Books
Coldly & Boldly Getting My Geek On
Jan 30th
The inevitable consquences of money in the bank and a visit to one of the best bookshops on the planet. I'll explain all at the end.
Sunday
Yes, I know, I’m here again on a Sunday. I know it’s a shock but dammit, I am buzzed. Not in a grumbly, prickly sort of way like last week when I pointlessly perpetuated the “whose phone is best” argument. Sorry about that. I don’t know why I vent on here as I know I get noticably less hits, less likes and less comments when I do so. I don’t even feel any better for it. I’ll try and remember not to do it again but the chances of noone ever pissing me off again are slim to none and my memory being what it is, I will probably forget ever typing this. How critics and commentators ever sleep at night when all they do nothing more than sour the atmos is beyond me.
None of which pointless blab serves any purpose other than to fill the world with more words, sour or otherwise.
So, I am buzzed. It might be caffeine, after all I have had 3 quite large black coffees today in two separate purveyors of such things, only one of which still calls them “black coffees”. The Americano virus spreads with little sign of abatement, despite my vigorous and intensive campaign of tutting and mild, silent sarcasm. I sometimes wonder why I bother, I really do.
By now, you might be asking yourself why I was out on a Sunday morning and you would be deserving of an answer. I was here (see below).
Plymouth Barbican
‘Twas a cold and brisk Sunday morning in Plymouth and after being in bed, eating breakfast in bed and eating breakfast in bed with someone else there are few places it’s better on to be on such a morning than Plymouth’s Historical Barbican. As is the current fashion in the world of “outside” if was f**king cold, if not colder but where would the world be without risk and adventure? As with most cities, there is some sort of unofficial competition between on-street parking machines and coffee shops to see who can charge the most for something of only little value and Plymouth is no exception. I don’t quite understand why you can only buy two hours parking from on-street parking meters on The Barbican. Considering the fact that its the most “touristy” of all the places in Plymouth, I find it strange that after two hours, the council would like you to pack up your trash and move on. It’s quite possible to spend more time than that in visiting only a few of the shops and galleries. Luckily, there are a few places, most of which are well off the tourist trail where you can park for up to 3 hours. Anything over that counts as all day and costs enough to ensure that you never darken Plymouth’s doorstep ever again.
Hey look, I wasted a paragraph on parking. Well done, Neil.
Coffee time in The Strand Tearooms
Coffee In The Tearooms
In wonderful moment of coicidence, synchronicity or simultaneousness, my phone chirped to tell me that good chum, Scott Grenney had sent me an Email. Not that amazing unless you know that I was standing outside his front door (The Admiral McBride pub) when it happened. It didn’t quite happen like that, as I didn’t check who it was from until I sat down in The Strand Tearooms about 5 minutes later, but I thought it worthy of mention.
I like it in The Strand. It’s the sort of establishment in which Captain Mainwaring and Wilson are shown drinking their morning Coffee in most episodes of Dad’s Army. Quite why the place isn’t permanently full of American tourists is very strange, situated as it is only 100 feet from The Mayflower Steps. Actually, when you consider that the steps themselves are rarely surrounded by more than two people, it’s not that surprising. Someone once told me that the place where The Mayflower dropped anchor in the states is always packed with sightseers and yet, the place where it left from isn’t. I could be very cynical about this by suggesting a sign or two at our end might help matters, but that would suggest a sense of reason seemingly absent from the general area. Indeed, the only person to have grasped the financial realities of the situation sells Ice Cream at prices high enough to give you a nosebleed, should you foolishly enquire.
After coffee, it was time to hit the shops.
The Barbican contains some of the finest collectible and book shops there are. I confidently attest to this fact, despite the fact that I haven’t been to any similar establishments anywhere else but you only have to waste five hours looking at the stuff in them to believe it with all of your heart. We all love to grumble when staff ignore us in shops but in places like these, it’s a neccesity. After years of watching people move amongst the shelves so slowly it’s hard to perceive their forward motion, it would be a foolhardy old bod who shot their conversational load too early. The first suprise on entering is they usually say “hello”. The first time I experienced this, I was briefly under the illusion that they had some of novelty door chime, activated automatically on my entrance. But no…it was the old guy behind the counter. Despite a mountainous pile of what appeared to be “stock” awaiting pricing, he was reading his Sunday Independant newspaper in a wooden chair/cushion combination probably made by someone who knew Sir Walter Raleigh personally.
My favourite shop is run by an oldish couple. Sometimes you get the bloke but today, it was the turn of “the missus”.
