joe-baldwin.net

OK, right. Last night involved me and Aimee bowling, going to the cinema and seeing Hancock (which really wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be, probably because I expected it to be irredeemably shit) and eventually drinking before we got shouted at by a prick of a bus driver while we were saying goodbye to each other. This last thing (and not, I stress, the rest of the evening, in case that’s ambiguous) has probably been the only profoundly negative thing that actually happened in Truro, which was a shock considering that everyone in my family seems to think of it as depressing for some reason.

Well, it’s not depressing. Yes, startlingly similar to virtually every other major city, but beyond that pretty and with things to do, which is more than I can say for Chesham, a town with no bowling, no cinema (at least not one that doesn’t show films about four decades after their original release - come on Elgiva, this takes the piss, even Padstow has a bloody cinema with more recent films) and now not even a major fast food chain since McDonalds moved out. This last one sticks in my craw a bit; yeah, Mighty Bite and the others are alright but sometimes you want something a bit less substantial. You want a 99p slab of cholesterol infused cow bollocks with some gone off mayonnaise, which sadly nobody seems to want to do any more.

(Incidentally, while I’m on the subject of cheap food, the next newspaper to advertise something cheap or on offer as “inflation busting” or “beating the credit crunch” should be pulverised into a million pieces. Cheap things are going to be “inflation busting” because inflation is more or less just things getting less cheap; beating the credit crunch would mean getting more credit, not spending less. Idiots.)

Burgers are probably not the best sort of food for me to be talking about now. It’s all I’ve bloody well eaten. What did I eat on the train to Truro? Cheeseburger. What did I eat in the hotel restaurant after arriving in Truro? Cheeseburger (with smoked cheese and Aberdeen Angus beef, but still a cheeseburger). What did I eat the following morning at Burger King? Cheeseburger. What did I eat that evening at Burger King? Cheeseburger. What did I eat this morning at Burger King? Cheeseburger. What do I have sitting immediately to my left? A goddamn cheeseburger. My diet, which was previously going so well, has flown entirely out the window (along with all forms of dietary and common sense) to be replaced with endless quantities of lard. Still, this was my holiday, and if I want to eat stupid quantities of hideously unhealthy foods morning noon and night then that’s my goddamn choice. This also has the side benefit of being partially able to blame First Great Western for any heart attacks I may have in the future, which is always a plus side.

Read a fair bit more of Nick Mason’s Inside Out, principally because I needed something to do for four hours. What transpired this morning was leaving the hotel and going to Burger King to read the Guardian; going to a small cafe and reading the Pink Floyd book; going to a pub next door and reading the Pink Floyd book; finally, after all that, going to Truro station and reading the Pink Floyd book for a good two hours because there was simply nothing else to do.

Truro station is an odd place. Last time I was there before this holiday, I had just spent the night sleeping on a landing. I had neither shaved or washed, and for reasons which to this day remain unclear I needed to leave. So I ended up wandering up and down the platforms at Truro station for three hours with only a copy of the Waitrose Chronicle to hand, gazing longingly through the window of the coffee shop that, despite there being someone inside, was going to remain closed until my train was due to leave. Bastardsbastardsbastards. This time was slightly more pleasant; the cafe was open, as was the waiting room, and I had something far more interesting to read than some snotty letters about the latest stupid thing to happen at Bracknell.

The station itself is especially odd; each passing generation of ownership and operation of the station has rubbed off a little bit on it by way of architecture or typography or whatever, giving the uneasy feeling of a station built up entirely of signs and fixtures purchased from charity shops. 1800s GWR benches sit underneath British Rail-fonted platform number signs which themselves hang directly next to a First Great Western poster about cheap fares being available online. This, because I’m a sad cunt, is fascinating while being strangely unsettling.

I’ve just written two paragraphs about a station. Christ on a bike, I need a life.

On the train now. This time I’ve bothered to get a three-way adapter, which lets me plug in the MacBook, and has the disadvantage that I can’t put the thing away easily now. This seemed stupid, until I realised that stealing a laptop on a locked train would be far stupider, considering that to find the perp all you’d have to do is look for the shifty-looking bloke who’s acquired a new MacBook.

