Monitoring My Aggression

It’s not often I write about my computer hardware. I’m not a nerdy twenty-something anymore who obsesses over the size of my motherboard or the speed of my processor. I no longer care about the make, model or speed. I just want things to work. To let me do what I want to do. To surf, to write, to research. Whatever. And no, “whatever” does not equal “dodgy web sites”.

I wrote about my monitor a while ago (a Cibox if you must know). It keep switching itself off. I was close to committing acts of violence against its LCD display. I realized at the time how ridiculous such an act would be.

I’m ashamed to say I’ve now gone beyond seeing the ridiculousness of computer focused brutality. It has become my normal mode of operation.

I snatched 10 minutes of computer time this morning before leaving for work. The bloody monitor switched itself off no less than 8 times. The only remedy is to unplug the power cable and then ram it back home again.

This has now become a dangerous remedy. I can hear electricity buzzing and arcing around the back. I suspect the socket has taken such a beating it now resembles Pete Burns’ lips. I have also punched the monitor in the face more than once too. I mean, actually physically punched it. To the point where it hurt my knuckles.

I’ve searched on-line for a diagnosis (for the monitor problems not my sore knuckles – I’m well aware of what caused that). Some web sites speak of driver issues with Windows 7. They might be right. The sporadic shutting down isn’t as arbitrary as it should be. It feels like my own interactions with the internet are causing it. No, not dodgy web sites again. I click on a link or close down a web page and ping! The monitor dies. The timing it just too spot on. However, my constant stabbing away round the back with the power cable has probably caused additional damage to the monitor. It now can’t be trusted to be sold on safely. It will have to be ditched.

I will take great pleasure in doing this, believe me.

I am seriously considering buying a gun.

Anyway, the upshot is that, despite not being able to afford it, I have ordered a brand new spanking 21.5 inch Samsung monitor from Amazon. It was dispatched this morning. On the one hand it feels like an extravagant waste of money on what is – relatively speaking – a non-essential item.

On the other, it does mean I will save a fortune on no longer having to attend anger management classes.

Because let’s be honest, they weren’t working anyway.

Rather like my old monitor.

*Sigh*

And breathe...

Homing From Work

A lot of employers these days are saving money by encouraging (or ‘supporting’ as it is known in business parlance) employees to work from home. Some IT bod leaves his subterranean life denial system (otherwise known as the IT Services Office), goes round to the employee’s gaff and installs some software onto their home PC or laptop which enables them to dial into their work PC almost as if they were actually at work doing it in person. I guess a simple telephone monitoring system then enables the employer to sift official work calls from spurious demands to sex line numbers in order that they pay for bona fide work calls only.

Hey presto, your earnest young employee is now being paid to work from home but without consuming the employer’s electricity, gas, water, lighting, air, toilet facilities, canteen services or any of the other perks that an employer is wont to provide. The work gets done; the employee gets paid as usual but the employer saves a pretty bundle in consumables and fuel bills.

‘Working from home’. It’s a great lark and a wonder of the modern age.

But I feel the envelope has not been pushed out far enough.

I want to work for an employer who not only allows me to ‘work from home’ but also – more importantly – allows me to ‘home from work’.

I want to be able to sit at my workstation dressed in jimjams and even possibly wrapped up in an old blanket with a steaming mug of hot chocolate in my hand. I want to be able to spend 3 hours on internet prevarication before I actually commit myself to the task that I originally sat down in front of the computer to perform. Once this task has been completed (i.e. answering a few emails) I want to waste another few hours on Facebook and Twitter giving the entire world a blow by blow account of all the amazing things I am not actually doing.

Sat at my desk drinking cocoa. Where does the time go? Lol.

I demand daytime telly, lunchtime telly, afternoon telly and then one of those mid afternoon drama serials – Mid Somer Murders or some shit like that – something I can snooze off too. I’ll also need a steady supply of bread to make toast, accompany tinned soup and comprise the odd sandwich that I will need to nurture my delicate constitution towards the safe haven of the evening meal when I can at last relax and bask in the glory of another hard day at the office completed. Then, of course, I will want to snookem’s up in bed with a nice hot water botty placed lovingly upon my tendermost regions.

Bliss.

