Tag: general

Well, the sol­stice slides on by, and after the poor results of the equinox drinks I decid­ed to scale these ones back. Just me and a bot­tle of good Irish whiskey.

I am still very unde­cid­ed on the sub­ject of ‘just in time’ plan­ning, the whole, “lets do some­thing on Sun­day, I’ll ring you” and then actu­al­ly call­ing at the time you want to meet up, rather than ever pre-arrang­ing any­thing.
While I also dis­agree with one of my friends, who cit­ed this as his rea­son for ditch­ing his mobile.
I think bal­ance is nec­es­sary.
I refuse to be a slave to my tech­nol­o­gy. It is a tool, for me to use, I decid­ed when and how and what for.
I see my phone going off a the machine shout­ing at me “i’m impor­tant, answer me NOW!”, and I take a sec­ond to think “do I wish to answer a call at the moment…”. If i’m talk­ing to some­one else, then usu­al­ly I’ll just reject the call and ring back when things set­tle down.

I caught up with my clos­ets friends tonight, we had drinks and talked and had a good time.
We all meet up at Gilli­gans, the cock­tail bar above the Oxford Hotel at Tay­lor Square. Now, I know my friends well enough to know that invit­ing them to a pop­u­lar cock­tail bar would not be very well accept­ed (unless it was their idea to catch up *shrugs*). So I did my research, I went in a week before hand to see what the place was like on a Wednes­day evening, and found that is was almost dead, four, maybe five peo­ple in the place, no music play­ing at all. It was per­fect for my friends.
The light­ing is dark, the sofas are com­fy and the drinks where 2‑for‑1. So every­one real­ly liked it. They had all said it was a good idea, and were real­ly impressed at how well it all worked out.
I made a point of get­ting sev­er­al rounds of drinks for every­one, a small part of pay back for all the sup­port my friends had giv­en me over the last few months when my fini­cal sit­u­a­tion had not been as good.

Hmm… it is strange­ly amaz­ing how a lot and a lit­tle can hap­pen in the space of sev­en days… at the same time.
For exam­ple. Mum went to Hong Kong for the week­end, she went over there to meet my eldest sis­ter who was on her way back from two years in Lon­don. Both of them had a great time in Hong Kong and spent lots of fun mon­ey. (and Mum bought me a nice, lit­tle dig­i­tal cam­era, so now I can take nice big picutres for my pho­to­blog).
Mean­while on the oth­er hand, Sat­ur­day, Sun­day and Mon­day I did NOTHING at all. Mon­day real­ly, real­ly dragged by as a result.
Fri­day night I was out… but that is anoth­er sto­ry, and you’ll only hear about that if it turns out well.
In oth­er news MS Access piss­es me off. Just cause it can do lots is not a good enough rea­son for mak­ing every­thing hard to do.

So, I was walk­ing around a lot yes­ter­day. When I need to think I usu­al­ly end up by the har­bour some­where, I find it set­tles me and that is a good thing. But in my walk­ing and think­ing yes­ter­day I found myself walk­ing across the Har­bour Bridge, some­thing I like to do on a reg­u­lar basis.
It was about 5:30 pm, so peak hour, and lots of oth­er peo­ple where also walk­ing across. But I was sur­prised to find that they now have secu­ri­ty peo­ple post­ed along the pedes­tri­an walk­way.
Why? Well, prob­a­bly some­one got mugged or some­thing, but man, that just sucks. Even the land­marks aren’t safe. The world is just going to shit.

So I got me a new phone at long last. Decid­ed to get a Nokia 3200, not because it has ALL of the fea­tures I want­ed, but because it has at least all the fea­tures of my old phone, plus it will work more reli­ably.
And by more reli­ably, I mean at all. My old phone got to the point where less than a minute into the first call made on a full charge and it would cut off.
So, how did I do with my wish­list???