“Hello”, she chirped as I opened the door.
“Good Morning”…
“Oh is it?”, she replied and then glancing at her watch (that wasn’t there) and then staring at the wall clock (that was),”Afternoon, just…”
“Yes, just.” (I laughed).
“Yes.”, (she laughed).
We both laughed.
“Do you need any help?”
“No thankyou”, I’ll come and get you if I do.
Silence.
Oh god, that sounded a bit rude.
“We have three floors”, she said, obviously not offended by my previous abruptness.
“Oh good”, I said, in completely pointless and unneccesary reply.
Three floors. That’s one more than last time. Oh god, I’m going to be in here until the Royal Wedding.
Unlike new bookshops (which now smell of burnt coffee beans and sound like Enya), old bookshops smell of history and sound like dust. They are like the biggest cupboard in your house, full of books you never knew you had, arranged in a way that would suggest you didn’t put them there and even if you did, you have never tidied them up. Everything you pick up has been touched, read by someone else and then put back on a shelf for a while. Actually, I always like to think that the books that end up in old bookshops never actually lived on shelves. People who read books seldom get around to putting them neatly on shelves. If they did, then the 1000′s of books I looked at today would look more like they do in Waterstones. Instead, they look like they have been used, left open with the spine bent, forgotten about and then finished months after they were first bought.
Another thing I like about old books is their naivity. As much as I love an old Conan Doyle, I have an almost perverse affection for old non-fiction. Before Christmas, I bought a 1968 tourist’s guide to Cyprus because it contained photos of places I remember from living there in the late 70s. Whilst reading it, you can’t help but be aware of things that hadn’t happened yet or the things the author didn’t know. Perhaps it’s a difficult concept to get across but there is an undeniable charm in reading books written before most of the crap currently scarring the world currently had come to pass.
After almost an hour, I had a small pile of books. Once more, my long searched-for original Bradshaw’s Railway Guide had eluded me in the most depressing way possible. There were TWO copies of something with a very similar sounding name and similar looking cover on a high shelf. After a dangerous and wobbly moment on a chair with too many wheels, my spirits sunk. The old dear was possibly more disappointed me than me as the space taken up by both books was so vast, she could have stashed away most of the new stuff on her counter.
No matter however. We all need windmills to tip at and I may be lucky next time.
So what did I buy? Well, the Conan Doyle fan in me got a Sherlock Holmes Commentary by D. Martin Dakin. To most people and even to some Conan Doyle fans, it may be the driest read in the world but to deerstalker & pipe nuts like me, his factual analysis of each story (dates, people, places, train routes etc) is a bit of a treasure. Who cares what anyone else thinks anyway? Well me actually, just not as much as I used to.
I also picked up a couple of dog-eared, 1980s Star Trek fan-fiction anthologies. Not that notable perhaps, save for one thing – they used to be mine. For reasons which now baffle me, towards the end of the 80s, I sold a load of books to a shop in town for a ridiculously small amount of money. Every now and again, I spot one in a shop and buy it for about 20 times what I sold it for. It bothers me not and I rest happy in the knowledge that I supported local commerce and warmed the heart of a trekkie for 20 years or so. Time has not been kind to them and they were certainly shinier and less creasey when I handed them over all those years ago.
Gotta love that 1970's artwork
So that was my Sunday. Half of it spent bookworming and the other half spent writing about it. Life is a blast.
Or, maybe it’s just the caffeine.
LL&P folks.
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Twitter, Android, Apple & Libraries: Almost The TechBlog
Jan 23rd
Sometimes, the torment in which I writhe in an effort to get round to writing words here would astonish you. I do everything short of losing sleep, I really do. This guilt is very counterproductive and actually makes me feel worse. Then, all of a sudden I find myself sipping a strong, black Americano in the comfort of a Plymouth eatery. Mild boredom has set in between coffee arrival and food arrival, and as is my usual habit, I tap the screen of my awful HTC Legend (more on that later) and see what the world is up to. If you’ve been outside at any moment in the last 3 years, you may have noticed other people doing this. I used a bus recently and whilst my life dribbled away “waiting” for it to arrive, 8 out of the 9 people at the bus stop were tapping away on their phone. It’s not unusual and despite what some would have you believe, it does not represent the end of the world, any more than colour television did when it arrived.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
“Oh christ, another bloody tweeterer…”
I wasn’t sure I had heard it properly at first, but even before I could look up properly…
“Why don’t they just f**king talk to somebody real?”
