2011, and all that that means

‘… and a place in the winter, for Di-hig-nity...’

It’s been weird this year, so far. I’ve not been doing the usual things I do, and yet the more things have changed, the more they’ve stayed the same.

I went to Blighty for the holidays. I never do that. I avoid England because there’s nothing to see there. There are people, granted, but I know most of the places and, let’s be honest, I’m not going there to sight-see, am I? And the places - I know them but they’ve changed. They look the same on the surface, but they’re nothing like they used to be. But then again, neither are the people.

I bought a computer. Last time I did that was about three years ago (not counting 1812, my failed ninja project). Still got the three-year-old. Jarvis, my ever-faithful iMac, now has a fellow clan member in the form of Billy, my eleven inch MacBook Air. They get along fine via Bluetooth and memory stick, and between them they take up most of my time. Like I said, things stay the same.

… In that they change. Now, instead of freezing my arse off in my small room (that belongs to Jarvis), I can be found on my sofa, using Billy to read and re-read stuff I’ve written. In fact, Billy has kind of become my third hand, seeing as he’s always attached to my original two. Even JT, my iPhone 4, is starting to give him shifty, possessive looks. She’ll get over it, I know. After all, PCCW can’t make the wi-fi modem work, so only Jarvis is hooked up to (cabled) Tinternet right now. All Billy can do is look on with wistful sighs as I shut him down to go use Jarvis for all Tinternet shite. It’s a shame, but then, Jarvis is quicker, more powerful and pretty much the real brain in my house flat, so it’s only right. And he’s where I’ve spent hours on Photoshop - mostly swearing and cursing at the bloody thing crashing or just plain refusing to work on me. Yes, the ‘known issue’ of Photoshop Elements 8 not letting Mac users change the frame delay on animated gifs is more than a little annoying. So is its refusal to let me resize or rotate layers without first shifting them in some direction by a few pixels. There is a lesson in all this: why did I bother paying for a legitimate version of PE8 when I should have stuck with my cracked, pirated version of CS4 that always worked? Ah well. I shan’t be wasting my money on another Photoshop product. Adobe fall into the Ben Kenobi category of effective teaching styles.

Cafepress. They’ve also incurred my wrath this afternoon - trying to work out why products don’t show up in your own shop is just a little vexing, especially when you’ve read the ‘help’ pages that don’t seem to pertain to your version of a shop. Then again, they were really fast (a matter of hours) in answering my direct e-mail for help. If only the information they e-mailed me were available in the help section to begin with, they wouldn’t get so many mails bitching about the same subject - I’m willing to bet. Still, mystery solved. It’s all sorted, and a lot more quickly than I’d anticipated. Go team Cafepress.

So I sat on the sofa tonight - oh alright, lounged on the sofa - and watched some telly via Billy and a Moshi Mini Display Port to HDMI adapter, and my nice big telly, Tosh (you get to guess what make she is). And the funny thing was, the two programmes I watched were both from my secondary school years. First was ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, with the real, actual Holmes playing himself. For some reason, no-one was supposed to know, so they billed him as Jeremy Brett and kept up the pretence for the entire series. Granada tried very hard to fool people into thinking they hadn’t simply borrowed the TARDIS from the Beeb and whisked him forward in time to play himself, but I saw the signs and I’ve witnessed his little slips with my own eyes - gotcha, Mr Holmes. But don’t worry; when I tell people this they don’t believe me, and simply assume I’ve been on the vodka.

Which is odd, because I haven’t been. Been out to dinner with friends, and haven’t actually felt like drinking. Still haven’t been to a single pub quiz this year, and I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. Must make it next week.

Anyway, point was (when I can get to it), the other show was ‘The Pretender’. Used to love it back in the day, and now I’m watching it again and wondering how I forgot so much. Mostly to do with the fact that, while Jarod is perfectly innocent and lovely (in a Sam Tyler kind of way, meaning I could never give him one), he’s also a complete fucking psycho whose ee-vil face is proper fru-its of the dev-il and he honestly can kill people with his brain - it’s just that he wants to torture them by snaring them in some overly-elaborate yet excruciatingly agonising plan mirroring their own misdeed. He’s ace. And then I look at the fact that I’m watching both TV series via a cable sticking out of a brand spanking new MacBook, and marvel at the distance and time between now and when I first saw them, live on real telly. So much has happened in the time that feels so long, that I really have to just stop and think about it, mentally pick through all the highs and lows. And then I realise there’s just too much and I have to say ‘fuck it’ and leave it alone. Such is the way of all things memory.

Cleverest IT Guy password-cracked some old - nay, fucking ancient - Word files of mine this week, and I found the Holy Grail of Where It All Began, my own original book-wise. All the facts I thought I had in my head, all the back-story and history I thought existed nowhere but my own little nutshell of a brain, had actually been set down on virtual paper by me a over a decade ago. Reading them again was a weird experience; the sentences were mine, the characters remarkably unchanged from when I turned them into real people in the latter half of 2010, the storylines exactly as I knew the foundation to unfold. But I don’t remember having written it down.

Perhaps, at the time, writing wasn’t important in the Grand Scheme of Things. Perhaps, at that time, I had a life and other things that kept me occupied. Which means I was writing, but not really obsessing over it.

How things have changed. I coast along in my job - so that I can concentrate on writing when I get home. I get home late Saturday night but stay up later - so that I can read through what I’ve written in the week. I own an iMac and a MacBook - so I can use MacSpeech Dictate to get things down. It’s fair to say that writing is pretty much my obsession, and even distractions like TV shows and work won’t always be in the way. And so it goes.

And so do I. This post, my first for 2011, has been longer than I’d anticipated. I was supposed to say ‘oh, nearly broke my foot but we’ll find out if it’s just a sprain when I’ve had an X-ray later this week’, but obviously I needed to get a few things off my chest first.

So that, my friends, is all the news that’s fit to print. At least for now. Soopytwist.

Tags:
~ Sherlock Holmes ~ The Pretender ~ England ~ iMac ~ MacBook Air ~ writing

Snow Leopard on an Eee PC

Many have done it, some have wished to do it, others have never even considered it.