You may be wondering what benefit this set up will have for society? Well, the more of us that home from work the less social housing we will need. This will free up housing for those people who are unable to home from work because they don’t have a job and therefore have nowhere to live. I must point out that people who take busman’s holidays don’t really feature in my Utopia. The more of us who home from work in communal offices will use less fossil fuels en masse than we would if we were all living in separate domiciles – thus the ecology of the planet receives a much needed boost. We could also share TVs, fridges, ovens, PlayStations – again, reducing consumption of fossil fuels and the creation of CFCs. There would also be no need to drive to and from work – so further reductions in oil consumption and pollution are produced.

For the planet this entire set-up would be nothing but an out-and-out winner.

The only downside would be having no downtime at all from your employer.

*Sigh*

Bugger.

Back to the drawing board...

So. Freeview. It’s A Bit Shit

It’s been about 4 weeks since we ditched the cable TV package and bought a mid range, mid price set top box from Argos. More than enough time for the new system to bed-in and outlive the initial honeymoon period.

Sure we can record one channel while watching another. Sure we can even record two different channels at the same time while watching one of them. Or we can even record stuff while watching stuff we’ve already recorded. And the rather capacious harddrive means we can store entire series and entire film oeuvres and still have room for the odd sitcom or two shoehorned on top.

Long live the great god Technology.

Except the reception is patchy and intermittent. This despite blowing the best part of £200 on a brand spanking new TV aerial and “booster box” – apparently the latter was necessary because our house is in a “slight dip” which is further aggravated by the presence of a 3 storey apartment block a couple of roads away whose sole purpose in life (aside from acting like a Chav hatchery) is to block out the TV signal that legitimately should be ours.

But here’s the thing: the reception seems to go at more or less the same time every night. 8.0pm approaches and the picture pixelates and the sound pops and jumps like that annoying comedian from the 70’s who’s main shtick was to pretend to have a dodgy hearing aid and would thus speak like this: “-llo can y- h- me? I’m h-ing tr-ble w- my h-ing ai-“

Yeah, right, ‘cos the ol’ voicebox is controlled by a device you plug into your ears, isn’t it, you st-pid b-st-d?

We’ve tried turning it off and on. We’ve tried changing channels. We’ve tried blowing onto the box in case, you know, it’s overheated playing back The Sarah Jane Adventures to the kids (well, Rani is a bit of a babe).

But all to no avail.

Reception is scrambled.

So something must be occurring around the same time every night and interfering with our TV reception. My money is on the students next door. I daresay 8pm sees them opening their coffin lids to finally start their day and all logging-on en masse to Windows Messenger and Facebook to see if anybody actually gives a shit about their status (“drank 8 bottles of tiger beer last night am well wasted”).

I can’t think what else it can be.

Either way if my Freeview box can’t cope with a little bit of interference then the great god Technology is dead and buried in my book. I mean, we never had reception problems like this when I was a kid. We only had 3 channels and they all worked fine. The only time the TV would go on the fritz was when a seagull would sit on the TV aerial or there’d be a thunderstorm somewhere in the Birmingham area.

Freeview? What a misnomer. It’s anything but free and half the time you can’t view anything.

Still, at least I can record static and white noise from 2 different TV channels whilst watching a digital snowstorm on a third.

Every cloud, eh?

Return Of The Blogging Jedi

So last week I felt a tremor in the Force; you know that weird mystical energy that binds all blogs together, that flows through and around them? It’s called the internet or something...

Anyway, it gave me bad dreams, nightmares, a strange prescience of the blogging world that is to come. My master told me to quieten my mind and accept what I saw, to let go of my blogging attachments. “The Future it is that you see in your mind. Your fears let go of you must. In the Force trust you may.”

I told him to go and get stuffed. I don’t know about you but I don’t take orders or advice from someone who looks like a talking sprout and talks like a Norwegian exchange student.

It was possibly the worst move I ever made. I can see that now.

I was wholly unprepared for what happened next.

Out of the technological darkness came a dark shape. All in black. A cape. A mask. That anonymous heavy breathing that I normally only hear on the phone at 4am in the morning. We fought. Our light sabers clashing and humming like vibrators at a Hugh Hefner private video party.

I confess, I got cocky. I thought I was already a Jedi and could do anything, that I was unassailable. But I slipped. I fell. I found myself on my butt, on a gantry suspended thousands of feet above a man-made electronic chasm.

A black gloved hand reached out to me.

“Steve, Steve, the blogging Force is strong in you. Join with me and we can overthrow the rulers of the bloggosphere.”

“No!” I cried. “I’ll never join you!” I tried to raise my vibrator saber again but the battery was flat.

