tap tap tap

It happened at one of those luncheon parties for gays. Everyone around me had tapped open their iPhones to see if the waiter was on Grindr, and then someone stared at me.
"Where's yours?"
"I don't have an iPhone."
"oh" A tiny pause.
I produce my battered Nokia.
"How... retro. Look! How 2000s." There is cooing. And clucking.

Not having an iPhone has become... well, it's become like some kind of deliberate anti-fashion statement. Or, in my case, because I belong to T-Mobile.

"Why don't you change network?" one of my exquisitely-haired friends tuts.
"Because I've got the most amazing deal." Seriously, there is a special T-Mobile Discount for "I've shagged the manager of a call centre on his water bed" and I'm not letting go of it.

But it does mean that "T-Mobile iphone" is one of my periodic hopeful google searches. Along with "Avengers blu-ray", "cancer-free cigarette" and the name of a particularly vile ex-colleague with "RIP" after it.

The other day, I hit pay-dirt on one of these. No, not the chance to do the Numa Numa dance on a grave, but T-Mobile now stock the i-phone. Well, kind of. You wouldn't expect them to rush headlong into the 2010s, now, would you?

If you click the existing customer button at the bottom of the page, it asks you to log in and then offers you a google android thingy. "What iphone?" it shrugs.

It has to be an iphone. I'd like to join Grindr before all the gays have moved on to dating via wireless hair-product. Already an A-gay friend of mine's informed me that "Grindr is ovah". But then he's now dating a sushi chef, so it could just mean the sudden rush of carbohydrates has driven him mad. I'm still recovering from the dinner party where the friends I'd invited over casually arranged their own dessert on the way out. This left me mildly stunned (there are other gays in my apartment building? is it the guy with the really tiny dog? or the guy who appears to live on Waitrose pierce-n-ping?).

Anyway. I'd like an iphone. So I make the mistake of ringing T-mobile customer service. This is like hell, if hell had voicemail. It's broken, and constantly spins you around in a loop while sending you helpful automated texts ("Why not log into our website?"). Eventually, after two minutes of stabbing the star key and yelling with a pent-up rage I haven't felt since my days of lower-middle-midle-lower management, they put me through to someone in a call center in a galaxy far far away.

This does not go well. The line is so faint and her accent is so strong and I'm so cross that neither of us can understand the other. At another time, if I hadn't just spent five minutes pressing 1 to hear those options again, I might, just might have found the fact that she pronounced it "pissword" funny. But not today. Today I'm like a freshly-microwaved Daily Mail of hate.

Finally I am transferred to a nice Valleys Girl called Kate. She's no-nonsense and will have none of it. "We do have the iphone" she admits, and we can transfer you to it. Hosanna. But it is quite pricey... hang on. She's checked my account. Actually, with the discount you've got... there's awe in her tone (I suddenly wonder if he took pictures). So, I'm left wondering... should I do it?

I email a couple of friends. One of them has just become the marketing manager of a major phone network. He promises me an even bigger discount. And this time it doesn't involve horizontal trampolining.

"Cool," I say. "How much?"
"Ah," there's a pause of about a day. "I don't know. Let me check the figures and get back to you."
"Hang on, you're the marketing manager of [blank] and you don't know?"
"No."
"That's rubbish."
"I know your phone number. Just you wait."
"Was that a threat?"
*click*

So. I'd like an iphone. But I still don't have one. And the nearest I'm getting to meeting temporary afternoon husbands is a sudden stream of texts from people called things like Tiffany explaining that they're bored and appear to have lost all their money and their clothes.

In media res

People are in employment who've never not known the Internet. I remember ten years ago taking on a work experience student who spent the entire day on IM telling her friends how bored she was. And I thought then "tch. kids today".

But it's worse now. Or better. But genuinely... everything's changing and changing so fast it's like the theme tune to Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads.

For instance, roughly speaking...

• In the 1950s, telly was in black and white, 4x3 and had 405 lines.
• In the late 1960s, telly was in B&W, 4x3 and had 625 lines (hi def!)
• In the 1970s telly was in colour (I remember a snotty kid called Dominic pointing at the Red Green and Blue dots on the formica front of ours and sniffing "Huh, yours only has three colours. Ours has all of them").
• In the 1980s, telly got Nicam Stereo and by the end of the decade, we all got video recorders so that we didn't have to miss shows... if we could programme the sodding things.
• In the 1990s, we got widescreen
• In the 2000s we got... digital, freeview, PVRs, the IPlayer, bittorrent, HD, DVDs then Blu-Ray... 

Yes, there's a bit of a fudge in the last bit, but you'll agree it's all a bit of a rush. And now Sky is launching 3D telly, already making whatever you bought last year obsolete.

