8 hours is not enough

Hi folks from snowy Scotland

Computer
It was a sad day last Sunday when I finally had to admit that, in its present condition my faithful old desktop has had to retire. The fact is that the glitches that it's reporting such as missing registry files and blue stop screens are just symptoms of a hardware problem that I just can't get past.

I spent about two and a half hours on Sunday trying to fix it and then had to admit defeat. As any good geek will testify, a computer is a conglomeration of many parts so all is not lost. The graphics card and sound card will probably make it on to a new 'basic spec' machine when I can afford one. The good news is that the hard drive is intact and runs using an external USB caddy so I shouldn't be too down. What I miss most is the graphics though and its not just me being fussy.

We probably watch more TV online over the net than what we get through the box. I have a 32" flat screen that has served as my pc monitor and display for online on demand television for about three or four years. The thing is I managed to purchase the only flat screen ever made that didn't have a VGA input for the PC. With my trusty desktop the graphics card had a HDMI output which was fine but the laptop only has SVID which is OKish for TV but dreadfully blurry for text like my blog. I did have to treat myself to a USB keyboard however as the laptop one just doesn't cut the mustard for any kind of typing. So for the moment the laptop will have to step up as the main PC because there are no funds for a new desktop, just now or, any time soon.

Credit Crunch
That brings me to the tale behind the title of my blog. 2010 has just been too tough and I'll not weep to see its passing. Although I don't want to wish my life away. I shouldn't complain as I have been able to pay my bills (most of them at least) and I have a decent job but it's the complete lack of even a spare penny as a contingency that's getting me down. I took my car to the dealer for new wheels. Yep I'm still screwing the dealer for every penny after my failed MOT earlier this year. Anyway they couldn't do two of the wheels because I need new tyres. That meant shopping around for tyres and yet more money. Then there will be next years caravan fees before you know it. I already can't afford Christmas so god knows what will happen if something unexpected crops up. So I am going to commit now to earning more in 2011. I don't do new years resolutions, it's not that, but I'm not spending another year of all work and no play. So here's the plan...

Between now and January I'm going to research ways of earning more and spending less. The blog has lacked focus since I gave up smoking but, from January I'm going to start monitoring what ways I come up with to earn Money. I'll also try to measure what I can manage to save by either using less or by learning to do things myself. Yep, this blog is going to be about thrift. I'm going to share whatever advice I come up with on beating the recession and living life. Any tips you guys have will also be included.

Iphone
This weekend saw new iPhone software released on the world iOS4.2. So why hasn't there been a blog about how to jailbreak? Well I haven't even upgraded yet. I'm waiting. I'm actually considering upgrading but then not jailbreaking. To any jailbreaker that must sound strange. Well the truth is that I want to see if I can improve the performance of the phone. I have already gone back to my HTC for satnav because the iphone is so poor. But it seems to be poor at everything so I'm wondering if it might perform better without the customisation. Watch this space for results.

Smoking

This weekend my wife was away with relatives. As I wasn't there I decided to have a wee weekend to myself. I bought a 24 pack of beer and settled in for some serious guy time. I even looked out some old vinyl 45rpm singles. Anyone out there remember the Stranglers, the Clash, The damned? What about some 80s stuff like the cure or the fall. I've even got older stuff inherited gradually from relatives so have some great stuff from the stones and Rod Stewart. What does this have to do with smoking? Well there's been a cigar kicking about my office since long before I quit. I've mentioned it more than once in the blog. I always enjoyed a cigar back when I smoked but this one survived intact. Until now. Yep, late on Friday night I nipped down to the cellar and smoked it outside the back door. Now anyone who follows the blog will know that there have been the occasional cigs.(The last one was back in July) To be honest the cigs haven't done anything for me and they are just one of those things where you try one once in a while to see if your missing something and then realise that you aren't. The cigar however was different. I loved it. So much so that I can't have another one because I would quickly become a smoker again. Maybe on Christmas day or boxing day I might have another but otherwise it's a no no. I've been quit since February and I aint going through that again.

