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July, 2007

  1. Thumbs Up for Apple

    July 5, 2007 by Cas

    I just quickly want to say a big thumbs up to Apple and their Southampton Apple Store – thanks to them, I have a working and highly shiny iPod once more, for the same cost as a new shuffle.

    How? Why?

    Aw, since you asked so nicely, I’ll tell you.

    My beloved iPod is an old 3rd gen model which I got way back in the mists of time (April 2003 to be precise) and it has served me wonderfully. The battery has never caused me a moments grief, managing to hold a full days charge up till the end. Yes, it got all scratched and dented to hell and back, but they were honourable scars. I loved my iPod from the moment I brought it.

    Yes, I admit I grew stupidly attached to a lump of metal and plastic, but it just fitted into my life so well and kept doing what I needed it to do so flawlessly that I started to take it for granted and got seduced by a prettier model.

    More fool me.

    This past week the poor iPod finally admitted its age and started randomly loosing ten minutes of time a day. Not a big problem till you remember I use it as my alarm clock… Then the alarm clock randomly decided not to work and my heart sank.

    One trip to the Genius Bar – free help with your Mac products, how great is that?! – and it had been muttered over by the helpful Genius. I wasn’t reassured when he told me he’d never seen this problem before… One hard restore later, I toddled back home hoping against all commonsense that that would have done the trick. Alas, it was not to be, so tonight I took myself back to the Apple Store for another meeting with a Genius.

    This Genius was even more helpful and candidly admitted there was nothing he could do for my poor iPod bar administer it’s digital last rites. As my face fell and I started to do the sums in my head to see if I could afford a new video iPod, he uttered words that were music to my ears -
    “Of course, for £49.99 I could just do a straight swop and give you a new iPod. It wouldn’t be a new model though…”

    I could have kissed him then and there, but I restrained myself. Just.

    You see, I don’t want a shiny new video iPod. Don’t get me wrong, they are sexy and shiny and lovely and great, but I don’t like the click wheel. It just feels, and I know this is silly, but it just feels too clicky. On my old iPod you just brush the buttons, no pressure required – it’s like you’re activating a computer in Star Trek or something. With the new video iPods, you have to push the button and it feels so tacky and twentieth century somehow. Plus, with a screen that big I’d be petrified of scratching it! At least with my old black/white screen all I’m going to obscure with a scratch is the track name.

    Yes, a shiny new video iPod would be shiny and new but… well, everyone has one! Mine still has some retro chic going on ;)

    So we did a swop. My old 15gb 3rd gen iPod got packaged up and marked for recycling and I got handed a worryingly shiny new 15gb 3rd gen iPod. All for £50 and ten minutes of my time.

    Not bad going really.

    Kudos to the Apple Store in Southampton. Yes, one of your operatives ran away from me last Saturday, but you’ve done good by me and my iPod. You didn’t once try to sell me something I clearly didn’t want – you listened, tried a fix, and when that didn’t work straight up offered me a replacement. For a gadget so old in tech-terms it should be getting it’s bus pass.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to scratch the back of my new/old iPod some – I’d forgotten how disconcerting the mirror brightness is!

    Oh, and if you’re thinking of trading in any of your Mac products for new ones, take them into an Apple store for recycling and you get 10% off the purchase of your new toys. Again, pretty good.

    Category Daily Waffle | Tags: | 7 Comments

  2. The beauty of anonymity

    July 4, 2007 by Cas

    Some days, becoming ‘known’ has it’s benefits. Yesterday was one of those days – coming home to find an advance copy of William Gibson’s next book on the doormat is probably one of the nicer ways man (and Penguin) have ever invented to end what was a fairly shitty day.

    But the rare golden moments aside, was it better when Bright Meadow, and Cas, slipped by under the radar with just a handful of readers? Not that I exactly have oodles upon oodles now, but I have more than my fair share.

    Along with my treasured readers, it turns out that I have “influence”. I’m not sure how you measure influence but, according to people who should know what they’re talking about, I have it. There’s this trust, apparently, that’s built up between blogger and reader/commenter, which means if I recommend (or conversely trash) something, it’s not totally inconceivable to think you might let my opinions sway your own.

    I’d never thought of it like that before. I’m just here, shooting the moon, saying the things I want to say… Never figured I could really turn y’all into my minions just through the words I said. Or that I’d be schmooozed by people oh so nicely so I might be more inclined to say nice things about them/their products.

