Huh!
I, yet again, didn't get enough sleep. So I'm going to moan about my tech. Fair enough?
Just did some minor editing of a few things here regarding profile and so on, and went to save changes. Firefox disappeared. As in crashed and burnt, gone but not forgotten. This happens occasionally; my online world vanishes before my eyes, my lovely tabs full of improving content and quite often my train of research which is not always entirely anthropological. Note to self - persist in trying to get on better with the small and stable Opera, which I so nearly love enough to use all of the time.
It's turned bloody cold. To you this may be a crisp freshness or a reassurance that global warming has taken the week off, but to me it is simply bloody cold and my natural enemy.
Bought a Sagem 410-something mobile phone yesterday. This is a simple candy-bar thing whose main claims to fame are that it has Bluetooth - essential for use in my car - and that it costs (from Voda at any rate) only forty quid. I have a while to go before I get my free upgrade, after all. I noted that it was flimsy as all-get-out, but was blinded by the low cost. What about my existing phone, ask hundreds of interested readers? It's a Moto Razr thing, and it's in fact pretty solid . But it has a flip. As such, it is chiefly remarkable for being a royal pain in a car holder, and it is prone to fly off into the middle distance when hurriedly answered with cold or otherwise impaired hands. The former is countered a bit by the way the Moto deals cheerfully with the Bluetooth hands-free in my Garmin in-car chav-nav, but the latter - well, I like a drink and I cope badly with the cold.
With el Sagem I thought a cheap fix to both problems had been effected. No. Sagem has Bluetooth that does not relate well to chav-nav. Awful, in fact. Bluetooth, like so many technical standards, is apparently not always Bluetooth. It is in fact a standard for ensuring that devices can communicate with one-another always, sometimes, totally, partially or not at all. So this phone is no more use to me than various old phones I have around the house whose Bluetooth, by virtue of absence, also fails to work in-car. I will get a refund and persist with Razr, spending refund on jazz records. I never write here about the jazz records do I? Perhaps I should start.
Yesterday I completed the Christmas shopping. What is it about the retailing of children's books? If you want improving literature you take care to know the author and title of the work, and you should have a pretty good idea what the genre is. So you peg it to your bookshop and you find it if they have it, not least because the stock tends to be alphabetically ordered. Not so , in many cases, with the books for children. To find those you need to know the series or the main character or some other arcane thing about the book, and you don't because all you have to go on is the data scarfed off Amazon by your diminutive but impressively violent godson's mum. Amazon is a godsend to her because she has very little time, being mostly concerned with preventing the godson from boiling and eating his little brother or pulling down the house or whatever. Of course you can ask a human in a shop, but sadly not easily if they are world-record busy just before Christmas. Got there in the end though.
I like my local shops too much to drive them to the wall by shopping online, unless it's the only way to get something in an acceptable time frame or it's really a lot cheaper and I'm feeling poor. I can well imagine what town will be like when everyone has secured the best deal online for another ten years. Full of more crap like McDonalds and Starbucks, and devoid of book and record shops with their largely enthusiastic and helpful staff will be what. I'd rather buy less and buy local for the most part. I see this an investment in my environment. It's a bit like the "want a new telly, want one that's eco-friendly" thing. I'll tell you what's eco-friendly. No telly. Or the telly you already have. Or that someone else does. The one that requires no further manufacture.
I am of course a stinking hypocrite, but I'm damned if I'm going to let that stop me venting my spleen.
Small godson prefers fairly advanced books. He is very bright but bone idle on the learning to read front. He regally peruses the pictures, while doting dad reads and explains the text. When he's older he can read the text himself, and then he can come and complain to me that I have bought him boring books. And I will sit there fat and drunk and not much care, and explain to him that I chose them because I liked the cracking picture of a toad on the front or a volcano or whatever, and that there are no real toads any more because of the over-production of new eco-friendly toads or televisions or something and we will call it quits. Amphibiae are disappearing everywhere in Britain, even in my carefully tended (read left alone) frog-breeding pond. I really need a sign that says "don't keep bloody treading on them".
