The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘tech-geek corner’ Category

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.

Happy New Year fuckers!

I hope you’ve all bought new cal­en­dars and you aren’t still writ­ing 2009 on your cheques.

Do peo­ple still write cheques?

I do, some­times, but that really doesn’t have any­thing to do with any­thing, so I’ll swiftly avoid the diver­sion in that dead end direction.

Instead, I’ve come to share the lat­est news from the land of your favourite north London-based hippy. Its actu­ally kind of big news.

Dig this, I sub­mit­ted “the offi­cial northlon­don­hippy iPhone app” to Apple yes­ter­day, it should be avail­able on the iTunes store very soon for your mobile surf­ing pleasure.

This isn’t one of my lit­tle funny wind-ups, its an hon­est to god, actual app that runs natively on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

How cool is that?

On the hippy’s cool-o-meter, its off the fuck­ing scale of cool­ness into a brand new realm of cool that has yet to be dis­cov­ered by nor­mal folk. Once the app is avail­able, that new realm of cool will be yours for the taking.

The app deliv­ers in an iPhone friendly for­mat, all of my inter­net con­tent. If I pub­lish some­thing, it will mag­i­cally pop up on the app. You will receive my lat­est posts from this web­site, as well as hav­ing easy access to my busy Twit­ter feed. I’ve also included my Twit­Pics and YouTube videos, which are all eas­ily acces­si­ble inside the app.

How much would you pay for a northlon­don­hippy iPhone app?

Really? I kind of expected that, which is why it will be avail­able to down­load for FREE. That’s a price I’m sure you can afford.

My aim is to make this app the num­ber one northlon­don­hippy iPhone app in the world. I don’t think it will be very hard to do, as it will be the only northlon­don­hippy app avail­able, at least offi­cially. I’m sure all the other kids will be cre­at­ing their own ver­sions to com­pete with mine.

Ah-hem.

I don’t want any of you to think I went off and learned how to write code for an iPhone, because I didn’t. I used a web­site called www.appmakr.com which auto­mated the process to such a degree that even a moron like me could do it. If you need an app made for the iPhone from RSS feeds, you could do a lot worse than try this site out.

I will of course, reserve final judge­ment on App­Makr until I see my fin­ished app on my own iPhone, but so far I am very happy with the ser­vice they pro­vide. You will be too once you are rock­ing my app on your mutha­fuckin’ iPhone.

Keep watch­ing for my announce­ment con­firm­ing that my app is live on iTunes. Until then, you can join me on some ten­ter­hooks as I try to patiently wait for Apple’s approval process peo­ple to what­ever voodoo that they do.

While I am quite pleased about my app, I am less excited about my birth­day this month. Is there a law that says you have to have birth­days? Can we get it repealed?

Some years I am not too both­ered about being another year older, but this year is not one of them.

I sup­pose a lot has to do with the awk­ward­ness of my impend­ing age…forty-fucking-seven. Its an odd num­ber in more ways then one. Mainly, it marks my decent into my “late forties”.

I don’t like the word “late”, it makes me think of death. I think about death enough already, I don’t need stu­pid words tacked on to my age to remind me that the mor­tal coil is get­ting dis­tinctly shorter every year.

My bones tell me, my mus­cles tell me, my world weary expres­sion tells me, all pretty much on a daily basis. I am plumb­ing the depths of mid­dle age.

I’ve been con­tem­plat­ing hav­ing my very own mid-life cri­sis, but I can’t seem to set­tle on what form it will take. On the menu are:

- a grown-up gap year to trek through the Andes
– a hair trans­plant
– 3 months of Swiss shin stretch­ing
– a small, red, con­vert­ible sports car
– a sex­u­ally expe­ri­enced 19 year old girl on the side
– a men­tal breakdown

I reckon to make it a proper mid-life cri­sis, I need to chose at least 3 things off that list, then pur­sue them with gusto.

Trekking any­where is out, because it sounds too much like hard work.

A hair trans­plant just sounds messy and expen­sive and for what? To look like Elton John? No thanks.

If I was going to have my shins stretched, I should have done it 20–30 years ago, but it didn’t exist back then. I don’t think I am going to live long enough to make the pain & suf­fer­ing worth it. You only gain a cou­ple of inches in height any­way, so screw it, I’d still be short.

The lit­tle red con­vert­ible sports car is cliche and I don’t really like red as a colour for a car. Unfor­tu­nately, because of my age, red is the only colour a car dealer will sell me, at least for a 2 door rag­top. I’ve checked, its a car dealer bylaw, right their in their charter.

Does it all make sense now? That’s why you only ever see bald, fat middle-aged guys in red Fer­raris (or Corvettes if you are state­side). And all this time, you thought they were choos­ing the colour. Now you know, its the law.

