Monday, June 28, 2010

Learning to love Apple, kinda

OK so I am now the owner of Apple's latest and greatest must have gizmo, the iPhone 4. In fact I have two of the little buggers as I got Mrs Dracunculus one as well.

Now regulars will know that I'm not mad keen on Steve Job's toys (see my comments on the iPad down the page a bit) and Apple fanbois like this one deserve setting on fire, stomping on and then setting on fire again just to be sure. However a couple of weeks ago I was, much to my surprise, given an 8Gb iTouch as a "thank you" gift from my gaffer at work for all the stuff I did in Honkers which was rather nice. Now I liked my little nano iPod and just saw this as a bit of an upgrade but the more I played with it, got it all working with the wi-fi, added a few apps that I actually use including a very nice graphical calculator that does matrices and calculus the more I liked it. So much so that I thought, "this is good, all it needs is to be online all the time, kind of like a phone" and as I was thinking that Orange my mobile provider rang up and said "Hello Mr Dragon, phone upgrade time again, what would you like?" and I said "iPhone please". And then they told me if I hung on for a week I could have the nice shiny new one when it was released.

So the day after all the sad fucks had queued up for hours to get their Apple heroin the nice man from DHL brought me a couple right to my door and I didn't have to queue up for anything. Nor did I have to pay through the nose as they went onto my 30 quid a month package which has 10 hours of calls and as much text messages and internet as I can eat and they only cost me 32 quid a pop, oh and the contract period is 12 months. The advantages of Orange still thinking I'm a business I guess :-)

So what's it like. Well it's rather nice. The screen display is to die for, brilliantly clear with text incredibly crisp. Sure you would not want to read War and Peace on the thing but for a bit of light surfing it's excellent. There was a but of a brown smudge on the bottom left of the screen (which Peter Ibbotson tweeted back at me was the glue curing or the blood of one of the suicide vicitms from the Foxconn factory where they make the phone, something like that) but it seems to have gone now. Its also very quick and smooth and the pinchy, grabby, wave it in the air like you don't care user interface becomes quite natural quite quickly. I didn't seem to have a problem with the signal dissapearing either but then living in the middle of the swamps as I do I barely get a GPRS signal at the best of times so today in town is going to be the true test of that.

The downsides as far as I can tell are just the normal ones you get with any Apple product and the reasons I don't own any Mac type products. First you have to use iTunes which is just about the suckiest piece of software in the Western Spiral Arm and you can do with it only what Steve Fecking Jobs says you can. Want to add words to the spell checker... no, can't do that. Want to set your ringtone to Kraftwerk's "Computer Love" which you have loaded up... no, can't do that either. How about using it as a portable hard drive? Nope, sorry. Want to write your own little app for it... oh do sod off, look buy "iCrap" from the hideously overpriced app store, we know what's best for you, little person.

Now if I could do all those things on my piddly little Sony Ericcson i910 how come I can't on your box Steve?

Still those niggles aside, I do rather like it and it can stay. I'd say get one if you can on a good tariff where you don't have to pay that much and you're due a phone upgrade anyway but if you go and pay 600 odd quid for one you need your bumps read.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Enough with the world cup already

Look I know there's a footy match on round at Nelson Mandela's old gaff at the moment but does every single fucking product I use have to jump on the sodding bandwagon? I mean my cornflakes at breakfast have "A feast of football" splattered all over the packaging with some bollocks about winning a shin-pad if I send in three packet tops. If I want a few pringles to nibble on when flicking through the TV channels to find something not soccer related I now have to open a packet of "Pringoooooals" and there's world-cup themed sandwiches in the staff canteen.

Honestly I am expecting to sit down on the loo only to see Wayne Fucking Rooney's gurning fizzog leering at me as it's been printed on the bog roll.

