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Here she comes, the great leveller..

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Alan

Aside from the Levellers of course, each of whom are great levellers – but I digress before I started.  The song that opens with the lyrics in the title is about heroin addiction, but can speak ‘the c word’ I’ve written about before.  This time it’s struck a little closer to home, indeed, it did some time ago – my Grandad now finds himself on a hospice ward in Nottingham’s City Hospital with probably less than a week left to live.

I’ve been to see him a few times – principally just to give comfort by my presence rather than being any practical help, as well as a bit of moral support to my Dad who’s been performing heroics in both visiting and practical duties.  It was difficult to listen to Grandad fretting about – of course – Granny and her wellbeing, but also the worries and niggles of every day life that, even now, he is only just managing to let go of and let us take away from him.

Seeing a man who hasn’t always been easy to get along with, but has always been there, stripped of his dignity and self-sufficiency is really rather tough – despite the fantastic care he receives from the wonderful staff at the hospital.  But you know, you can kind of accept it as what life throws at us, and at the end of the day you just kinda have to deal with – as Shakespeare would have it – the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I thought that at least until today when I visited along with my Granny.  My Granny suffers with a case of dementia which means her short term memory is not great.  This means that my parents and aunty get the heartbreaking scenario where Granny discovers Grandad is terminally ill, again, like some sort of sick version of Groundhog day.  Fate is a cruel mistress indeed.

All being well his suffering won’t be for much longer, then we face the prospect of at which point – if ever – Granny will be able to commit his passing to her permanent memory.  Ouch.  What a sad way for three score plus years of marriage to be drawing to an end.  I always relish getting involved with my work’s events to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support regardless, but this year’s events it will be with a bit more gusto.

In cheerier news my replacement phone got sent out today.  God that sounds shallow.

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Trees, these useless trees…

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Alan

A day of small but varied occurences today…

  • Thanks to my research and Cat’s slender fingers the MX-5 can now happily play music from a wired-in iPod and stream via bluetooth (and do hands free).  Very trouble free aside from the fiddly small space in which to fit the plugs in.  I do miss the awesome functionality of the stereo from ‘the nail’, but I didn’t want to rip out the factory stereo.
  • New entertainment options in place, a trip to the O2 shop in Beeston saw me acquire an adaptor to convert my iPhone’s microsim to a normal sized sim card.  Cat had posted my iPhone to the insurance company in the morning, so I bought the cheapest pay as you go phone they stock – a £12 Samsung GT-E108oi.  Wow, it’s basic!
  • Some observations about this dramatically backward step in mobile telephony:
    • It doesn’t have predictive text – making writing text messages a real chore, and quite frustrating for anyone in my proximity due to the clicky horrible buttons
    • It doesn’t have any internet or email functionality. None. It certainly doesn’t have apps like Tapatalk or Forumrunner (or Facebook or Twitter)
    • I couldn’t import any contacts into it from my backups – so I had to type them in, with the horrible clunky buttons.  I hadn’t missed that process.
    • It’s tiny!
    • It doesn’t play any music or multimedia, has no camera.  It only has one game on it.
    • The battery lasts for ages.
    • I can’t wait to not have to use it any more!!
    • People were right when they suggested that I perhaps had a warped opinion of how important an iPhone is to life and living life – clearly I had under-estimated the pivotal nature of this magical device!!!
  • I’ve been harrassed by a Welsh gardener who seemed to really want to cut down our Leyandii for £90.  So much so he sent a minion to ask Cat after I’d said no, and I bumped into him again in the local Sainsbury’s where me mentioned it again!

Look, I admire your entrepreneurial spirit, but begone – confounded Welshman!  Never darken my lawns again!

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Random songs from primary school..

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Alan

I had one of those ‘random things from school popping into my head’ moments again today. Being firmly of the Google generation I duly searched for it, partly to see if it is something I imagined – to validate my strange mind, and of course to see if anybody else out in Internet Land had remembered more of it than me.