For me, it’s been a long time in the making and a lot of hassle, but due to the diligence of a trained tech. bloke and all-around star, it is now semi-operational and entirely squeee-inducing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: my Eee PC 901A (now called '1812') running Snow Leopard 10.6.3.:






It still needs some tweaking - enabling it to boot from the hard drive and not the memory stick, a few drivers for sound and graphics, etc., but it’s pretty fucking cool right now, and no mistake. In just a very short time, it’ll be competing with JT the iPhone 4 for my constant attention.


Peach and lube, people. Peach and frelling lube.


Tags:
Apple ~ Mac ~ Snow Leopard ~ Eee PC ~ Hackintosh

News update



Apparently, according to my group of Form 2 students who attend various Hong Kong secondary schools, only people in big hats are in charge. They cite the Pope, chefs in any swanky kitchen, ‘that bloke who got shot in America’ (A.K.A. Abraham Lincoln), and, of course, the Fat Controller from Thomas The Tank Engine and Friends.

Also, from a particularly pants-wettingly funny crack!lesson* including a dangerous mix of P5 (ten-year-old) students and myself high on green tea (hey, don’t knock it till you’ve done it), ninja monkeys are equipped with lightsabres that have had their power units swapped out for fruit (read ‘herb’)-based sugar sources to produce blistering moments of naturally beneficial squirtiness. Yes, you’ve guessed it - bananasabres.

According to the same sources, Doctor bloody Who’s ‘running music from season 3’ (officially known as ‘All The Strange, Strange Creatures [The Trailer Music]’ by Murray Gold) now trumps the Indiana Jones Theme as the ultimate Monday morning get-your-arse-out-of-bed music. However, it’s a toss-up between ‘Boe’, also by Murray Gold, and ‘Labour Of Love’ by Michael Giacchino (from the Star Trek XI soundtrack) as to which plucks at the heartstrings more.

On a completely unrelated note, the first two attempts to graft Snow Leopard 10.6.3 onto a clean Eee PC 901A have not met with success. However, NetBookBootMaker et al is being shucked in favour of Chameleon, so hopefully by this time next week we’ll be victorious.

That’s about it.

Soopytwist.

* Crack!lesson:
Named after the drug to imply that the tone of the lesson can only be the product of a deranged mind, crack!lessons can be identified by their absurd, surprising, or ridiculous premise. Generally they are full of fall-about laughter, puns and in-jokes.


Tags:
~ Hong Kong ~ Doctor Who ~ Star Wars ~ Indiana Jones ~ Star Trek ~ Hackintosh

Electronica Moronica

There is a reason I haven’t been here in ages, honest. First there was the whole jetlag thing, which as usual, I don’t believe in until I realise that I’ve been walking around for three days as if I’m just visiting from a different planet. Now, normally, this would not be anything out of the ordinary, but for some reason this time I just felt really detached from everything going on around me.

Then there was the whole “I suddenly have a burning need to put everything in my flat in order” thing. First it was the bookcase - I went through all of the books on said piece of furniture, and basically chucked out everything that has been there for years without me ever having touched it. Then it was the DVD and VCD bookcases, and I have to say there’s an entire canvas shopping bag full of rejects ready to be split among mates. Then came my wardrobe and chest of drawers, which have quite happily housed all kinds of similarly untouched shite for the past two years. That was fun!

And then there was the whole “everything here works wrong, and I’m going to do something about it” thing. Which included me buying an official pair of Apple in-ear headphones, and a Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. First of all, let me explain why I was trying to eschew my Skull Candy ‘Noise isolating bass-rich ear buds with in-line microphone compatible with iPhone and Blackberry Curve and Storm’ in the first place. You see, it all started a couple of Fridays ago. It was the weekend before I was going away to Dragon*Con, and I thought I had to put a few of my things in order before I went away. I spent two and a half hours in the 3 shop, picking up my supposedly “reserved” iPhone 4. Once this was done, I just about had time to race home, plug my new iPhone into my iTunes, have it load my iPhone 4 from the last backup I did of my iPhone 3G, and then get back to work. I was impressed that it took so little effort to accomplish all this, and I certainly kicked the arse out of my new iPhone for (called JT) taking close to 300 photographs and about 30 videos at Dragon*Con. She also worked wonders data roaming in the USA, picking up my e-mail and also using the mobile site for Twitter. I would have preferred to use my third-party app for Twitter, but Twitter themselves decided to change the signing-in authorisation procedure just a few hours before I left Hong Kong. This meant that not one of the three third-party apps on my iPhone 4 were able to sign in to Twitter. I was not a happy camper, as you can probably imagine.

Anyway, it wasn’t until I returned to Hong Kong and had time to get reacquainted with my iPod aboard my new iPhone 4, that I realised my Skull Candy headphones repeatedly used the sound suppression blip, normally reserved in case of incoming mail or text messages, while just playing music or video. While not exactly the most vexing thing that’s happened to me recently, it did start to annoy me after a while. Deciding that I had tried it out every single kind of in-ear headphones during the last three years, I thought perhaps it was time I gave the official Apple earphones a chance. After spending HK$600 on a pair, I was monumentally peeved to find out that they lack any kind of proper bass - by any stretch of the imagination. Inevitably, I have gone back to my Skull Candy headphones, and now I am quite happy to put up with the occasional suppressive blip if it means I can have proper fucking bass.

So, on to my new Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. Within minutes of turning it on, I had it paired to both my iMac and my iPhone. It works wonders with both Skype on my iMac and also receiving or making calls on my iPhone. However - and this is a huge fucking ‘however’ - it takes a little bit of ingenuity and patience to enable it to work with MacSpeech (which is completely MacSpeech’s fault). It is entirely possible, seeing as that is how I’m writing this blog post at the moment. All you need is Soundflower and LineIn. A little bit of jiggery-pokery later, and here we are dictating a blog post.