Still not writing about last night. Because I can’t be arsed.

I’m still not writing about last night. Not because it was bad or anything, but because I only woke up about 10 minutes ago, I’m dripping wet (laptop while dripping wet? yeah, great idea) and well, screw you. And I’d like to hate on the XDA a bit more.

Maybe I was a little unfair last night. Maybe its faults aren’t with the hardware (fat finger-baiting send button aside) but with Windows Mobile, whose fault nearly all of my complaints I can lay directly at the feet of. It’s like someone aimed a talking doll at preteen girls, so incredibly well made that every girl wants one and would kill their parents in order to steal the money to buy one, but made it spout hideously biological quotes from male German porn stars, in a male German voice, ruining it entirely. And to think I tried to defend it on Slashdot. Tch.

Sitting in a hotel room slagging off a phone. It’s the new black.

OK, about 10 minutes after writing that, I decided “fuck this” and wandered down to Phones4u, after spending those 10 minutes thinking about all the ways the XDA Trion annoyed me. To wit; it’s slow, it’s buggy, it has settings for various things in stupid places, it uses the Mac OS X method of only hiding closed applications but makes you go into a control panel applet to actually quit them, it can’t accept files sent to it by Bluetooth (?!), the built in web browser is a piece of shit (Internet Explorer, natch), it’s huge, it’s bulky, if I press a letter on a keyboard I expect that letter to appear right away and not in two seconds, no the “Send” button should not be above the “W” so if your finger slips a message gets sent halfway through and wastes your money and someone else’s time, if you receive a text message it sometimes won’t play a sound or blink the “message received” light so people think you’re ignoring them, the stylus falls out the bottom and gets lost, the camera is infuriating, the whole unit feels very flimsy and I hate it from the bottom of my heart. I hate it so much that I was willing to sign up for a new contract in the middle of my existing one just to get a new phone. Not even a physical QWERTY keyboard, such a rarity and a nice thing to see, could save it from this sort of horrible writeup; it feels like saying that Hitler being nice to his dog might somewhat mitigate the horrors of the Holocaust.

Instead, I now have a shiny new Samsung TOCCO (TOCCO being “I’m not an iPhone but I sure as fucking hell look like one and pretend I am one” in some form of language) which hasn’t actually once irritated me in the slightest since I’ve got it. Which is actually quite lucky, since the process of obtaining it involved me simply wandering into Phones 4 U, pointing at a shiny looking phone (the LG Viewty) and being told that the TOCCO is better so I should get that one. Frankly, even the network didn’t matter to me - Orange declined me but Vodafone and O2 said “yes”, so I plumped for Vodafone - even though I’d explicitly said I didn’t want Vodafone (for reasons I’m not entirely sure of; probably some sort of racial memory involving apostrophe-based logos or something).

A painless transaction, basically. Except for when I got back to the hotel and noticed that the cheeky sods had signed me up for a £9.99 a month insurance package, despite me not being informed of this or given an opportunity to decline. In fact, it was only mentioned once, when I was handed a booklet about it, which I politely flipped through briefly, pausing to glance at the arse of a model in one of the stock pictures they used to illustrate just how nice peace of mind is, and then ignored.

The rest of the day was spent reading Nick Mason’s Inside Out: A Personal History Of Pink Floyd, which up to the point I’m at appears to be composed entirely of namedropping and wry anecdotes about hauling gear around - which isn’t entirely unwelcome - as well as shots at Roger Waters, which are always welcome. See, while Waters is undeniably talented, and an excellent songwriter - this will probably mark me out as some kind of SWP tosser, but I thought The Final Cut was an excellent album when taken as a whole and had a very potent and truthful message - but at the same time an absolute dickhead to any number of people. Maybe talent is proportional to dickheadedness - if so, then I am clearly the most talented man alive. I’m so dickheaded I can spit roast a woman singlehandedly. In the missionary position.

Bluh. I’ll write more about today tomorrow when I’m on the train or something. I am tired and have had two JD and cokes and am going to watch Life on Mars in bed for a bit.

Edit: After reading this back, this post is actually quite gratuitously offensive. I wish I cared.

