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

Help my PC has turned blue and isn't moving. It might be....

Just in case the world thinks that I've given up the blogging I thought I'd drop a very quick post to let you know what's happening.

For the past two weeks I've had a bit of a rush job on a work so have been working on parts of it at home. These things can get pretty all consuming hence the lack of activity on the blog. The good news is that it's finished and looking good. The bad news is that my PC is yet again in pieces around the office floor. I just cannot figure out what's making it so sick. I even tried my hidden ace of using a different hard drive just to get it started but it just wasn't playing.

It went blue on Friday and I spent most of Saturday pulling it apart and trying to cajole it into activity but to no avail. I would have went further today but I sacrificed the virtual world to go out amongst the real world and see some relatives. I can be really guilty of shutting myself off from the world once the caravan season ends. What that means is that, if you don't own a caravan, some relatives haven't seen me since the last time the trees were this bare and the nights this dark. It's a shame because every time I visit I think, I really enjoyed that, I should make the effort more often. I hardly even saw my brother in law (he's not really but I think of him as being) and he's one of the very few folk who might have some idea how to fix my pc. Here in Scotland there has even been pockets of snow and the temprature has been down close to zero. It could be a long cold winter if this keeps up.

Anyway I'm on the laptop and its late so I'm off to bed. I will update the world as soon as I either get the pc back up and running or give up the ghost and admit defeat. The money pit is empty so there's no option for a replacement PC so I'll be burning the midnight oil to get this one fixed. Plus after seven years or so of service I doubt a new one could ever live up to it (or down to its unreliability).

There's also rumours about iOS 4.2 around the corner and a new version of iTunes so there might be a wee iblog due soon too. Although itunes and all the software for updating my phone is on the broken PC so that may be a problem.

So I'll be blogging again very shortly. Wish me luck in the meantime
T.

Geek Week

OK so first things first. Sorry for not letting everybody know how it went last week. So here's a quick recap. Shit happened big time to my desktop PC. Last weeks blog came from an incredibly Pissed off TQ working on the laptop. I was facing potentially hours of work and, what's worse, I had no idea why. My PC had just shut down and was refusing to recover.

The good news. I settled in for a marathon session. This required lack of cleanliness and old comfortable clothes. It helps when you're working with PCs if you can grow stubble as you work (sorry ladies but it's true). My first start had enough oomph to get into windows once I'd cancelled disk checking. First task therefore was to basically steal as much as I could copy before the blue screen could catch me. With every file my mood lifted. I may lose the PC but I was recovering the files.

Next, after several failed re-starts, was to try and defrag a drive that looked like it only ever surfed the net for Viagra. I honestly can't ever remember a defrag taking longer. When it finished the drive still looked rough so I started again. The PC seemed to be getting more stable plus I could take risks because I had the important files backed up. Yep it took two days and I have no idea why it happened but I'm back on the desktop and it's working.

It was just time consuming but, file by file, cluster by cluster, I recovered to the point where I had a stable PC. I'm still a bit disturbed because I can't find an event that caused this one. How do I know it won't just happen again? I'll just need to keep my fingers crossed because there's stuff higher up the list than a new PC. The dishwasher is broke for instance which is much more of a crisis because the temporary replacement is me.

10 Cheers for Binary

Ten past ten on Sunday should really be a big date for geeks and binary enthusiasts the world over. It will be 10:10 10/10/10. Actually my first phrase can't be right. There's no such word as should in the world of binary. It either is or it isn't.

I'm a Photo shop Pro
One way or another it's been a really geeky week. There was the PC to fix. At work I was trying to help someone use some HTML tags to add interest to an online presentation that they were putting together. Now I don't really understand much about HTML myself and the little I do know has been kind of self taught from editing my blog so I printed some stuff off from the net. It was from this that I heard about meta tags. Meta tags apparently help google to list your blog. Who knew? So I've added a couple of rows to the Head section of my blog. I'll check google analytics periodically and see if it makes any difference before I bore everybody with a how to.

I also had a couple of things to do in photo shop. Now I've had a version of this kicking about on my PC for ages but I actually find it to be one of the more difficult image editing software's to learn so I've kind of avoided it even though I know that it's supposed to be the best. The thing is I had a couple of things I wanted to do that the easier image editing stuff wouldn't do so I gritted my teeth and went in to photo shop.

