Yesterday, I wandered into a visual FOR-NEXT loop.
It’s not a kind of roundabout. It’s also not a trap made by nimble-fingered Boy Scouts (although it is a kind of snare, shaped exactly like your brain).
It’s much more dangerous than that.
September, 2009:
I Know, I Know
Yes, I’m doing it again.
Dear Faithful Imaginary Regular Reader,
Yes, this blog *is* still active.
I know you’re only Imaginary, but I’ll make it up to you. (As in Actually).
In the meantime, might I interest you in this sumptuous platter of Elsewheres?
Foodies, try a heaped portion of the Chez Pim or the Angry Asian.
A dollop of Almost Fearless is perfect for the nomadic palate.
If cartography tickles your fancy, might I suggest plunging up to your ears into Strange Maps?
Try the wit. Works with anything.
Care for a foil-wrapped travelogue? Choose from this dazzling selection. (I can particularly recommend the Gill. Can be rather tart, but always bursting with flavour).
Watch yourself with these. They may give you convulsions.
Back soon.
Opera Mini 5 and Skype Mobile: How They Shamed Me
For the last 2 years, I’ve ignored the Cardinal Rule of IT Gadgets.
And I only realised it last night.
If you know me in three dimensions (that sounds rude – oh, you know what I mean), then you will have met my phone. I show my phone off at the drop of a hat. If someone mentions telephony within earshot, I pull my phone out and press buttons to make it bleep and get everyone’s attention. If I could wear it in a holster, I would. A face holster. I’m that proud of my phone / I’m that tedious.
My phone is a T Mobile Vario III smartphone, and I’d recommend it to anyone, mainly because it’s an excuse to show it off, but also because it’s a terrific piece of kit on a terrific little contract (free web access with no data tariffs; free GPS; free Microsoft Word / Excel / Powerpoint / Adobe Acrobat built in; slide-out keyboard that actually works, and not just in a technical sense; and Other Cool Stuff).
But I was so bowled over, so giggly and hair-toyingly won over by this half-brick of wizardry, that I ignored the cardinal rule of IT gadgets.
Cardinal Rule Of IT Gadgets:
When you get a new IT gadget, immediately look on the Internet for better software.
As wonderful as my phone is, it has been pre-installed with Internet Explorer Mobile. In another age and another universe, this would be cutting-edge. In this one, it’s like trying to get onto the Internet by rubbing two bits of exposed wire together. I see this now. I see it fully, for what it is.
The first time that someone shows you their iPhone, they make a big deal about poking the screen with their finger. That’s because the browser on the iPhone is designed by someone who actually wants to browse the Internet from a mobile phone. With your finger-tip, you drag the screen around, yanking, whipping across pages like you’re waving a camera lens about. It’s dazzling. It’s utterly unlike what we’ve been putting up with on normal, non-touch screens. It’s instantly intuitive. It’s right.
Opera Mini 5 (beta) does exactly the same. The frontscreen is thumbnails of 9 user-defined bookmarks, ie. your 9 favorite websites, all ready to go with one fingertap. When a webpage loads, it fits the screen so you see it all, unreadably small – and then you double-tap on the screen, and it zooms in to normal readable size. Then you drag your finger around, and the page slides around like it’s been greased.
It’s gorgeous.
But that’s not all. I also installed Skype Mobile. This means I can instant-message or talk over Skype from my phone, entirely for free. International calls (to other Skype-installed gadgets), free, over your phone. Free.
To be fair to me – and I know I’m biased, but I’d like to be fair to me, please – these applications are only recently available. In fact Opera Mini 5 is only just out. But that’s not the point. The point is…I hadn’t been looking. I’d been making do, with the unwieldy relatively backward preinstalled gubbins on my phone, for years.
This evening, I have an entirely new toy to play with, it’s true….
…but I am so ashamed.
What Is A Staycation?
As the leaves turn golden and Christmas approaches, our thoughts naturally turn to what truly sucked about 2009.
Top of my list? “Staycations”.
Oh, you horrible, horrible word – a wretched portmanteau of “stay” and “vacation” (and perhaps a silent “bullshit”).
British media coverage has been intense. Every newspaper, every radio presenter – such as this one – and every inch of travel-themed newsprint seemed obsessed with it. I think I understand why. You know when you wake up in the morning and there’s a song lodged in your head, and it stays there all day – and you loathed it to start with? This is what happened with ‘staycation’ in the Great British Media Consciousness this summer.
And not just in the UK. You can’t blame us – it all started abroad, well before 2009. My fave online travel read World Hum charted an arc from pioneering fascination to a premature obituary and lately to weary resignation. Staycation. It lingers, like a persistent grease-spot or a kippery smell coming from the carpet. It’s unstoppable. We pump round after round into it, and it just keeps coming.
But…what is it?
At the height of the summer madness, the Times Online noted that because of the recession, Brits were staying within Britain for their hols – day-trips, weekends away, or gallivanting around in a camper-van. You stay in the UK, but you travel. The Guardian agreed.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph was defining it as staying in your own home – putting your feet up, ordering pizza, catching up on Lovefilm DVDs, and attemping Do-It-Yourself that resulted in a couple of grand being knocked off the value of your house. In other words, “a luxurious time in your own home”. I recently listened to BBC Radio 2′s Jeremy Vine take a similar tack.
So which is it?
I’m all for exploring your home country, your home county, your home town. I hardly know York, and now my nomadic plans are starting to crystallize, I’m going to undertake a protracted written goodbye to this city that has housed me for a decade, with articles for fun in here, and other, better articles pitched at paying markets. I’ll thoroughly explore York – and part of that will be staying elsewhere in York, in bed & breakfasts, hotels, campsites, you name it. (This appeals to me greatly, being an idea both adventurous and faintly stupid).