In a perfect world, I would let rip with an incisive reposte that would leave the intolerant nutsack quivering in their Reeboks. Alas, a whole day later, I still haven’t thought of anything suitable (although I am starting to think “f**k off nutsack” has a certain ring to it) and in any case, he was a bigger than me and had he given chase, would probably have caught up with me in good time. Even allowing for the fact that his knuckles dragging on the ground would give me a sporting chance of reaching the Rover 214, my key fob is unreliable at best and I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, “it is better to shut the f**k up than to bleed to death on the bonnet of your car with the last syllable of a cutting witticism on your lips.”
So, with my cheeks blushing in self-rightious anger, I ignored him. I wasn’t even on Twitter and was in fact trying to get the generously offered Free Wi-Fi to work. Had I achieved this, I would indeed have gone on Twitter but until Free Wi-Fi becomes even semi-usuable in this great land of ours, I am slightly hesitant to waste too much of my mobile data allowance.
Anyone wondering where I am going with this?
Well…Twitter. I love Twitter. I know loads of people who love Twitter as well. If you don’t like Twitter, shut the hell up and leave us alone. I completely fail to see how someone tapping their phone in virtual silence is any sort of inconvenience, annoyance or threat to you. There is more sense, intelligence, wit, empathy, tolerance and inight expressed online than you will ever know or experience.
Let’s analyse the specific comments of the dribbling, imbecile who had the good fortune to sit near me yesterday morning.”
“Why don’t they just f**king talk to somebody real?”
Twitter, my bird of choice.
This concept has always bothered me a little. If someone is not in the room with you, are they somehow not real? As I have said, the problem they seem to have with you, is that they are not talking to them. Really? Why would I talk to them? They don’t even believe that themselves, so what is the real problem? Is it really just that something is going on they don’t understand? Perhaps. Is it because they consider it impoliite? Hardly. A few minutes later, his companion’s own phone rang and she answered it and spoke at the sort of volume that would suggest she didn’t give a flying hoot about anyone else nearby.
In the end, I gave up. I could say that I wasn’t bothered about what he thought, but the paragraphs above would suggest otherwise. It did bother me but only in the way that most intolerance does. Those who know me will know that I am an not-uncritical evangelist for The Internet and the technology that surrounds it. I have long held that the best way to combat such intolerance is to ignore it and wait for it to disappear. This sometimes takes ages but it does happen. Forty years ago, people complained that colour television was too distracting and heralded the end of civilised society, when it was nothing more than a natural progression. I am not saying that everyone should shape up and start Twittering, Facebooking or Beebooing, just that they should do what every educated person should do about the world around them. Stay informed and decide for yourself, don’t just decide because The Daily Mail says you should.
In a detail that sounds almost perfect, said imbecile had in fact been reading The Daily Mail and it lay next to his plate, clumsily folded and ragged as only a free paper can be after 20 people have flicked through it. After they left, I took it and mainly because it was the only paper nearby, I began to read. It was only slightly more acidic and vile than when my last barber shop haircut had forced me to attempt a similarly ill-advised read. I only managed to get some way through a slightly cruel and amazingly ill-informed piece about Jonathan Ross and his “weird” family before my food arrived. I located the online version this morning before writing this and read it in it’s entirety. Please feel free to do so too.
Click here to read it.
I am assuming that the Ross family had nothing to do with the piece but I do hope it finds a permanent home on their fridge door.
Amongst the “evidence” of the family weirdness are the following…
1. Ross installed internet connections in every room of the house.
I think this is called Wi-Fi and I have a similarly elaborate setup in my own house, as I believe does about 54% of UK homes. The article makes more sport of their lavish expenditure, including (believe it or not!) a “home” cinema. Big deal. If we all could, we all would. The same applies to remote-controlled toilet seats. Go on..admit it…
2. The Ross family communicates via Twitter.
The clear implication here is that they don’t communicate in any other way. They don’t say it but it’s blindingly obvious that we are suppose to infer it. The simple fact is that they all use Twitter and follow each other on Twitter. This is far more astonishing in a positive sense than those who don’t Tweet will know. I know of one family who do this and it’s nothing sort of charming. An example is given where one his daughter asks her dad to bring her a glass of water via Twitter rather than go down an get it herself. I think this is what is known as “funny” and nothing else. I have followed Mr & Mrs Ross on Twitter from the beginning and their communications show nothing more than a happy bunch of people who have committed the cardinal public sin of being happy, loving each other and staying married for an awfully long time.
