Twittering On

I signed up for Twitter this week.


I didn't know anything about Twitter until fairly recently, when The Tomahawk Kid asked if I was on Twitter. I wasn't at that time, but my acquisition a fortnight ago of an all-singing, all-dancing, ultra-modern internet mobile phone encouraged me to take the plunge and sign up.


So far, I'm intrigued. Twitter seems to be Facebook without the constant oneupmanship, stupid games and getting poked by idiots from school you'd rather forget.


But it's just the latest in a long line of social networking sites that have suckered me in. Over the years, I've joined Friends Reunited, MySpace, Bebo, WAYN, Facebook and probably several others that I've forgotten.


So while I can now send an emailed photograph of myself to the six people worldwide who are bored enough to want to know what I'm doing (including Barack Obama), my own wife doesn't know what I had for lunch today and my parents don't know what I'm currently watching on TV.


It's a strange world we live in.

Broken Household Appliance National Forest

Is nothing built to last any more?

In the past few days, the dishwasher at Dungroanin' has packed in, and this afternoon the Jockmobile refused to start after a hard day of sitting doing nothing in the Montrose railway station car park.

The car I can understand - it does a lot of miles and sheer wear and tear over its seven-year life span is obviously going to take its toll eventually. Hopefully replacement of the starter motor will be quick and comparitively cheap.

But the dishwasher is more irritating. I'm fairly certain it was installed when the house was built, which is around three years ago. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I expect a £450 piece of equipment to last more than three years.

The same can be said of MP3 players - I'm now on my third Magic Tune Box, and I only acquired my first in late 2004.

We've become an unnecessarily wasteful society, where nothing is built for the long-term. If something breaks, it can often be cheaper to replace it than repair it.

In what world does that make sense?

RIP MTB

Every day, I'm accompanied almost wherever I go by the Magic Tune Box, an incredible device bearing within its dainty frame 15,000 songs.

At least I was until yesterday.

Whilst transferring new music onto the Magic Tune Box, its battery died. "Nobig deal," I thought, "I'll just plug it in."

Except, when I did, it started rebuilding its internal library. And when it had completed that task, it had miraculously lost 2,500 tracks. Not whole albums, not tracks in any logical order. Just 2,500 random tracks.

Despite this sudden removal of 20 per cent of its total of its contents, this incredible piece of technology had decided not to free up the disk space previously allocated to the tracks. So I'm left with a machine missing key tracks from most albums, its memory full and no way of resetting.

So, as a permanent solution, I'm going to sell my soul and jump on the IPod band wagon (10 years too late). I've decided to invest in a 160GB IPod Classic, which I'm hoping to pick up fairly cheap in China next week.

(Doesn't that last sentence make me sound like a real global traveller. Worse still, at one point in the past day, I uttered the phrase "Maybe Ican fit it in between Shanghai and Stavanger." Which probably just makes me sound like a wanker.)

Anyway, RIP Magic Tune Box. It's been a pleasure.

Plus Points

At the moment, I'm more excited than I really should be at the prospect of Dungroanin' being visited by a man in overalls.

Today is the day, after several months of waiting, that the world of televisual pleasure afforded to myself and Mrs Wife in the homestead enters a new world.

At some point in the next four hours, a Sky engineer will arrive to upgrade our equipment from bog-standard Sky to Sky+. And, as I've already said, I'm more excited than I really should be at the prospect of this development.

In truth, the only real differences will be the possibility of reocrding whole series of shows at the touch of a single button, instead of manually setting the hard drive recorder for every individual episode, and the fact that Sky+ broadcasts in surround sound where available.

But, in my day-to-day life, these count as exciting developments, so I spent an hour last night disconnecting everything in preparation for the Man From Sky's arrival. Which means I'm now sitting here patiently, waiting for the man in the leopard print van to arrive with a brand new Box of Tricks.

I need to get out more.

Rise of the Machines

Ever offered to help out with something and then wished you hadn't?

I've spent the best part of a week helping to 'fix' a friend's computer. Initially, it looked as though it would be a simple case of swapping out a damaged hard drive for a fully-functioning one.