I always make my wife's birthday card you see. It's not that I'm too tight to buy a card, honest, it's just that you want to do something personal. It started about 13 years ago when we got married (and coincidentally got our first PC)and I've made a card for every birthday, anniversary and Christmas since. My wife reads this blog so I'm not going to give away the details of the card however: I had found an image that would have been perfect except for two things. It was completely the wrong colour and it had stuff in the background that I wanted to remove. This is the sort of thing that photo shop was invented for and I have to say, after much googling and perhaps the odd swear word, it worked perfectly. Go photo shop. Actually I'm kicking myself because I did one image perfectly in photoshop and then (time was against me) I did another very quickly in PowerPoint and the difference shows.

Phone Home

So when I was working with photo shop I had an idea for the phone. Whilst searching for images for the wife's card I came across a picture of an old fashioned British red phone box. Wouldn't it be cool to use that as the icon for my phone? But then I'd need to redo the other icons on the dock at the bottom. A post box for SMS, a map for Tomtom but what about settings? Maybe the IPSW icon that apple use. I lifted and tidied the images using my new found photo shop skills and I think the results are pretty good (if a little bizarre looking). I have an idea to take this further but I haven't completely made up my mind yet. What do you think?

It's Raining It's Sn0wing the Whole thing is B0ring

My iPhone has now been upgraded to iOS 4.1. I finally managed it on Friday when Redsn0w released a windows version. It worked flawlessly and there were no scary moments except when cydia came up with a white icon. I clicked it and it did stuff and before you could say 'screw this I'm going back to HTC' it was fixed. I do have a slight concern that when I click the remove background program in SBSettings it crashes the phone but otherwise it all works.

Thank god it did work because the whole Jail breaking scene has gone off its head this week. I love the fact that these geeks help us to mess with our iPhones but they truly are a bunch of geeky divas. Greenpois0n was to be the jailbreak to end all jailbreaks. An exploit called Shatter was discovered before iOS4 had even been released and it was to be the first to break all models of phone for life. The problem is that they didn't release it. They kept telling everybody how good it would be and showing videos of how it broke various devices but they never released it. Up until this week that is.

This week they announced that it would be released at ten past ten on Sunday. 10:10 10/10/10. The bad news however was that it wouldn't jailbreak the bulk of our iPhones. Only the iPhone four and the iPad. Bummer. Given that Friday saw the release of Redsn0w for windows and that Sn0wbreeze should work on the 3gS I think most of us are actually already able to jailbreak our phones anyway but it was none the less disappointing given that we've been waiting for more than a month.

Geohotz Rains on Chronic Devs Parade
Now came the bit that no-one expected. Ahead of the greenpois0n disappointing release came news from someone who claimed that they had bowed out of the whole jail breaking scene. George Hotz released a jailbreak one day ahead of greenpois0n that worked on most types of idevice. Limerain instantly became the jailbreak of choice and no-one even wanted greenpois0n any more. So much so that greenpois0n hasn't released. They say they are keeping it to jailbreak 4.2 when it comes out next month. I for one won't hold my breath.

So there you go. What a week to be a geek.

More next week

T

What Would You Like Windows To Do Today? F*cking Work!!

Where have I been? There were a couple of blogs for the iPhone crowd and then nothing. The whole jailbreak scene is very interesting if your in to that sort of thing but where did the blog go?

Anyone who followed my stopping smoking attempts from the early days will remember that I got a bit upset about a couple of computer hiccups. I spent a fair bit of February working away on my laptop whilst I used a variety of software to first fix my desktop PC and second try and recover at least some of a dodgy hard drive that had just crumbled. In the process my desk became a clutter of cables between the laptop and the desk top and the hard drive and it wasn't long before I ended up spilling a whole can of beer into the keyboard and killing it too. I was gutted.

Like many of these mini tragedies that we face it did have a kind of perverse upside. There was the triumph of getting the desktop working at all. The pot luck that was recovering the defective hard drive whilst knowing that it was possibly a waste of time, certainly an inconvenience and also potentially lethal to my now semi repaired PC. In terms of success though it was pretty good. Almost everything got recovered and the PC worked once more. What's more it was made all the better that my home built, home spec PC at over five years old was still able to hold its own against most of what's on the market now. In PC terms that's pretty amazing. I'll grant you that when I designed it it would have held it's own against high end gaming PCs where as now it was more like a run of the mill high store model but I was still pretty proud of it. Many of you guys already have me down as a geek and I wouldn't argue except that, I'm 41, didn't do PCs at school (even calculators were a bit of a no no) and have pretty much self taught or used the internet as the font of all knowledge. Fixing things and getting them working properly is still therefor quite an achievement to me.