I have a Ford Fiesta now, rather than the Toyota RAV 4x4 I had for six months before that. I changed partly because people drove into the RAV because I live in a small street, and local would-be eco-warriors took a dim view of it and disrespected it by leaning their bikes insolently against it at every opportunity. They are very pleased now that I have the Fiesta, and they reckon that it is much more sensible to have a little hatchback which will not murder all their children even when left unattended nor require the environment to take one for the team any more than necessary. No matter that the RAV did 44 to the gallon on diesel, potentially bio-diesel, and had a particulate filter and will serve its new owner loyally for decades after the Ford has collapsed. No matter that the small Ford has a beast 2 litre motor and does 23 to the gallon while moving at just under the speed of sound. They are simple, bovine creatures who react only to large and obvious stimuli and in depressingly predictable ways, and I have yet to forgive them for scratching my RAV. Rude.
I usually walk or cycle in any case, as I much prefer it. I regard buses as an unsightly plague, whose purpose is to ferry the disabled - jolly good - and the lazy, whom I loathe. If you can walk, walk. Or cycle. Unless it's pissing with rain, perhaps. Or unless you can't carry all your stuff, which is of course why I have a car. Buses should not be simply a means of killing and injuring cyclists, obscuring the view of nice old buildings, blackening stonework or providing a social club for gum-chewing educationally sub-normals who believe that the word "like" is a verbal comma. They are not intended to sail past small attractive cars with five people in them while containing only two themselves, nor for that matter does it increase the sum of human happiness one jot when social detritus miss them and then work out their issues by vandalizing bicycles instead as they walk to what they call, with no trace of irony, home. Environment's a funny thing; it produces a relatively small number of genuine victims, but a seemingly inexhaustible supply of pricks. I like to roll the "r". Prrricks. Or maybe Perrricks. Public transport inbound-onlies. 2200 buses per day up our lovely High Street, every one expensive enough to discourage its use.
God bless the council's transport strategy, based on the systematic discouragement and demoralization of the motorist while profiteering inexcusably on parking. Three cheers for a policy of bleating about about how nice it would be if more people cycled while utterly failing to do anything to prevent the rampant theft and vandalizing of bikes. Why not ban all cars from the city centre except for the all-important loading and unloading, and devote all those keen traffic wardens to being instead a bike-protecting militia? That'd do it.
Right, time to freeze my arse off walking into town.
Just did some minor editing of a few things here regarding profile and so on, and went to save changes. Firefox disappeared. As in crashed and burnt, gone but not forgotten. This happens occasionally; my online world vanishes before my eyes, my lovely tabs full of improving content and quite often my train of research which is not always entirely anthropological. Note to self - persist in trying to get on better with the small and stable Opera, which I so nearly love enough to use all of the time.
It's turned bloody cold. To you this may be a crisp freshness or a reassurance that global warming has taken the week off, but to me it is simply bloody cold and my natural enemy.
Bought a Sagem 410-something mobile phone yesterday. This is a simple candy-bar thing whose main claims to fame are that it has Bluetooth - essential for use in my car - and that it costs (from Voda at any rate) only forty quid. I have a while to go before I get my free upgrade, after all. I noted that it was flimsy as all-get-out, but was blinded by the low cost. What about my existing phone, ask hundreds of interested readers? It's a Moto Razr thing, and it's in fact pretty solid . But it has a flip. As such, it is chiefly remarkable for being a royal pain in a car holder, and it is prone to fly off into the middle distance when hurriedly answered with cold or otherwise impaired hands. The former is countered a bit by the way the Moto deals cheerfully with the Bluetooth hands-free in my Garmin in-car chav-nav, but the latter - well, I like a drink and I cope badly with the cold.
With el Sagem I thought a cheap fix to both problems had been effected. No. Sagem has Bluetooth that does not relate well to chav-nav. Awful, in fact. Bluetooth, like so many technical standards, is apparently not always Bluetooth. It is in fact a standard for ensuring that devices can communicate with one-another always, sometimes, totally, partially or not at all. So this phone is no more use to me than various old phones I have around the house whose Bluetooth, by virtue of absence, also fails to work in-car. I will get a refund and persist with Razr, spending refund on jazz records. I never write here about the jazz records do I? Perhaps I should start.