When I was a child, my parents got me a Boots B&W portable telly. It weighed so much it held down a tent in a storm, and you tuned it with a dial. I finally said goodbye to it in late 2001. Apart from anything else, my DVD player just had no idea how to talk to it. But I was sad to see it go.

Now TVs are things that we shrug off like frayed socks. The lovely Ros who is staying in my Glasgow flat at the mo emails to say that she can't work the telly. It's not broken, she just can't get the hang of it "but don't worry, I picked up a new one on the way home." That's where we are.

I've a trunk in the flat of obsolescence. It contains two laptops, the record player, the minidisc, the VHS and, of all things, the DVD-Recorder (which is soooo five years ago). I got the last two out yesterday to copy over some old tapes for my parents, and got a few minutes in and thought... "there must be an easier way". The answer is, madly, that it was easier to download the shows from YouTube and burn them to DVD on my laptop (with a menu feauturing pictures of my cat, natch).

Of course, the brilliant thing about YouTube is that, if the source is an old VHS tape, you get strange little bits of old wonder that remind you how brilliant telly was in those days. Or not. Please, for your own joy and wonder, watch the first 30 seconds of the following clip:

Haiti: Charity begins at "oh"

If you're sending money to Haiti you might learn something interesting about how charities work on the web.

The DEC is set up to be a centralised money pot making the giving really straightforward. There one number, you give money, and pray as much of it gets to the source as possible. It's designed to make knee-jerk charity as easy as possible: Something terrible has happened - I want to help - Oh, that was easy. It's also designed to stop charities competing with each other in an undignified disaster scramble.

Now let's see what happened when Eddie Mair gave out the phone number on the PM Blog.

After a few comments (thanks for the link/troops out/send the bankers' bonuses to Haiti) we get #6 - a plug for Oxfam with their campaign link. OK, it's from "pastymuncher" who may well not work for Oxfam, but look at how well-worded this comment is. Oxfam "support the immediate priorities - providing safe water and shelter material for the people who have lost their homes". From which you can infer that money sent elsewhere goes to non-essential frivolities.

Then comment #7 - Christian Aid.

Comment #10 is for the British Red Cross, with their link, an explanation of why they're great. And it appears to be from "BritishredcrossJ".

This is starting to look odd. Can charities really be trolling the blogs and social networks and punting people towards their own campaigns rather than the central pot?

I have some limited experience of this. I've worked for a couple of charities, and, while everyone there was very, very committed, I still remember the jealous fury at one charity when Oxfam got their link for a flood up first. No one at any point said "Well done Oxfam for starting to get donations in" or even "We've got to be more like them next time". No, it was just sullen bitterness.

Anyway, back to the thread. Just when it was all looking a bit desperate, along comes Lucien with comment #11:

I have no idea whether or not the posters promoting individual charities here have connections with those organisations, however ...
The point of a DEC appeal must be to centralise fund-raising and have all the relevent UK charities work together in vital disaster relief, not to operate competing PR and/or fund raising efforts. This thread is beginning to resemble a marketplace


There. Strangely the competing messages stop at this point. The next time I think "no one sane ever posts on message boards" I shall come back and read Lucien's comments. I'll never meet him, but I'll always adore him.

By the way - DEC are http://www.dec.org.uk

The Death of Zen

Goodbye then, trusty Creative Zen Media player. We've had some times. You've played a lot of terrible music and some great Radio Four. Remember when I showed a video on you to a BBC Future Media Exec and they said "oh, but don't you need a TV Licence for that, sweets?"

You've been smashed and you've still worked, you've diligently played every format, you've been held together with sellotape for the last year... but you've been a good friend.

Now alas, you're utterly shagged. And I don't know what to replace you with. Do I upgrade you to your credit-card sized replacement? Despite my sexuality, I just can't get an iPhone as it won't play most of the media formats I use and isn't available on my phone network.

Temporarily, I've got a £20 new generation portable Digital Radio. And it's proved what I've always feared... Digital Radio is fucked. It's like mobile broadband - it works perfectly if you're in Central London and stand very still.

Digital Radio's been around longer than most people have had the internet, but the idea that they still haven't produced something that can receive Radio 4 on a day with a "y" in it is laughable.

Here's a hilarious piece as a BBC's correspondent tries to test in-car digital radios. Utter Radio Fail:

Could Digital Radio Switchover cost Labour the next general election? The middle-class middlebrow heartland will take almost anything, but not the loss of the Archers in 2015.

[ PS: Dear BBC News. It's lovely that you offer "please embed this clip in your blog" on video clips, but why is it the fattest embed code ever, far wider than blog templates, and immediately stops working if you try and resize it? ]

Caught on tape

It's 30 years of the Walkman. To celebrate, BBC News got a 13 year-old to swap his ipod for a walkman:
"It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape... Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is shuffle".