Where is this going? Well...... One of the main uses for my PC is watching TV. I love being able to watch what I want at a time that suits me and, here in the UK, you can pretty much get all TV via the internet. It fascinates me that this works in most countries however you can only access most of the content if you are doing so using an IP address within that country. Some of you people from the US and Australia would probably love some of the stuff that we get and I'd love to get HBO etc but they have that restricted at the moment (you can get round it but then you need to know what your looking for and what shows are what etc. I can wait).

Anyway we're sitting watching a show on Tuesday night when..the picture freezes. The sound continues but the picture has frozen. Control, Alt, Delete? Pain in the arse but I've noticed more than once recently that control, alt, delete has a habit of bringing up the task list but being just as frozen as the system you're trying to close. Screw it. Hold in the power button and force the stupid thing to restart. Press restart, disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Finally after about fifteen attempts at the above windows logs in...'error finding a file in the registry but have restored from a copy', 'Error with Java script', active desktop needs to close, AVG process could not start. one of your....Blue Screen Of Death. Disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Few trys later without even getting as far as windows then 'Scandisc needs to check drive C for errors, press any key..' Scandisc is deleting lots of your good stuff and it ain't telling you what it is or why it's deleting it or giving you an option to stop. Blue screen....shutdown. At least scandisc stopped. Disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Few more failed log in attempts but wait...I'm getting in to safe mode. It looks awful. There are still quite a few errors but it's stable enough that I can get restore point to run. Finally there's a chance. Or maybe not. Thousand errors and then blue screen. Disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Yip. The laptop rides again. Hence the blog got put off a bit. Sorry to those who like a weekly dose of Glasgow life but don't have iPhones. I will be trying to resume normal service as soon as possible. For those that do have iPhones: No Jailbreak yet but until my PC is back up I can't get my itunes so I couldn't test a jailbreak anyway.

The plan for recovery borders on crazy and shows a true lack of thought. I still have that dodgy hard drive from the breakdown in January and it's clear. I had a half idea of trying to do some deep rooted recovery to see if there were any last remnants of the drive that could be recovered so had purposefully never written any data to it. I plan to put a clean(ish) install of windows on the dodgy drive and use it to boot the PC. If that works I should then be able to copy all my good files from my normal PC hard drive. Then I should be able to format my normal PC hard drive, re-install stuff and see if it will start running again.

Sounds like a possible plan although it's easy to see failure points at almost every step of the way. Even if it does work, recovering properly and getting stuff back up to date will take a while. You never really get it back the way it was. By the time I go to work on Monday my eyes will be those of zombie and my skin will have the pallor of a man who has lived on coffee for 48 hours and has not left the house. Wish me luck

TQ

Bloody vandals

Someone just wrote on my wall and someone else poked me. What's more the first I knew anything about it was when I got an email.

Yep I'm learning a new language that you probably all recognise as face book. Don't laugh but, when you don't know how it works it's all a bit bizarre.

When I got back from the caravan I thought I'd check out Poet and Zoe's blogs to see what had been happening. Nothing it would appear. I am beginning to suspect from Zoe's last post that someone has indeed seen her with a ciggy and shot her. Only herself to blame really because that what she said they should do. As for Poet! I became concerned that she and K had become locked out of their house. I thought they had maybe gone to the deck, forgot their keys and were now fighting off bears.

In Poets post she had mentioned face book. There was a link to it on her site. I clicked the link but it took me to a log in page. Now I've been confronted by this sort of skulduggery before. My wife once wanted to check someones BEBO page so we had to create a log in and then delete it afterwards. So this was to be my cunning plan. Create a log in, see what was there, and then leave.

Now normally if I'm doing something like that I have the foresight to use my gmail address that I created when I created this blog. It's a legitimate address but allows me to remain anonymous. If I hadn't mentioned it T isn't my first name and Quittin isn't my surname (I'm truly sorry if I've burst any ones bubble with that information). Anyway without thinking I entered my actual email address and clicked the 'create account' button or whatever it was called. This took me to step 2. Step 2 still puzzles me a wee bit so if someone can tell me definitively how it works I would be interested.


Step 2 was to add friends. What surprised me was that there were three photographs of three people I knew already there to get me started. One was my aunt, another was a mate from the pub where I used to stay and still catch up with every so often and the final one was a bloke that I went to college with to do a course in 2005/06. Whilst all three have now received a 'friend request' (only my aunt hasn't accepted. What is it they say about blood being thicker?)but I have to say that they were an odd collection to turn up by default. How did it know that they knew me? I think these three may have allowed face book to access their email contacts and I've been lurking there from some dark and distant past.