• Cam­era (at least 640x480) — Nope, it does have a cam­era, but only takes pics at 352x288
• shared mem­o­ry — yeap
• expand­able mem­o­ry (at least part­ly) — nope, and only has 1MB total
• syn­cro­ni­sa­tion with Mac­in­tosh — nope
• hands­free speak­er — yeap
• blue­tooth or usb con­nec­tion (both would be handy) — not out of the box, but got me an IR-USB thingy now
• poly­phon­ic ring­tones — yeap
• ring­tone com­pos­er (both mono and poly) — nope
• midi, wav and mp3 ring­tones — midi yes, the oth­ers nope
• cus­tomis­able inter­face — a lit­tle bit

So am I hap­py with this? So far, yes, I can actu­al­ly have a con­ver­sa­tion with the peo­ple that call me with­out fear of the phone shut­ting down. I can once again take prop­er “impor­tant” calls with­out hav­ing to be plugged into main pow­er. It is only a stop-gap mea­sure, as it does­n’t do every­thing I want­ed, but the old phone was actu­al­ly crip­pling me, so its much bet­ter than that already!
And, look, now I can do a pho­to-blog!

There I was on the bus on my way home last night. Last bus of the night, so I made sure I was at the stop on time and then spent 20 min­utes try­ing not to be the one that the drunks came and tried to talk to.
Any­way, I was on the bus, there were a few peo­ple on the bus, but is was­n’t packed or any­thing. Then rather sud­den­ly the inte­ri­or lights went out. It was very sud­den­ly very dark. But the thing that was real­ly odd was no one at all did any­thing to com­plain.
The bus car­ried on and the peo­ple sat there in the dark. About 30 sec­onds lat­er the lights came back on again, and no one made any com­ment about that either.
It was just odd. Peo­ple in gen­er­al are not that well behaved.

Since late 1999 I have been using my trusty Nokia 3210 as my main phone. My pri­ma­ry point of tele­phone con­tact and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. And lets face it, 4 years of use out of a phone is con­sid­ered “fuck­ing good”.
How­ev­er it is basi­cal­ly true that for the last two years I’ve been con­sid­er­ing my options for a new phone. There are two fac­tors that have held me back:

1. My cur­rent phone still works (most­ly).
2. None of the new phones have all of the fea­tures I want.

In that time phones have learnt a lot of new tricks, the most obvi­ous is hav­ing built in cam­eras. So what are my options now? Is there a phone out there that can do every­thing I want?
YES.
But.
Not cheap enough.
So you ask (go on, humour me) “What is it you want in a phone Dave?”
I’m glad you asked, I’ve made a list. (unrolls 12ft of paper)

• Cam­era (at least 640x480)
• shared mem­o­ry
• expand­able mem­o­ry (at least part­ly)
• syn­cro­ni­sa­tion with Mac­in­tosh
• hands­free speak­er
• blue­tooth or usb con­nec­tion (both would be handy)
• poly­phon­ic ring­tones
• ring­tone com­pos­er (both mono and poly)
• midi, wav and mp3 ring­tones
• cus­tomis­able inter­face

At the moment Nokia make one phone that does all this, the rather odd look­ing 3650. Sony-Eric­s­son also make a phone that comes close, the cute and tiny T610. But nei­ther of these phones fall onto a plan I can afford so until they do I’ll buy a new case and bat­tery for my trusty 3210 and squeeze anoth­er year out of him.

So yeah… I’m 30 as of today.
Guess i should say some­thing pro­found about my stage in life, or what I’ve learnt so far on the jour­ney, or some­thing. Fuck that.
If you do how­ev­er want insight check this out The Ran­dom Pro­found Quote Gen­er­a­tor.

I looked into the kitchen draw this morn­ing and found a odd lit­tle thing. It is black, and cylin­dri­cal, with a sil­ver stick­er on one end. I looked at if for a while, then I picked it up and looked at it clos­er.
I had abso­lut­ly no idea what the thing was. This isn’t an unex­pect­ed occur­ance in a shared house. And was­n’t the thing the real­ly freaked me out. What got me was that I put it back and had no inter­este in find­ing out what it was.
It’s still in the kitchen draw and I’ve not made any sort of inves­ti­ga­tion at all. This isn’t me. Or at least it nev­er was… some one has stollen my curios­i­ty.