    So where’s the down side?

    Free stuff = always cool. Free stuff I enjoy = even better.

    But there’s this accompanying nagging feeling that I should then blog about the free product, and I do so hate to be forced to write on certain topics. Then you have the expectations of the readers bearing down on you. This feeling in the back of your mind of “oh crap, I haven’t posted anything in near a week…” Heaven forfend I should miss two Sunday Roast’s in a row – there’d be a riot!

    Or the times when I want to write about something that’s happened but I can’t, because now pretty much everyone and their pet cactus reads my blog. I can’t vent about work because people at work have the URL. I can’t blog about crushes overly much because, yup, you guessed it – invariably they’ve somehow finagled the URL out of me or have stalked me to Facebook. There are family things I can’t mention because… You get the picture. I don’t force any one of these people to read Bright Meadow and 99% of the time I love that they read it, comment and participate because for better or worse it’s a huge part of my life, but there’s that 1% of the time I just want to let of steam and I can’t.

    I thought about starting an anonymous blog but I realised I like having readers too much. To be not known now after I’m starting to take baby steps toward getting there… Shudder time. I can bury some of my rants and frustrations in the fiction I occasionally spew out, but people are starting to work out THAT code too.

    For sure, no one is forcing me to put these words on the Internet. I could trap them up inside a journal or in a text file on my hard-drive, but it’s true a problem shared is a problem made smaller. And not just problems. Some truly fantastic things happen in my life that make me laugh out loud for the sheer absurdity of them – yet I can’t write them and share them with you, dear blog readers, because they involve other blog readers who I would never want to hurt in any way with my words.

    I could just write and post regardless, I suppose, telling myself I don’t care what you all think, that if you don’t want to read it you can leave, but that’s not me. I try never to intentionally hurt people. If there’s an argument, I tend to just step away. It’s a curse, but I’m the one with the “nice personality”. I’d far rather sit on some story than post it and cause pain. The more people I get to know though, the more stories there are that I have to sit on.

    And let’s not forget the truly odd feeling you get the first time you walk into a bar full of strangers, only to be hailed by cries of “Cas!” and “we’ve all be reading your blog – it’s great!” As I said, odd, and not just because I haven’t been called Cas to my face since Ti and I last spent a summer on the beach. The mild confusion over names aside (which get more hilarious when all parties concerned are well lubricated on alcohol, trust me) it’s the sheer stalker-heaven that is blogging which has hit me in the last week or so. “I’ve been following your progress on Twitter” and “recognised you from your hairstyle on Facebook” are two comments that are brought forcibly to mind. Along with “yes, we’re all going to be reading your blog…” said to me more than once by people I’ve grown to love and respect.

    All things designed to make one shy country lass want to hide under her duvet and never blog again.

    Sometimes.

    Maybe.

    OK, I lied. I love it. I was always the quiet one at school, the one no one remembered. To know that my words in some small way stick in people’s brains? That’s just the best feeling in the world.

    But sometimes I think it would be nice to go back to how it was before Bright Meadow took up so much of my life. To when I could rant about the Cute Canadian and not have to worry if he was reading. Or when I could tell verbatim what happened down the pub. When Neko turned to me the other week and said “You’re going to blog about this, aren’t you?” I realised quite how far into my life it’s all gone (and how blessed I am to have people around me who understand) and then I realised that, actually no, I couldn’t blog about it for assorted reasons. And that sucked.

    For about ten seconds till she poured me another glass of wine and the vampire stories started up again.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is this: this blog isn’t all of me. I would that it were, but the closer it gets to a real reflection of my life, there more I’m going to not be able to say. Some things just aren’t bloggable for whatever reason. Which is sad when I’ve set out to write but life, but then that’s the way it’s supposed to be. If you knew everything about me from my blog, we’d have nothing to talk about when we met up. Just think how boring the conversation would be then.