Britain is a wondrous place, I hear. I can’t confirm that, because like 99.9% of the population, I don’t know it very well as a whole. I’ve been here, I’ve been there, but on average I’ve missed out absolutely everything there is to see. I could spend the rest of my life traveling around the UK.
Just as long as I’m traveling.
Staying at home is not traveling. Staying in your own home, no matter where you go for the day, is not the same experience as being truly Elsewhere. Home is a mass of habits, complacencies, commitments and interruptions, and when you stay at home, these suck you right back into the everyday world you long to escape from.
Travel is escapism – maybe even escapology. When you’re at home, there is no escape.
If a staycation is about traveling around, I like the idea (hate the word; like the idea).
If it is about staying at home – please let it die.
Images: mondopiccolo and Mike Sowden.
Why I Play Games
This one is a rant that’s been waiting in the wings of my brain for the last, ooh, half-decade. This article is the breezy version.
Agreed, many games are mindless fun, churned out by the numbers to wring cash out of undiscerning amateur gamers (or their parents). EA, j’accuse. But some games are genuinely mind-expanding, life-enriching experiences. Some games are truly staggering works of creativity- such as this one.
Some games are (ready?) as good as reading a book.
(There, I said it).
But now, at least, the scientific evidence is stacking up. Games are dangerous, yes…but not if played wisely.
Image: Bethesda.
I Can’t Think Of A Title For This Post. Maybe There Isn’t One.
I’d like to say “For the last few weeks, Firefox has been slow”. But I can’t.
I can’t because it conveys nothing of the magnitude of my struggle. It’s been epic. It’s been grim. It’s been like “Gandalf vs. Wolverine” directed by Cecil B DeMille, filmed in Swansea. You’re lucky you weren’t there. But I was.
Okay, just the facts.
For days now, the simplest right-click has turned into a spacetime-bending anomaly that has threatened to suck my laptop into the beyond. Opening up a tab turned from a handy convenience into a trigger for a kind of Centrino-fuelled Genesis Device, bursting outwards into my machine’s RAM like a digital airbag and sending the processor fan into frenzied bubbling shrieks. Within seconds, the whole machine was too hot to look at except askance. It burned my shadow into the dining room wall (quite a pretty effect: I’ll take photos).
A dull muffled groaning whine filled the air as the lines of force that bind our Universe together were pushed to breaking point – then, just before the Unseen Dimensions burst out in a flail of knuckly impossibilities, the tab opened and Firefox started calming down again.
After the first few times, this got a bit wearing on the old nerves.
So this evening, we fought, my laptop and I. It was…it was…
*goes away to have a little cry*
Well. It’s all too fresh, and I don’t really want to talk about it, except that it involved maggoty crops of ad.yieldmanagers and a big wet suppurating pop of MS Antivirus 2009 malware, spattered right across my C: drive. I hope I’m not making this sound pleasant in any way, because it really wasn’t. It was ugly as sin and excruciatingly painful to endure. It was Jar Jar Binks.
So anyway, skipping to the end. Eventually I unhorsed my foe and smote his ruin upon the mountainside.
I actually did this by running lots of antispyware programs, cleaning the registry, defragging C: and reinstalling my web-apps, but that’s denying the emotional reality of it all, and therefore a kind of Lie.
(And I hate Lies).
SmarterFox is a Firefox plugin that does many wondrous things. Get it.
I’ve barely begun to understand it, but I’m amazed and deeply grateful at something called “endless scrolling“. You load up a webpage, scroll to the bottom, and the program automatically loads up the next page in sequence and tacks it onto the bottom of the previous page. Reading a blog is…transformed. Amazing, clever, and obvious really.
It’s really annoying that some things are only obvious when someone else has done them first.
Image: hongkiat
Nithering
Hornsea – the Bahamas of England’s east coast.
Some folk say Hornsea can be gloomy, dank and bitterly cold. They’re fools.
Growing up as a child, I used to look out of my window and watch the sun come out in all its radiant rosy-fingered beauty.
What fascinated me was that it always came out at a great distance. Over Hornsea, the grey skies were permanently locked and bolted.
When I asked my parents what this was all about, they told me to be grateful we had enough coal to survive the winter. Happy memories.
Today, thanks to global warming, Hornsea is enjoying a kind of rennaissance, particularly with the establishment of a high-profile “boot-camp” for the British Antarctic Survey, and a residential building-boom resulting from the ground thawing enough to be diggable for the first time since the last Ice Age.
It’s a town that has everything. It’s true what they say: when you’ve been to Hornsea, you’ve visited the ends of the earth.
It gives me a warm glow to think of it.
Overheard. *hic*
(At night, on the streets of York, with hearing attenuated by two small bottles of Jacques)
- “IT’S THE FINAL PILTDOWN, DIDDLE-DAA-DAAA, DIDDLE-DA-DA-DA” – a lad slurrily having a crack at karaoke, and I’m guessing he’s an archaeology student.
- “John, if you don’t come over here this second I’ll bloody well come over there!” – Another triumph for male psychology.
- “Of course’ss stone. Is’s same stone that the Romans used to build the Minster.” – Bless.
- “What do you mean, keep your f***in’ voice down?” – shouted by a lady into her mobile phone outside Marks and Spencers at 11pm, into a silent street, at a volume you’d normally associate with football matches.
Ah, York.
Image: gerry balding
