainly use iMovie. I also record my own music, using Logic Pro and a host of external toys and musical instruments that connect to my iMac with ease

Once I’ve done everything I have to do on the iMac, I might move over to the sofa with my iPad. I surf, use Twitter, keep up with my RSS feed, all in a relaxed, comfortable way, but that’s not all I’ve done with it. I’ve also used it to edit video, write blog posts and record music. Some of the music production apps I have are truly amazing, especially Apple’s new GarageBand app. Its easy to lose hours of your day just playing around with it. I’m also a secret Angry Birds HD addict, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone.

My iPhone is always with me and I use it for so many things, its really a Swiss Army Knife of a gadget. Its my calendar, my contact book, my mobile Twitter machine, RSS reader, internet browser, still camera, video camera, music player, film and video player, navigation device, compass, photo editor, video editor, news portal, note taker, audio recorder, gaming device, clock, weather centre, torch, handheld trackpad for my Macs, email client, reference library, text message device, oh and its a telephone and videophone too! It does even more than that, I’m just running out of steam thinking of it all.

My point to all this tech history is that none of this was possible 7 years ago, 2 of the devices I just mentioned couldn’t have even been imagined then.

In 2005, I had a running joke here about my brand new all digital lifestyle, right around the time I bought my first iMac. Its no joke today, my life truly is all digital. So’s yours. So is everyone’s.

They like to describe all this as “disruptive technology” and that’s a pretty accurate term, as long as you don’t see disruption as a necessarily bad thing. I don’t buy CDs any more, I don’t go to record stores any more, because that industry has been disrupted by the ease and availability of music downloads. If you own a chain of music stores, you’re not going to like this sort of disruption, but if you are a keen media consumer, you’re probably pretty happy about it.

Technology isn’t the only thing that’s disrupted my life in the last seven years, there’s also been some illness and some death. When it comes to disruption, nothing else comes close.

Both of my parents passed away since I started this website. My father was already ill when I started it, and his cancer featured frequently back in the day. Somewhere, in the archive, is a post called “Dad’s pissing blood again” and I’m surprised it didn’t win any awards. He died before this blog was a year old.

My mother crossed over to the great beyond at Christmas, two years ago. Nothing fills you with the holiday spirit like a bereavement on Xmas eve, and that applies to the future too, Xmas will now and forever be a reminder of her death.

While my mother had health problems for years, her sudden death was unexpected. My father died slowly over the course of a year and we pretty much knew when his death was coming to the day. I last spoke to him two days before he died and I got to say goodbye. I didn’t have that chance with my mother.

I’ve become old in the last seven years, at least in my head I have. In my head I’m not 48, I’m “pushing 50”. One of those posts I haven’t written is entitled “My unhealthy obsession with death” and I will get around to writing it, mainly because I’m hoping that spitting out a life time of death obsession might help me move past it. Or not. Who knows.

Blogging is like therapy for me sometimes, its a good way to try to work shit out.

I don’t really think I will ever work out my weird obsession with death, specifically my own. I’ve imagined my moment of death so many times, in so many ways, yet I know that none of it has probably come close to whatever horrible fate awaits me, as it awaits us all.

Keep an eye out for my death post, it will be a cheery little number, guaranteed to lift your spirits and make you want to do a happy dance down the street.

The truth is that I feel expendable, disposable and irrelevant because I am getting old. Maybe that’s normal. Maybe there’s no such thing as normal.

I can feel my body breaking down, I discover some new ache or pain on a daily basis. My joints creak, my muscles throb, my bones ache and I’ve been diagnosed with a long term health problem that requires daily medication for the rest of my life.

Middle age is a joy.

Middle age is stupidly named. Either you are young or you’re old. I’m old. Physically I am, but in my head I’m still 18 years old and full of all the hopes, ideas and dreams I had at that age. Sad, eh?

I’m the same person I was back then, I might move a bit slower and have loads more knowledge and experience, but I’m still me.

And I still smoke weed.

That was one of my goals when I started blogging, to further the cannabis cause. I’ve been smoking weed every day, for a couple of months shy of 30 years. I would qualify my use as a combination of recreational and medicinal, though its certainly more medicinal these days.

Weed should be legal and the fact that its not shows just how mixed up our current drug policy has become. Cannabis can be so beneficial in so many ways.

