http://www.sanrio.com/main/phone/phone.html
http://cellphones.engadget.com/entry/5843052316337252/
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
How long have I lived here?
I’ve just found a cache of wine in one of the kitchen cupboards, I’m sure I went through them all when I arrived, how could I have missed 6 bottles of wine, one of Johnny Walker, one of an impronouncable Ukranian spirit and one of champagne? Unless the agent deviously planted them for me last week when they came to check I’d trashed the house…
Today I’m fighting for bandwidth against a cygwin download…..I need wget ‘cos I can’t get firefox to change its cache location to another drive, thats what you get for setting up win98 on a 500Mb partition, isn’t it? Theres 40Gigs free in the rest of the machine but to download anything it has to go via the now-full system disk. Grrr.
That aside, I went for a wander around the fens earlier. Admittedly I didn’t get very far beyond my village, but I did at least see a field. I was wondering howcome some of these things landed in the ditch at the roadside, there are some things that make sense, like car wheels or coffee cups, I guess even the childs trainers make some kind of sense, but how does a plant pot end up in a ditch in the middle of nowhere? Or a copy of company accounts? Or a handbag?
Perhaps the answer came a few hundred yards later when the footpath ran out at the household recycling centre. An unusual destination for a walk, I suppose, but there didn’t seem much option, so I wandered around a bit, between the shiny new volvos and the battered transits, amazed at the pile of broken washing machines and hardcore.
On the way back, after passing a man with a measuring wheel[0], I noticed the extensive brambles between the A10 and my housing estate – if I’m still here autumn next year I’ll be out with the coathangers trying to avoid the scratches…
Then I darted through an alleyway into the back of another of the village estates, this one has made an attempt at fitting its houses into the surroundings, by giving them apparently random styling from 1900s, 1930s and 1950s, and placing them around a series of ‘village greens’ which don’t make any sense at all, theres no shops, no ammenities, not even a postbox on most of them. All of this plays havoc with my sense of direction, since I’d expected all roads from the village green to go *somewhere*, the one I chose lead into the back door of the school. Oh well, round and round again.
…and Octaine on Thursday night was good, the punk set (whoever that was) was great, but followed by a rock set, I think we’ve lost touch with ‘rock’ over the last few years since there wasn’t anything I recognised apart from Nirvana and Green Day. There were a few irregulars who turned up hoping for some after hours drinking, one took the chance to trip over my feet on the way to the dancefloor (how he managed this with the twelve foot gap between me and the other side of the room is, erm, open to question) and demand an apology from me. “I’m sorry you’re such an idiot you tripped over the feet of someone standing perfectly still minding their own business when there was plenty of space for you to squeeze past”. Happily there one of the ‘regulars’ came over after seeing the incident and made it clear there wasn’t going to be any trouble…
[0] I gotta get me one of those, it’d make it ok to wander around doing apparently random things, “Its ok, hes got a wheel, he must be doing something official that we don’t understand”
“go ahead, don’t worry, go as fast as you want, there’s no need to pay attention to your surroundings…With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square – backward – straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions.”
Book review: In the shadow of the American dream
…The diaries of David Wojnarowicz…
I chose this book purely on the strength of its title, it is, I think, the last book I bought in Tokyo, where you had to take what you could get.
It was slow going, mostly because it contained rather more graphic detail than I was comfortable with about some of his sexual encounters. Though there was a lot of good context material the first two thirds of the book did rather concentrate on things I really didn’t want to read about.
Things got interesting when his friends started getting ill, at that point you get the feeling that his view on life changed, from the live-forever view of a teenager to a rather more fragile and mortal man. After this things spiral down into his own illness and depression that goes with it.
Theres a telling moment where he’s on a roadtrip with a friend but shes not talking about details of her life when he’s been opening up about his – he gets upset that he feels she doesn’t trust him any more and goes into a sulk. These are precious days for him, he knows he doesn’t have much longer but can’t bring himself not to be angry, equally doesn’t express that in such a way it can be solved, perhaps not even open to the idea it could be fixed.
No happy ending, obviously, there rarely is with biographies or diaries, but this has gotten me thinking about the final days, what they’ll look like. More importantly, what I should be doing now, before getting to the point where I know my final days are coming imminently.
Should you read this book? Maybe, if you’re less prudish about homosexual relationships than me and (probably) if you know his works, this will be a worthwhile insight into how they came to be. Me? I won’t read it again, but I think I understand people a bit more now. And certainly understand mortality a bit more. And I’m not sure I like it.
“Is your SIM card 16 or 32?”
Erm, what? It doesn’t make any difference, the application runs on the phone but gets an ‘Access Denied’ message when attempting to connect to GPRS data context. Anyone got any idea how I can talk to someone at O2 who has a clue about what they are talking about? Does anyone in Cambridge have an O2 contract SIM I could borrow for a few hours this afternoon?
Linkblast
“In evidence of his “craziness,” Charlton offers this picture of a Newton resting against a headstone marked “Newton.” (Apple Computer “killed” the Newton in 1998)”
“We really believe that once you’re in a city, there’s no better way to experience it than walk around it and listen to stories and be able to see the sites that are being explained”…which has gotten me thinking some more about technopsychogeography, but I’ll bore you with those thoughts another day.
“The fake screensaver emails contain an attachment with a RAR SFX archive that has embedded key logger Trojan inside”