The nine­teen year old girl seems on the sur­face to be an easy option and if I was a mem­ber of the Rolling Stones they would be queu­ing up at my door, but I’m not, so they’re not. Besides, 19 year olds haven’t lived enough to be inter­est­ing, so unless I can cram a 50 year old’s brain into their 19 year old body, I don’t see much point. And if I am hon­est, the only way I am going to get a hot lit­tle 19 year old is to rent one for an hour. I cer­tainly couldn’t afford the care and feed­ing of one full time and I am a hippy on a bud­get, so this is out too.

A men­tal break­down? Don’t I mainly have them on the inter­net or as it is oth­er­wise known, a run­ning blog.

This web­site is my ther­apy, which I guess makes all of you my shrinks. Every time I ask a ques­tion, you just have to say “well, what do you think?” Go on, its easy and I just saved you seven tedious years of uni­ver­sity and med­ical training.

Email me for your cer­tifi­cate or degree from the Uni­ver­sity of North Lon­don (hippy). That and a pound will get you a ride on a bus.

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!

I’ve had my geek on for the last week. I suc­cess­fully updated all three of my Macs to Snow Leop­ard and I swapped my iPhone 3G for the new 3GS.

Snow Leop­ard
——————–
The upgrades were very smooth and sim­ple, though I did have some hard­ware trou­ble with my three year old Mac Mini. The Snow Leop­ard instal­la­tion DVD would not mount in the Super­Drive, instead it would try to read it, then spit it out. A healthy dose of canned, pres­surised air sprayed into the DVD slot cured it and I was able to com­plete the installation.

The changes with Snow Leop­ard are sub­tle, but wel­come. Expose and Stacks are notice­ably improved and more use­ful, the Finder tweaks are also quite cool, espe­cially the icon siz­ing and pre­view func­tions. Mainly, every­thing is a lot faster, start-ups, shut­downs and espe­cially sleep­ing and wak­ing. When I wake up my iMac now, it recon­nects to my net­work almost instantly.

The best thing is the amount of hard drive space I got back on each com­puter, around 10-12gb. Stream­lin­ing is a good thing!

I bought the fam­ily pack ver­sion of Snow Leop­ard, which cost £39, so that’s thir­teen quid per com­puter. A bargain!

I haven’t had any seri­ous issues so far, all of my reg­u­lar soft­ware is work­ing fine. Safari seems espe­cially fast and launches like a rocket. Oh and maybe I’m crazy, but the screen seems sharper, like they’ve improved the graph­ics card dri­vers, or the way it ren­ders images, I don’t really know.

iPhone 3GS
—————–
I’ve had it in the back of my head that if I didn’t get a new iPhone by the end of the sum­mer, I would leave it until next July. I’ve tried to buy one a cou­ple of times, but they haven’t been in stock. They are appar­ently still in great demand.

I decided that if I was going to do this, I would buy the iPhone out­right, get­ting it on Pay As You Go, rather than get­ting it as a con­tract upgrade. By doing it this way, I will then be eli­gi­ble for a sub­sidised upgrade next Sum­mer, when the next model comes out.

What finally pushed me towards act­ing is a friend of mine lost his iPhone 3G and needed to replace it. O2 wanted silly amount of money from him for a new one and he offered to buy mine. I agreed, if I could find a black, 32gb 3GS on PAYG.

O2 didn’t have any, the Car Phone Ware­house didn’t have any, but the online Apple Store said they were ship­ping them on 5 days delay. I went ahead and ordered it last Tuesday.

It shipped on the Thurs­day and arrived in my hot lit­tle hands on the Fri­day. Wow, that was fast!

Swap­ping phones was an absolute breeze. I popped my con­tract SIM out of the old 3G iPhone, then popped it into the new 3GS. I con­nected the 3GS to my iMac and it instantly appeared in iTunes. It was acti­vated in sec­onds, then offer­ing to restore it from my most recent back-up, done an hour before. It restored and synced my media quickly. It was set up just like my old iPhone, even my apps were in the same places.

I did have to re-enter a few pass­words for email accounts and tweak a few set­tings, but I would say 98% of it hap­pened automatically.

Wip­ing the old phone took longer than set­ting up the new one. The old iPhone switched on and worked with­out a SIM card and I was able to reset all set­tings with a cou­ple of clicks. Be warned, it takes around 2 hours to wipe a 16gb iPhone.

So what do I think of my new iPhone 3GS?

I’ll say this right now, it is not an essen­tial must-have upgrade. I’ve gained a few use­ful and wel­come fea­tures and a lot of speed, but that alone is not worth the money.

The increase in speed is obvi­ous, the entire phone is faster and more respon­sive. Apps launch almost instantly, there’s no lag at all.