The mask spoke again. “Obi Wan never told you the truth about the blogging world...”

“He told me enough!” I snarled. “He said that you corrupted all the mummy bloggers! That you destroyed them all!”

“No, Steve.” The mask shook its head and thrust its gloved hand towards me one more time. “I am your mummy blogger. Join me, we can rule the internet mummy blogger and... er... daddy blogger.”

“Noooooooooo!”

What could I do? What was left to do?

I hurled myself screaming and nauseous from the gantry and after a fall of what seemed like aeons I found myself back in the garbage dump where I’d originally started – surrounded by all the usual stuff I write about: crap times at work, poor finances, all the women I fancy off the telly and all the drunks and oddballs of Leamington Spa.

And a cat in hell’s chance of ever being offered the chance to endorse the latest Nestle breast pump or Palitoy home liposuction kit.

God it’s good to be back.

Brown Bread

The life of yours truly should have come to an abrupt end last Sunday at approximately 3.37 in the afternoon.

I was, as you might have guessed, doing a form of DIY (the single biggest killer of the average male in the UK after cancer, stress and marriage. I am, of course, joking regarding the latter – a woman doesn’t have to be married to a man to be able to kill him). I was doing the gardening.

For once it wasn’t a lawn mower based accident. With a little ‘un running around I’ve become very OCD about always unplugging the mower before I empty it or even leave it untended for the smallest amount of time.

On this occasion the agent of my destruction was the hedge trimmer. A nasty biting brute of a device that lays our front hedge low with the slightest of touch. I’d unwound the cable. I’d plugged it into the extension lead. All seemed good to go.

I pulled the trigger.

And if the world had been any different – if human technological advances hadn’t brought into being such things as fuses and trip switches – my life would have been over at this point. I’d’ve been a goner. I’d’ve been, to quote my old granddad, brown bread. And you wouldn’t be having to read this ‘ere blog post right now – a fact, I’m sure, which will have many of you lamenting the safety features on the average electrical plug.

The cable you see had, unbeknownst to me (because I was tired / daydreaming and didn’t check it properly), become interwoven in the moving teeth of the trimmer.

As soon as I turned it on the trimmer severed the source to its own power. A single spark – like a dud firework – leapt forward and fizzled out before it hit the pavement. This was the first I knew of my death. I say death because I’m sure that in a parallel universe somewhere funeral arrangements are even now being arranged for a full state burial and my wife is celebrating gymnastically with the milkman.

Bizarrely, this close encounter with t’other side didn’t hit home until much later. My first reaction was to run cap in hand to my wife and apologize for coking the trimmer at a time when we can’t afford a new dibbler let alone a hefty new electrical gardening gadget. I’d also tripped the main electricity supply to the house and my youngest son was complaining vociferously that Woody and Buzz Lightyear had rudely vacated their usual slot on the TV screen.

In the panic of trying to find the distribution board and right these myriad wrongs by restoring the appropriate switch my missed appointment with St Peter completely slipped my mind. Life went on as normal. Life indeed went on.

It is only now, days later, that I realize how lucky I had been. How lucky and how foolish.

How easily and unthinkingly we go about our daily business blasé and nonchalant to the many potential death traps that litter our modern world!

My humble thanks go to all those boffins who over the years have contributed to the safety mechanisms of the common-or-garden house plug. My thanks go also to whatever deity decided to give my miserable soul a second chance. And my biggest thanks go to you, dear reader, for the bouquets of flowers you would have undoubtedly sent, the donations to my favourite charities and the selfless acts of throwing your mini-skirted selves (and that includes the guys) down onto my coffin as it is lowered into the damp earth and your wails and protests that there simply wasn’t the time to ravish me one more time.

‘Cos on the bright side, folks, there still is.

See. All’s well that ends well.

iClaudius

With the advent of the iPhone, the iPod and the iPad I’m feeling the need to cash in on this bandwagon of “convenience technology” by throwing my own hat into the ring. I’d like to run a few ideas (or should that be: iDeas) by you just in case there are some enlightened iNventors or honest admin assistants at the Patents Office out there who’d be willing to take a gamble and make us both some money.