Car

Finally. It's snowing heavily here. Yep winter isn't just around the corner, it's here. This could last till February. I've just spent two hours clearing the path. This means that the wife and I will have to share the car. To all those who scoffed at my 4x4, who's laughing now? Can't wait till after Wednesday when the new tyres get fitted but to be honest I'd rather be in my car with bald tyres in this weather than most of the other cars I see sliding around the road. Last year mine had a hiccup on black ice but apart from that it's the only way to handle this weather.

Hope everyone is well. Enjoy the snow. Give me ideas to make or save money or to do things myself without paying. I'll update again next week.

Cheers

T

Old War Wounds

Well I've managed to swing a sneaky wee long weekend at the caravan this weekend. It's only an extra day off but it's a chance to head off to the caravan and get another injection of sea and sand and sky.

I mention Sky because where we are was officially designated as one of Europe's best 'Dark Areas' last year. What is a dark area I hear you say? It's a place that has so little light pollution at night that it offers a fantastic opportunity for people to view the night sky. I live in a city so the sky is usually just a glow created by traffic lights with the occasional twinkling aeroplane or police helicopter.

I've always loved to go out in the dark and look up, as a wee boy I even started trying to identify some of the constellations, (I gave up when I realised that astrologers were just talking crap when they said it looked like a crab or a goat or scales, or twins. I Would have loved to see their dot-to-dot books at school. (and they think my generation discovered drugs) I can honestly say that in my whole life I've never seen a sky as crowded as the sky gets down there. I almost wish I had went last week because there was supposed to be a big meteor shower. One time we even saw the Northern lights (that's impressive in the south of Scotland, they must have taken the wrong turn on their way up to Aberdeen).

The stars may not be an issue however because the weather is supposed to be predictably Scottish. Anyone who has ever heard of Scotland will know what that means. Imagine that the constant is grey and persistently wet with occasional extremes that could include, sunshine, Gail force winds, lashing rain, hail, sleet and snow and you've got the average Scottish weather forecast for June. Take the sunshine out of the mix and you've got pretty much every other month of the year. Imagine grey clouds sitting at rooftop level for eleven months of the year.

In some countries it stays dark for three or four months without a proper sunrise during the winter. In Scotland the sun does rise, you just have to take someone Else's word for it because we don't see it. So stars may not be an issue. Officially the weather is to be as shown but we're way to unpredictable to trust weather reports.

One last thing on the weather before I go. Seven years ago I almost crippled myself climbing over a gate and broke my knee very badly (not that I can think of a good way to do it). Anyhow it took a while and technically I still have a broken leg but you would never know. Except!!!! twice a year when it gets uncomfortable. It doesn't get sore just a bit stiff and almost bruised feeling. I hate to say it but, when that happens, it heralds a change in the season. Yep it never fails. I'm not sure if there is a scientific reason but it works. It doesn't tell me that it will be a bad winter or a good summer. Just that the season has changed.

Skeptics will point out that there are other signs of the season changing. The calender is a good one for a start and then if that fails there's always leaves falling off trees, berries etc. I know I know but, when the knee goes it means that there has actually been a fundamental change. You may still get the occasional lovely warm day but, the morning will be colder (into single figures) and the evening will be colder. There will be a slight tangible sharpness to the air. Yep the nights haven't really started to draw in yet but I can feel Autumn. Problem is that it's way early. This shouldn't happen till mid October.

Could the knee be wrong......

Stay hooked to find out

See you on Monday

T

Back to reality

Well, that's me back in the real world once again. Today is the last official day of holiday and then it's back to work on Monday.