But this laborious quest has instead involved performing a Frankenstein treatment on two separate machine and installing three different operating systems.

The desired result, that my friend should end up with a basic machine for a six-year-old to play games on, has finally been reached.

It all seemed so much simpler back in the days of Windows 95 - you stuck the CD in, the operating system installed and that was you ready to go.

Now, with online registration of operating systems, Microsoft has really upped the ante in a bid to stamp out piracy.

Which all just makes me very glad that I chose to turn my back on being an IT professional and pursue my career in the media. I no longer have the patience to sit in front of a computer that won't work and attempt to solve its problems.

Stains

Whilst I was reading the Sunday papers yesterday, a little catalogue dropped out.

This paper emporium of delights purported to be 'everything you need to be safe around the house and garden'.

Idly flicking through the catalogue, I happened upon perhaps the most ludicrous invention of all the strange gizmos on offer - the adult bib.

Yep, an adult bib. A bib for adults.

This 'durable, wipe clean clothes protector' was three foot in length. Tied around the neck, it claimed that it would keep all ties and shirts stain-free.

I cannot imagine any adult in full charge of all their faculties wishing to purchase a bib for their own use.

Mrs Wife might disagree, as she is forever pointing out my food-based mishaps. Anything involving gravy, ketchup (or indeed sauce of any kind), ice cream, chocolate or custard tends to find itself, at some point between plate and mouth, down my front.

This very lunchtime, I struggled manfully with two soft-boiled eggs and toast soldiers (OK, I battled - there is no manful way to struggle with boiled eggs). Incredibly, my shirt and tie were blemish-free at the conclusion of my meal.

So, is there any market for the adult bib? Or should we march gleefully onwards, taking whatever stains eating too fast throws in our way? I know which gets my vote.

D'ya wanna be a spaceman?

In previous posts, I have alluded to the fact that I like sci-fi. I'll elaborate - since the age of around four, I've wanted to be a spaceman.

So I'm delighted by the news that NASA is going to build a permanently-manned moonbase.

Yeah, so the base is going to 'serve as a science outpost as well as a testbed for technologies needed for future travel to planets'.

But what I want to know is - when can we start taking lunar holidays?

No-one's been to the moon since well before I was born, but hey, bring it on - I'm ready to volunteer.

At least it doesn't rain on the moon.

Sound and vision

Yesterday, I drove for three hours to Dundee, where I exchanged the broken surround sound system for a new one (sorry if this seems to be a recurring theme).

I then drove for three hours back to deepest, darkest Argyll, where I unboxed the system and spent more than an hour feeding cables round furniture and through speaker stands.

Just as I finished this complex procedure, I realised something - I hadn't seen a remote control in amongst all the equipment.

There wasn't one.

So, I then had to strip it all back down and pack it back in its box, ready to be transported back to the store. So another long trip ensued this evening, two hours through driving rain to pick up the third surround sound system.

But it's all working fine now. Bring on the blockbusters!

Work in progress

Sorry folks, don't have time to stop tonight - I've got a surround sound system to wire up.

I'll be back tomorrow though, promise!

Is this thing on?

I love electronic gadgets - I always have. Ever since I was a little boy, I've been fascinated by anything that lights up, plays a tune or displays a picture. It's an affliction I inherited from Faither, who would always have the latest gizmo - from electronic ear defenders for shooting to a CD player and on to MP3 technology and various laptops.

Anyway, I love it when my hi-tech household runs like digital clockwork. Mrs Wife and I invested in a home cinema system earlier this year, which I think has been one of my best buys ever. I love being able to watch DVDs and hear the action explode all round me.

At least I did until the woofer stopped working this week. The rest of the speakers work just fine, but they are hampered by the lack of low frequency kick generated by the working woofer.

Several emails and phone calls later, the good people at Acoustic Solutions and Argos have decided that the best option is to exchange the system. Which is all well and good until it comes to unravelling almost 30 metres of cables and dismantling all the speaker stands, a task I have been engaged in for the past two evenings.