The video cam­era is good, not great, but bet­ter than no video func­tions at all. The tap-to-focus fea­ture is very cool and really works. The com­pass is also a nice thing to have, espe­cially if you use the Map app to get around on foot, it really helps to ori­ent your­self in new surroundings.

And who wouldn’t want extra storage?

I’m sure I will sell my 3GS next sum­mer when the next iPhone upgrade comes, it will still have con­sid­er­able value then. If the 3GS is con­sid­ered an evo­lu­tion­ary upgrade, then next sum­mer hope­fully we will see a rev­o­lu­tion­ary jump in iPhone tech­nol­ogy. At least, that’s what I’m gambling!

That’s a fairly bold state­ment up there in the title. How will I ever live up to its promise?

Sim­ple, its com­pletely trans­formed how I inter­act with the inter­net. (And please note not “sim­ples”. I am sick of that shit already).

Again, another fairly large claim about a “com­plete trans­for­ma­tion” of my surf­ing habits.

I ain’t lyin’ neither.

In the old days, I used a browser to explore the inter­net. I’d plug some­thing into a search engine and let it trans­port me to another site, which might then lead me to yet another site, and so on and so forth, until I returned to the search engine to start again. Of course, I book­marked sites too, but the point is I had to think of a site I wished to check out, then nav­i­gate to it again.

Over time, I devel­oped my own inter­net rit­u­als, vis­it­ing my favourite sites on a reg­u­lar or semi-regular basis, check­ing for new con­tent. This style of surf­ing meant I would occa­sion­ally arrive at a site to dis­cover it hadn’t changed since my last visit, but I wouldn’t find that out until the page loaded and wasted some of my valu­able online time.

And then, I dis­cov­ered RSS feeds and read­ers. Sud­denly, I didn’t have to visit all of my favourite sites to check for any­thing, instead I waited for their head­lines to arrive in my reg­u­larly refreshed RSS reader. If I wanted to explore the arti­cle fur­ther, I could click once and eas­ily open the page in my browser.

But RSS read­ers don’t work in real time, there’s no push-type sys­tem to receive the head­lines. Instead, they refresh auto­mat­i­cally at a pre-defined inter­val or if you are a bit obses­sive like me, man­u­ally refresh­ing every 10 sec­onds just in case. It worked, but it wasn’t perfect.

Then I dis­cov­ered Twit­ter and Twit­ter clients. The “client” part is impor­tant, because if you’re access­ing Twit­ter via your browser, you are miss­ing out on some of its use­ful­ness. I’ll come back to that.

Twit­ter is more than just read­ing about what peo­ple had for break­fast. There are other meals and snacks to read about too.

No, what I really mean is beyond fol­low­ing indi­vid­u­als, you can also fol­low web­sites. Web­sites with RSS feeds can marry them up with a ser­vice like Twit­ter­Feed and auto-generate a tweet link­ing to new con­tent pub­lished on their site.

I use Twit­ter­Feed here on my site and it auto-generates a tweet to my Twit­ter account, @nthlondonhippy with the title & first line of the post, along with a short­ened bit ly link to the full text.

Admit­tedly my site is not the busiest in the world, but if you are fol­low­ing me on Twit­ter, you will be alerted to any new con­tent. Even if you are not fol­low­ing me, you still may dis­cover the tweet and it might even be how you ended up here right now.

I would spec­u­late that around a third of the accounts I fol­low on Twit­ter are auto-generated from web­sites I reg­u­larly visit. Head­lines and links flow onto my computer’s desk­top via my pre­ferred Twit­ter client, which at present is TweetDeck.

I fol­low many news out­lets, loads of the Guardian newspaper’s Twit­ter accounts, the New York Times, var­i­ous Apple and gad­get sites, celebrity news sites, con­spir­acy sites, all sorts really. My tastes are var­ied and diverse, but luck­ily so are the choices avail­able to every­one on Twit­ter. If you’re inter­ested in some­thing, chances are there’s a Twit­ter feed (or 20!) that would cater to you.

Twit­ter is also a fright­en­ing good source for break­ing news. As Twit­ter exists in the “nearly now” and moves in real time, when some­thing hap­pens any­where in the world, it doesn’t take long for it to bub­ble up to the surface.

There’s an organ­i­sa­tion that uses Twit­ter for just this pur­pose, @BreakingNews — BNO News, which is run by a 19 year-old in the Nether­lands. They’re scary fast and often beat the more tra­di­tional old-style media out­lets by 10–15 min­utes. In the age of “now”, that’s quite an edge.

And yes, I do work in the old-media, but it doesn’t worry me. The smart old-media out­fits will adapt and change with tech­nol­ogy and most of them have started already. Twit­ter is re-writing the rules here too.