Coincidentally, this weekend I was suckered in by Maplin's £40 gadget for turning your tapes into mp3s. And am I having fun?

Oddly enough, nearly. I am rediscovering my love of The Older Woman (a comedy series starring Martin Clunes and Zoe Wanamaker which is as utterly brilliant as it is totally forgotten). I am quietly stunned that I own a Def Leppard album, but with hindsight not so surprised that I own Roxette.

But I'm also a bit baffled. The Maplin walkman-to-MP3 is actually rather fiddly. I've a suspicion that they've taken a few thousand old we'll-never-sell-these dictaphones and added a USB soundcard. For a start, the dictaphone is mono. And comes with some horrible software. What's needed is a clever thing that lets you play the tape and spits out an MP3 at the end. Not a complicated jumble of wires and things that requires endless fiddling to produce a sound file that i'm still not sure i've cleaned up. At the most, the software should have 1 button. Not more waveforms than a surfing beach and a manual about how to ride the equaliser - I just want to listen to the Duchess of Malfi without the hiss. And no, don't even get me started on trying to do it in Audacity.

I guess it's the tape's fault. They sounded fine back then, but now they're horrible. Especially stuff recorded off the radio which is like listening to distant music in a rainstorm.

And tapes are so random. Where is episode 5 of The Older Woman? Guttingly replaced by half an hour of 24 year-old me pottering around a room clearly not seizing the day but obliviously wiping comedy gold while doing the ironing you dull fuckwit.

I have even found an "audio diary" I kept while backpacking. Cos everyone likes listening to the sound of their own voice. Especially when it's squeaking "I can't stop throwing up and Ollie really hates me, I wish I was back home".

Technology 10 years ago

I spent the weekend using my CD Walkman. I'd mislaid my MP3 player and I thought "how hard can it be?" - but it's strange how self-conscious bulky old-tech looks. I was edging away from people at the gym, trying to conceal the priapic bulge. It's the one occasion when you want the lump in your trousers to look as small as possible. After all, don't you edge nervously away from people on the tube who are still using a Walkman? And you change carriages if its playing cassettes.

And yet, 10 years ago:

• You were still recording telly using VHS
  
• You had a dial-up modem
  
• Early adopters were watching BBC Choice through OnDigital
  
• Portable hard drives held 100Mb (ZipDisk! ZipDisk!)
  
• If you owned a DVD player, you loved buying discs in bulky packaging.
  
• And even adored being stung for £7 customs on your £15 Region 1 of Hudson Hawk (was that just me?)
  
• Widescreen cathode ray tellies were all the rage.
  
• An iMac without a floppy disc drive seemed weirdly cutting edge
  
• Having a CD burner was quite the status symbol. If only you could get your head aound those MP3 things.
  
• I got a bollocking at work for coding a website using CSS rather than tables and invisible gifs (one for the nerds).
  
• You were still 2 years away from the BBC streaming an on-demand radio drama (bows and tries to look humble).
  

Yesterday, annoyed by my inkjet's Seymour-like demands for ink, I went out and bought a laser printer. For £40. This felt like a brilliant thing. Then I remembered that it was 20 years since I'd first seen a laser printer. And then I just felt old. Although I remembered reading Douglas Adams' introduction to "Dirk Gently" where he explained that he'd typeset the book himself and it had been printed out by a computer and I thought it was witchcraft and spent much of the book squinting at the print to try and see the dots. Hey. I was 14. Sod off.

Belief Systems

So, there was some pillow talk with a Theology Lecturer. He asked what I did for a living, I tried to explain and he pulled a face.
"Oh," he said, "I had a psycho ex who loved Doctor Who."
"Ah." I said.
"Not the new series. The old one. He had all these videos of it in his flat."
"All neatly arranged in order, no doubt."
"No, that was the freaky thing. They were in piles, everywhere. But he could find a story in seconds. Clean socks, not so much."
"Um."
"He knew all sorts of freaky stuff. I mean, honestly, he could recite all of the programme names from beginning through to the end. How mad is that?"
I sipped my drink, carefully. I was thinking... I can do that. A a bit of a hiccup with Seasons 2, 9 and 15, but other than that... oh god.
I smiled weakly. "That's totally insane."
We nod, awkwardly.
There's porn on. It still baffles me. "I mean, who first looked at a riot baton and thought you could do that with it?" I ask.
He looks at me, oddly.
And I'm thinking Day of the Daleks has to be after Curse of Peladon, surely?

Gmail chat

I have never used gmail chat. Well, that's a lie - someone tried using it at me once, but, I just switched it off. It's always been there as part of gmail, along with those too-clever ads which know slightly too much about you (last year's winner: "Is he cheating on you?").