The next bits were also about adding friends. It offered the option to raid my email contacts (no thanks) and then also showed me pics of folk I might want to add based on the three amigos that we started with. Great idea this; If I like someone and they like someone then the someone they like will like me, I think. I'm not sure that my aunt would be all that interested in my mate from the pub or that he would take to my mate from college. Maybe I'm wrong and this is how great friendships now start. It could also start a lot of random stalking me thinks.


Anyhow being a miserable git I declined all future friend requests until I found out what happened with the first three. So I was now live on Face book (did I ever mention the danger of leaving me bored at a PC?). I had assumed that, since I'd used a link on Poets site that I would be taken to Poets page but I wasn't. Instead I had a rather bald looking profile page called after me.

Now I should have just left it that way but, what about the friend requests that I had sent out? They would need some details to identify me. What I should do therefor is check out their pages to see what sort of stuff you should put. This I did. Why does everyone else seem to have a great photo for these things and I never do? Even as kid anything that needed a pic just got a randomly cut out pic from a holiday snap. My driving license has one that I photo shopped the background out of. Anyway I found a pic of me looking a bit dishevelled and dodgy on a bench by the sea. If you knew me and half shut your eyes you'd recognise me. If you didn't know me then you would probably pick me in a police line up anyway. I do look a bit criminal.

OK so now I had a profile that Interpol and the FBI can look up when they want to create criminal personality types. Now I could track down Poet. Might even send a friend request (get me with the lingo already). Nope. Couldn't be found. Searching Canada on foot might have been quicker. Hmm that makes me think of someone else I could look up.... Yep that's what happens. You just keep thinking hmm that's someone else I could look up. I stopped myself from sending bizarre friend requests (based on the fact that I might have had a drunken conversation with you once in a pub but your friend didn't like me)and only sent one friend request to a pal I had lost touch with. I spent about an hour in all and then gave up.

Sometime later when opening outlook.... Between the spam for the Orleans Casino Vegas (why can't they just f**k off) and the job sites that completely ignored the job specs I gave them and send me totally inappropriate jobs I found the following;


'Brian has accepted your friend request' and then another saying that 'Brian wrote on my wall'!!!!! At this point I was only aware of certain walls belonging to me and I really didn't want anyone writing on them. What the hell? Gavin had also accepted me as a friend but had the decency to leave my walls alone. Well I thought he was decent until I got to my home page and discovered that he had 'poked' me. (Couldn't they have come up with a different term? Nudged? Nodded? Poked just sounds wrong). I had the option to 'Poke back'. I selected this option assuming that it would open up a message box for me to write something witty. Nope it just said that I had poked Gavin. I feel a bit guilty now. Should I have said something? I've no idea? How do I even know if he's online or if he poked me hours ago

To make matters worse I then wrote on Brian's wall. I tried to be witty but then thought.. He'll see the funny side but will everyone else who ever views his profile? I haven't found a recall button yet.

I also discovered that you can 'like' things in face book (FB to it's friends). Around 2 million people apparently like Cheryl Cole but I settled for liking a site called Big on Glasgow. What happens is that it and another site that I've mentioned on here, Redmond Pie, appear blog like as news whenever I open Face book. I must sound like someone from the stone age here but it's all a bit confusing. If I wanted to see those blogs I'd just go to them via favorites. Why do they appear in my news.

I'm filing this post with tags for both blogging and PC in the hopes that anyone who uses those links at the side of this blog feels my pain and leaves me some tips to help me out.

Later

T

Quick Update

OK so I'm off on holiday in a couple of hours for the best part of two weeks. You can tell that it's proper holiday time hear in Scotland by the marbled grey sky, smattering of rain and the 45 degree angle of the trees trying to fight the wind. For most people it would be time to rush in doors but, for this hardy Scot at least, it's time to head for a caravan at the seaside. Time to give up bricks and mortar for tin and....well more tin really. Hopefully by the time I return I'll have loads to update you on.

I've just finished writing a letter addressed to 'The Directors PA' of the company that I bought my car from. I've finished the letter by pointing out that, whilst the service manager may be feeling pleased about having saved his company half the price of a new wheel, their company will lose more than this in the first year with just the loss of my humble business. I'll wait to see what the response is before I launch an attack via the official forum sites that I'm a member of. All I want is a wheel but it'll cost them more than the price of a brand new car by the time I'm finished with them if they don't sort things out. I wont be content until I feel that they regret selling me the car every bit as much as I regret buying it.