My first concept that is up for grabs is the iPub. Yes, the mobile pub in your pocket. Enhancing hologramatic technology you can have a virtual 3D pub in your pocket for the fraction of the price of a pint at Spearmint Rhino. Just toggle between Irish / East End / Corrie / Wine Bar / Polari for the ambience of your choice and let the flock wallpaper and the smell of urine and sawdust pixelate into HD being before your very eyes. With programmable jukebox music, Easter egg lock-in option and “Easy Lay” expansion software you need never have to suffer a miserable night in on your own again. Comes with a choice of 3 barmaid personalities: Keeley Hawes, Meryl Streep and Beryl Reid and warm beer (depending on how cool you keep your trouser pockets).

Concept no.2 is the iPrayer for those who want to bring their worship into the 21st Century. This little device comes complete with the religious icon (ha ha) of your choice and seamlessly integrates with all modern social networking sites – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace – and allows you to share your devotions and votive offerings with the world wide web. Why get on your knees and bang your head against a pew when you can email God or send him a Tweet or two? There is an optional Confessional mode for those of you with Catholic leanings – though be careful to run this in silent mode. For those of you with Old Testament sympathies the device also doubles as a sizeable and weighty stone that can be used to punish adulterers and those who have given their seed unto Molech. Device is waterproof up to 10 metres and comes with an easy-kleen screen.

Concept no. 3 is the iPimp and yes I am scraping the barrel here. Choose from over 50 accents to give your iPimp the national flavour of your choice – Eastern Bloc, South American, Cockney, to name but a few – and indulge yourself electronically in the seedy world of human trafficking. An advanced touch screen menu system will allow you to choose between violence or drug addiction as the method of controlling the merchandise or simply purchase an optional software upgrade that will give your iPimp a Huggy Bear “skin” and render all your transactions somehow fun and jocular and Carry On-esque without a word ever having to be said to the wise, know worrimean? The iPimp comes supplied with a his ‘n’ hers virtual reality enhancing body suit with over a million electronically fired neurone amplifiers to make your experience as real as possible. We recommend that customers buy the iPimp in conjunction with the iPrayer in order to make the most of the inevitable post-transaction feelings of guilt, remorse and self disgust and the need to absolve oneself of an emotional and moral stain.

Concept no. 4 is the iPrick. This tiny, tiny device... yeah, yeah, I think this joke has just about run its course now. If anyone from The Gadget Show is watching I’m available most evenings for interviews but please make sure it’s Suzi Perry and not Jason Bradbury. Ta.

Seventh Heaven

The end of last week saw me both ill and gadgetted up with a brand new PC. Unfortunately the former delayed my getting to grips with the latter by a day or two.

‘Cos, let’s face it, you have to be completely healthy when faced with a brand spanking new PC complete with brand spanking new operating system – the much vaunted Windows 7. New PC’s are stress-fests of the highest order. Will it like your peripherals? Will it run your software? Or will it spit the dummy at the first whiff of your modem, tantrum at the mere proximity of your scanner? Will you have to claw your way through dozens of installation discs that have littered your shelves like strange voodoo objects that you’re too scared to throw away but have no idea what at all it is they were created to do?

The man in the computer shop assured me that the above scenarios would just not take place. Windows 7 is – despite a ubiquitous mistrust of all things Microsoft – a break-through. An operating system that for once delivers; it does exactly what it says on the box.

Just plug everything in, the man advised me, it’ll all work instantly...

Yeah right.

I’ve run PC’s for 10 years, mate. Plug ‘n’ play in a fallacy. It rarely happens. Instead it takes hours of head-bashing to work everything out or to download the necessary patches and updates and tweaks.

Like I said. I needed to be fully fit and healthy before attempting a job of this magnitude.

But blow me if the man wasn’t right.

The installation discs for my various bits of antiquated hardware were unnecessary. The dust on them has not been disturbed.

I plugged everything in and everything worked with barely a pause. I was online, emailed up and fully connected with the WWW in under 10 minutes. An absolute record.

No glitches. No freezes. No compatibility issues. All my hardware A-OK. All my software A-OK.

Microsoft has at last come up with a shiny new operating system that I have fallen completely in love with. It’s smooth. It’s (so far) stable. It’s visual and intuitive. It’s easily customizable. It’s fast (though this might have more to do with my quad core processor and fully stocked memory than the OS).

It’s, in short, beautiful.

I like it. I’m impressed.

Suddenly I’ve fallen in love with my computer again. I’m experiencing a new honeymoon period. I hate being away from it. For anyone or anything.

All other life is a distraction.

Me and my new motherboard, we’re like bonded, OK?

So, that’s it, folks. Me and Windows 7 have got things to do, things to discuss. We gotta shoot the breeze. And we might be some time.