The headset itself gives good sound and obviously works quite well with MacSpeech, without being too heavy. Being wireless also means I can wander off away from Jarvis my iMac, and still be heard whilst on Skype. However, having it jammed in your ear for anything up to two hours while you’re talking on Skype can mean it starts to make your ear ache just a tiny bit. This could be due to the fact that the earpiece is roughly the size of a dinner plate. That said, I am enjoying using it immensely.

I think I should leave it there, as it is getting quite late and I’m supposed to be up relatively early tomorrow doing private lessons before work. Oh, and I do have a Supernatural/Doctor Who crossover fanfic to finish for my sister.

Soopytwist!


Tags:
~ iPhone 4 ~ Apple ~ bluetooth headset ~ MacSpeech

Good times and bad times

Went jonesing for a nine inch notebook to use for Operation Hackintosh in Wan Chai computer centre this evening; we were disappointed. Just means I’ll have to get a MSI Wind thing from somewhere else and still have it up and running before I head off to Dragon*Con in about five weeks: BAD TIMES.


However, got myself a WD My Book Studio hard drive (one terabyte) and, once home, plugged it into Jarvis the iMac to find he was chuffed as nuts to use it as a Time Machine. And away we went: GOOD TIMES.

Still haven’t seen Toy Story 3: BAD TIMES.

Have finished writing my book: GOOD TIMES.


Anyone know any agents as can sell it to publishers…?


Tags:
Hackintosh ~ writing

Freedom Of MacSpeech

This has to be a first for me. I am sitting in Michael, my most comfortable of chairs, playing with a Heineken rugby ball that I won in some poxy pub quiz about two years ago, dictating to Jarvis my iMac via a headset and microphone.

The entirety of this blog post will be made with MacSpeech Dictate. The scary thing is, it’s almost as if a real someone is listening to me and writing down my crap. And, as a consequence, for the first time in history, I don’t actually have anything to say.

Well, that is not strictly true, is it? After all, I have already managed two paragraphs, and am no doubt about to manage a few more. This blog post is the first time I have used MacSpeech after getting it out of the box. I’m surprised and rather pleased to find that it can actually listen and write down really quite accurately everything that tumbles out of my mouth. It seems I no longer have an excuse for not writing a blog post, as technically I will no longer have to write blog posts, but just say them at Jarvis my iMac. (And yes it actually recognises the name Jarvis.)

All this sounds incredibly exciting and should make my life much easier. However, it also means that I actually have to know where my sentence is heading before I finish saying it. This, normally, is not a problem, as when I type I often make up the end of the sentence while I am still in the middle of it. Doing a blog post in Dictate Mode however means that I have to know what I’m driving at while I’m still getting there. Not so easy. The good news is that so far, my voice appears to be clear enough that Jarvis can understand me and type everything out properly. In fact, I haven’t actually had to change anything he’s typed for me yet.

I wonder how this will change how I write stories, as while the dictation ability is amazing, it’s not exactly what I thought it would be. I find I’m staring at the monitor, and am more interested in what comes up than in speaking the next part. Maybe if I stop looking at the monitor and actually think about what I’m saying, it will be easier for me to get this blog post done. Speaking of which…

I think that’s all that’s fit to print right now. So while I have lots of things to talk about with Jarvis, I shall leave you lovely people to get on with your lives.

Soopytwist.

Tags:
Apple ~ iMac ~ MacSpeech

Bad Upgrade, No Cookie!

Where the fuck's my SMART SHUFFLE on my iTunes 9?

And while we're at it, where in the present continuous tense is my fucking 'open Twitpic links as webpages' option on my Twitterrific Premium version?

Thieving James Blunts, both!

Shopkeeper. Parte The Firste.

The First Visit.

I walk into the tiny shop, casting an appreciative eye over the masses of technical equipment: flash drives piled high in their plastic packaging as if they're much-used and unloved dinner plates, hard drives and external zip drives plonked down in tiny reproductions of either IFC 1 or 2 (it's hard to be sure). Keyboards hang from white wire racks, even the odd Apple Mighty Mouse peeks out from behind stacks of replacement laptop batteries - and then I see a curious configuration of monitors that's either Escher’s most drunken approximation of a straight line or Schrödinger’s particular brand of quantum physics holding up the local Space-Time Continuum.

It is a quaint, reassuringly worked-in kind of computer parts shop, and I'm glad I bothered to stop by. When I were a nipper, the room that had housed Dad’s workbench smelt of used solder and PCBs for large television sets. This place, in a Doctor Ten kind of way, smells of used PC tower casings and that metallic residue of said housings having been opened with a power-assisted screwdriver.

It's Dad’s old workbench, 2.0.

I'm still looking at the piles of flash drives, hypnotised by the thought of instant data transfer running through my head, when a tiny, elderly lady pops up from behind the clutter. Like a magic eye picture, what was once a hoard of spare computer parts turns into a slight woman who's looking at me like I've lost my R2 unit.

“DVDs?” she asks, and I have about half a second to realise: ‘That’s exactly what I wanted.’ I nod at her politely and she heaves a cardboard box of what seems to carry modems aside, to reveal an eclectic assortment of the aforementioned hardware.

I look around the shop, trying to think back: how did she know what I wanted? Was I gazing at what I thought were CDs when she saw me and divined what I was looking for? No - says the other me - I was taking in the organised chaos, I hadn’t even tripped over one item I had looked at for more than it took to realise what it had been. So then I have another half second to think to myself: is she lucky, psychic, or Derron Brown?

I buy the recordable DVDs. I leave the tiny shop. But I won’t forget the old woman.

And it won’t be the last time my money and her bank balance cross paths.


Tags:
Hong Kong

GRRRRR x 2

The next fucking person who tells me summat fucking broke or summat doesn’t fucking work properly because I’m using it wrong BECAUSE I’M LEFT-fucking-HANDED (and CLEARLY, therefore fucking BACKWARD) is going to get my much developed left fucking hook with all 170 fucking pounds of me behind it in their fucking face.