We’re back at Primary school time, so mid-to-late 80’s, and it was one of those strange music-book-story type things.  I seem to recall it being about a catalogue in which you could order pretty much anything you could possibly want.  Pretty much the only thing I could recall in any detail were the words (and tune) to part of a song: “It’s easy as falling off a log, when you order from the giant ginormous catalogue.”

All Google really unearthed were a couple random Facebook groups such as this one and this one.  Given the myriad of randomly and wonderfully obscure information on the Internet I can’t believe there’s nothing more than that.  Can anyone remember any more? I’m wondering if any Google hits that find this page might reunite me with somebody who can remember what the hell I’m talking about in more detail.

While I’ve been pondering this I can remember another musical type thing that we endured at school.  It involved some kind of song-writing competition in which there was a hero and a villain – the villain realised he wasn’t very talented so arranged to copy the hero’s song to cheat and win.  The hero gets wind of this, and creates a dirgey tuneless song to trick him – whilst of course secretly having a real song in reserve.

The only real detail I can remember are the lyrics to the ‘fake’ song, although I may have some details wrong… it goes something like this: “The blackbird sings a tuneful song, with turns and trills so fine, such skill has he, such majesty, but it’s not as good as mine. La la la la la, La la la la la, no it’s not as good as mine.”

The only potential reference Google could find for this was this Tweet. One solitary Tweet.  On the whole Internet – and hardly conclusively about the song I’m thinking about.  After all, the blackbird does sing a tuneful song.

Does anybody else retain these meaningless trinkets of memory to the extent I do?  I often think when I’m at work struggling to remember what I was working on a few weeks ago when somebody has a follow-up query that if I could somehow empty my cache of these silly recollections it might give me a more efficient mind.

It would be a shame to lose silly recollections though, wouldn’t it?  I think on reflection even if that was an option I would keep them.  I would love to hear from anybody who stumbles upon this post through searching for either of the song lyric fragments above, though!

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Protect your Bubble, toil and trouble!

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Alan

So it’s been almost a week since I broke my phone.  Anyone who knows me will undoubtedly have observed how frequently I use it, so it’s frustrating.  Of course, it is still usable despite the broken screen, but it’s not ideal.

Having immediately got in touch with Protect your Bubble – my insurance provider of choice (because they’re considerably cheaper than insuring with O2, which I’ve done in the past), they quite reasonably asked me to send them a claim form and proof of purchase of my device to them.  I did this – I printed them out, filled in and signed and emailed it to them as per their instructions.

This was five days ago.  I’ve had a busy time and wanted to give them a chance to send the envelope for me to return my phone.  Having returned home from an overnight business trip to no envelope I chased them up by telephone.  It transpired that they were awaiting confirmation of payment details for the excess (which I had included on the claim form!!), so they will now authorise the claim and despatch the means for me to send my phone to them.

Which means I’ll probably get the chance to get the phone despatched on Friday.  They’ll get it on Monday or Tuesday, they will assess it for repairability (I suspect it needs replacing, but who knows?), and either repair it (3-5 days claimed for this) before sending it on (1-3 days delivery time) or potentially might immediately decide on a replacement in which case it could shave the repair time off.

Either way, I’m looking at having a defective phone for the best part of 2-3 weeks (and had I dropped it a little harder it could’ve been a completely dead phone!) which is pretty disappointing.  When I had a similar experience with O2 insurance with my old iPhone 3G I called them, they sent a courier with a new one the next day – he took away my old phone, and it was sorted.

Seems you do get what you pay for – although of course, whether or not that brilliant level of service is worth almost a tenner a month extra when it’s (hopefully) unlikely you’ll need it is ultimately the crux of the debate!  Ho hum.  I shall continue to monitor my experiences.

So far I have been rather disappointed, but perhaps shouldn’t be surprised given the price.  But it ain’t quite what is implied in their TV advertising, that’s for sure.