Apple are also supposed to be holding a press conference today to explain what they intend to do about the new IPhone 4. They aren't expected to do a recall but they will have to do something. Ask Microsoft. They still suffer from the catastrophe that was Vista. Even now that windows seven apparently sorts the issues out most of us have decided that it's just safer and more sensible to stick with good old XP. Mr Jobs could learn from the vista example. The first frustration most of us had wit VISTA was that the security settings prevented us from doing what we wanted to do in the way we wanted to do it. Sound familiar Mr Jobs?

iOS 4 is a really good jump in the right direction. It has Windows 3.1 like folders to keep your icons in. It does almost all the things that those who had jail broken their phones were already doing. MY 3G can multi task, record video and display screen backgrounds even though it is clearly stated that it can't. What's more I believe it performs better in terms of signal etc than the ill fated iPhone 4. Yep I'm looking forward to commenting on how today's activities play out.

Hard to believe that we'll be nearly into august when I get back. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was sitting in my office in January worrying about whether it would be Champix or not smoking that would drive me out of mind. Turns out I was already there.

Hope you guys hang around till I get back.

Speak soon

T

Car, Music, Money

To the UK, US, Ireland, Australia and Saudi I want to say thanks for sticking with me and taking time to read the site. This month has seen visits from 15 countries in all but some don't seem to hang about much. You guys rock. Would love to know who you are so leave a comment sometime.

On Friday I go on holiday for two weeks and it's unlikely, although not impossible, that I'll update so I thought I'd better put something down tonight.

To tie up some loose ends before I go:

The car seems to be running fine. I amn't pursuing the wheel with the finance company but am going to put a strong complaint in to the dealership. I'm thinking something along the lines of:

I love your vehicles but have had such poor service from your service dept that I wont be purchasing anything from you again. The loss of this one customer probably wont damage your business too much but will cost you considerably more than replacing the wheel would have. If I only discourage one other person from using your dealership then I'll have done enough damage to pay for more than three years servicing. Given that people are impressed with my car and take an interest in what it's like to own I think I have a fair opportunity of discouraging at least one potential customer.

Who knows...maybe I might still get the garage to fit that wheel at get to watch the service manager squirm. Even if they do sort things out to my satisfaction they have completely lost me as a customer.

Talking of customers...One somehow managed to phone through to the training department today and got me. Now since a big part of our job is teaching people how to deliver customer service you would think we'd be at the top of our game. Don't want to give too much away but it took three of us to decide what was best to do. In fairness the end result was way better than it would have been with the call centre guys. My boss walked in toward the end and was extremely worried though. The last time he heard me being that polite was at interview. I think he thought I was talking to the police or the press. Nice one.

The music thing with the iPhone... Well I'm loving the app and it is introducing me to lots of potential music that I like but, it's a bit of an effort to keep it up daily. I think it will be one of those things where I'll try it every time I'm bored. I've blogged about it so can keep track of the date started and can then look back in a years time and see how many tracks it spawned. At the minute I've gone from one track to fourteen so it's not bad going. Try this site for downloading the individual tunes. I'd stick with torrent sites for albums but this is good for tunes: www.4shared.com

On the subject of music...Bob Geldoff (The Boomtown Rats) swore at me 25 years ago today. Well me and several million others when he was telling us to 'give us your fucking money' live on TV on Band Aid. Yep I work with people who weren't born then and lots more who were too young to remember. There's a music festival every week from about March to September nowadays but nothing comes close to live aid. I was 17 in a shared flat and a whole crowd of us gathered to watch and drink and smoke etc. Back then we were changing the world..Now 'We are the world , we are the people...' . God I hated that but Live aid was good. Give it another generation and I'm sure something will best it the way it bested woodstock.

Money..Still aint got none. I actually got one of those pre-approved credit card things through the other day. Just sign and return and you'll get a credit card. Given that I'm skint I could be tempted. Thing is they actually weren't even trying to hide the fact that they wanted 39% interest. The UK is usually quite good at catching that sort of scam and stopping it dead (we do do free enterprise but normally in a more civilised way). When does the interest charged become criminal? It seems that world leaders are scared to criticise banks just now because they are so insecure but someone needs to protect the vulnerable. 39% interest should be criminal.

Also on the money front...My wife lost her purse at the weekend. Had to stop all the cards etc and were planning to get new driving licenses and stuff when....Someone phones and says they found it. She got it back cash and all. As far as I can tell no one has stolen her identity (still looks like the same girl to me). So the world can't be all bad. Maybe it's even better than we think but we just concentrate on the bad.

