December 2004

Friday before last I deposited a cheque into my basic, no-frills, we-give-you-Solo-coz-you’re-a-credit-free-zone account. It was for a piffling amount. It shouldn’t matter. It cleared today. TODAY. It went in on the 11th and it’s now the 21st. Two weekends in there, but don’t tell me computers can’t work weekends?

What gives? And why does the money clear my account the same minute when I draw from a cash machine? Why doesn’t that take 10 days? How do the banks get away with it?

These are the same fuckers who didn’t process a giro in time, missing a direct debit instated at great insistence by BT to “save me money” by a single day. The bill was for £50. The charge levied by the bank, because my giro was processed by them a day late was for £35. The giro went in the next day to cover the amount, but of course, by that time, the bank had raped me. Do they have any idea how much £35 means to me? Vile, thieving, penny-pinching scum. May they all rot in hell.

Tomorrow, Tuesday the 21st, the shortest day of the year as my taller friends at school used to tease me, is also my birthday.

For the first time since I can remember, I am actually going to celebrate the anniversary of my birth. I won’t resent the passing of another year or greet with apathy the beginning of a new one. I will be grateful for the gift of life, for the honour of experience and the value of love. I will celebrate by praying and thanking God for another year.

What would I like for my birthday? For my prayers to be answered really. And my prayers are for the most part, private correspondence.

And on a more selfish note? Well, if anyone has a good idea for a business to start up that might suit me, I’d be interested in suggestions. The catch is that it has to bootstrap from no capital and be possible almost entirely online.

In my 40th year, I would like to learn Arabic and some conversational French and German. I’d like to start a business. I’d like my divorce to come through quickly. I’d like to be settled in my own place. I’d like to get fit. I’d like to be in the best control of my diabetes in my life. I’d like my friends and family to know that I love them. And I’d like to be with a special, special person.

Insha’Allah.

It shouldn’t happen I know, but I got my Mac and PC talking to each other over Firewire. I had the help of two capable assistants who are boffins in their own right. I’m just a tinkerer with little patience. But I got an Internet connection shared between the two incompatible machines over an interface that was never designed for networking. Notworking would be a more apt description of my trials in the past.

Not only that, but a shared Internet connection despite the best efforts of ZoneAlarm to block everything the Mac was trying to do…sensibly of course, you can’t blame the old firewall for being sensible, can you?

Backup and security are becoming big concerns for me, as you might well understand. I must be getting on a bit. I’ve never learned from my past errors in this respect.

My life is moving on in many ways. This has been a year of tumultous change. Now it’s time for me to start a business from scratch, with no capital, and succeed massively. There’s no reason why I can’t do it. It has to start from the solid foundation of a machine that’s frequently and redundantly backed up.

If you’re interested in tennis writing, I’d like to recommend Rashid’s blog.

I don’t know of anyone with a deeper knowledge of the game or a more profound love and understanding of the traditions, the history, the stars and the chicks, of course. He is also an amazing teacher of children in the game. He injects fun and enthusiasm and gets results. I also have to warn you that there is probably no mortal on the face of the earth who could beat him at any video game with tennis in it. The AI player in Virtua Tennis deliberately crashes his PS2 in order not to have to face the ignominy of shameful defeat yet again. Or it might be that it crashes because he kicks it when it cheats, but whichever way you look at it, you will never out-tennis Rashid Ahmad, anyway, anyhow.

From a personal point of view and to distract you somewhat, he gave me a one hour lesson in table tennis recently that utterly transformed my game. For the first time ever, I was hitting good forehands consistently. I rate this as an achievement as high as learning to swim. I never thought I was cut out to swim, and I never thought I was cut out to hit a forehand in table tennis. Rashid proved me wrong on the latter. My kids set me right on the former. Remember what I said about learning to walk? What goes around, comes around.

I’m back on the Mac!

Lots has happened recently. Let’s be honest - I’m no stranger to drama and sometimes, I wonder if my subconscious creates it just to inject some interest into my otherwise very ordinary life.

The back-up I’ve just got working on the Mac is a good few months old, so I’ve lost a fair bit of useful stuff, but nothing I would die without. Photos, bookmarks, movies, music, applications, downloads, a few letters and a document I was working on which incidentally, was not my book.

The whole process was not without fuss and drama, as you might expect. I did manage to procure a hard drive eventually, a supposedly reliable Hitachi Travelstar. Now I’m a bit behind the times as I wasn’t even aware that the hard drive division from IBM, which produced the successful Travelstar range, had been sold to Hitachi. Let’s hope quality hasn’t changed much. So how did I get the cash? I still had some shares in BITS, about three hundred pounds worth. I sold those and got the hard drive. The rest has gone, and other than this necessary expenditure, I am more frugal than ever. The car still hasn’t gone though, but it must. I have to whittle down that £30,000 of debt somehow, and I’m not going to default, that is just not my style.

I tried the freezing trick for the knackered hard drive. Unfortunately, that didn’t work. Taking the Powerbook’s case apart was a drama in itself! I had to download a service manual on the PC which I referred to constantly, before which, I had to find something that read the format that I downloaded the service manual in. I got the case apart eventually, what a fuss! Over 20 screws. Now that’s something I’ve long forgotten about…

I realised that the clone I’d made a few months back of my data was not bootable and couldn’t be copied over the newly installed hard drive. So I had to take the following steps:

1. Fresh install of OS X Panther onto the new internal drive
2. Install ADSL driver
3. Download Carbon Copy Cloner
4. Clone the fresh installation onto the external Firewire drive with the old backup on, making it bootable
5. Boot from the external Firewire drive which was now host to a virgin OS with clean ADSL driver and copy of cloning software
6. Clone the backup on the boot device (the Firewire drive) to the slave device (the internal IDE)
7. Weeks later, I’m back up on the Mac.

Now I have to rebuild my virtual life, and of course, my loyal reader base!

And I have to say, the Blog editor on the PC is better than the one on the Mac.

Microsoft have launched MSN Spaces - their own take on blogging. It’s currently in beta. My comments are brief.

Likes

1. You can restrict the viewers of your blog to those on your MSN Messenger list
2. It will intensify competition, keeping Google on their toes. (I have no immediate plans to abandon Blogger!)
3. It takes next to no time to set up your first blog
4. It has some kind of built-in photo-album support

Dislikes

1. Tight integration with Microsoft’s Hotmail and Messenger services may force you into a “three for one” kind of deal
2. It has banner ads in the style of Hotmail
3. It censors the title of your blog and your entry headings - this isn’t the end of the world, as far as I can tell, your content isn’t censored. Headlines are presumably censored because there will be some kind of publicly accessible directory of blogs, available to all ages. For example, I couldn’t even get “Suspect Paki” though, but “SuspectPaki” passed without a hitch. I can use the word “paki” in the post, but not in the heading for that post. Personally, I won’t use the service because of the censorship. It’s evil. End of.
4. It’s an online Microsoft service, hackers will go after the vulnerabilities in MSN Spaces before targetting Google and others.
5. Arseholes will use it
6. It will probably be shit because it’s Microsoft
7. It won’t let me type in html - I’ve tried a link to my blog and it just puts the text in verbatim.
8. It doesn’t confirm to mark-up standards.
9. Worst of all, everything you post belongs to Microsoft!!! Allow me to quote from their terms of use:
   

   For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a “Submission”), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission.

Links:
MSN Spaces
Boing Boing FUCKS the censoring
The Register