Categories: Blog, iPhone / iPad / Mac | 90 Comments

Manna from heaven..

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Alan

It’s been a really mixed few days for me – Thursday started badly. My car, which for reasons I can’t quite fathom I’d parked on the drive the day before, wouldn’t start – it’s kaput, I suspect either the starter motor and/or the alternator is broken.  Whilst repairable, I’ve reached the stage with it where I’m not prepared to sink more cash in to it, and I don’t have the time, inclination or expertise to properly take care of it.

In attempting to hook up a booster pack to it to try to force it to start I also dropped my phone from my pocket, smashing the screen. Deep joy!  It is insured, although the process to replace it is much more long-winded than with the more-expensive O2 insurance – so there’s a learning there.  I currently still have a broken phone, I’ve sent the relevant forms/proof of purchase and await an envelope to send the phone away in.

More positively the death of ‘the nail’ has accelerated half-formed plans I already had to continue my journey through a mid-life crisis – and on Saturday with some investigative help from Ma I found my next car, a rather pretty Mazda MX-5 which I shall hopefully be taking delivery of (or rather collecting!) on Wednesday all things being well.  So that’s pretty exciting stuff, I reckon!

Today of course is Father’s day – so it was good to pop and see how Dad was doing – indeed, a very wholesome family day all round really, I stayed for lunch – at one point I was even playing on the piano with my Granny (not that I can remotely play the piano!!), and we also popped to see Grandad who is currently in the hospice section of the hospital as he is suffering from terminal bowel cancer.

There’s nothing quite like seeing an 84 year old man who has always been a fairly formidible character look so defeated by such an ugly illness.  Of course, I imagine ups and downs are inevitable with such a battle – but listening to his concerns, his fears (and almost acceptance) of not coming home again it does rather bring in to stark relief the importance of realising how relatively short our time is around the place, and to make the most of it.

Sufficed to say Grandad has been a challenging man to get get along with at times – but none of us are without our foibles, after all.  He’s also the man who took endless time out to indulge me and Rich in our interests – whether it be planes, creating fires in the garden, making kites, the intricacies of Skateboard maintenance and ramp-building or just collecting random words.  There’s a lot of fond memories there.  I could probably have lived without the tram museum in Crich, though.

It is a strange feeling to think that the next visit to see him might be the last – as unfortunately nobody seems to be able to give a timescale for him.  Whilst the staff looking after him are fantastic, it seems a very undignified way to be spending what is ultimately likely to be his last weeks.  Finding that balance between not wanting to lose someone and hoping their suffering stops is a difficult one.

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I got (iOS) 5 on it..

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Alan

Another geeky post. Thanks to the generosity of a friend who has an Apple Developer Account adding my iPhone to the list of eligible devices to take beta versions of the operating system, which has enabled me to install iOS 5 on my iPhone 4.  I am impatient, after all.

First job was to install the beta for iTunes 10.5 – this was actually a slight nuisance, with me using Windows Vista on my laptop (more through habit than desire!) it didn’t seem to like installing over the old iTunes, however a remove and log-in as Administrator a clean install worked much better.

Once installed I attached my iPhone, once it appears hold down shift and hit restore and point to the IPSW file I downloaded – et voila, after a chunk of time the new operating system is installed.  Upon installation the phone offered the chance to set up without a computer- nervousness meant I instead directed iTunes to grab my old phone info and sync.

The first big benefit from the new iOS is the ability to continue using your phone whilst it syncs (which was possible through jailbroken phones).  Also I noticed that it was installing three apps at the same time rather than one at a time (obviously it might have done that anyway, you can’t normally see though – however later a multiple-app update later did the same thing – woo!).

Notification center is cool, I like it a lot.  iMessage is an awesome idea – obviously rather limited at the moment since I don’t know many people who’ve taken the plunge!  Love the idea of Reminders – although the address based ones seem rather hamstrung that you have to pick an address from your contents rather than just entering a postcode. Meh. Disappointing.