This is where a Twit­ter client really comes into its own. If you’re log­ging onto Twit­ter via their web­site, you are pre­sented with a fairly usable inter­face, with one flaw, it doesn’t refresh auto­mat­i­cally. To see new tweets, you must man­u­ally refresh the page. It works, but its not ideal.

A Twit­ter client is a stand-alone app, that sits inde­pen­dently on your desk­top and they can refresh in real time or nearly. Many of them are feature-rich and allow you to do all sorts of cool things with Twit­ter, often with one-click.

I have been using Tweet­Deck for a while, but there are oth­ers avail­able, most of them have free ver­sions, so you can try them out and see if they work for you. I like Tweet­Deck because it is col­umn based and is col­lapsable into a sin­gle col­umn, which is how I run it most of the time.

With Tweet­Deck, you can have sep­a­rate columns for your main feed, your men­tions, your DMs plus you can cre­ate other columns to fil­ter your stream even more. You can search with a hash­tag and see real-time results and you can cre­ate groups from your main fol­low­ers list too.

You can also do things like reply, send a DM or retweet with one click, as well as fol­low­ing and unfol­low­ing with the same ease.

With it set up like this, a quick occa­sional glance keeps me up to date and can alert me to any­thing that might inter­est me, while I do other things on my com­puter. Like write this post.

While I’ve been work­ing on this fine piece of Twit­ter related prose, I’ve helped some­one with an iMovie ’09 ques­tion and replied to sev­eral tweets addressed directly to me. I don’t see it as a dis­trac­tion, but rather it aug­ments what­ever I’m doing and in this case, actu­ally informs and enriches it.

If I have any sort of ques­tion that I haven’t been able to answer with more tra­di­tional means, like search engines or forum posts, I’ll tweet it. Before long, an answer will come back, one that wouldn’t have been easy to find any other way. Call it the col­lec­tive knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of every­one inter­act­ing on Twit­ter at that moment, or the “hive mind” if you will, but what­ever you call it, it is a quite pow­er­ful tool.

You can instantly col­lect opin­ions and reac­tions to some­thing from a broad cross sec­tion of the planet, or find local knowl­edge of an event or sit­u­a­tion right now.

Twit­ter has become my point of call for just about every­thing online. I use it to keep track of the news, of web­sites I like and sub­jects that mat­ter to me. I engage in dia­logue with other, like minded peo­ple, shar­ing my own knowl­edge while at the same time, ben­e­fit­ing from other’s.

More sig­nif­i­cantly, I don’t surf in the same way I used to; I don’t really browse using a browser any more. Instead of seek­ing out sub­jects of inter­est to me, I have them streamed onto my desk­top con­tin­u­ously and in real-time, cherry pick­ing the spe­cific pages I want to see and only then open­ing them up in my browser.

Just as the inter­net has evolved in the last 10 years, from slow dial-up con­nec­tions with mainly text-only pages to fast, always on-broadband and media-rich con­tent, our ways of inter­act­ing with the inter­net have changed too.

Twit­ter has become my inter­net aggre­ga­tor, my media and infor­ma­tion fil­ter. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it too soon to tell?

How about you?

Has Twit­ter changed your surf­ing habits? Do you use it as I do? Or have you found some other ben­e­fit I may be over­look­ing? I’d gen­uinely like to hear from any­one who might have any thoughts, so please feel free to tweet me and include my Twit­ter ID: @nthlondonhippy in your tweet, to make sure I see it and respond. Thanks!

I flirted with Twit­ter for around 6 months before I prop­erly signed up and started tweet­ing. I didn’t really get it at first, which is not unusual, for it has become a vir­tual sub-culture on the inter­net, with its own rules and eti­quette, that must be observed if you wish to play a part.

By rules, I don’t mean any­thing offi­cial, per­haps con­ven­tions or an infor­mal code of prac­tise would be more accu­rate, but for sim­plic­i­ties sake, I’ll stick to “rules”.

As I’ve used Twit­ter, I’ve devel­oped my own set of rules, or rather they’ve evolved as I’ve learned bit by bit what works for me.

And that’s what I believe is the key to Twit­ter, learn­ing what “works for you”. Dif­fer­ent peo­ple use it in dif­fer­ent ways and I’m going to share few things I’ve picked up since I started tweeting.

Fol­low­ing people:

At first, I really didn’t know who to fol­low beyond @wossy and @stephenfry and while they are both enter­tain­ing and pro­lific tweet­ers, it wasn’t enough to make Twit­ter worth my time. And its one thing fol­low­ing celebri­ties, they expect your atten­tion and ado­ra­tion, but how do you find other peo­ple to follow?

I was a bit shy about fol­low­ing peo­ple at first, after all you are choos­ing to learn a great deal about some­one who is a ran­dom stranger on the inter­net, but I’m far less so now.