I’m going to find whoever designed the O2 XDA Trion and punch them repeatedly in the face until they bleed. While the ability for my MacBook to connect to the Internet through it is pretty nifty, its inability to send files to selfsame MacBook is infuriating in the extreme.

On the positive side, I suppose Facebook will be spared another 4 million dreary holiday snaps.

OK, the pictures of the hotel aren’t made up, I was just looking from the wrong angle. From the rear, basically.

That’s just one of the numerous ways that today has been a journey of discovery. This morning, I discovered that all the stuff about needing to be shown how showers work in hotels is quite painfully true. Mine has five settings; off, quite hot, scalding, quite hot and squirted at you with great force and napalm. I picked the second to last option, after a brief and intensely dispiriting experience on the latter.

I also discovered that shaving gel and foam is total bollocks. I left mine at home, because in my cramped suitcase everything would have been covered in a bright blue foam within about 20 seconds of boarding the Tube. So I ended up using soap, which worked far better than I thought it would. It clings to your skin and doesn’t come off easily, so you can shave properly lubricated. Normally, after shaving, my face would be cut to ribbons and bleeding from numerous places. Not today. Best shave of my life. This too was followed by a further discovery, that even though I can program in Objective C and understand fairly complicated technical concepts without issue, I’m not king of all technology yet as it took me a full 20 minutes to work out how to make the kettle work, those 20 minutes being me having the switch in the “off” position, not realising it and wondering why the water wasn’t boiling.

Then there was an altogether far more unsettling discovery; the automatic bollard. Oh yes. Lewis Black, in one of his standup routines, referred to the end of the universe being a street with a Starbucks across from another Starbucks. He was wrong; the end of the universe is an automatic bollard, a device located in Lemon Quay in Truro. The automatic bollard, which probably comes from the same disturbed mind that invented all the stuff you used to see in Innovations catalogues and the London 2012 logo, lowers itself to allow through one single car and then raises again. It’s also covered in lots of blinky lights.

This is an exciting development, because given the choice between a bollard and no bollard (and expecting drivers to use their better judgement as to when to go out onto the main road) they chose to waste lots of money on a magical futuristic quasi bollard covered in blinkenlights. They’ve started pointlessly motorising and complicating shit just for no real reason. I used to think my touch-activated lamp was pretty needlessly futuristic, but at least a light switch has a purpose. This doesn’t; this is insanity. I’m quite impressed that someone actually bothered to invent such a useless object, the sort of thing Douglas Adams would have a field day over.

I also discovered, among other things, that WH Smith thinks Eric Schlosser books belong in the Reference section, that the irony of looking for them after eating at Burger King is actually not very funny, that Starbucks’ look the same pretty much everywhere and that HSBC branches also look the same pretty much everywhere too.

I’m actually going to dwell on the Starbucks/HSBC thing a bit. Because it initially surprised me that there were all these chain stores in Truro. Then I thought a bit more; I was expecting, this being Cornwall, lots of twee little stores with names like “Brickabrack” selling things covered in seashells with tiny plastic googly eyes - because that’s the sort of impression I got as a tourist. But that’s bollocks; when you start to imagine Truro as less a town in Cornwall than as a town in Britain, you realise that the proliferation of Starbucks and Subway and HSBC and NatWest and WH Smith and Waterstones and HMV and Burger King is not at all surprising. A lot of people do come here, myself sadly included, thinking that Cornwall is some rural hideaway where the year 2008 hasn’t yet permeated it, and then get rudely awakened when they find an ATM. It’s quite perplexing.

It also makes the Cornish nationalism thing look all in all a bit silly; if Cornwall were an independent state, it would be fucked. Not only would it still be composed almost entirely of what would then be foreign businesses and foreign tourists, but there’s the more practical consideration of how exactly you handle border controls over the River Tamar (Saltash station becoming a checkpoint?) and the even more worrying problem that Cornwall is an extremely poor area - so poor, in fact, that it qualifies for Objective One financial aid from the European Union - with very little visible industry to speak of that isn’t tertiary sector (retail and tourism) fishing, shipping or agriculture. Given this vulnerable position, seceding would probably not be wise in the slightest. The country would be fucked before First Great Western checked its first passport.