I AM NOT A CHILD. I HAVE AN IQ LIKE YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE. If summat’s broken, you fucking fix it. You don’t piss and moan cos OBVIOUSLY you don’t believe that the aberrations and freaks of this world - NAMELY, THE LEFT-HANDED ONES - could possibly be using it correctly but it’s a piece of fucking shit.

Don’t you fucking stand there and ‘awww’ at me like I’m five fucking years old. Don’t you patronise me and fucking giggle like a 16 year-old girl working for McDonald’s cos you think “it’s like, all so funny, right?” Don’t you give me that unctuous, pathetically saccharine smile as if my IQ is lower than my European shoe size. Don’t dismiss me and my shop-bought goods problem cos you, you HANDIST fucking IGNORANT bloody twat of a shop keeper, cannot understand why I want to return a pair of fucking scissors that don’t fucking cut.

There. That’s it. Think I feel better now.

And just fert record, they were ‘universal’ scissors. Obviously not ‘universal’ enough to deal with the most hated and scorned kind of people in said ‘universe’ - LEFT-HANDERS.

I spit on your scissors, and your parochial grasp of ‘universal’. Handist bastards.

And while we’re bitching about shit, how about the earphones I bought in August? Oh and woah woah woah, back up for a second: why did buy them in the first place when I already had perfectly good Apple earphones with which to control iPhone Dax?

Apple, oh Apple, you know I love you. But what IN THE PAST CONTINUOUS HELL were you thinking? Why do you supply the iPhone with the biggest, moon-shaped and downright uncomfortable excuse for earwigs in the known universe? Why must I suffer them falling out of my fucking ears every time I move? Why do I have two dinner plates that, due to their size and lack of curvature, only deliver half the music as it plays? Why must I lose most of the bass and half of each mixed track? And why must I turn it up so high everyone in the fucking train carriage can sing along, just so as I can hear it? And why can I still hear everyone else’s conversations and PSPs around me? This is not why I listen to the iPod function at every opportunity.

So I bought replacements. Nice in-ear ones that fit, that guarantee I can hear all parts of a song, that stop out the outside world (well, 90%, anyway), that don’t fall out of my ears every few minutes cos they’re too fucking big to be wedged in for long - and they don’t even hurt when you use them longer than twenty minutes at a time! Fancy!

Bliss. Even got an inline control and mic, same as the Apple ones.

Suddenly they’re fucked - a great annoyance to Yours Truly, seeing as (1) they were HK$550 and (2) when they’re not being used they’re kept in their supplied carry box. Just another thing to piss me off this week - but hey, don’t worry: we have a new, shiny-shiny episode of ‘Supernatural’ to enjoy tomorrow night, so I should stop moaning and be glad it’s back for the rest of the fourth season. And hopefully, the final fifth. But that’s another rant…

Soopytwist, everyone.

Tags:
left-handed ~ Apple ~ iPhone ~ earphones

Porn crashes iPhone 3G shocker!

I’ve been away from my blog for a bit, I know that. I did try a quick attempt at an excuse, but it’s not sticking and I know it. So here I am, trying to make up for that.

So, yes folks, the sad truth is that, while Safari on Dax, my lovely iPhone running software update 2.1, can handle all kinds of websites with less sweat than an Eskimo waiting for a bite, it appears there is one thing she can’t handle.

Girlie porn.

Ironic that, seeing as she can open all kinds of picture-related sites and news videos (and she’s named after a more-often-female-than-not alien who was the queen of multi-tasking). She just cannot deal with the workload that has started to come my way, and, sadly, has had a few Ackle-eptic fits * recently. These two-second convulsions of the over-loading variety that crash Safari and cause all half-loaded pages to be lost to history and bookmarks are a little annoying. Unfortunately, they are more frequent than they used to be, what with season four of ‘Supernatural’ in full swing.

Let’s be clear about one thing: we’re not talking actual YouTube or proper porn. No, we’re talking pics that a girl would consider porn. This can range from shots in which The Biceps of Doom (they do have a fatal affect on some) are at least half-uncovered, to full-on sweaty Dean kicking some deserving ass. Can you blame a girl for taking a quick squiz at such pictures? Come on, really?

Anyway. Been kinda busy, really. Totally forgot to pimp my mini story-ette written for the Hallowe’en challenge over at SPNVille. Didn’t win (naturally) but go read the winner and the entries, and I dare you to keep a straight face.

So what's left to add? 'Supernatural' episode 4.7 ('It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester') was veeeeery interestink to watch, and now I'm convinced I know a bit more about what's going on with purr wee Castiel. Poor angel. Poor lonely, over-worked, under-loved angel. I'd show him a bit of love, if he wanted. Even when he does look like a Holy Tax Accountant and I don't believe in angels.

The new AC/DC album is bloody fab, Hallowe’en was spent watching John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ (which I’ve not seen in aaaaaages) and of course ‘Army of Darkness’ (don’t know if I was howling with laughter more or reciting script more. Sad, but so much fun).

And that shallot. Onion. Everything. I’m going back to bed. Or maybe the pub quiz. Hmm, which one’s going to help get shot of this raging cold I’ve got? Oh. So which one will I actually do? Riiiiiiiight.

Soopytwist.

* Ackle-eptic fit: A sudden spasming or jerking of muscles caused by viewing photographic evidence of Jensen Ackles’ inability to look less than perfect from any angle.

LATE EDIT:

November 6th’s ‘Supernatural’ guest star? It's Ted Raimi! Ted Raimi! TED RAIMI! Wooo-hoooo!! Could we be any more excited? (Well maybe if it were Bruce Campbell himself, of course.) Joxer the Mighty, hag from the fruit cellar, dodgy beardy bloke from every single Sam Raimi film ever made… It’s TED RAIMI! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!

Tags:
iPhone ~ Jensen Ackles ~ porn ~ Halloween ~ Supernatural ~ fan-fic ~ Ted Raimi

Not buying an iPhone: you’re doing it wrong

Yeah, finally caved and bought the damn 3G thing. There have been some nice surprises, not least of all the fact that the battery lasts longer than I had previously witnessed on other people’s models. There are little things that niggle, like the extremely basic SMS function that doesn’t appear to have separate viewable folders or a set of templates. A set of fixed folders for sorting messages might no longer be the done thing, so perhaps my adherence to an out of date structure shows that even though I’m a Mac user, I’m having trouble making the leap to a new kind of phone platform.

