Falldog

Baby wants an iPhone. Baby wants an iPhone sooo bad.

Shortly before last week’s holiday*, of course, the internet exploded with drool and froth about the iPhone, which had just been released in the US. If I wasn’t sure about getting one before this mass Apple love-in (and I was), then I am now (and I am). But anyway, that is not why I bring you here today:

Stay with it till the end. The sight of the child falling into a fascinated coma over the sound of Coldplay is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in ages.

* Hello, I’m back. Me, the Mrs and a concerned friend travelled down to Cornwall for a (mostly) wet and grey week. Fun was had, and I very suddenly developed an obsession for the overblown gothickry of Daphne du Maurier. And bought fudge. And some local art. I don’t think I could have been more touristy if I’d tried.

It seems nothing will shake this headache. I’ve been feeling a bit ropey all day, to be honest. (I got travel sick on a 10-minute bus ride to Lewisham this morning. Really. To the almost-puking stage. I sweated through the last two stops, desperately praying that I could keep it together. How mortifying would it have been, if I’d been sick?)

I’ve had a good day and a half rattling words out for the novel, and it’s been beyond fun. I always kind of cringe when writers say, “The characters really surprised me when they suddenly…” Well, it’s been a little like that, and a little more far-reaching than that. The two main characters (Lily and Bernadotte, since you ask) have sprung to life, one in particular seeming wonderfully mentally unbalanced. The story has changed immensely, and both expanded and contracted (Big Human Ideas in/naff aliens out… mostly), and it’s currently sitting there, staring at me, beguiling me with its possibilities. I’m so pleased to say that I’m finally excited about it, and finally feel like I’m on some sort of track with it – which, combined, is a feeling I’ve not had about this project before now. There will be more word-rattling next week, when I have a full five days (ish… the Mrs and I are off for a weekend away on Friday afternoon) to play.

But, for today, this headache/ill-feeling has made me shudder to a halt, and now I find myself thinking dark thoughts about Linux. I’m a terrible one for wanting to know what all the fuss is about; I hate to feel I might be missing out on something. I can almost hear my poor little Macbook whimpering at the thought of what I might do to it.

I’m working in Windows, using IE7… and quite liking it. I’m still on a Mac, mind you (lovely, lovely Boot Camp), but even so. I am practically shaking at the thought of all the creepy-crawlies trying to hack their way into my machine however, so I won’t stay long.

Use a Mac with OS X? (You most assuredly should, but let’s not get into this now.)

You really, really have to use a program called Scrivener.

And that’s all the posting you’re going to get for this week. Because I am, for a change, actually busy getting on with stuff, thanks to the above. See you on Monday, and have lovely weekends!

Look what I’ve just found! It’s called, marvellously, Delicious Monster, and it will catalogue all your books, CDs and DVDs through the power of barcodes and put it all on your Mac. I particularly like the barcode-reading thing. I’ve often thought about trying to catalogue all my CDs, but the idea of typing everything in has always put me off.

However, there is the nagging fear that, just as the Gracenote CD database that iTunes uses doesn’t cover anything slightly off the beaten track, Delicious Monster will be just as flawed. It’s got to be worth a go, though.

Although, now I come to think of it… Am I actually bothered about huge lists of my stuff any more? I know I was, once – but I couldn’t tell you now exactly why I was. Hmm. I mean, exactly what use would it be, really? I pretty much know what CDs I’ve got (I couldn’t reel off a list now, but you know what I mean), what DVDs I’ve got, and books are just something to create a tantalising jumble on any available shelf. I’m a bugger for buying three books and reading only one, leaving the other two to languish, forgotten, just waiting to be stumbled upon and – only possibly – finally read.

Anyway, even when caught in the wilder throes of fandom, I was never one of those who revelled in lists. (I’d rather get shot of Schott. O ho ho.) I’ve certainly used others’ lists while on the hunt for things – mainly Pet Shop Boys CDs – but then one of the pleasures of rooting round record fairs, books shops, music shops and the like is stumbling on something you never knew existed. And working from a list kind of removes that thrill of discovery and spontaneity.

And I think that’s probably why I’m less than keen on cataloguing all my possessions. I’m sure that, like the books, there are one or two CDs I’ve forgotten I own. They’re just waiting in the loft to be rediscovered and enjoyed anew. It seems a bit unfair to drag them into the light now, catalogue them and then more spitefully forget about them as anything other than words on a list.

I’d be a terrible librarian.

Sorry I’ve been quiet.

“200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.”

I’m not one of them, it’s just been a ‘blah’ week.

Anyway, the above news story is full of nonsense:

Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010.

Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

Well, think about what you’re saying. First of all, a million and one bloggers, commentators and experts have stated that Vista will turn out to be the last major release of Windows. So, great prediction there!

Also, if PCs are going to fall in cost so radically – presumably due, in part, to an ever-widening international sales base, particularly in developing countries – doesn’t it follow that more people will have them, and an equal proportion of those new owners will become bloggers, thereby continuing to fuel the growth in blog-starters? Maybe I’m missing something.

I’m no Cassandra (not on weekdays, anyway), but even I can see that you, Daryl, sir, are being paid to spout rubbish. At least I have the good grace to do it for nothing.

Well, as of this morning, we still had a connection, albeit very shaky, variable (we tested it - it runs at anywhere between 150Kbps and 8Mbps!) and liable to drop at any second. They promised me it would be shut down at some point on Saturday, so I could have had their replacements working on re-establishing my service by now. But it seems that not only can TalkTalk not run a reliable connection themselves, they are incapable of pulling a plug with a day’s notice. Sigh.