Final discovery: Death Cab For Cutie’s latest album is pretty good.

Five hours on a fucking train is painful, even with leather seats and a grumpy Irishman. There was only so much Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy I could read before I started willing the train to move a bit fucking faster. Especially during the end of the journey; for the last two hours, the buffet car closed completely, leaving anyone who wanted something to eat or drink up shit creek without a paddle. I feel cheated out of my infinite free coffees and will put in a formal complaint if and when I can be arsed.

The hotel isn’t nearly as bad as the Internet suggested it would be; the reviews I’ve read referred to a smell of dog and cheap, tacky looking rooms. Well, compared to the fucking Ritz, yeah; the hotel is small, and the pictures I’ve seen of it are as far as I can tell completely made up (as the place doesn’t even bear the slightest resemblance), but it’s nice. As good as I’d expect a hotel to be, really, and yet another reason to innately distrust anything on the Internet whatsoever, including this.

Not pissing down with rain. This is probably a bad sign in general, and most likely a sign that the clouds are saving up some nice, heavy rain for me tomorrow, which will suck. Especially as my coat is about 300 miles away.

OK, now finally on the train to Cornwall. Suffered a small scare when some points failed at Neasden, leading to the Metropolitan line being totally fucked for delays, and the train having to take a detour through the Jubilee line - further leading to confused Jubilee line passengers at West Hampstead somehow missing that what they thought was their train was a different shape, too big to fit in the tunnels, very un-Jubilee like and had, as what may be considered a dead giveaway, the words “Metropolitan line” plastered on it. The humour of this only occurred to me after I stopped worrying about what I would do if I missed the outbound train, as I have one of these ridiculously stupid “Advance” tickets.These, in case you’ve not heard of them, are an invention designed to make something that should be worry free (i.e. locating a long, smoke emitting object on wheels which goes where you want to go) into a time trial worthy of the Crystal Maze if something goes wrong. This is because your ticket is tied to a specific train at a specific time and, in my case, a specific seat. If you miss any of the above, your ticket is worthless. I’ve suffered this before; a train to Loughborough wasn’t announced, so me and my then girlfriend missed it, leading to some pissing Midland Mainline jobsworth (oblivious to the fact that my girlfriend was crying) arguing with us over us having to buy a new ticket because we took the advice of station staff. They may be cheap, but they’re invented by tossers.Anyway, yes, on the train now, in a reclining leather seat with a coffee, a cheeseburger (which actually tastes fairly good, as it fucking should for £3.25) and a DVD of Dylan Moran, playing on a MacBook which I can’t charge because the plug is too big for the at-seat power points. Bollocks.

For fucks sake.

Microsoft, on 29th April, released a new version of their MSN client for Mac. A major release - 7.0. When MSN 7.0 came about on Windows, this introduced a metric fuckton of features, like nudges, winks… basically all kinds of shit to irritate anyone who had any kind of social connection with you, no matter how tenuous.

The new features in Microsoft Messenger for Mac 7.0?