After joking about the Scottish Weather, apart from a gray Sunday/Monday at the start, the weather was pretty good and, despite my wife's efforts to get me to wear suncream strong enough to protect vampires in daylight, I even have a hint of a tan. It's funny because we've been going up and down to the same region every year for the last seven years and yet we still discovered a forest trail that took us to a bit of deserted beach that we hadn't been to before. (The flies and insects in Forrest particularly loved my suncream and I ended up like that character out of Peanuts, Linus I think, that had a permanent cloud of bugs around their head). Also although we didn't get out fishing quite a few folk did so we had mackerel for tea on several occasions (note to self: look up mackerel recipes online because we're needing to get inventive if we're having it every second or third day). For some reasons the locals in the local town have now decided that we aren't caravaners anymore but are actually locals ourselves. It's very flattering but hopefully it doesn't get too obtrusive as we quite like our privacy. So all in all the holiday did exactly what holidays should do...we relaxed a lot. We stayed for nine days and then had a few days back at home at a slow pace to catch up so all good.

When I got back I checked the blog. The traffic slowed a bit without updates but still gained some visitors from some far flung places. Outside of the UK the USA now sends more visitors than Canada (need to get your friends involved Poet, Hi to Wisconsin, California, Ohio and Florida) with Australia (The Gold Coast has been loyal for a long time but is now joined by Sydney and Adelaide) out in front of the republic of Ireland (think Zoe has lost interest but Peter might still be keeping the side up).
There's also been some welcome but unexpected additions such as Iran, Romania, Singapore and Malaysia to mention just a few. Since I started monitoring in April there have been over 100O hits from 23 separate countries with the average hit spending 4 minutes on the site and viewing 3 pages per visit. OK so some sites get more hits than that per hour but I'm pretty impressed, not to mention grateful, that so many folk have taken an interest in my decisions to; give up smoking, attack a car company and switch to an IPhone.

So, without further ado, what about smoking, the car and the iPhone?

Well I still don't smoke so that's good. I'm not saying when but I did have a drag within the last eight weeks and it damn nearly blew the top of my head off so I think we're officially safe on that front. I don't remember it being anything like that back when I started smoking because, this time, I couldn't even contemplate a second drag. Didn't want to say at the time because I felt guilty but there you go.

I've heard nothing from the car garage. I'm quite surprised because I thought that going via the directors would have got me some response, even if it was just to tell me to shut up. Watch this space though because I will be following it up. I am a member of a forum for my particular brand of car (there is only one major forum for this car). When I got back from holiday I had a 'Friend request' from the forum from someone else in Scotland (my area too). It's only polite to accept such requests, so I did, and then sent him an email detailing exactly what I thought of the dealership. I explained, in reasoned terms, why I wont use the dealer for servicing and even suggested a garage that could do this for him with an average saving of £100 per time. Haven't heard back yet but here's hoping he takes my advice. Through the forum he may befriend other owners and before you know it there shoddy attitude and disgusting policies will be the stuff of Internet legend. I will of course keep you updated on this site but would rather not use this blog to do the actual campaigning.

Bad Apple just a barrel of Laughs

Before I left I also mentioned that Apple were going to address the reception problems of their new iPhone 4. Well they did. They offered every iPhone 4 customer a free Bumper (sort of rubber band that frames the phone) or case (not sure what quality). That's fine I suppose. I would have purchased a case at the same time as the phone anyway because it's a big screen that scratches easily. Despite not ordering a recall they did say that people could take the phone back if they were dissatisfied. In addition to this they issued a software update; IOS 4.01.

Software updates are a pain in the arse for those of us who choose to jailbreak the phone because you have to re-jailbreak and re-install your apps every time it happens. Did this using Redsn0w. Maybe because it wasn't a major upgrade this was easier than last time. It would seem that a major reason for the upgrade was to address the reception issue with the iPhone 4. Apparently it mis-reported reception making it appear that users were getting a better reception than they actually were. To my knowledge this only affected the iPhone 4. After the upgrade however my iPhone 3g shows poorer reception than it previously had. I have to say that this has little or no impact on my ability to make calls it just makes it look like the phone is getting poor reception. If you forget the fact that it works perfectly and gets 3g reception and everything and just go by the bars displayed after the upgrade...It would seem that I'd do better switching back to my HTC touch because it showed more bars. Well done Apple. On the plus side the advertisers have had a field day.
At Motorola, we believe a customer shouldn’t have to dress up their phone for it to work properly. That’s why the DROID X comes with a dual antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like to make crystal clear calls without a bulky phone jacket. For us it’s just one of those things that comes as a given when you’ve been making mobile phones for over 30 years.