Bye.

Psychic Jam

Sauntering along to the local shops the other day I was struck by the sheer number of satellite dishes that adorn the houses – my own included though we are not connected (it came with the house and we haven’t as yet motivated ourselves sufficiently to have it removed).

And not for the first time – after all this is hardly an earth shatteringly original thought – I found myself musing on the terrifyingly large volume of radio waves that we must all spend our lives totally immersed within. TV, radio, satellite, citizen’s band, police radios, MI5 ops (they’re always hanging around outside my house) not to mention various pirate radio stations and various terrorist groups constructing vast microwave machines to fry our pituitary glands while we’re sleeping.

It can’t be good for us, surely, all that static and electronic caterwauling constantly beaming its way through our genetic building blocks? I’m not sure I want my DNA modified by Chris Moyles though Jo Whiley is very welcome to run her fingers through my scintillating chromosomes.

It’s only a transient worry, I admit. I hold it only for a few seconds and then it’s gone (possibly fried out of my brain cells by Jihadi microwaves) but it does keep recurring.

How do we know that all these radio waves aren’t having an adverse effect on our emotional make-up? That we’re not being psychologically damaged?

I’d love to be able to breathe some clean, unadulterated air one day just to be able to find out. To do this I need to find somewhere that’s in a technological blind spot – literally off the radar.

Anyone got any suggestions?

(Royston Vasey doesn’t count.)

Electric Boogaloo

I have just survived the maddest two days at work that I’ve ever experienced in my life.

Day One. On Tuesday afternoon a burning smell was reported coming from the main electric metre of the building. Investigation revealed not only an overpowering smell of burning wires but also an inordinate amount of heat emanating from the metre box and the cable housing beneath.

I’m not a trained electrician but even I know that’s not a good sign.

Cue various visits from various electricians and experts who all, to a man, sucked their teeth, nodded, oohed and aahed and basically said there was an imminent risk of fire and/or explosion.

We promptly evacuated. The building that is. Though the public were amazingly nonchalant about getting out of the danger zone. The internet junkies from the Library’s cyber café had to be dragged away twitching and sobbing about their abridged chatroom romances. Old ladies had to go to the loo just to spend that last penny. And we even had a Christian group in the Assembly Room who refused to leave early because God’s work was far more important than saving their own hides – though they were lightening fast at demanding compensation for their lost room hire. God certainly moves in mysterious ways.

As do the electricity board. They turned up around 7.30pm, took a look at the metre and cable intake, isolated it, shrugged their shoulders and said they’d see us in the morning around 9.0am. Ta-ta.

Great.

Except that the building only has battery back-up power for a maximum of 8 hours. Which meant that all the fire alarms, security alarms, heating, IT facilities, and all other essential services all died around 1.0 am the next morning leaving the entire building – including the Art Gallery with an art and object collection worth millions of pounds – completely “unprotected”.

To add to our problems most of the external doors to the building are electronically operated. Without power they all defaulted to open so absolutely anybody could have walked in off the street and helped themselves to whatever was available. Hence my boss, Jeff, and I were stuck at work until 10.30pm getting all the doors secured with a local carpenter. This involved nailing planks of wood across them on the inside so that they couldn’t be opened and swapping the electronic lock on one door with a mechanical lock so that at least staff with a key could get back into the building again the next day.

Day Two. Back at work to find the place in total darkness and quietude. The electricity board arrived at 9.45am (as opposed to 9.0am) and straight away brewed up for a cup of tea. I guess it’s all a question of priorities.

While the building staff milled about in the penumbral atmosphere, reading newspapers by the light of their mobile phones and basically making use of the shadows for whatever nefarious purposes that took their fancy I ran about trying to coordinate the “clean up” operation so that when power was restored at 12.30pm I was able to lead in a team of engineers, alarm experts and IT boffins to restore the full range of exciting services that my place of work usually offers.

By 3.0pm we were back on-line. All systems go. Sorted. Open for business. Hallelujah.

Except at 4.30pm there was yet another reported smell of burning coming from the electricity metre...

Aaaargh! Here we go again. Sigh.

Anyway the current state of play is this: the smell (and this is from the mouths of top-notch high level experts) is merely the new unit “bedding in”. All is kosher. All is well. It’s fine, gov. Have a cup of tea. Praise the Lord. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.

Worry? I’m too effing knackered to worry.

Night-night all.