When I started, I only really fol­lowed peo­ple who fol­lowed me first. Silly, eh? Don’t be afraid to fol­low some­one if you want to, even if their updates are pro­tected with a pad­lock. Mostly, that’s to keep out spam­mers and porn­bots, not gen­uine peo­ple like you. Occa­sion­ally, an account is truly pri­vate, but I’ve yet to per­son­ally encounter one.

Nearly all of us are on Twit­ter because we want to be fol­lowed. And who wouldn’t want some cool rockin’ hippy like me trail­ing them in cyber­space? Now tell me, what colour is your thong today?

Unfol­low­ing:

Occa­sion­ally, I unfol­low some­one and if it is you I unfol­lowed, I don’t mean any dis­re­spect. The biggest rea­son I unfol­low peo­ple is they tweet too often and its mean­ing­less crap — and that’s my job on Twitter!

Recently, I’ve unfol­lowed peo­ple because of the con­tent of their tweets. I’m rarely offended, so if you man­aged to offend me, you’ve said some­thing extremely loath­some. And I’ve unfol­lowed peo­ple who’ve signed up for adver­tis­ing tweets — I don’t want your stream to be inter­rupted by a word from YOUR spon­sor. It reduces Twitter’s value for everyone.

Fol­low­ers:

Its not a num­bers game. Don’t be suck­ered into think­ing that it is.

At first, I was con­cerned about how many fol­low­ers I had, and what peo­ple would think of me, if I didn’t have many. I soon learned the num­ber of peo­ple fol­low­ing you doesn’t mat­ter as much as the qual­ity of your fol­low­ers. And if the qual­ity of your tweets is high, you will attract fol­low­ers soon enough.

If you have a smaller num­ber of like-minded peo­ple fol­low­ing you, that beats mil­lions of ran­dom fol­low­ers any day.

If I cared about the num­bers, I’d let all the spam­mers and mar­ke­teers con­tinue to fol­low me, but I don’t — I block them. If I did leave them in place, it would prob­a­bly dou­ble my num­ber of followers.

If you fol­low me, I won’t auto­mat­i­cally fol­low you back. I might fol­low you, but only after I’ve had a look at your pro­file to see if your style of tweets would be inter­est­ing to me. If I don’t fol­low you, please don’t be offended. I only take a quick look and then make a snap deci­sion. Some­times I get it wrong.

And if you want me to fol­low you, just send me an @ mes­sage and I will. There are too many “online mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists” who can help me make money on Twit­ter try­ing to fol­low me, or girls who want to show me their sexy pri­vate pic­tures, for it to be sen­si­ble to auto­mat­i­cally fol­low back.

Find­ing people:

I stum­ble upon new peo­ple all the time, in many dif­fer­ent ways.

Some­times, some­one using a hash­tag I’m track­ing will catch my attention.

I often look at who other peo­ple are fol­low­ing or fol­lowed by as well. And on occa­sion, I see some­one I’m fol­low­ing exchang­ing @ mes­sages with some­one and while fol­low­ing the con­ver­sa­tion thread, the new per­son catches my attention.

A lot of peo­ple think #fol­lowfri­day is another good way to find new peo­ple, as its the day to rec­om­mend new peo­ple for you to fol­low. I have to be hon­est, I still don’t really get the eti­quette of the whole thing. To me, every one of the nearly 500 accounts I’m fol­low­ing are worth it, or I wouldn’t be fol­low­ing them. So I choose peo­ple to rec­om­mend, know­ing I’ve prob­a­bly unin­ten­tion­ally left some­one very wor­thy out, or I’ve embar­rassed some­one by rec­om­mend­ing them. Clearly, I’m too neu­rotic to be play­ing in pub­lic with strangers.

My tweets:

I make a lot of jokes, or at least I try to, but some fall flat on their faces. I am occa­sion­ally seri­ous, sin­cere, angry (more than occa­sion­ally), but mostly I am sar­cas­tic with a dash of irony.

I tend to treat Twit­ter like one giant open-mike night and let my inner-comedian run wild. If you worked with me or hung out with me in per­son, it wouldn’t be much dif­fer­ent, only I would type less.

The impor­tant thing is I don’t tweet any­thing that I would be embar­rassed or ashamed of later. I’m polite and friendly to oth­ers, but most impor­tantly I am true to myself.

It helps that I’ve blogged a long time and have learned how much of myself to share with the wider world. Too fuck­ing much!

DM’s and @ messages:

I try to reply to all I receive, as long as you are not offer­ing me a free Mac­Book Air or telling me how to get 16K fol­low­ers in a week, and make money doing it!

If I haven’t replied to your mes­sage, its because I prob­a­bly missed it. And Twitter’s not per­fect, as some mes­sages and tweets get missed out from client to client. I know this because I use a vari­ety of meth­ods to read my tweets and mes­sages and I can see that some­times things aren’t exactly the same from client to client or device to device.