Incidentally, I regularly tweet with people at work who are only sat a few feet from me. This almost always makes them smile, as do their replies. I occasionally look out of the window to see if the sky has fallen in or if the moon has turned to blood. So far, nothing to worry about.
Oh and before I forget, Twitter has a website but it is not A website. I just wanted to clear that up.
Android & Apple
My Phone - I hate it.
I am kind of hoping that the mighty Google spider doesn’t index this next bit and that hordes of nerdly open-source enthusiasts don’t fill my comment box in the same way the Doctor Who crowd did a few months back, when I dared to express an opinion.
Anyway, I have an HTC Legend and I hate it. I hate it because I hate Android. There, I said it.
“Why don’t you have an iPhone then?”, I hear 3 of you cry.
“Because I can’t afford one”.
This simple statement also answers the questions “why don’t you have an iPad”, “why don’t you have a Porsche” and many other similar enquiries.
Cost is pretty much it. I love my iPod and I would love an iPhone and an iPad but they are too expensive for me.
My HTC is my first monthly contract phone and it costs me £21 a month. Last time I checked, an iPhone would cost me about £60. So there we are. I could handle criticism of an iPhone on the basis of cost but on little other. They are beautiful and iPads are even more so. They just are.
I am not completely blind to the iPhone problems either. The “leather case” problem earlier in the lift of the iPhone 4 was laughable but it’s easily solved by doing something that every sensible person does anyway.
I love the argument “I would never buy an iPhone” or “I have never touched an iPhone”. An interesting perspective, if nothing else. Incidentally, I realise that my iPod is not an iPhone but it’s pretty close and I have used an iPhone. I know of what I speak – a little anyway.
My HTC phone crashes a lot. It gradually slows down until the only solution is to switch if off and on again. Memory is a constant concern and I find it amazing that so many people recommend a “task killer” to kill apps that haven’t closed properly. These work a lot of the time but it would be nice if they weren’t needed in the first place. It’s not even that I play with a lot of features on my phone. On a daily basis, I check my Email, use Facebook & Twitter and look at a few websites in break time. Not exactly a heavy user but such activity regularly brings my phone to it’s knees. Not good at all. I have never had trouble getting a signal but sometimes the button just locks up. This happens both at the beginning and end of the call, often leaving you to wonder whether you have hung up at all.
The same apps are infinitely better on the iPhone/iPod than they are on Android. Facebook and Twitter are prime examples. The printed word hardly does this argument justice but there is really no competition. The official Twitter app on Android is so awful that most people don’t use it – me included. Incidentally, I would love to uninstall the Android Facebook app but you can’t. Uninstallation of apps actually requires a third-party app to be anything like usable. Guess what you do on the iPhone? You press the icon for a few seconds, tap the x in the top left corner and it’s gone. Better still, do it on iTunes when you get home.
Android itself. It’s open source and anyone can write an app and start selling it, unlike that evil overlord Apple who must approve every app before it’s allowed to be sold. Thank god they do. Have you seen the crap in the Android App Market? The Apple App Store is not perfect but jesus christ. Incidentally, some of the most popular apps in the Android store are complete launcher replacements. Hardly a ringing endorsement. If you want copyright-infringing sound boards, there’s only one place to go. Incidentally, there is a growing feeling online that the sheer number of different Android phones and configurations thereof will significantly hamper app development.
So I have an HTC but I hate it. In 8 months, I will upgrade and hopefully have an iPhone and this burning anger inside me will subside.
Libraries
That's not me, I'd never get up there.
The imminent plans to close many local libraries is a tragic reflection of the times in which we live. Either that or it’s something that was bound to happen sooner or later. When did you last go to the library? I can’t remember exactly but it must be something like 20 years or in other words, something like the time the Internet arrived in my house. I took my mum to one on a semi-regular basis a few years ago but then she got hooked on audiobooks and that was that. This Christmas, she got a Kindle and I fear she has borrowed her last book.
I am not naive enought to suggest that the Internet has removed any need for libraries, just that it has removed it for a huge chunk of society. I suspect in a few years time, a Kindle or something similar will cost about £20, most books will be cheaply downloadable and we will look back wondering what all the fuss was about, much the same way that most people remember the board game, the fax machine, common decency, respect for elders and cartoons before the news in the evening.
Literature hasn’t died, knowledge hasn’t died and I am pretty sure Amazon would attest to the fact that books haven’t died. If you can listen to Stephen Fry read Harry Potter, one of his own books or actually anything at all out loud and still say that books are dead then you are a dullard.