Have I grown so inflexible that I find this new streamlined SMS style lacking? For someone that, up until last night, regarded herself as pretty open-minded, I’m being incredibly parochial. Throwing my toys out of my pram cos I can’t see things as they used to be is just, well, juvenile, I suppose. And as I let myself ditch the old ways and get used to how organised, forward-thinking people do it, I find the new filing system for SMS is much more convenient anyway.

Talking of throwing toys from prams, the entire pram nearly went arse over tit when I noticed that you’re not supposed to be able to add your own ringtones or message tones to the factory-fitted stock. Getting a grip on reality is essential; this kind of pouty, whiny behaviour is just indicative of a lack of perspective. Especially when I find this piece of software does exactly what it says on the tin. Within ten minutes of trialing it I had the mighty Zeppelin back where they should be. Sorted. Now all I need is a way to import my own message tones... I miss Dean Winchester’s “poke it in the eye!”, but I could go for the always-amusing double-whamminess of both brothers’ “Jesus Christ - holy crap!” However, this is a little more difficult than simply getting round non-US iTunes ringtones playlists. This seems to involve a little jail-breaking and SSH’ing to get what you want. All this techno-effort, to be honest, has never stopped me before. I have taken the liberty of downloading Cyberduck. Just have to work out how to use it properly. Give me some time. I’ll have The Boys back on my message tone eventually.

And then there’s the tiny shiny moment where you’re moaning that the new Apple earphones aren’t exactly like your trusty Panasonic in-ear ones. And then, on a whim, you plug them into your iMac and find you can use the earphones and built-in mic to have a spiffingly private conversation on Skype. Bonus.

But buying an iPhone is only half the story; what with the huge surge in black market phones and iPods, it’s imperative we owners find a way to stop the thieving gehts from, one, getting their greasy mits on them in the first place, and two, being able to do owt with them after the fact.

There are many ideas about how to render an iPhone unusable, should it fall into the wrong hands. However, I’d love to try this one. The idea of SSH'ing your own phone to send shut-down commands or freak out the new recipient so that s/he dumps it at a police station is an exercise in revenge I would not be able to resist. Again with the having to get to grips with Cyberduck, I think...

Peach and lube then.

Tags:
Apple ~ iPhone ~ iMac ~ Skype ~ ringtones ~ Cyberduck ~ SSH

Reasons to be cheerful

1. Hang Seng, that loveable off-shoot of HSBC and as such, Very Nice Chaps, have sent me a credit card. My first in about 6 years. Woo-hooo! Now just what is all this chip n’ pin bollocks? PayWave? Say whaty who now?

2. 3 HK, that annoying branch of Hutchison Whampoa (Orange), have sent me a text full of promise: apparently I qualify for a whopping great discount on an Apple iPhone. Might have to mosie on down and look at the things in the 3 shop.

3. Nineteen days to season four of ‘Supernatural’.

4. It’s still summer for me, and yet all the monsters students at work are going back to work on Monday. Ah, malicious bliss. Can you say Schadenfreude?

5. Dean Winchester.


6. Cap’n Mal Reynolds.


7. Having series two and three of ‘Doctor bloody Who’ on DVD on my shelf right now.

8. Having seasons one, two and soon three of ‘Supernatural’ on DVD on my shelf right now.

9. Having seasons one, two and three of ‘Gatchaman’ on DVD on my shelf right now.


10. Major Kira throwing a cup at Gul Dukat’s head, then telling him to his face that, one day when he least expects it, she’ll kill him. Magic.


11. Having all the ingredients, present and correct, for Purple Nurples tonight. Oooh-wee, but it’s gonna be a good one.

12. Looking forward to seeing the World Classic Rockers at the FCC Charity Ball 13th September 2008. Oh yes. We’re going to be stomping to such fantastic choons as ‘Gimme Three Steps’, ‘Foreplay / Longtime’, and ‘Magic Carpet Ride’… and so many more! Can we wait? Can we bloody hell as like! Which reminds me - did I tell you I got to interview Randall Hall, formerly of Lynyrd Skynyrd? No? Oh. Will get round to that very soon…

But for now, that shallot. Onion. Thing. Too tired. Planning to sleep till my name changes to Soupy-Van-Winkle. Arf arf.

Tags:
Hang Seng ~ HSBC ~ iPhone ~ Supernatural ~ Dean Winchester ~ Jensen Ackles ~ Mal Reynolds ~ Nathan Fillion ~ Gatchaman ~ Battle Of The Planets ~ DS9 ~ Nana Visitor ~ Major Kira ~ Purple Nurples ~ World Classic Rockers ~ Hong Kong

Eggs and baskets

Questions. Life is full of questions. Like if a vodka and orange is a screwdriver, is a vodka and pineapple a sonic screwdriver? Or what was the best thing before sliced bread? Or who put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop?

Another one, that I have thought about only in the last few weeks since an iPhone arrive int flat, is why are PC and Mac users so different? Or are they?

Bestest Flatmate has a swanky new iPhone. A done deal with 3 Hong Kong a few weeks ago got her a nigh-on free 16GB slab of technological perfection of which I am highly envious, but still deliberating over. And here’s the thing: syncing and sorting her new baby to import contacts, adjusting personal settings etc., we discovered the essence of what makes PC and Mac users different.

You get certain tricks, treats, bells and whistles on the 3G iPhone, sure, but the annoying thing is that you can’t import your own message tones. Neither can you use your own music from iTunes to create your own ringtones. No! Shut it, wait a minute, you can’t! Just listen for one minute, before you yell that you've done it and I’m mistaken.

You can open iTunes and click on anything you've purchased from the iTunes store and choose ‘create ringtone’. But this feature only works in the US right now, according to Tinternet.