Twit­ter is fast mov­ing plus I keep weird hours most of the time so I do occa­sion­ally miss things.

If its impor­tant, mes­sage me again — I’d rather have your mes­sage twice, then have you think I was ignor­ing you.

I’m happy to hear from any­one, espe­cially if you’re in Nige­ria or a mem­ber of the US mil­i­tary in Iraq and look­ing to trans­fer large sums of cash into my bank account.

Invest time

You need to prop­erly invest time inter­act­ing on Twit­ter. You can’t just send the same tweet over and over, sell­ing your prod­uct or ser­vice. Peo­ple won’t pay atten­tion, they’ll clas­sify you as noise.

Start out slowly, grad­u­ally build­ing your net­work. Give more than you receive on Twit­ter, if you can answer someone’s ques­tion accu­rately, then do it. Don’t be self-centred or self-serving — peo­ple can smell it a mile off and will avoid you.

Know what you want from Twit­ter:

This is the best advice I’ve found on using Twit­ter, so I will pass it along. Think about what you want to get out of Twit­ter and be focused on that.

If you want to extend your social net­work, or use it to pro­mote a prod­uct or ser­vice, go for it, but do it well. There are many guides avail­able on how best to use Twit­ter for your busi­ness. Heed their advice.

I won’t lie, I joined to pro­mote my web­site and “brand”. Are you shocked? Sad­dened? Will you not look upon me with the same ado­ra­tion you had for me yes­ter­day? I’m crushed.

Its worked, I’ve seen a dra­matic upward spike in vis­i­tors to my site since I started tweet­ing regularly.

What I didn’t expect but found any­way, is a com­mu­nity of extremely nice, kind, help­ful, gen­uine people.

I’m quite reclu­sive by nature and more than a bit of a loner, but I find myself exchang­ing @ mes­sages with peo­ple quite fre­quently. Its an unan­tic­i­pated, yet wel­come ben­e­fit of being a mem­ber of the Twit­ter community.

Now, I won­der how many of them would loan me some money? I don’t need a lot, just a few grand to get this shy­lock off my back. You don’t want to see a cer­tain north Lon­don based hippy with shat­tered knee-caps, do you?

I haven’t put any­thing new up here in a cou­ple of weeks, so I guess I should just post something.

This is that some­thing, or rather it will be when I fin­ish it.

I’ve only just started and I don’t know where this is going, so how will I know when its finished?

I’m still not feel­ing 100%, so this could turn into a hippy health bul­letin. There’s a lit­tle bit to report.

After count­less treat­ments with my chi­ro­prac­tor, my back is now 99.9% pain free. I’m sleep­ing well and mov­ing well.

I’m still feel­ing list­less and occa­sion­ally a bit breath­less, but I saw an endocri­nol­o­gist this week who explained why and made a rec­om­men­da­tion that should help.

With thy­roid prob­lems, like my Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, your blood is tested for two things, your T4 lev­els, which is the actual thy­roid hor­mone and your TSH, which is Thy­roid Stim­u­lat­ing Hor­mone and made by your pitu­itary gland.

While my T4 level was good, my TSH level is still on the high side and should be lower. Low­er­ing it involves increas­ing my dose of med­ica­tion again and another blood test in a month or so. I’m going to go see my GP next week to sort all that out and hope­fully I’l be feel­ing some ben­e­fits in a cou­ple of weeks.

That wasn’t much of an update, was it?

How about an update on my site?

If you haven’t noticed, even when I’m not putting new posts up here, I am still adding qual­ity content…well qual­ity if you are inter­ested in my musi­cal tastes or what I had for break­fast. I’m talk­ing about my Last FM playlist and my most recent Tweets.

The Last FM wid­get on the right, shows you the last hand­ful of songs I’ve lis­tened to from my home media cen­tre, my iMac and my iPhone. It also tells you when I was lis­ten­ing, so you can keep up with it in real time. I don’t know why you would want to, but you can if you like.

I’m still enjoy­ing Twit­ter and I do tweet a fair amount daily, often at weird times, like the mid­dle of the night or early morn­ing. I’m some­times around dur­ing the day and at night, it depends on my weird sched­ule. I tweet all sort of ran­dom crap, from inter­est­ing links to odd and sur­real jokes.

Today, just for fun, I started using a hash­tag for a vir­tual Glas­ton­bury fes­ti­val online — #vir­tu­al­glasto — for peo­ple like me who will watch from my sofa, shielded from the ele­ments and poorly cooked veg­gie burg­ers. I’m actu­ally look­ing for­ward to Spring­steen on Sat­ur­day night and I hope the BBC don’t fuck me over and only show a cou­ple of songs. We want the whole god­damn set, god­damn it!