Anyhow that's me for the moment. If you're really dedicated and can't wait till I get back from hols then go back and read some old posts (there's more than 80 now). If not I'll speak to you when I get back.

Did I mention that I still don't smoke?

Next time...

T

Singing a different tune

Ever get the feeling that you sometimes get caught in a rut? I know I do. When it comes time for the monthly shop do you find yourself ordering pretty much the same as last month? You can have whatever you want but you, like me, probably have a relatively set menu that you stick by and only occasionally supplement. Or maybe the change in seasons is the reason that you are eating a little differently this month.

Routines rise out of comfort situations. They are not bad in themselves because they are established using the tried and the tested. Yet you often watch a cookery show and crave the alternatives that they show. Or, Like me, you have sat in a restaurant at some point waiting for your regular meal to arrive only to see something looking far better going to another table.

A couple of years ago a friend asked me to retrieve the contents of a memory stick as they were having problems with it. The stick had their music collection of 30 or 40 songs on it. I created the copy they were looking for but I also took a copy myself. The songs on their drive weren't new. I recognised them all. The reason I took a copy was that I liked all the songs but not enough to have gone out and purchased or downloaded them. Yet having them together made an excellent collection of songs that I listen to to this day.

I remember loving the film 'Good Morning Vietnam' because of the soundtrack yet I didn't have one of the artists let alone the songs in my collection.

Where am I going with this? Well we're all pretty insular about what we actually purchase and yet no-where near as insular about what we actually like. I like a vast range of music, both older and contemporary, and yet I stick to the same artists constantly when I make a purchase. Don't get me wrong I like what I like but sometimes it can become a bit boring. This is where a program called Shazam comes in and a little experiment that I'm going to try.

Now I discovered Shazam via the iPhone. This however is not an I phone blog. A version of Shazam can also be found here: http://www.shazam.com/music/web/pages/explorer.html

For iPhone users Shazam was that cool little program where, you held your phone up to the music and it told you: what song was playing, who it was by and when it came out. The rest of us mere mortals were impressed but fell short of selling the family car to have this functionality on our Nokias. However like a lot of software it has been developing away quietly into something more than just a good gimmick. I got it for my phone. I played a random song from my PC to test it, turned on the phone, selected 'Tag now' and waited. Sure enough it had identified a song by a band called Alabama 3 called 'Ain't going to Goa'. Never heard of them? They sang the theme tune to the Sopranos if that helps.


So this might be good but it falls short of impressive. I knew who sang the song and so did it. A gimmick and nothing more? Possibly not. As well as identifying the song and band it also did something else. It 'Tagged' the song and recommended five other songs that I might like. One of these tags was REM and a song called Stand which I know and really like yet haven't ever purchased. Another was for a song I'd never heard from Baldly drawn boy called 'The time of times'. For each of these tags there was a link to a 10 second clip of the recommended song. After listening to the badly drawn boy song, and liking it, I downloaded both it and Stand by REM. I wasn't overly keen on the other recommendations however (it gave 5 in all). But I did like the idea. Could this little program expose me to music and bands that I have no idea of? I played Stand and 'tagged it'. Bingo. Now I've downloaded Jason Marz and Spin doctors (both songs I could sing along to on the radio but couldn't have named the artist).

So here's the deal. I'm going to follow this wherever it leads. I know the song that started it. From that song I now have two more. I can tag those and I'll get yet more. Within a year i could have discovered a whole new taste in music.

There's a blogger thing online about taking pictures. I can't remember the name but the idea was to try and take 365 pics in a year. For most of us it would provide some sort of voyeuristic insight into their life's whilst for the photographer it would be the ultimate diary. For me this Shazam thing could work in a similar way with music.


If you like this idea access Shazam from the link above. If you want Shazam as an app for your iPhone or other mobile phone then download the paid version as the free version limits you. Remember that downloading music without paying for it is 'a crime'. There's a whole world of music that you already know of but don't have access to. In addition there's bound to be stuff you've never heard before.

I remember once my dad finding me reading a book. He asked what I was reading and I replied. With true feeling he said 'I wish I hadn't ever read that book so I could discover it right now'. He was genuinely envious of the fact that I was discovering at that moment the excitement of a story that he had already been told.

Think of your favorite song. 'shazam' it and then follow the tags. Download the songs that you like. 'Shazam' those songs and download the recommendations that you like. Before you know what has happened you'll have a whole new music collection.