Suddenly, however, gmail's got strangely aggressive. Next to every email I get from anyone on gmail, it informs me, tartly that X "is not available to chat". As though you had your chance, you blew it, and don't you try jumping on the bandwagon now.

Tech fail

I still haven't explored all the functions on my lovely new laptop. The other day, I clicked an untried icon on my desktop, and up popped a picture of a smiling man with stubble.

Goodness, I thought, that's a jolly handy button. And then I realised. I'd found the webcam.

On Vista

So, I love my new laptop. It's tiny and shiny. But I still hate Windows Vista. After only a week, its running speed has halved. And *every single day* it demands that it installs Important New Updates.

Curiously, my old Vista laptop didn't do this. So, I'm wondering - what's up? Why is Vista so shit? But every time I even think this, a window pops up saying "A User On This Computer Has Attempted Thought Crime".

On cable

I am a man. I own a whole box of cable. That's actually a lie. It's two boxes.

"Only connect," said EM Forster, and never a truer phrase was spoken about the male condition. That fundamental, driving force which compels man to Maplin, there to buy any number of coiled black leads with gold connectors that best link one black box to another.

This particular pon farr was caused by my new laptop. It is lovely. It is shiny. It has an HDMI port. I've never had one of those before, so had to buy a cable for it. Even better, my projector turns out to be HD-ready. Thrillingly this meant buying an HDMI to DVI cable. For £30. Which seemed a bit steep - but then who wouldn't want to update their Facebook status on a screen 10 feet high?

Of course, I got the cable home and discovered I'd bought an HDMI to Simple DVI cable, rather than the proper HDMI to DVI-30pin (RGB-CGA-MDA-EGA) cable. I looked on the internet. If I wanted to play that game, I'd have to buy the cable from Holland.

Every man knows their limits. I've got SCART-switching boxes. I've got S-video connectors that would make a monk blush. Despite being unable to drive I own several in-car chargers. I've even got a headphone-splitter jack in case a friend should say "I'd also like to listen to your taste in music on this interminable train journey" (This has never happened. This will never happen. But I have a cable, just in case).

But finally, here was the cable smackdown. The invitation had come - did I want to pony up and join the big boys? Did I want to get envious glances in Maplin? Did I want to be the person who says to guests "why yes - isn't the picture clear? I got this cable custom shipped in from Holland"?

The answer is no. Instead, I dangled my useless £30 cable from my hand and watched the cat chew on it happily.

i can has book

I even has blurb:
Almost Perfect

Emma is 30, single and frankly desperate. She woke up this morning with nothing to look forward to but another evening of unsuccessful speed-dating. But now she has a new weapon in her quest for Mr Right. And it’s made her almost perfect.

Gwen Cooper woke up this morning expecting the unexpected. As usual. She went to work and found a skeleton at a table for two and a colleague in a surprisingly glamorous dress. Perfect.

Ianto Jones woke up this morning with no memory of last night. He went to work, where he caused amusement, suspicion and a little bit of jealousy. Because Ianto Jones woke up this morning in the body of a woman. And he’s looking just about perfect.

And Jack Harkness has always had his doubts about Perfection.


James Goss spent seven years working on the BBC’s official Doctor Who website and co-wrote the website for Torchwood Series One. In 2007, he won the Best Adaptation category in the annual LA Weekly Theatre Awards for his version of Douglas Adams’ novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Less than 7 years ago

Apple unveils digital music device. And we've only had the Internet for a decade. Wow.

PS: Gasp at the old fashioned BBC News page. And the quaint phrasing: "Digital jukeboxes, which let you store up to 150 CDs on one hard disk, are already becoming available. They allow people to transfer their CD collection or download songs from the internet, store them in one place and carry them anywhere."

What have the Nazis ever done for us?

Disturbing/astounding article about top Nazi brands Siemens, Hugo Boss, VW and IBM

Metadata

The improved tagging means that you can read all the stories tagged about "TV". Of which there are 50. Or "Sex", of which there are 220-something. I don't mention this to boast. But it gives a completely misleading impression. I have nothing profound to say about this. That is all.

Decorating

It's a bit peachy-beige isn't it? Hopefully, normal service etc, soon!

New web addiction

Hunters and Gatherers - lifting unfortunate profiles from gay dating sites. Safe for work (on the top level). I'm laughing like Phil Spector at a gun show.

LOL cats in-joke

It's not WMD, it's just a cat!

"A new kitten named Cookie will be introduced to the show, while the BBC said Socks would "also remain on the team". [Blue Peter editor sacked]

Further Socks fakery! In an interview on the BBC website, Socks announces: "Embarrassing moment? Having to be made look messy before being groomed on the show!"

Hai World!

It's taken less than a year for Lolcats to go from a joke to a programming language. Called LOLcode, obviously. Monorail cat would be proud.