Still, it will all be worth it when I sit down to watch all six Star Wars movies back to back at some point in the next two weeks. Life doesn't get much better....

Hail to the geek

Praise be to the uber-geeks who invented the worldwide interweb. Without them I would be far less happy than I am at the moment.

The reason for my happiness? I have just completed my Christmas shopping from the comfort of my office chair.

I know that I moaned about people starting Christmas too early in this previous post, and that I demanded no-one mention the C-word until December 1.

But Mrs Wife has been driving herself, and as a result me, into a frenzy by demanding that we buy everyone's presents and write the cards so that we don't have to do it nearer the time.

So, leaving the purchasing of most of the gifts to the little lady, I have finished it off with just a click of my mouse and an assault on my credit card.

It must be the first stirrings of middle age - having my Christmas shopping completed by the end of November. If only other areas of my life were so organised....

Where to begin?

I'm currently considering buying a new laptop, but the whole process of trying to find the best deal is so frustrating, I don't know where to begin.

Although, in a former life, I worked as an IT support technician, I've been away from it for long enough that I've lost touch with what's hot in the world of mobile PCs.

Which processors are fastest? Who makes the best RAM? Which manufacturers should be avoided?

Ideally, I'd like a mimimum of 1GB RAM and 60GB hard drive. In a perfect world, it would be a Dell, but go beyond their basic packages and they start getting pretty pricey.

So I'm throwing the question open to the floor - what's the best deal for the laptop I'm looking for? Preferably costing (substantially) less than 500 quid.

Am I a woman?

Man has sent hi-tech pieces of equipment, and humans, to the moon. He has successfully taken organs from one person and transplanted them into another. He has invented millions of life-changing gizmos including the television, the internal combustion engine, the computer and the Pot Noodle.

Yet man cannot make calorie-free food that tastes as good as the real thing. If we can observe the surface of Mars first hand, why can't we invent a jam doughnut that's as good for you as celery? How have the assembled scientific minds of the 21st century not yet stumbled upon the recipe for calorie-free Dairy Milk chocolate that tastes EXACTLY the same as the original product? Why aren't nutritional experts urging us to make sure that we drink two litres of Coke each day and ensure that we get our five daily portions of cheesecake?

I'm no scientist. I am to mathematics what Paris Hilton is to celebacy, and to physics what Courtney Love is to decency. But surely these dietary advances are possible?

The reason I ponder this problem is because I don't like healthy food. Quiches, salads, fish and most vegetables fail to register on my list of most palatable foods. I'd eat red meat every day if I could, would gorge on chocolate and guzzle fizzy drinks by the bottle.

But if I ate to satisfy my desires, I'd end up being removed from my house by a fire crew, watched by little children standing with mouths agape as the crane buckled under my bulk.

Anyway, that ends today's groanin'. I'm off for lunch. What am I having? Chicken soup....

The sky's the limit

Finally, the news I've been waiting for for more than 20 years - the world's first flying car has been put up for auction on Ebay.

Designed by Moller, a working protoype of the M400X has been put up for sale. Bidding ends on Thursday, with the winner taking home a four-seat cruiser with eight engines, a top speed of 375mph - and cup holders.

Quite what anyone would be able to drink at 375mph I don't know, but it's a nice touch.

Moller expects that within ten years, 25 per cent of the US population will have accesss to a Skycar, rising to 90 per cent within 25 years.

The car is apparently a combination of a helicopter, a jet plane and a mid-range car - a flying Ford Mondeo if you like.

Except I've never seen a Mondeo sell for four million dollars - the expected selling price of the prototype.

My boyhood fascination with all things sci-fi means this is a dream come true, that sizeable pricetag notwithstanding.

The fact that it looks like one of the pod racers from Star Wars Episode One make it all the better.

A Skycar would certainly make my frequent jaunts to Glasgow a few hours shorter, but unfortunately they don't come with in-built CD players or much boot space.

Still, if anyone's feeling generous, or if I ever win that elusive EuroMillions lottery draw, I'll get my hands on a Skycar.

Bet it would be quite pricy to insure though.