The end of a lot of libraries can be sad and yet still be inevitable at the same time. I just think that, although inevitable, it’s just not time yet.
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Get On The F**king Pavement
Jun 24th
Tesco
Without yesterday afternoon, this would be a week I could happily forget forever. Don’t get me wrong, it was nothing life threatening or too tragic, just a week I would quite happily leave behind.
If my current job has taught me anything is that people generally aren’t as bad as you think. Yes, a huge sweeping generalisation but one I have found to be true. I spent the first 20 years of my working life in small jobs, rarely meeting anyone new from one month to the next. After a while, I got the measure of most people and they were a mostly decent bunch. Of course, the fact that I never really came across anyone my own age or even only a few years older than me may have had something to do with it. One the few occasions I encountered those younger than me, I didn’t deal with it very well. Like most of us, basing my opinion on the way they looked or spoke.
Then I was made redundant. Now I work for the single largest employer of people between the ages of 18 and 30 (probably) in Plymouth. I have spent the last 5 years re-evaluating the way I see and interact with people. Every now and again you come across completely irredeemable cretins but generally first impressions are wrong. Once you get to know most people, you find that you are more alike than you think. They like and dislike most of the same things as you and more often than not are quite capable of holding a decent conversation with you…
…and then there are the sort of people who drive shiny red Vauxhalls in Tesco car parks on a Saturday afternoon. Shiny, red, customised and suspension set so low that their huge exhaust barely clears the road. So there I am, trundling a full trolley uneasily towards my car when I hear the following…
“you know this is a f**king road don’t you?”
Ginger skinheaded bloke shouting at me past his embarrassed, hoopy-earringed girlfriend. He drives on slowly.
“actually mate, I thought it was a car park”
He stops again and reverses about 2 feert..”what?”
“look, I didn’t mean to get in your way but this is the only way to get to my car.”
“you should get on the f**king pavement”….his girlfriend is staring straight ahead. “just drive Gary.”
If this idiot had looked around he would have noticed that there are in fact no pavements and only a VTOL equpped trolley would have been able to get from the store entrance to my car without inconveniencing at least one person. I could have pointed this out but I didn’t really want Sophie to see her Uncle Neil beaten to a pulp and decided to opt for the dignity of silence.
Now, I can see how he was annoyed. I have been there myself and his car is far more shiny and far more valuable than mine. A scratch from a shopping trolley would not be good. I have not, however, leaned out of my window and used the word “f**king” when addressing a complete stranger. I certainly have never shouted it.
The prick should get a blog if he has that much anger to spare.
Fraud
There was something very wrong in the world this week. Some bastard fraudulently took a few hundred quid from my bank account. They didn’t steal my card, they just go hold of my details and bought some mobile phone top-up vouchers over the phone. Luckily, my less than stellar credit rating forced the bank to stop honouring transactions beyond a certain point. The card has been cancelled and I have submitted my claim to get it back.
It could have been much worse I suppose. Only a fool would try and steal money from my bank account a few days before pay day. They could have got a few grand had they waited a week or so and then I really would have been up shit creek.
Now I find that its happened to practically everyone I know and almost always used for mobile phone top ups. From beavering around the net, I understand their dastardly scheme works something like this..
You steal a mobile phone and stick a pay-as-you-go sim card in it.
You top-up the sim with anything between £30 and £100 worth of credit using some stolen credit card details.
You sell it to some loser in a pub, letting them dial 150 and see that the phone has loads of credit. They give you £25 to £30 for the phone thinking they have got something of a bargain.
This has to be done really quickly, e.g. before the owner of the credit card used to buy the top up vouchers reports the transaction and the top-up is cancelled.
Unfortunately, it took me 3 days to notice.
Either way, the buyer of the phone never sees the guy who sold it to him again.
What scares me is the relatively few online places I have used my card with. Not a cowboy in site. You know them all. Big names.
Sophie
I just took Sophie home. She spent the night and as always made me forget everything else going on for nearly all the time she was here.
The Child Inside
He came out again. I just spent over £50 buying Star Trek comics on EBay. Now I know you probably think I am an idiot but you are wrong. They were really good comics. Two really really really rare ones, the successful purchase of which I am hoping is an upturn in my luck. So how much? Well. Two in a batch of 25 that are worth £50 or so quid each. I got all 25 for £3.50.
Were it not for my lack of credit card and meagre PayPal balance, I would have also bought a batch of 117 Star Trek novels for £30. You see, I sold all mine at a car boot sale about 10 years ago for about £30.
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