Everything else has been fine though, the only buglet I’ve noticed is that my playlists in the iPod app (which is now called Music) are in an arbitrary order rather than alphabetic.  A relatively small matter – although if you’re a bigger playlist user than me it could prove a frustration for you!

I’m not really bothered by NewsStand, and as it’s technically a folder it can’t be hidden away like I do with the Stocks and Contacts apps in a folder – so I’ve just dumped it on the last page.  iCloud is limited at the moment – it’s only a first Beta after all!

I took the opportunity to have a real cull of apps I don’t really use too, so all in all it’s been quite a productive evening of farting around on my own technology rather than Rich’s!  That said, Rich did provide me with a case of Magners Pear Cider in exchange for my laptop recovery services, so all is certainly not lost!

As for iOS 5 – if you’re an unfeasibly impatient sod like me then go for it, it has definite benefits – highlights for me are the notification centre and the ability to use your phone whilst syncing.  Also it appears to have enabled personal hotspot without the need for the pay-for service that my network provider would usually try to levy.

If you want to go for it – then you will need to find somebody with an Apple Developer Account to add your iPhone’s UDID to their account.  Some unscrupulous people are charging cash for this, others seem more magnanimous.  Should you wish to proceed, then you can find the relevant files here:

Files you need to upgrade your iPhone

But remember that you need to register your phone’s UDID, and definitely remember that this isn’t something you’ll get much sympathy for should you fuck it up!  iPhones aren’t designed to be able downgrade the operating system.  So do it at your own risk!!

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Routin’ tootin’ trouble shootin’..

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Alan

For a fair while now we’ve been using a Cisco Linksys WRT160N router – a fairly bog standard wireless router that connects to our Cable connection and spreads out the interweb via both ethernet ports and of course wirelessly.  You can probably get them dirt cheap now, although when I bought it it was reasonably new and shiny!

I’m not right sure whether or not it has always done it, or whether it’s a recent phenomena now we have more-things-than-ever hooked up to it by hook or crook (at last count two phones, three laptops, one desktop, one Wii, one XBox 360, one PS3, one Blu-ray player, one Television and one NAT.  I think that’s it.  Rarely all at the same time too, I might add!

Anyway, for whatever reason the router required rebooting to restore connectivity.  It seemed to have topped out at twice a day this occurred – annoying when you may be downloading a big torrent or hoping to use AudioGalaxy to access your music library when at work or out and about, I’m sure you’ll agree!

I investigated new official firmware releases – I was already up to date, and eventually happened upon this alternative firmware (having done something similar with the NAT which was playing up before).  Not only has this added all manner of geekish functionality that I don’t fully understand, more importantly it has delivered a much more stable router that has been up for nearly three days and counting…

So, if you’re having difficulty with  your router I can recommend DD-WRT if you’re feeling suitably confident in fiddling around with things at a fairly fundamental level.  It’s a shame the router doesn’t have more space to install a few more things on it – but never mind!  At least the internet connection in the house stays up now!

Not the most illuminating or fascinating of stories – the main reason for writing it was because I only pieced together the solution from numerous different sources, so should someone else out there with the same router as me be suffering the same fate, they may well – thanks to Google – stumble across this solution!

The only teeny issue is that since the change an amber warning light is now illuminated on the router, but this is down to the rogue firmware not quite properly talking to the hardware on this small instance.  It’s a small price to pay!

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Monkeys, Meatballs and Magic!

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Alan

Unfortunately you can’t, with any good conscience, review a Derren Brown show as such – because it’s packed full of things I could spoil by doing so, which would be rather unfair to performer and readers as-yet-to-see-the-show alike.  Not that my site gets that much traffic, but well, you know what I mean.