For one reason or another (mainly personality faults), I have a PC on one side of my living room and a Mac on the other. I know the PC knows it doesn’t do things with such effortless ease as the Mac. I know the Mac knows that, even all Bootcamped up, it still can’t compete with the PC as a gaming rig. I know they glower at each other when I’m not there, getting the cat to pass on messages to each other: “Tell the PC that his mass of wires are causing a terrible dusty mess.” “Tell the Mac that he can’t run Premiere Elements, and that his paltry little iMovie can’t hope to do all the things I can…”

Ah, Premiere Elements. And so to our topic for today.

I recently agreed to help a couple of friends out, filming and editing a little sketch to put on a DVD celebrating the 40th birthday of their friend Mark. The whole thing hinged around an excerpt from an old black-and-white silent movie which featured an actor with an uncanny resemblance to Mark. Their sketch needed a little clip of this dropping in. Not a problem. They provide the clip to me on DVD, I edit the rest of the sketch together with Premiere, rip the DVD, plonk in the excerpt – job done.

Except. I tried everything to rip the DVD, but my PC wasn’t playing ball. I ripped it using at least three different decrypting/ripping apps, but none provided a format that seemed to work in Premiere (which claimed to work with .avi, .mov. mpegs, you name it…). So, I then put it through a number of file converters, to see if I could make it into something useable. Nope.

I don’t want to get long-winded about this, but any number of the above things should have worked. In frustration, I switched to the Mac. Success! It ripped fine first time, in perfect quality, iMovie could read it… So, I thought, export it as a .avi file from iMovie, put that on the PC (during one of those moments when I force the two machines to talk to each other directly – the cat is good at many things, but he’s not a flash drive), pop it in Premiere, and we’re away.

Except. That didn’t work either. Premiere still wouldn’t accept the file from iMovie – be it .avi, .mov or an mpeg.

Tonight, I shall be burning the sketch as it stands on the PC to DVD, ripping that on to the Mac, and putting it all together in iMovie.

Then, I shall be opening the window and throwing every piece of technology in my living room out into the street to be picked over by hyenas and buzzards.

WiFi in this county is an unweeded garden, that grows to seed. If you ask me.

While we were in Seattle, we passed through whole neighbourhoods that were covered by a cloud of free WiFi. The US telecoms companies may not like it, but stuff like this is becoming more common by the day.

(I know that particular example is run by Google, and a lot of people don’t like Google, but you have to admire the initiative, no? And it’s by no means the only such cloud in the US, nor the largest, I’d wager.)

Picture Sunday morning in one of kooky Seattle’s kookier neighbourhoods. We were on our way to the zoo, and stopped for coffee in a smart little cafe on the way. We were about the only people there who didn’t have an open laptop on the table in front of us. Everyone was surfing away in the same way that people in a similar establishment over here would be leafing through the Sunday papers. And all, one could reasonably safely assume, for absolutely nothing.

But here in the UK? You’ll be lucky…

Case in point: recently, I was travelling on a GNER train from London to Durham, and noticed that they offered a WiFi service. I don’t think I had my laptop with me, but if I had I would have been tempted to idle some of the journey away with a quick surf. But for £3.50 for half an hour?! I’d already paid nearly £100 for my train ticket, and they were trying to stitch me – and countless businessmen with genuine uses for their WiFi service – for another uncomfortably large chunk of money.

More recently, we were at Gatwick airport, where a mobile phone operator proudly advertised its WiFi zone. Although I didn’t check it out, I also didn’t assume for a second it was free. I see stickers for WiFi availability in every Starbucks I pass, too, but again – that nagging thought that, if their lattes cost that much, well…

I know it’s rich to expect something for nothing, but those Americans who use free WiFi clouds have to pay at some point down the line, be that signing up for a Google account and being exposed to chillingly targetted advertising, or maybe paying a little more tax for the local government to fund the scheme. Privately funded or publicly funded, the user gives their chunk of flesh in one way or another. So why can’t it be the same here?

The internet, when used well, is a tremendously democratising force, informing and empowering with a speed and a grass-roots loveliness like nothing else for years. There will always be a discriminatory issue in how you get the internet into the hands of those too poor to afford a computer, but why not start pushing the issue of widespread, always-on usage by encouraging city-wide (or region-wide) free WiFi in the UK anyway? To my mind, there’s very little reason for London not to have it already.

Come on, coffee houses, start to make the move, then hopefully a wider change will follow. If a borough council could take up the banner – or an ISP take it up and offer to carry it for them – London could, bit by bit, be the kind of wired city I bet Tony Blair wet-dreams about.

Those who offer access at schools or colleges, or at public libraries, would also benefit. They’d no longer have to sort out their own internet provision – as their establishments would live under the borough-wide cloud – and so that would be one less (presumably quite costly) thing to worry about. And there would be, therefore, improved net access for the poor – along with those who might be able to scrape together enough money for a PC and a wireless adapter, who would have their own access to the always-on net supply.

Sorry. Am I banging a drum? It’s just that it annoys me so. All it would take is for one company or one council to make a move, and they would be the first domino. Soon everyone would live under a happy WiFi cloud, and we’d be one step closer to the purple-haired, silver-suited future that surely is long overdue by now.