So then, the crux of PC vs Mac users: PC users are perhaps happy that it just works, but Mac users take that as a given and want to know why they can’t do more.

I hope Steve Jobs realises what he has done in conquering the world with the iPhone. Instead of Mac users complaining that everything is PC orientated, now we have a Mac platform bit of kit made compatible with PC users of the world. We should be happy, we should be smug cos it’s our platform that’s the optimum home environment for arguably one of the most impressive amalgamations of phone and PDA ever designed.

But no. Whatever the iPhone can do, we will not be satisfied. We’ll piss and moan that there are a few items or settings missing, and third party tinkerers and putterers and fixers of incomplete packages will go ahead and set about writing the software Mac users feel is missing.

Those wonderful people at Adium are completely re-writing their spectacularly amazing messenger interface as we speak, hoping to make an iPhone compatible version soon. Why have MSN on your iPhone when you can have the infinitely better Adium X?

I’m slowly over-coming the eggs and baskets thing - ironic coming from a nearly four year Mac convert. Not because I don’t believe in putting all my eggs in one basket, but rather that I don’t normally trust the bottom of the basket not to fall out. So instead I have an iPod Touch and a separate phone. If I had everything in one big basket, and I took every precaution but the bottom still fell out, I’d be mightily pissed off. Mostly because this should never happen to a Mac user.

But I’m slowly coming round to the idea of having everything in one place. Perhaps I will just pop into my local 3 shop and see what the deal is on these things. Next month.

Soopytwist.

Tags:
iPhone ~ Mac ~ PC ~ 3 ~ Hong Kong

Not my fault

Not in a Han Solo ‘It’s not my fault! They told me they fixed it!’ kinda way, but a ‘PCCW / Netvigator are playing silly buggers with my net connection again’ kinda way. This is why I haven’t posted in a about sixty years, and this is why my write-up of ‘Doctor bloody Who’ series four finale is going to have to wait till it’s fixed.


Did I mention I’m angry? Hmm, can’t quite remember a time when I was this angry… Oh no, wait, yes I can - the last time they gave me a piece of shit wireless broadband modem and then cut me off for a week, telling me it was my fault cos obviously my computer was fucked up and not set up properly. Then sending two engineers, one of which saying the signal strength to the building was to blame but he’d fixed it, and the next telling me he weren’t surprised it didn’t work cos the useless bastard thing - and I quote, people, ‘is not compatible with Mac’s Airport’.

Yes, I shit you not. They actually believe this is a reasonable excuse in this day and age. What’s next, my DVD player is not compatible with my front room? Oh no, wait, I’ve got one - my arse is not compatible with my sofa. He actually had the balls to stand there and say that Mac did not work with his precious modem. Oh no, no, no, I said, I think you’ll find your fucking waste of space box doesn’t work my my Mac. And let me tell you why.

A long convoluted conversation about the fact that I can pick up everyone else’s wireless int residential block of flats, and the fact that my settings are just fine, ta, seeing as Jarvis II took them from the modem itself without humans getting int way, and he’s almost thinking about changing his story.

I don’t care. I couldn’t give a foetid pair of dingo’s kidneys what he believes, so long as he makes the fucking modem work. I mean, not to be rude, but it’s their job. It’s not like I’m asking them to repair the road outside my flat, or fix my fridge, or provide me with milk every morning. All I want is a working modem for which I’ve already paid. At this rate I don’t think I’ll pay my bill at the end of the month - prove to me I’ve actually used the fucking service first, eh?


Anyway, the wait for this morning's engineer continues...

Tags:
PCCW ~ Netvigator ~ Airport Extreme ~ Mac

Fucking useless bastard thing!

It’s Sunday, right? So I should be sat here wi a big hyowj mug of soldier tea while I settle in to watch last night’s ‘Doctor bloody Who’.

But no.

Cos I don’t even have a copy yet.

And I’m never going to get one, the way this is going.

Far be it for my net service provider to actually provide me wi a service. So again, just 36 hours after the man came and ‘fixed it’, I’m cut off. (I've called on my trusty sidekick geek-toy, iPod [Touch] Bob III, to get online and post this. Do not think for one moment that there's been a slip-up in their perpetual ineptitude and I actually got online at home).

Why do I bother? I’m checking on Jarvis II's built-in ethernet stats and then calling Netvigator and telling em where they can stick their fucking useless piece of black plastic shit that pretends to be a wireless modem.

Wireless modem? Wireless modem? Fucking horrendous waste of space and resources is what it is. In fact, I think it doesn’t exist. It Isn’t. Cos it dunt think, so therefore it ain’t. It just sits on the windowsill, with that stupid smug shine on its plastic surface, taunting me wi dreams of being connected, when in actuality it has no intention or in fact the capability to do so. Fucking smartarse. Let’s see how fucking funny it is wi my boot up its bloody shiny plastic arse.

So my experiment in joining the up-to-date people and getting wireless didn’t work. I blame myself. I knew it could never have been that easy - I mean, trusting a company to actually deliver one modem, connect it and keep it working? Sheer fantasy! Where was my brain that day? Why did I believe any of that could have been possible? So here I am, slapping myself for being so naiive.

It’s Jarvis I feel sorry for. He’s sat here, all raring to go forth and commit amazing acts of derring-do left, right and centre, Tinternet-wise, and he can’t do a bloody thing. It’s unfair. It’s appalling. It’s like keeping a lion in a small cage. It’s rude.

I really am kicking meself for thinking that I could ever have trusted someone with my net connection. What the fuck was I thinking? Why did I do that to meself - and Jarvis? Will he ever trust me again? Will he ever believe I will again be able to provide for him? How can he look at me the same way again? I’ve failed him, I know that. And I know that saying ‘it’s Netvigator’s fault’ really, really don’t cut it. I was the one who called them to trial the new wireless modem, I was the one who made them install it, I was the one who thought one little hiccup and being cut off for three days was a minor problem (see previous post), and I was the one who believed them when they said they would fix it. And now I’m the one sitting here trying to convince myself I can make it up to poor wee Gladiator Maximus Jarvis by arranging for the old cable box back as quickly as possible. I did this. But at least I can do summat about it now.