Rich and Em kindly bought Cat and I tickets for Derren’s ‘Svengali’ tour this weekend at Liverpool.  Unfortunately Cat was poorly, so sensibly opted to stay at home whilst the rest of us set off early in the morning due to some diversions – because Rich and Em had to meet up with their wedding venue, which is kinda en route, we found ourselves with a whole day to kill before the gig.

We decided to visit The Monkey Forest near Stoke, which was ace – it’s quite easy to describe really, a woodland enclosure full of monkeys.  Barbary Macaques to be precise, and they were great fun – watching the baby monkeys playing in particular was hilarious.  I don’t think it that you could make a full day out at the place, but £7 for an hour or two’s monkey magic is well worth it.

Onward we headed to the North West and went to Ikea to get some tealight holders for the impending wedding, and took the chance of course to grab some meatballs – nom!  On the trip we managed to offer Cat’s ticket to Mark, who lives in Manchester, so we arranged to meet him in Liverpool in time to watch England stroll past Wales.

So we watched the match in the Walkabout in Scouseville on one of the best definition big screens I’ve ever seen.  To say it was a walk in the park for England is an understatement – game over after 15 minutes or so, and barely a sweat broken.  Despite not really being into international football to any great degree it’s nice to watch on occasion.

For some reason Torres doesn't seem popular!

After further mooching around – a Subway, a quick drink in a really dodgy pub near the theatre (that stank of piss, and was tastelessly bedecked in Liverpool FC memorabilia – I suppose that’s an occupational hazard in Liverpool itself though!) it was time to take to the theatre itself.

The show was at once excellent, enthralling, stimulating and entertaining – I won’t spoil any content, but Derren Brown never disappoints.  I think, on balance, I liked his last show Enigma better – but this was plenty beguiling and confounding enough.  And a little sinister.  Also hilarious, because Mark was singled out quite early in the show and as a result revealed an ingenius story about himself (after being warned about surreptitious camera use and threatened with being asked to leave!)

I didn’t manage to grab a frisbee, again – indeed, only one came up to the circle where we were sitting.  Never mind!  It was still tremendous show, and well worth missing out on more direct involvement because of Mark’s revelations – which admittedly was trumped somewhat later, all I can say about that is ‘Hammer Time!’

Then it was for poor Rich to finish off a very long day with a nightime drive back to Nottingham.  All in all, a long but thoroughly entertaining day.  Not looking forward to being back at work in the morning…!

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Your policies have failed the test of time, ‘coz you sold ’em down the river..

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Alan

The Levellers - in Glasgow the night before we were to see them..

It’s no secret on these pages about my mild obsession with all things Levellers – and they didn’t disappoint last night to pick me up after another serving of turd courtesy of Forest.

I hotfooted it straight from the City Ground to meet the rest of our group going to the gig, and we headed straight to the early-opening Rock City.  Spotted Jen, Amanda and Brian at the front of the queue, as ever!

Also saw the perpetually dishevelled Mr Chadwick ambling up the other side of Talbot Street, I imagine having had a few cheeky pints down at Langtry’s.

First up though were The Wonderstuff, a band I was dimly aware of ‘in the day’, and have been listening to more recently – wondering why I didn’t know more about them.  At least, two of the original band were there – but they were great fun.  Miles certainly seemed to be genuinely enjoying his time on the stage and this was infectious into a greater degree of crowd participation than you’d usually get for a support act.

I watched the support from a cunningly secure eyrie on the balcony which provided a cracking view of the stage, but was a bit distant.  The big plus side for The Levellers in this gig – the 20th anniversary of Levelling the Land – was that they were playing it in order, so I knew which songs were coming up.  After a montage of political imagery the boys took the stage, and I’d found myself a suitable spot in the mosh pit as they broke straight into One Way.

The thing that struck me, around three people from the front in the middle of the stage, was the volume of people around me singing along with every song.  This is an album that, twenty years on, still speaks to people with the ferocity it did back in the day – indeed, the crowd singing competed with the PA which I’ve never experienced before.  It’s quite moving really.  Impressive too that people were finding the air to belt out singing whilst leaping around and the usual pushing and shoving!