Mainly, I’m post­ing today because I’ve been get­ting so many new vis­i­tors. I’ve had another sig­nif­i­cant rise.

This is to let all you new vis­i­tors know that I’m alive and well and liv­ing in north Lon­don, just like always. Keep book­mark­ing me or grab­bing the RSS feed and before you know it, I’ll post some­thing amaz­ing that will inform, enter­tain and amuse.

Just not today.

I think I’m fin­ished now.

I’m angry.

I’m pissed off.

I’m hop­ping, fuck­ing mad.

Apple showed off the new iPhone 3GS a cou­ple of days ago and it is a desir­able piece of kit. While not a huge leap in tech­nol­ogy, the new hardware-based fea­tures of this new model make me want one.

You’d think, in the mid­dle of a deep reces­sion, that spend­ing my hard earned cash would be easy.

Think again.

O2, the mobile net­work here in the UK that has exclu­sive rights to sell iPhones are being quite fool­ish about upgrades to exist­ing cus­tomers like me. They seem to think its sen­si­ble for me to take out a 2nd mort­gage to upgrade to the new model.

Exist­ing sub­scribers are gold dust to com­pa­nies like O2 or at least they should be, but it seems this time that is not the case.

In the cell phone indus­try, net­works refer to it as “churn”, or the loss of cus­tomer to other networks.

There was a lot of “churn” here in the UK last sum­mer, when loads of peo­ple dumped their exist­ing net­works to move to O2, so they could have an iPhone 3G. I was amongst that large group of switch­ers myself.

I love my iPhone, its eas­ily the coolest device I’ve ever owned. I have no regrets about chang­ing net­works to get one.

Early adopters, like myself and many of my friends and work col­leagues, drive tech­nol­ogy sales in that we buy first, pay full whack, then show it off to our mates who end up buy­ing them too.

I can think of half a dozen peo­ple right off the top of my head, who bought an iPhone because I per­son­ally intro­duced them to mine. I’m sure the same is true for many other early adopters; we should all be on com­mis­sion really.

Instead, O2 don’t respect us and are actu­ally going out of their way to penalise peo­ple who bought their iPhone 3G’s last July. Do you think that makes me keen to per­suade oth­ers to get an iPhone from O2 now?

O2 want to sell me a 32gb iPhone for the same cost they’re sell­ing them to new sub­scribers, £269 I believe. I could just about wear that, if I had to, but they also want me to pay the remain­der of my con­tract as a penalty.

A penalty?

I want the lat­est hand­set from my cur­rent net­work provider and they want to charge me a penalty? Why not just smack me in the face and get it over with?

I have 6 months left on my cur­rent con­tract and I am on the £45 a month tariff.

£45 x 6 = £270 (it dou­bles the cost of the phone).

Its stu­pid beyond belief.

They want me to pay £539.00 to upgrade my hand­set, when some­one off the street just sign­ing up to O2 would get it for half that.

Its mad­ness!

I’m an exist­ing cus­tomer, I should be treated bet­ter than a new cus­tomer. Show me a lit­tle love and I’ll show you some back, but try to screw me over and I’ll cost you money.

How?

I’m still work­ing on that, but I have a cou­ple ideas.

Every­one who wants to upgrade their iPhone should each spend at least one hour on the tele­phone with O2 cus­tomer services.

You’re not going to get any joy, but you are going to waste their time and in busi­ness, time is money.

For every minute you keep one of their sales reps occu­pied, that’s another minute they are not sell­ing a brand new phone.

Be polite and just keep repeat­ing your­self, its what the O2 rep is going to do, so you might as well do the same.

Esca­late too, they hate that. Ask to speak to a super­vi­sor, then the supervisor’s super­vi­sor, then the depart­ment man­ager. The key is to keep them on the phone as long as you can. And call them from your iPhone, because the call is free to you, but it does cost O2 in net­work bandwidth.

Say any­thing, use some of my argu­ments, sing them a song, tell bad jokes, what­ever will keep them talking.

Then use the word “churn”, that will scare them.

Keep telling them exist­ing cus­tomers are get­ting a raw deal.

O2’s line is that the iPhone 3G was sub­sidised, which is why they want to force peo­ple to see out their con­tracts before get­ting a new hand­set. Its bull­shit, but that’s the tack their taking.

Like I give a shit about their profit!

If they did a bad deal with us last year, tough. Don’t try to fix it by screw­ing us over a year later. That’s not smart.

I don’t want the new iPhone in 6 months, because it will be a six month old phone then.

And I know 6 months after that, a bet­ter iPhone will be released. And here’s the thing, the dif­fer­ences between the iPhone 3G and the 3GS aren’t that huge, but that might not be true with next year’s model. Who knows? And who wants to gam­ble on it?

