Greetings from 2006

I've fallen through a hole in the space-time continuum and I'm writing this from 2006, or it sure feels like it.

Disaster struck at work the other day, and for once it wasn't work related. I dropped my Blackberry, the trackerball fell out, and the wee chromed ring bit rolled off under a cage. I managed to recover all the bits, but I was quite distraught.

Somehow it still worked, I called up the nice people at Orange and they said they'd send me a new one if I paid £60. I said I'd think about it.

Luckily the internet told me that the trackerball is just held in by magnets. So I popped it back in, making sure everything was the right way round and it worked, almost as good as new.

Until the next day when none of the keys worked. People would phone, I couldn't answer. Emails would come through, I couldn't read. Blogging needed to be done and couldn't be.

The internet had the answer this time too, moisture had gotten into the phone, and sticking it in front of a hairdrier would fix it, sometimes.

So I gave it a try, the keys came back to life, I called my attractive young ladyfriend to assure her I was still alive. Then the keys died again, and no amount of hair-drying would fix it.

My sim card is now in my old 2006 Nokia, the battery life is about six hours, and it doesn't do email or internetting.

All the stored phone numbers from the last three years have been lost, so I just have the number of people who I was still in touch with in 2006. Hello ladies.

The great and tedious saga of me trying to get an internet connection of my own, as documented previously here, as drawn to an uncomfortable close as I've abandoned the plan of getting my Ubuntu netbook online and had to settle for my old cranky desktop computer which takes half an hour to boot up.

When it finds an internet connection, all by itself it loads up MSN messenger/Live messenger. Does anyone still use that? I fear not.

On the way walking to work, through Wembley, there's a wee independent computer game shop, in the window on Monday I noticed amongst the preowned PS3s and XBox 360s, they had a preowned original Xbox, only £15. Now way back in another life I used to test AV and hifi systems and we got an Xbox at work, I used to spend weeks and weeks playing Project Gotham Racing, nipping round Edinburgh and Stockholm, and now this was my chance to get back.

Alas, when I went in the shop, it had been sold. Still it would have been just like 2006.

On Sunday I wandered out to the Hangover Lounge at The Lexington, where in with the chilled out music, it was also Scrabble Club, hosted by Ken Chu. I hadn't seen him in months. I couldn't help but think, there's few people more 2006 than Ken Chu, bless 'im.

This is what the past feels like.

Hopefully a courier should be bringing round my replacement Blackberry this evening, and the nightmare can start to end.

So much for driftwood dreams

Days have passed since I posted about my dreams and aspirations, the one about wanting to build my own floating island, somewhere bobbing about in the lost continent of discarded plastic in the North Pacific Gyre.

I'm not alone.

It seems this meme has spread far and wide, well, The Spectator warmly embracing the article in Wired

Friedman and his followers are not the first band of wide-eyed dreamers to want to build floating utopias. For decades, an assortment of romantics and whack jobs have fantasized about fleeing the oppressive strictures of modern government and creating a laissez-faire society on the high seas. Over the decades, they've tried everything from fortified sandbars to mammoth cruise ships. Nearly all have been disasters. But the would-be nation builders assembled here are not intimidated by that record of failure. After all, their plans are inspired by the ethos of the modern tech industry, where grand quixotic visions are as common as BlackBerrys, and they see their task not as a holy mission but as something like a startup. A couple of software engineers came up with an innovative concept, then outsourced it to a community and let the wisdom of the crowd improve on it. They scored financing from a top-tier venture capitalist and assembled a board of directors. They will be transparent, blogging their progress. If they fail—which, let's face it, is the most likely outcome—they will do so quickly, in time-honored Valley fashion. But if they succeed, they have one hell of an exit strategy.

From the looks of things, their plans are a bit more developed than my own, with heli-pads and floating support columns.

I think I'll stick with my plan of building my stead from marine debris and sargassum, I can use ghost nets to bind it all together. Might have to relocate to the North Atlantic Gyre rather than the Pacific, its closer to home.

Hmph, on reading the article and the youtube videos attached. I reckon for the pro's who don't want to make their island out of garbage, they'd be best off buying a handful of really big ships, like the ones clogging up Hong Kong, and lashing them together. Maybe welding them together, but aye, something that's alread built and seaworthy. It'll be good for a few years, but then when one of the middle ships springs a leak and sinks, you'll lose half of your island.

Product development

I rather like this wee graph that I found on Blue Matter here, not for the way it shows the adoption of new services and technology has speeded up.

But because it lists the trappings of 21st century civilisation, and show's how the western world has spent a century developing these things, making them affordable to the massed, ubiquitous and available.

So in third world countries, for the poor populations, for all the abuse and exploitation that goes on by the west and by their own corrupt leaders, we can take them from the top left corner to the bottom right.

No need to re-invent the wheel.

Is the touchscreen smartphone the pinnacle of human civilsation? The iPhone, is that it? The moment when every member of the human race can have a touchscreen smartphone and the infrastructure is in place to support it, that's the peak of the machine-age.

**UPDATE**
Eep, I forgot about the multi-touch touchscreen smart phone, when that's ubiquitous, then we've won.

Terror strikes

More terrifying things and stuff...

I'm just trying to change over my old T-mobile number to my Orange Blackberry, as per instructions left on this blog in the comments the other day.

IMG_6024
Originally uploaded by manc_ill_kid

Whilst the folk at T-Mobile and Orange have been very helpful I'm still someone confused and disorientated. In my left hand I have my old T-mobile phone with its T-mobile sim card and half hour battery life, and in my right hand I have my funky Blackberry with its Orange simcard, week long battery life and its ability to email-to-blog with photies to strike terror into bands and English cities.

Some questions

• So at what point do I ping out the sim card from my old phone and put it in my new phone?
• Do I need to do this at all?
• What about all the phone numbers stored in my old phone?
• Do any of them really matter since I haven't phoned 95% of them in a long long time?
• Should I just put out a facebook / twitter message saying I've long my phone, my new number is (actually same old number) and politely ask people to text me so I can harvest their numbers afresh?
• Or should I scribble out by hand all the old contect numbers and add them to the new phone manually?
• Should I just wait a few days and see what happened with the numbers?
• Should I try phoning from each phone every hour or so and check what number shows up?
• Why do I only think of one person when I imagine phoning up an old contacts?
• Why is that person a big homo from university?
• Am I gay?
• Will this affect my relationship with the girl?
• Can I sit on the Circle Line all day with my Blackberry and live-blog going round and round all day or doesn't the circle line work like that?