I’m going to make meself some soldier tea anyway, and then calm down long enough to make a few calls. Who knows, I might even get on the net later to post this!

Woah, easy Tiger! Get on the net? Pssssh. That’s fanciful talk.

Tags:
Apple ~ iMac ~ PCCW ~ Netvigator

Do the monster Mac!

As some of you may be aware, my beautiful three year old Mac Mini, Jarvis, has passed. Over the counter at the Apple store. He has been succeeded - but can never be replaced - by Jarvis II. Jarvis II is a 20” 2.66GHZ 4GB SDRAM wireless everything Adonis of the computer world. The only thing he dunt do is make tea. Since he weren’t exactly built for such a task, I’ll let him off.

Getting him were easy. Call the Ultimate PC and Mac Gallery in Central (Stanley Street), reserve one as the new stock comes in. Apparently these things fly out the door (not literally; he dunt come with a jet-pack, neither) and they were waiting twenty-four hours for new stock from Apple. It seems those crafty wizards at the bright centre of the universe, namely where they think up and produce these machines, keep the bulk of their available stock for their own online sales. Which would make sense. But it also means I have to wait a few extra days to get my sweaty mits on my model. But anyway, what’s a few days when you’ve wanted one for months?

So I get him home Friday night. On paper, this were possibly the worst night to have picked him up, seeing as it’s the shortest night I’ve got all week and the one time I can’t be up till 3am due to having to be at work for 9am Saturday morning. However, it took about ten minutes to actually get him out of the box, two minutes to connect him and get him on my window ledge, and then about thirty minutes to familiarise myself with Leopard OX and Pages - the iWorks equivalent of MS Word. I shudder to think how I ran Word for Mac on Jarvis I, even though it repeatedly gave me trouble and even did this really bizarre thing: it would stop working, quit my stuff even though it were unsaved, and then simply close the programme. Is this kind of militant behaviour common in MS stuff? Does it just do what it wants, as opposed to what the user wants? Is it that rude that it would close an application with neither warning nor saving anything you’ve accomplished? Is there a word for this anti-social action? Oh, hang on, let me try the dictionary... Ah yes, here we are: ‘crashing’. Oh. Never heard of it. Must be a Windoze thing.

Anyway, long and the short and the tall of it were that it took me substantially less time than I thought to get used to it all. And while I were in perpetual awe of the very, very clear 20” screen and totally worshipping the lightning fast reactions, I did need one more thing.

A wireless modem.

Being a long-suffering-standing customer of PCCW and Netvigator, I decided to throw all caution to the wind and take them up on their current offer of a jump from my kitsch old 1970s-ish ZX81-looking wired modem to a spanking new wireless modem - that looks and feels like the black plastic cover is the most expensive thing about it.

Having to wait three days for the installation man did nothing for my impatience, but hey, at least in all that time I could transfer any files I deemed necessary and get on with really playing and getting to know my lovely shiny shiny Jarvis II without the distraction of Tinternet.

So the man comes Tuesday morning (“Madam can receive her man at 9am, Tuesday?”) and it takes him about two minutes to plug it in and ten minutes to arse about shitting himself because he has no installation CD for a Mac. When I pointed out that the last Mac I had didn’t need any installation software, and if he waited long enough, Jarvis would get annoyed and bloody well do the necessary himself, he started to click some stuff and stumbled upon the right course of action, software-wise. When I say “stumbled upon”, I mean Jarvis opened a wee window and told him to follow the steps therein. It then took a further ten minutes to set up whatever it was he were setting up.

With him over his Beavis and Butthead penchant for smiling to himself over the fact that there were two single gwaimuis (foreign birds) occupying the same flat, both shuffling round in jim-jams, he got on with it and very soon he were out the door.

I played on Safari 3.0.4, the same version I had on Tiger and Jarvis I, and everything were hunky-dory. Authorised my new Jarvis II for my iTunes account (on the UK store, as Hong Kong dunt have one and probably never will, the way people squabble over rights and management over here), downloaded new Adium X and stuff like Transmission, and were loving it.

Skip to last night. A disastrous turn at the pub quiz saw me packing it in, in favour of checking some mail and going to bed. What actually happened, as so often does in our house, were me checking mail, being sent on a wild and woolly convoluted path of a million links, attachments and MSN conversations, until eventually I minimised Safari to organise some icons I’d made. An hour later I went back to Tinternet to upload them, along with some sounds that I know Bestest Flatmate would probably like to use as her ringtone or message tone, or similar, on her phone.


And that, dear readers, is why I’m lounging on my sofa, wireless keyboard under my fingers, bitching about the bloody useless gits that supply sub-standard equipment on behalf of PCCW.

As of last night, around 3am, the modem ceased to connect. I knew it were the modem and not my settings cos (1) my settings hadn’t even been touched or viewed, (2) I can still pick up (secured) wireless accounts from every other bugger int building, and (3) my iPod Touch would connect, but as soon as you tried to find a page, it would say the network was unstable and the page could not be found.

At 3am I decided to give it up as a bad job and went to bed. This morning I find that not only is my Tinternet fucked - and by “fucked” I mean unusable as I cannot connect - but that my nowTV channels are all off. Completely. Not a flicker of a picture, not a whisp of sound, nothing. Absolutely nothing. A phonecall to 1833 833 later, during which I’ve to be careful not to swear or get angry as the nice girl does her best to find out what’s wrong, and it turns out my modem is, and I quote, “not good”. Riiiiiiiight. But that’s ok, cos the nice lady will send another man, and he’ll make it work. Let’s skip my truck-load of scepticism and get to the real issue: he can’t come till Friday. Friday 8pm - 10pm, to be precise.

So, thanks to PCCW, I have no cable/satellite TV or Tinternet until Friday night. Thanks, PCCW, I love you! You are the greatest! You are fab! You’ve cut me off for TWO FUCKING DAYS because yer fucking modem is shite. Well thanks! Let’s add up all those times I’ve had to call you because the fucking nowTV channels don’t work, as well, shall we? Hmm... I called twice last week, and once a week for perhaps two weeks before that. Something tells me I’m backing the wrong horse.