Happy hunting

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

Would you Adam & Eve it-I've taken the Apple

For the international readers, 'Adam and Eve it' is what's known as Cockney rhyming slang for 'Believe it', i.e. 'Would you believe it-I've taken the Apple'. Phew glad that's out of the way. Here in the UK we have some funny customs that seem normal till you try to explain them.

Anyway what the hell am I on about? Well I'm not on about smoking because I don't do that now. What I am on about is mobile phones. Yep some folk are quite happy with phones that can make phone calls and possibly send and receive texts. Add on a camera and it's enough to make some folk faint.

Me!!! Well I always wanted more. I bought a PC when they were expensive and no-one could understand what you would do with it. I had a calculator in Primary school. That was long enough ago that most of the other kids parents didn't have one and hadn't seen one. Lucky this isn't a dating site because I don't think I'm really selling myself here. The point is I always wanted gadgets. I didn't necessarily know what they did or why but I wanted them. When I was watching space 1999 I wasn't enthralled by the whole 'other worldliness of it all'. I wanted to know what the machine with all the lights and dials did. I would have bought a toaster if it had a graphic equaliser or decent digital display. So when it came to phones I always had the cutting edge one.

I fell for the ultra mobiles hook line and sinker. I even stuck with it and learned how to text using a stylus and a version of my own hand writing. Even the true geeks gave up on that but I didn't. BUT, I never got the whole Apple vibe. My samsung MP3 player had a 20gb hard drive before your computer had a 20gb hard drive. What's more I could download what I wanted and not be stuck with Itunes. My computer could sync with anything and if I wanted software (not from shops if you know what I mean) I only had to persevere and I'd get it. I once boasted that 'the only legal piece of software on my pc was the software I used to download illegal software'.

But now I've given in. My HTC was a damned fine phone in millions of ways and I actually wanted it to be better than an I phone. I wanted windows mobile to out do apple. The phone was capable of it. I even think windows might have won but then android and symbian make the non Ipod market to diluted so developers can't concentrate on one thing. So now I have an apple Iphone.

If you get one, be prepared. This doesn't work straight out of the box. You NEED to have Itunes on your PC and an Istore account (with your bank details loaded) or you can't even switch it on (you could but there'd be no point). Remind yourself how to 'Pair' your wifi with your broadband because you'll want to do that. Figure out how to copy all your contacts because you need a new Sim card. Make sure you have a free usb port on your pc because they don't like extension cables or external USB ports. I took a morning off to wait for the delivery. Then I ended up getting it from the depot the night before. It took all that night and my morning off to get the damn thing up to speed.

That said...It's pretty bloody good once you get it figured out. Oh and there are some naughty people who've cracked a way of installing stuff without going through Itunes. I could grow to like this.

I wonder if there's an app that could stop you smoking?

Speak later

T

Day 31

31 days. That's a month in any ones book. If I'd have bet anyone 1 month ago that I would have been stopped smoking for more than 2 weeks within 31 days there aren't many people who woudn't have taken my bet. That would include those closest to me and if I'm honest I'd have been ahead of them in the cue at the bookmakers. But here I am not smoking.

To be honest I'm finding typing on this new rubber keyboard that i bought, after pouring a pint over my old one, more irritating than the non smoking. This weekend has been kinder than previous weekends in terms of the urge to smoke. Of course I'd love to say that I had no urge to smoke but I think that those who follow regularly would spot the lie.

Come to think of it how is everyone else doing? Jamie, have you got an appointment yet? Kerry, are you still off the cigs? Jo, have you decided on a plan B for quitting and Jo's friend, are you still having the odd sneaky one? It's always good to hear how everyone else is doing.

Anyway, it's late on Sunday night so i think some sleep is in order. Speak to you all during the week.

stay hooked

Day 24:

Hey folks. First up I'm pleased to say that I still haven't killed my desktop PC. On a less upbeat note I still haven't recovered all the stuff I'm after from the old drive yet either although I did get some stuff today and will hopefully get some more tomorrow night. I am however writing the blog once again on the laptop. Why? Because earlier on when I sat down in front of the desktop I spilled a can of beer almost directly into the keyboard. One half of the keys don't seem to want to respond at all whilst the others type between three and five characters at a time and not necessarily the ones that I wanted. Tempted to smoke?.....I sorely was.

Next I wanted to say hello to Jo who is on day one of the adventure that is Champix. Jo left a comment on the Day 2 blog and another on yesterdays. Thanks again because I love comments, especially just now when I don't have a wild amount to report except the number of days that I haven't smoked and how I miss smoking.