    Just forgive me if I go a bit into hermit mode on occasion, please. I’m just having a personal moment of stage fright ;)

    Category Daily Waffle | Tags: | 15 Comments

  3. Sunday Roast: where were you when they taught stealth in super-power school?

    July 1, 2007 by Cas

    And it’s that time again. Technically it is Sunday lunchtime, but because I’m still sitting here in my PJ’s, drinking a fruit smoothie and feeling ever so slightly rough around the edges thanks to Neko & Co, I’m going to persist in thinking it is ‘morning’ till I’ve had my shower, made myself respectable, and taken myself off the Apple Store to see if they can work out why my trusty iPod is loosing ten minutes each day. Now loosing ten minutes a day on your iPod really shouldn’t be such a major thing, but it is bugging me because my iPod is my alarm clock. Not for me being woken each morning by the harsh, clarion call of synthetic bells jangling discordantly in my eardrums. Oh no. Instead I come to consciousness gently, to the strains of some favourite mellow music. So when my iPod is loosing time each day, this causes me a problem, because I rely on the iPod to wake me up each morning. Plus I really don’t want to have to buy a new one.

    Other than that, I have one more thing to get out of my system and then we can continue – I met William Gibson’s UK publicist-type-person! < moment of sheer cyberpunk geek-out pleasure / >

    OK, I’m good to go now. Enjoy :)

    The world this week
    The cash machine was invented by a Scots man, as all the great inventions were.

    I’ve been taking Echinacea for several years now, as have other people I know, and we can all say anecdotally that we’ve had fewer and less severe colds, but now it’s been scientifically proven.

    Clearly my penguin obsession has filtered through to y’all, because five separate people took it upon themselves to tell me about the discovery of a giant penguin. This is just the first evidence that once penguins ruled the world and should be taken as a warning that they will soon be trying again…

    It’s not often that a book review in the NYT catches my interest, and it’s even less often that a non-fiction book reviewed in the NYT catches my interest, but The Cult of the Amateur has peaked my interest. The purported premise – that the rise of the amateur in Web 2.0 is dangerous – intrigues me because it chimes with some things I’m thinking of at the moment. I’d be interested to read this if only to see what his arguments actually are (and yes I know I’ve used ‘interest’ far too many times in this paragraph, but it’s a Sunday and my creative writing skills are still fast asleep in bed).

    The poor NFL is withdrawing from Europe because no one is watching or even interested. Funny that. We have these two sports called Football (soccer if you’re American) and Rugby. The first requires skill. The later is American Football for grownups – it also requires skills and, unlike the wimpy American game, they don’t wear more padding than the average soldier on deployment in Afghanistan.

    Bytes and Pieces
    Emil has, as always, good tips on how to check if your site is ‘accessible’.

    So I’m a huge fan of the Die Hard movies – can’t get enough of ‘em, and seeing a trailer for Die Hard 4.0 at the cinema is often more exciting than the film I’ve gone to watch – but I never figured on the collateral damage in the movies before.

    It’s great to see that Nils has we and truly got his blogging mojo back – his comparison of the different social networking sites had me giggling like a nutter (or GLAN’ing to make Neko happy).

    Some people, it turns out, are incapable of getting places on time. Me, I’m not one of them. I think mainly because of my insanely organised mother, I have to be early everywhere. Yes, I can think of a few instances later where I’ve been a few minutes late but that was always due to circumstances beyond my control. This WikiHow article claims to have some useful pointers for the chronically late among you. It might be so, but I have an issue with point two and its reliance on time pieces. I don’t wear a watch and I haven’t for many years. I don’t have multiple clocks around the house or on my desk at work – the only clocks I look at with anything approaching regularity are the one on my mobile phone and the one on my computer taskbar. But, and I stress this, I rarely look at them. Tasks take as long as they take and I don’t rule my life by minutes/hours. Yes, there are certain things that have to be done at certain times (meetings to get to, tv shows to watch, buses to catch) but once I know the fixed points in my day I’m good to go. I don’t really have much of a point to make, but I do recommend trying to go without a watch for a few days. Once you get used to it, it is very liberating.

    I don’t want an iPhone, I want a Helio Ocean – if, you know, I had to go for a multi-function device. As it is, I’m fine with using my phone just for calls and texts and only checking email etc when I’m at a computer. Call me old fashioned that way.

    Here’s a nice article on Creative Commons and publishing (book publishing for the premise of the article, but the points are pertinent for other fields).

    There aren’t the words to describe how glad I am that strange things happen to people other than me. It makes me think the fates aren’t just picking on little old me.

    Filmy Goodness
    I recommend you go to One Race Films and look at the video for Babylon AD (alas I can’t link direct). Yes, I’m a bit of a Vin Diesel fan.

    And now it’s time I got dressed and headed to the Apple Store. Wish me and my poor aged iPod luck!

    Category Sunday Roast | Tags: | 7 Comments

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