And here I am, Wednesday night for me, wondering why nothing in Life is as reliable as a Mac. Please, someone tell me they’ve had no trouble with their wireless modems or shifting Tinternet. I wouldn’t mind so much, but I’m paying for services I can’t use. And that’s just robbery, the way I see it.

But then, if yer reading this then they’ll done summat to fix the situation. Not before bloody time - especially as it shouldn’t have fucked up int first place.

* UPDATE: It’s now Friday night and the man has been - and found the fault lies with the building. Apparently, we “weren’t getting a good signal strength” from our connection to the building, and that were affecting our net connection and consequently our nowTV channels. All fixed now. We’ll see how long it lasts, eh.

So all is right with the world again - I have my 'net back, and even the TV is working. Bloody marvellous.

Tags:
Apple ~ iMac ~ PCCW ~ Netvigator ~ nowTV ~ Microsoft ~ Windows ~ iPod

Meh!

I’m upset:
‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ sucked the big one. I feel betrayed. Oh George Lucas, what have you done to my Indy? I shall find your offices and burn them down in retribution.

I’m busy:
Bestest Mate is in town soon, which means I have to tidy up. My life.

I’m impatient:
Getting an iMac next week, so naturally want it to be next week right now. Wouldn’t you?

I’m annoyed:
nowTV’s broadband service keeps fucking up, so I missed the last ten minutes of ‘Life’ last night. Called helpline and got a stupid fob-off. Complained about not being offered a new decoder box and/or modem, seeing as I’ve had both for three years now. But then, might change to wireless modem next week anyway, cos of said new iMac (who shall be my little Jarvis II and I shall call him Jarvis II and he will be the best Jarvis II ever. You wait and see).

I’m happy:
David Cook won ‘American Idol’ last week. Bloody marvellous.

I’m intrigued:
‘Sex And The City’ opens next week, and I know I’ll end up getting a ticket.

I’m amused:
Did more Winchester Wallpapers after spotting a cup in Pacific Coffee, taunting me with its little fancy print on the side.

I’m eager:
Now that Russia’s got its rocks off, we might get back to some gratuitous ‘Doctor bloody Who’ on Saturday evening. Yay!

That’s it, I’m gone.

Tags:
Indiana Jones ~ George Lucas ~ iMac ~ PCCW ~ Life ~ Jarvis Cocker ~ David Cook ~ Sex And The City

Winchesters, Jarvis and choices

So we're 24 hours out from the end of ‘Supernatural’. I can only describe the anxiety and dread in ‘Doctor bloody Who’ terms; I have not been this worried since the wait for the penultimate part of series three. I were convinced the good Doctor Ten was done for, that his reign were over. I was absolutely and resolutely resigned to the fact that we were going to get Doctor Eleven very soon. And I'm equally convinced that Dean Winchester is about to slide into the ninth circle of Hell, one manly muddy biker boot after the other. Not that I want him to, obviously. (I've already written his way out, over at the FanFiction Archive, after all. Sorry, couldn't help it) I can only hope that I'm as wrong about his departure, or at least cessation of living character, as I was about the end of Ten's tenure.

I'm known for working myself into a tizzy about such things. Normally so level-headed, I can easily turn 'dingo ate my baby crazy' ('Mystery Spot', anyone? Oh how we wish...) when favourite TV characters are in severe peril.

Or my toys. If, say, I were to lose Sean (the DVD player) or Bob (my flashy fab new iPod Touch) or Mavis (my Samsung E-908, or E-900 if yer outside Hong Kong) I think I'd be inconsolable.

Or if I were to lose Jarvis.

My beautiful Mac Mini, the very excellent Jarvis The Uncrashable, developed a fault early Tuesday morning. A quick trip to the Apple repair shop later, and it seems an intermittent hardware fault fucks up, well, intermittently, rendering him in a temporary state of ‘off’. As my Jarvis was bought in 2005, a replacement model would be much cheaper and easier than a straight repair job. So all I actually have to do is pick which model I'd like. Budget be buggered, I would of course be walking home this evening with a 24" iMac with so many bells and whistles it'd have Fred Dibnah itching to see if he could make it steam. However, while budget (and at such short notice, too) is a constricting factor, there's a much more pressing concern.

Space.
Blessed with a bedroom big enough to just about house a sofa bed (that has to be put away so I can move during the day), Jarvis has lived in the bay window so far. So any Jarvis mk II would be moving in at the same address. This means a nice big iMac would fit alright, but a new model Mini would be less cumbersome. and leave more space for, er… stuff. (Singing: I can't decide whether I should buy or try.) I'm sure one single evening without either and it'll concentrate my mind enough for me to decide alright.

And whatever I do get will be connected to my TARDIS USB hub, cos Jarvis' 80GB hard drive is being removed from the train wreck and will be inserted inside the aforementioned hub, providing me with a safe back-up and of course, a TARDIS hard disk.

But… Three years we've been together. Three years and never a lick of trouble. How I'll miss him and his little ways. At least a new model will do everything he did, faster and more efficiently, I don't doubt. I can get a new one, aye, but a replacement? Never.

It's never easy saying goodbye, I know that, but at least his hard drive will live on in my new Jarvis mk II. Small consolation, but a consolation none the less.

So what will happen to Dean? Are we going to get to keep him for another season? Will Jenny the extrapolated DNA shadow of a Time Lord dappy bint get her own spin-off series to please the ankle-biters on CBBC? And what will become of my faithful Jarvis? Will his hardware fault stop me from keeping him until June, giving me time to decide who the heir to his pad and hard drive will be? All these questions, and no doubt more, will be answered next time I actually have time to blog.

Ta for reading, and goodnight and good luck. Soopytwist.

Tags:
Doctor Who ~ David Tennant ~ Supernatural ~ Dean Winchester ~ Jensen Ackles ~ Apple ~ Mac Mini ~ Jarvis Cocker