Yesterday I completed the Christmas shopping. What is it about the retailing of children's books? If you want improving literature you take care to know the author and title of the work, and you should have a pretty good idea what the genre is. So you peg it to your bookshop and you find it if they have it, not least because the stock tends to be alphabetically ordered. Not so , in many cases, with the books for children. To find those you need to know the series or the main character or some other arcane thing about the book, and you don't because all you have to go on is the data scarfed off Amazon by your diminutive but impressively violent godson's mum. Amazon is a godsend to her because she has very little time, being mostly concerned with preventing the godson from boiling and eating his little brother or pulling down the house or whatever. Of course you can ask a human in a shop, but sadly not easily if they are world-record busy just before Christmas. Got there in the end though.
I like my local shops too much to drive them to the wall by shopping online, unless it's the only way to get something in an acceptable time frame or it's really a lot cheaper and I'm feeling poor. I can well imagine what town will be like when everyone has secured the best deal online for another ten years. Full of more crap like McDonalds and Starbucks, and devoid of book and record shops with their largely enthusiastic and helpful staff will be what. I'd rather buy less and buy local for the most part. I see this an investment in my environment. It's a bit like the "want a new telly, want one that's eco-friendly" thing. I'll tell you what's eco-friendly. No telly. Or the telly you already have. Or that someone else does. The one that requires no further manufacture.
I am of course a stinking hypocrite, but I'm damned if I'm going to let that stop me venting my spleen.
Small godson prefers fairly advanced books. He is very bright but bone idle on the learning to read front. He regally peruses the pictures, while doting dad reads and explains the text. When he's older he can read the text himself, and then he can come and complain to me that I have bought him boring books. And I will sit there fat and drunk and not much care, and explain to him that I chose them because I liked the cracking picture of a toad on the front or a volcano or whatever, and that there are no real toads any more because of the over-production of new eco-friendly toads or televisions or something and we will call it quits. Amphibiae are disappearing everywhere in Britain, even in my carefully tended (read left alone) frog-breeding pond. I really need a sign that says "don't keep bloody treading on them".
I have a Ford Fiesta now, rather than the Toyota RAV 4x4 I had for six months before that. I changed partly because people drove into the RAV because I live in a small street, and local would-be eco-warriors took a dim view of it and disrespected it by leaning their bikes insolently against it at every opportunity. They are very pleased now that I have the Fiesta, and they reckon that it is much more sensible to have a little hatchback which will not murder all their children even when left unattended nor require the environment to take one for the team any more than necessary. No matter that the RAV did 44 to the gallon on diesel, potentially bio-diesel, and had a particulate filter and will serve its new owner loyally for decades after the Ford has collapsed. No matter that the small Ford has a beast 2 litre motor and does 23 to the gallon while moving at just under the speed of sound. They are simple, bovine creatures who react only to large and obvious stimuli and in depressingly predictable ways, and I have yet to forgive them for scratching my RAV. Rude.
I usually walk or cycle in any case, as I much prefer it. I regard buses as an unsightly plague, whose purpose is to ferry the disabled - jolly good - and the lazy, whom I loathe. If you can walk, walk. Or cycle. Unless it's pissing with rain, perhaps. Or unless you can't carry all your stuff, which is of course why I have a car. Buses should not be simply a means of killing and injuring cyclists, obscuring the view of nice old buildings, blackening stonework or providing a social club for gum-chewing educationally sub-normals who believe that the word "like" is a verbal comma. They are not intended to sail past small attractive cars with five people in them while containing only two themselves, nor for that matter does it increase the sum of human happiness one jot when social detritus miss them and then work out their issues by vandalizing bicycles instead as they walk to what they call, with no trace of irony, home. Environment's a funny thing; it produces a relatively small number of genuine victims, but a seemingly inexhaustible supply of pricks. I like to roll the "r". Prrricks. Or maybe Perrricks. Public transport inbound-onlies. 2200 buses per day up our lovely High Street, every one expensive enough to discourage its use.
God bless the council's transport strategy, based on the systematic discouragement and demoralization of the motorist while profiteering inexcusably on parking. Three cheers for a policy of bleating about about how nice it would be if more people cycled while utterly failing to do anything to prevent the rampant theft and vandalizing of bikes. Why not ban all cars from the city centre except for the all-important loading and unloading, and devote all those keen traffic wardens to being instead a bike-protecting militia? That'd do it.
Right, time to freeze my arse off walking into town.
posted by Jim at 9:59 am
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