The really smart thing to do is buy the new iPhone 3GS pri­vately once an unlock is avail­able, then switch net­works. O2 are being so myopic about this, I am very tempted to fol­low this path and show oth­ers how to do it too!

O2 are going for short term profit, when suc­cess in cus­tomer rela­tions only comes by play­ing a long game.

Peo­ple are seething over this, check out mobile phone forums or Twit­ter. Every news­pa­per has had a story on this mas­sive O2 cock-up too.

I’m def­i­nitely not the only one who wants to push back hard at O2.

I can’t do this alone, we need every other iPhone owner look­ing to upgrade to take action.

“Brand man­age­ment” is a mar­ket­ing buzz­word these days and O2 have done some real dam­age to them­selves. They might be able to put a ridicu­lously high price on upgrad­ing, but hav­ing a well-respected brand is priceless.

Can you hear that, O2? Its the sound of your stock price drop­ping fast. I don’t see a net to catch it, do you?

O2 can either work out a bet­ter plan for us to upgrade, or they will start to haem­or­rhage sub­scribers. If O2 don’t make us all happy and soon, its going to cost them plenty.

( #O2fail — search for it on Twitter! )

This is a lit­tle warn­ing from your friendly, neigh­bour hippy.

Do you tweet from your iPhone? Are you broad­cast­ing your loca­tion with every tweet when you are at home? Do you know what I am talk­ing about?

If you answered “yes” to any of those ques­tions, espe­cially that last one, you really need to pay atten­tion to this.

Your iPhone is location-aware, so to an extent is your iPod touch. You prob­a­bly know this already. It means it can work out your loca­tion using GPS, wi-fi and/or cell phone tower infor­ma­tion to a rea­son­ably accu­rate degree. That fea­ture is built right into the core archi­tec­ture of your iPhone.

Hav­ing that infor­ma­tion at the core, means appli­ca­tions like many iPhone Twit­ter clients, can mag­i­cally grab your exact loca­tion (expressed in lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude) and attach it to your tweets and Twit­ter account.

If you look at people’s Twit­ter pro­files, occa­sion­ally you will see two sets of num­bers where their city would nor­mally be…if you cut and paste those num­bers into Google Maps, it shows you their exact location.

Per­haps there are times when you want to broad­cast your loca­tion, for exam­ple, you are vis­it­ing a famous land­mark and want your tweets to reflect that. Or maybe you are out on a Sat­ur­day night and you want your friends to eas­ily be able to find you, because its your round. That’s all cool.

But what if you are at home, mer­rily tweet­ing away about your two-week hol­i­day abroad that starts tomor­row and you’re not aware you’re send­ing out your home address with every mes­sage? Sup­pose you have a photo of your­self on your account, or hun­dreds of them on your linked Face­book page.

What would it take for some enter­pris­ing crim­i­nal to park up on your street and watch for you to leave, know­ing your flat will be empty for a fortnight?

Very lit­tle.

Think I’m being para­noid? Think again, because some­thing like this hap­pened recently in Ari­zona. Here, check out this local report.

So what can you do to avoid this hap­pen­ing to you?

Sim­ple, become more aware of loca­tion awareness.

If you tweet from your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or any other loca­tion aware device, if one exists), go into the set­tings of your pre­ferred Twit­ter client and turn off loca­tion ser­vices. The set­ting is some­place dif­fer­ent in every app, and if you can’t find it in the app, look on the main set­tings sec­tion from your home screen.

When the app asks you to turn them on again, like it did the first time you used the app, say “no”, unless you want to broad­cast your loca­tion. And if you are home, or where you work, this should prob­a­bly always be “no”.

You can re-enable this fea­ture if you do want to use it, when you are out and about, but I really rec­om­mend keep­ing it switched off as your default setting.

Also, check your own Twit­ter pro­file, to see what you have listed as your loca­tion. You might dis­cover a lit­tle surprise.

If you wish to change it, log into your account from the web and go to Set­tings, then find the lit­tle box for loca­tion and type some­thing suit­ably vague. Mine says: “north Lon­don, UK, Earth”, in case any­one con­fuses it with the Venu­sian version.

There’s one more sim­ple thing you can do to pro­tect your­self, when you send tweets, don’t give out too many spe­cific track-able, real-world details about yourself.

I realise if you are tweet­ing under your own name, and can be found by direc­tory enquiries or (gasp) in the white pages, it may already be too late, but if you are at all pri­vacy minded, nei­ther of those things will be true of you. They are cer­tainly not true of me, but I am extremely pro­tec­tive of my pri­vacy online and off.

If you’re some­one who didn’t realise you’ve been prac­ti­cally attach­ing your home address to every tweet sent from your iPhone, this advice is espe­cially for you. Just send me what you saved in the increase to your home con­tents insur­ance post-burglary and we’ll call it even.