• A new look. It’s not Unified, it’s not the old theme (which even looked alright); it’s fucking ugly.
• Bonjour support. This would be lovely, if I actually knew anyone who had any fucking interest whatsoever in Bonjour. Or even had a Mac, frankly.
• More features for the corporate side. This is funny, because, for all of the niceties of Macs, there are about three companies that have huge Mac deployments, and at any rate they will most likely be using something like Jabber rather than thinking “Hmm, we have hundreds of Apple computers. Let’s get Office Communication Server, rather than a P133 with Jabber which has a native client on every single one of them, and what’s more one that doesn’t suck donkey balls.” One of these features is A/V support…
• No personal audio/video support. Now, true, this doesn’t matter much to me, seeing as nobody wants to see me on webcam anyway seeing as I look like a cross between Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charlie Brooker and a violent street attack with a spade, but I may want to see other people on webcam. More to the point, there are other people who may want to see each other on webcam too. This is, hands down, the most requested feature of them all, because in this day and age EVERYONE FUCKING USES AUDIO AND VIDEO SUPPORT IN INSTANT MESSENGERS. Every single MacWorld, Steve Jobs - the preening, turtlenecked cunt - comes on and outlines a new shiny in iChat’s AV support. Maybe it has a new feature where you can make gigantic hairy dicks erupt out of the forehead of whoever you’re talking to, or some kind of magic clothes remover which removes the dignity-strippiture of having to ask your chat buddy to take her goddamn bra off. Either way, iChat accelerates leaps and bounds ahead of Microsoft’s pissweak offering. What the fuck do they expect us to do, cybersex? ASCII drawings? Anime emoticons? What do they expect me to do for fucks sake, especially since by writing a long, ranting blog post on a website nobody reads about an instant messenger I’ve prevented myself from ever being within 20cm of a naked body ever again? Twats.The worst bit is they’ve not given personal users AV support, oh no; they’ve given it to corporate users. Because there’s clearly a huge demand for seeing some cunt from down the hallway gurning at you when you’re trying to work.
• Custom nicknames for contacts. Oh, goody. This one might have some value; you could change the name of some irritating twat who you only tolerate because you’re too nice to block him to “Cuntocks O’Queef”, or rename all your contacts to the names of famous mass murderers to make yourself seem like some sort of incredibly linked-in bastard (”Peter Sutcliffe has just signed in”).
• A pointless search bar. I have about 15 contacts, you dickfaces, the day I need a search bar for those is the day I should probably glue a fucking dunce hat backwards onto my head and start talking with a hugely exaggerated spitfleck-liberating retard voice until the end of time.

Here’s what they didn’t add:

• Nudges, winks, personal AV support, voice clips, handwritten messages, adding custom emotes that are animated, phone support, anything but rudimentary support for MSN Spaces, JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING WINDOWS MSN USERS HAVE BEEN USING FOR THREE YEARS NOW

Granted most of these are irritating features which shouldn’t be in an IM client - nudges spring to mind, a feature designed solely to irritate the bollocks off anyone who happens to be upon the receiving end to the point where they start drafting plans to single-handedly extinguish the entire human race, starting with the pointless chamber pot of a person who nudged them. Maybe these features should be put into a little box and fired into the sun, not in an IM client - but people, for better or for worse, use them, and these pricks have completely ignored them in their rush to give Office Communications Server a big sloppy BJ.

And yet, MS saw fit not to include any of them. Why the fuck bother? Why the fuck open your mouth? The open source client Adium is way, way ahead of the official Messenger in the feature stakes, and considering that most open source software* is desperately playing catch up to just about every other piece of software ever (witness Linux’s slavish cloning of Aero/Quartz effects), or is actually trying to be other software (OpenOffice.org anyone? No? Because it’s a piece of shit, you say? Oh, agreed!) that’s quite bloody shaming.

*Before some Twitter-esque tard comes along and bitches me out for being an M$ shill despite the fact I’ve just spent a large amount of my time bitching them out, I said “most” not “all”, Amarok springing to mind as a decent example of good free software, and if you could kindly show me an OSS application which doesn’t have a more featureful closed source equivalent I’ll eat my fucking hat.

I bought Audiosurf today, and frankly it scares the hell out of me. It’s basically a cross between Guitar Hero and a racing game, which seems to be designed to induce psychosis in anyone who dares play it for a significant amount of time. It advertises freely that you can import any song into the game and it’ll analyse it and spit out a race track, so after playing the Orange Box soundtrack for a bit (sidenote: Still Alive is the best ending to any game ever, anyone who disagrees is a liar) and finding it quite dull I stuck in some of my music. Unwisely, I chose Achilles Last Stand by Led Zeppelin, which for anyone who doesn’t know is very fast paced and very long.

The overall effect was like taking amphetamines and watching Nickelodeon while playing Tetris at the same time. Coloured blocks fly at you with incredible speed, and you have to collect them, which resulted in me frantically thrashing the mouse around from side to side to keep up with Zep. It’s a thoroughly pointless endeavour, but amusing at the same time (at least until the aforementioned psychosis sets in, anyway.) For a fiver, you can’t go wrong.