And what's got everyone's knickers in a bunch? Well everyone who gives a shit about watching the spectacle of a bunch of overpaid tossers kicking a ball about anyway. That would be the "vuvuzela" which is the Xhosa word for "wank-trumpet" apparently. I can see how folk might be a tad irritated by said "instrument" as quite by accident I caught the last 10 minutes of Rooney and his friends being held to a one-all draw by a nation to whom footy ranks around the same level of interest as competitive scrabble or morris dancing. It took a minute to work out what was wrong with the sound as all I could hear was a swarm of angry bees doing a simultaneous B-flat fart, ah - that would be your knuckle-dragging football fan embracing the "cultural diversity of the Rainbow Nation" and honking his plastic wank-trumpet. I found I wanted to ram the bloody things flare end first up their collective arses within about 90 seconds so what the hell it must be like listening to it for 90 minutes I hate to think.

And can you imagine being in the stadium itself? I read the noise level of these things is 113dB which, to give you an idea, is the peak sound pressure of my 16" chainsaw when it's at full chat. I fully expect our wandering fans to come back from SA and walk straight into the nearest hospital to get treated for deafness.

Maybe they could pick up some retro-viral drugs to handle the HIV they picked up off the local good-time girls whilst "On tour".

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Gardening with rifles.

Hello dear readers... oh hand on I just had a look at my webstats, let's make that "Hello dear reader and the rest of you who land here after typing "scaly dragon porn" into Google with your left hand because your right hand is otherwise engaged."

Bit of a blogging hiatus over the last couple of weeks as I was on holiday after the HK debacle and before that was too busy telling anyone at work what a complete and utter clusterfuck the HK operation was to get any blogging done. Anyway back now and with concrete poured, greenhouse erected, raised beds made and a whole load of other "grow it yourself" stuff done.

However I'm not entirely sure I'm going about this latest "save the planet grow your own food it tastes better and is good for you" thing that seems to be going on at the moment. Sure all those things might be true but it's so far cost me a small fucking fortune to even get going. Tomatoes, peppers and chillies all need to be grown more or less indoors so that's 180 quid for the sand, cement and gravel, 200 quid for a cement mixer (I have lots of concrete to make later on so I splurged on a new one) then 800 quid for a wood greenhouse because the aluminium ones are crap so all in with pots, compost and the all important little sticks that say what each plant is I've spent the best part of 1300 quid on this so far which would buy a hell of a lot of chillies I reckon.

Yes I know I could have done things cheaper. We did make a start with a cheapie plastic "greenhouse" which was basically thick plastic over a flimsy frame which is getting results but it (a) is dropping to bits already with one part of the "door" held together with bulldog clips after the zip broke and (b) looks dreadful.

The beds were a bit cheaper - just 80 quid for some timber and a bit of my time to screw it all together and 20 quids worth of timber treatment. We're only going to use these for stuff like lettuice and expensive veg like white onions though as living in the middle of a swamp where the predominant industry is growing things I can pick up a 25kg sack of maris pipers for under a tenner and that lasts us most of the winter so sod growing my own spuds.

Oh and the chickens... wow we get free eggs and they are much better than the shop bought ones. And the chickens themselves were cheap as we got ex battery hens so it was just a fiver each as a donation to some hen-hugging charity and they are cheap to feed. Ah but they need a house to live in - I got a plastic one as when I costed the timber to make a traditional henhouse the plastic one came in about the same price. And then living in the middle of a swamp as you do as soon as you get chickens you end up with rats.

So now I have a shiny new air rifle to deal with the rat issue. Got a reasonably priced 200 quid one from China (so now Blackpowder is not talking to me because I got a girly gun rather than a proper one) and there is something quite theraputic about sitting on your deck in the evening blasting away at the furry little bastards and at 15 metres even a crap shot like me can hardly miss and they just go "squeek" and fall over (apart from the one I had to finish off with a brick as I fluffed the headshot) but yet another expense I could have done without.

So there you are, self sufficiency and growing your own food. I would not recommend it unless you already have a very well paid job. But you do get to kill rats with a gun.