Note the reception bars in samsungs 'Hello'

I'll update again before Sunday but that's enough for now

Gone Fishing

OK aside from the car and the iPhone and the smoking.... What else has been happening?

Well I'm sure I mentioned before that, despite not being nearly old enough, we have a caravan that we like to spend our weekends at.

I had booked the Friday and Monday off (one of the reasons I was so determined that I wanted a hire car)so we headed down to the van on Thursday night.

The weather was to be great so I suggested to our neighbours that we go fishing.

Now fishing has been quite a fraught affair for us in the past. We do own a small fishing boat that we share with family however we are hopeless at launching it. I once nearly sunk a car in soft sand and had to be towed out. My step dad is competent at launching the boat but doesn't really do fishing and wants to stay out all day. All we want is to take some beers. Go out on the water. Drop a few lines (we're not fussy if we only catch mackerel whilst all the serious fishers seek Pollock cod and tope and frown on mackerel). We want to have a laugh and a chat for an hour or so then come back in when we've drank all the beers and it's time for a pee.


This time that's exactly how it worked out. We headed out on an afternoon tide on a calm sea in our neighbours boat. He and his brother are kind of serious about the whole business but, they wanted big fish and we said we wanted mackerel. Here's the deal. They stopped for a while till we caught ten or so mackerel then they used three or four for bait so they could chase dog fish. Neither they nor my wife really went for the lager (my wife didn't want to need a pee on a boat full of guys) so I drank it. When I eventually needed a pee I just went to the side of the boat that didn't point into the wind. Given the stresses of the day before with the garage it was the perfect unwind.

More at the weekend

T

Credit Crunchies.

In a few days time it will be June. In Scotland there has been fresh snow on top of the already compacted stuff in the cairngorms meaning that they are having one of their best seasons ever.

At the same time we're being told that this will be a barbecue summer. They've been making that prediction for the last few years but, based on recent events, this time it may be true. For a massive amount of reasons I distinctly remember 2003 as being a barbecue summer and, so far, this year isn't close but it is better than the last few.

Now that the car's fixed and the weather has picked up I should be making a b-line for the caravan and, possibly for the first year in a few, the boat for some fishing. Instead I'm at home for the holiday weekend. Why? Well 2010 is fast turning out to be the toughest time I've had in nearly 20 years. Every time I think that, once that's paid I'll be fine, something else comes up. 2010 is fast becoming reminisce of 1994 when I set up home with the , then to be, wife. Thing is 1994 is a year I look back on as being one of the best years in my life. We really did have nothing and yet we really were happy.

2010 so far involves:

- Being skint (British term that means that you have no money)
- Giving up: Smokes and cutting seriously down on alcohol
- Realising it's not all yours: Lot's of folk on the outside think we've got it all. We have but it takes a hell of a lot of work to keep it.

Something tells me that 2010 is going to be a key year when I look back but it feels pretty tough when I look forward.

Is this common? Who knows? The people that follow this site have gradually disappeared but have told a variety of stories. I'm sure others will do the same. Poet has had a tough time but is getting ready for the future whilst K is preparing for exams. Zoe is also doing the exam route. It's weird but 2010 might end up being the year everyone hated and yet the year that changed everyones life.