As the half-way point of the album was reached a selection of B-sides featured whilst the virtual LP or tape was being turned over.  I was starting to tire from my proximity to the stage, but really wanted to be up close for Sell Out so toughed it out to do just that – it was a worthy endeavour, it’s probably one of my favourite songs on the album.  It’s followed by probably the first song of theirs that ever really ‘hit’ me back in the day.

Another Man’s Cause is a timeless anthem and sadly seemingly always relevant – it’s also a quieter song.  My timing was pretty good in making a tactical withdrawal to the balcony from this point, because I wanted to hear the band rather than the fan singing at this point.  It worked really well – I’m getting a bit too old to last a whole Levs gig in the mosh pit!  Being right at the front is okay, but 3-5 people back is hard work!

Eventually Beanfield ends the album proper – there was time for a few extra tracks like Cholera Well and Beautiful Day before oddly we were outta there by 10pm, a bizarrely early finish.  Having had a fair bit to drink throughout the day though, I was ready to head home rather than stay out.  I think I made the right call – including the chicken tikka kebab from Victoria Kebab on the way to the taxi.

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Without our stories and our songs, how will we know where we come from?

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Alan

I’ve been spectacularly lax on updating this site really.  Life’s kinda ticking along which doesn’t inspire updates – I suppose it should do still, but I’m lazy too.

However, excitement is mounting for me as The Levellers come to Nottingham on 12th March as part of their 20th anniversary tour for Levelling the Land.  To say I’m unfeasibly excited by this prospect is a massive understatement.  Of course, in football too Forest remain in the mix for promotion but have faltered of late in their form – hopefully they can get back to winning ways tomorrow when Hull come to town.

Other excitement for a gadget-nut like me is that we’ve bought some new home entertainment things – after our last ‘proper’ telly blew up (probably because one of the winged menaces landed a direct hit down the back of the air vents) we’ve made do with a smaller cheap one – which has done admirably.  We are finally joining the proper HD revolution though.

We are planning on wall-mounting the new telly in a recess in the chimney breast – this will prevent our feathered friends from sitting on top of it you see.  Over-engineering, perhaps – but it will look pretty too.  To go with the telly we have an alarming array of wires and peripherals to plug into it, as well as a splendid hand-made unit to house them.  That arrived today.

Unfortunately the builder who is going to do the difficult bit for us is tied up for three weeks so we’re going to have it set up on the new piece of furniture in the interim, which is pretty exciting in itself.  We’ll be a three-console household which feels rather decadent, particularly since I’m not a particularly hardcore gamer by any stretch of the imagination – but well, meh.. the PS3 is also an excellent blu-ray player and media streaming device which was the main reason.

Finally a blast from the past caught up with me – Audiogalaxy was my favourite p2p downloading means in the early noughties.  I used to install the satellite application on my work PC which had uber-fast internet connectivity and then remotely send whatever music occurred to me whenever to it, then brought them home on zip disks (remember them?!) to add to my library.

After it was closed down – understandably given the questionable legality of the operation – it was a real bind.  Well, it’s back – albeit in a very different, but still bloody useful, guise.  You see, you can install their ‘helper’ programme on your computer housing your music collection – and then access that collection wherever you are with an internet collection or, for iPhone users at least, on your phone.

Nice features like integration with Last.fm, Twitter and Facebook are good bonuses, and I’m hoping that in the future they might enhance the social media aspect of the project by enabling you to listen to your friends’ music collections etc – really cool, I like it a lot.  It means I can refine the music I carry around with me on my iPhone now and free up space for, well, other stuff (as yet to be determined).

Good to have you back, Audiogalaxy!  Rapidly approaching is my birthday and then a week-and-a-bit break in Dorset which I’m looking forward to, could use some down-time!

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