I do however have to question whether Jo's sudden tiredness three hours after pill number 1 is related to champix or whether it could be something to do with the fact that, three hours before the first comment, would have been 5am in the morning here in the UK. Of course this is the World Wide Web so Jo could really be anywhere. I am also ignoring the fact that Jo may work shifts and keep separate hours from the rest of us. I enjoy the detective work though. Keeps my mind off smoking.

Anyway Jo the good news is that you are not much more than two weeks away from a serious chance of stopping smoking. Like you I had read all the horror stories about Champix online however the one thing that I did notice that everyone had in common was that they stopped smoking. OK some of them stopped breathing, some are in jail whilst others are looking for good divorce lawyers but all of them successfully stopped smoking whilst on Champix. Hopefully your nowhere near as hopeless an addict as me and find that your experience is more like Kerry Bee's (which does seem to be the more common reaction).

As for me, I'm still not smoking which is nothing short of miraculous. I'm not feeling sudden bursts of Ecstasy nor am I considering signing up with a gym but I'm not smoking. I'm also not suffering any side effects good or bad.

If you'd like to join me tomorrow I'll give you more insights into my smoke free world. This may go something along the lines of '11 days and still no cigs' but there's always the chance that something could happen and a whole different story could unfold.

If you don't come back tomorrow you'll never know

Day 23

Hey folks. Funny thing today. I may not have mentioned it but I've always rolled my own cigarettes. For years this meant that one of the major reasons why people quit smoking, money, didn't apply to me. Why? Because, if customs and excise are to be believed, I propped up organised crime and kept the grey economy intact by buying packets of tobacco with health warnings in Dutch or polish etc. No wonder our politicians had to fiddle a few expenses what with me avoiding paying cigarette duty for most of the thirty years I smoked.

Like all good things the cheap tobacco came to an end just over a year ago. My Dealer lost his supplier and before I knew it I was forced to go legit. The only way for me to get cheap cigs was to look for dodgy folk at market stalls. Thing is I was never there at the right time. Today, 9 days after quitting, where do I find myself but at a market that would have furnished me with my smoking needs. I even had money to hand. It felt really strange to not be looking for someone to buy cigs from.

Another thing that you wont know from this blog, because it happened before I started the blog, is that I killed my home PC just before Christmas as a direct result of trying to repair a faulty external hard drive. It took about 4 days and many a full ashtray to get back up and running with a working PC. The external hard drive however has never been recovered but needs to be as it has about six years worth of photos on it. So tonight I am typing this on my laptop whilst my main PC is running a recovery program on the external drive. This is a long slow process that will hopefully run over night. I'm only telling you because there are a couple of things that could happen that may send me over the edge.

First the recovery software could find a bad cluster within seconds of me leaving the room meaning that when I get up tomorrow morning I'll have lost out on 7-10 hours disk recovery all for the sake of pressing one button saying 'yes'.

Second the temporary file created to let me see what can and cannot be recovered from the damaged drive may actually be big enough to completely fill the working drive of my PC putting me right back to the position I was in before Christmas where I have to format my C drive and start again.

If the first sentence of my blog tomorrow indicates that I've smoked 70 cigs and smashed the house up. Don't blame the Champix. I can always claim extreme provocation.

Wish me luck. Until tomorrow....

Day 21

Well that's it folks. Since it's past midnight as I write this I've officially not had one draw from a cigarette in 7 days. Scary

No logic to it so don't get excited but today was relatively easy. Also the wife and I went to the pub for a couple of beers and that didn't spark any mad urge to smoke. I think I need to give it a few days before getting excited about this as today could just have been a good day.

The downside of having a good day is that it doesn't leave an awful lot to write about. The only thing that has been consistently difficult throughout the week is that I've been trying to install a downloaded sat nav torrent into my mobile phone. As always with torrents the instructions have been appalling and I've had to use a combination of google and intuition to get it up and running. It would probably be less hassle just to buy the software in the first place. Any one who uses a computer and smokes will know what I mean when I say that this one was a full ashtray project. I should have been stubbing cigarettes out on top of a mountain of cigarette ends. Instead the ashtray is stored away neatly in a cupboard for visiting smokers to dirty at some point.

Sorry it's a short post today but it's late and I don't have much to report. I'll update tomorrow when I'm sure that the prospect of the weekend will inspire me to wax lyrical on the joys of being smoke free.

Stay hooked.....