On a different theme: The Ipad arrived on these shores today. Fools queued outside overnight to be the first to own. Now I'm not a professional reviewer but I do have an opinion:

Apple are saying 'the price is right'. An 8gb pc is un-sellable under normal circumstances but that's what your £400 gets you. A big Ipod touch and nothing more. The top spec 3g 64 gb macine is nearly £700. For an Iphone with a big screen that loses the camera and phone capabilities and still has additional costs for the net???????

Get a net book. Get a good net book. It won't have apps as such but it will do everything an iPad can do and so much more. Can you watch streaming tv on a netbook? Yes. Can you have a massive music library? Yes. Dictionary, email, encyclopedia etc? Yes.

The ipad looks great and I'm fast becoming an iphone convert but, come on, this is an idea that should have gone so much further. I'm flummoxed why there isn't a use able pc in my car. Why it doesn't connect to a mobile device that I take with me and connect to my pc?

A tablet that, when connected to my PC collects all my music, photos, movie files etc, when docked to the car provides navigation, records the journey via web cam, offers the passengers music and DVD, and, also via web cam, provides reverse parking assistance. When I park the car I lift the 8-10 inch removable screen part and take it with me like an iphone or PDA. Nothing I'm asking for there requires any sort of new tech. You just got to do it guys.... Back in the 90s pc makers made so much of multimedia. My first multimedia PC was 2.3 gb with intel inside. It actually did everything a pc could do back then. Manufactures now need to really work at making multimedia work for us now. The same multimedia in the home, the garden, the car and the workplace. No new inventions, just a better use of the tech we have.

Rave over.

Stay hooked

T

Ups and downs

Hi folks

Another quick update.I've got a long weekend this weekend so you may wonder what's happened when there is no update on either Saturday or Sunday until Sunday night.

Now that the snow has finally stopped falling, the threat of major flood has diminished and sea tides have calmed to a suitable level I can get into what I call 'the season'. What is 'the season'? Well, this will make me sound older than the hills, the season is the time of year when I escape the city every weekend and go to a caravan in the far south of Scotland for some R&R. Don't worry, even close friends can't figure it out. You have to be 70+ to own a caravan don't you?

Well here's the deal: When you go to the caravan you forget about what you should be doing. At the caravan there's no decorating or monthly shop. There's no pressure to fill the day. If it's calm you could swim or fish. If it's not looking so good you could head for the pub. Ireland's only a couple of hours away if you fancy the ferry (you can see it from the coast at Port Patrick, Ireland that is not the ferry).

The only stress with the caravan was that it was a confined space that I wanted to smoke in. My wife hated me smoking, I hated the argument because if it was wild outside then I wanted to smoke out the window whilst she wanted me to go outside. This year I don't smoke. (Still feel I had a moral high ground that I lost). It makes me realise how many things in life change when you properly stop.

Lots of people limit where they smoke in the house. Weirdly a lot settle on the Kitchen as being the only room to smoke. Wrong! If there is one single room that you must never smoke in it's the kitchen.

People will marry a smoker thinking that they will change. Good luck with that...

Cigarettes are perceived to be dirty (ash etc). It's hard to imagine something more scientifically clean than cigarette ash. Any nastiness has been incinerated.

On the other hand: There was a thin (Pompeii like) film of ash over everything in my office always.

The office still smells of smoke and there were nights when I still smoked that it stank the whole house out. I like the smell and even I noticed it.

As a smoker I had got to the point where I wouldn't even consider leaving the house without having had two cigarettes. I reasoned that the benefit wasn't just mine but also who ever I was meeting. I'm not the brightest in the morning but without cigs I can actually mobilise faster.

When anything needs done you wont have to wait 'two minutes' till I have a cig.

I can go to meetings and training courses without stopping to smoke first. (More important than you think)

Yep being a non smoker has more benefits than you think. Retaining your smoking roots also endears you to smokers who, thinking about quitting or not, want to know the secret so they can use it at some future point.

Even my spot problem is clearing up and my skin is beginning to recover. When you've done this much self harm you probably don't deserve the benefits that come with stopping, but they come along anyway.

Don't quit quitting folks