Right now, in these difficult and depressing economic times, cannabis is a cash crop our leaders should not be ignoring. A licensed, regulated and more importantly taxed cannabis market would be a much needed boon to the economy. Instead they would rather close schools, hospitals and libraries and let criminals control the market. Its as foolish and shortsighted as it sounds.

I’m not going to bang on about it too much now, my position is clear.

I may not be as prolific as I once was, but there’s a giant archive of nearly 750 posts to explore. You might learn to love me, you might come to hate me, but I’m sure you can waste plenty of time here, if you desire.

So that’s it, my weird and rambling reflection of the last seven years of living my life online, just for you. I’m always here, just a few mouse clicks away. Come hang out with me, any time.

If the first seven years are anything to go by, the next seven ought to be a real gas, man! Groovy!

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.

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

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

I’m not going to give you a full review of it, there’s already been countless detailed run-throughs of the iPad from people who’ve had them for ages. I got mine on Friday, UK launch day, so I know I’m late to the iPad party.

The first thing I really noticed was how ridiculously thin it is, its easy to hold but a little heavier than you might expect. Its also easy to sit in a comfortable normal position on the sofa with it propped in your lap, balanced with a light one handed grip.

What I foresee is a market for lap-pillow like stands, that keep it at a comfortable viewing angle, while letting it rest securely without using your hands. For watching films and videos, something simple like that would be ideal.

The screen is bright and extraordinarily sharp, hi-res colour photographs look unbelievably crisp and clear with vivid, deep colours. Video also looks good, though its all been in standard def for me so far.

Websites fill the screen smoothly, there’s no need to pinch and zoom to see or read anything. Like the iPhone, the interface is responsive and smooth.

It is a fingerprint magnet, more so than my iPhone 3GS, which shares the same oleophobic coating, but doesn’t seem to be as noticeable because of its smaller size. Keep a microfibre cloth nearby, or a lens cloth from any camera shop.

Apple’s case (or something similar) is absolutely an essential accessory. The Apple Case for iPad is very well designed, its simple to secure the iPad inside it. It is very thin and doesn’t add much additional weight, but provides extra protection and flexibility, allowing you to position the iPad for upright, wide screen viewing, or angling it on a desk for more comfortable typing. Its folio-style, with a flap that covers the screen while doubling as a sort of reenforced kick-stand. Its very good.

There are already a lot of iPad optimised apps out there, I’ll mention a few quickly that have grabbed my attention:

- Wunder Radio — an internet radio station aggregator that seems to offer just about every internet station in the world. It also uses GPS to generate a list of local stations and it did very well finding them around me. The audio streams are high quality, there’s iTunes tagging for stations that support it and the interface is clean and easy to use.

- Air Video — I know this one is on the top of many people’s lists and for good reason, it works very well. Air Video let’s you stream just about any video file from a Mac on the same network, converting the video on the fly as you watch. I’ve streamed .avi’s, MP4’s and hi-def MKV’s from my Mac Mini to the iPad already without any lag or drop out. You do need to install a small piece of software on the host Mac to act as server and point it to your video directory in the Finder, but once you do that the iPad finds the server automatically. From there you navigate to your film or tv show, and after a very quick buffer time of 5–10 seconds, the video is delivered to your iPad. I already had this one for the iPhone and a recent update made it iPad friendly too.

- NewsRack — has been my RSS reader of choice for a while on my iPhone, with its simple interface and ability to sync with my Google Feed Reader account, it works very well. Now optimised for the iPad, the same app is serving double duty for me, at no extra cost. NewsRack uses the extra screen real estate to good effect, giving you a left column for your feeds and a large reading window on the right side. You can also open links within the app.

- PinBallHD — bought this one yesterday on the strength of the reviews and sales in the iTunes app store, glad I did. The graphics and gameplay blew me away and am finding it very addictive. Haven’t really played or bought many games for my iPhone, but I can see how much better the iPad is for playing anything because of its larger size.

The iPad is probably more disruptive than anyone has realised yet, its an entirely new class of device. Other manufactures will be trying to catch up, this form of computing is going to explode in popularity. It can replace so many different devices, not just laptops or netbooks, but portable radios, portable TVs and DVD players, MP3 players, portable game consoles, e-readers and probably a million other things I haven’t even thought of yet. It is so thin, so light, so easy to carry along with you, the temptation to never put it down is immense.

Is it an essential? No, not if you already have some sort of computer, but as luxuries go, it pretty damn useful. If you’re thinking about taking the plunge, all you need to do is spend 5 minutes using one and you will be ready to dive in deep.

“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?