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Thank you for joining me at Suspect Paki and if you haven’t done so already, please change your bookmarks appropriately. You may switch over now.

If you’re used to doing a search on “Suspect Paki” to find me, that will start working again in about a week or two once the search engines have spidered the new site.

To begin with, you won’t notice much change at all, but behind the scenes, I’m working on some cool stuff, which I hope you will share with me and enjoy!

IMPORTANT NOTICE

To all readers - this blog will no longer be updated at www.shahid247.com.

Over the coming months, you can expect to see some interesting changes to Suspect Paki and I hope you will enjoy them. If you don’t, feel free to email me. I will of course be suspectpaki at gmail dot com, but also shahid at suspectpaki dot com. Too many identities, not enough time!

My new host is midPhase. My first impressions of this company are very good indeed. Given the fighting over international telephone rates and the pathetically small costs in calling the USA now, it’s actually cheaper to call midPhase in the USA than it is to call a UK support number on an 0870 line, which is what UKHost4U from the UK (where else?) were offering.

The approval process took minutes and all my confirmations came through right away. I will keep you posted and wil of course let you know when to change the bookmarks you all have.

I really should pick the one thing. In my father’s day, you picked a career and that was it. Now even the unemployed are burdened with choice. I could never look back at my life and say “I was a postman” or “I was a Traffic Warden” or whatever. Now even the postman has to have a webiste, plan on being a contractor and read Tom Peters’ “A company called I” or whatever the fuck. Posties have to Martha Stewart themselves. And no, that’s not an aphorism, but it could be.

I have to find some hosting for my various sites. Easily are poor value and their service is slow. They also have far too little in the way of trendy features. As for the space - 50MB? Come on, my wristwatch has more memory than that, and that’s a wind-up. (Read that how you will)

Choices are the great satan. It’s choice that causes your life to be frittered away in frivolous farce. Too many TV stations, by the time you’ve chosen, an hour has passed and you still haven’t really enjoyed anything, watched anything, learned anything. You’ve just been choosing. Too many books. So you browse and browse. You go to Amazon and spend more time on the chase than you would calling a good friend and having a decent conversation. There are too many mobile tariffs. We switch on a whim, and endlessly research what the best plan is for us, meanwhile, cheerily complaining about how long we’re spending on hold listening to the same hold tune.

Too many magazines. Too many lifestyles. Too many clothes. Too many shops. Too many cars. Too many shoes. OK, you can never have too many shoes. I admit that.

The problem is we have too much choice and that burden of decision is a time-wasting distraction. It really doesn’t matter what you do. Honest. No one will remember you in a hundred years time. Your choices do not matter. But do choose something. And stick to it. And yes I am talking to the person I was 20 years ago and not anyone out there in particular.

Choose. And get on with it.

Fear kills everything. It kills hope, happiness and human beings. A person lives in fear, dies thousands of times before they actually die. I’m tired of dying.

Let me tell you a quick story.

A boy grew up on a council estate, broken home, victim of racial abuse, had his life torn to pieces over and over again. He got conned, taken advantage of, lost everything, including hope, a roof over his head, his friends, and almost his life. On several occasions.

Now that boy is a man. He drives a Maserati. He lives in a huge home in Surrey, with a garden big enough to have a mini-tennis court and still have room left over for a five-a-side football match, without disturbing the play areas for his kids. And that’s just the back. He owns a successful business with a large office and loads of staff. This despite having his last business wipe him out.

He has every toy imaginable. His home office sports a table-tennis table. His Mac is of course huge. His kids of course are well looked after and the eldest goes to a fantastic private school. He has a great marriage and despite being diabetic, his health is excellent and he keep in supreme shape.

His attitude is nearly always fanastic, and his outlook is positive and progressive. He gives to those less fortunate and never suffers fools. He is brutally honest and yet devilishly charming. He has a filthy mouth, but he gets away with it. Especially with the ladies. This is the man with everything.

My brother is a stunning example of how to make good with what you have. I am inspired by his example. He doesn’t live in fear. It’s not that he doesn’t have fears, he just refuses to live his life by them. Courage isn’t the absence of fear - courage is the ability to do the right thing in the face of fear.

I’ve had my ups and downs. The ups have been spectacularly good. They are well documented. And of course, the spectacular lows are well documented too. Well, ok, maybe not as well documented. I have had a great life. I’ve learned lesson after lesson after lesson. A time comes when those lessons have to be applied, otherwise you’re just a forgotten, dusty book on one of humanity’s vast library shelves.

I stopped playing football a few years back. I’m no good at it, but I enjoy it and it gets you fit, as long as you don’t play it as mentally as I used to. So tomorrow, I’m going to play football again. Well, I’ll wave a leg at the ball and see how it goes. I’ve stopped enjoying my life and my city. Samuel Johnson warned me of this. Well, on Saturday I spent the whole day travelling on buses around London that I hadn’t been on and walking. How good it was not to suffer the encumbrance of one’s own motor car!

Time for me to do the right thing, because time is-a-ticking and my body is not giving me great signals. I can be paralysed by fear, or I can use it as a spur to begin the third phase of my life. Coming of age. Could be good.

• No more congestion charge
• No more parking tickets
• No more pay and display tickets
• No more bus lane violation tickets
• No more road rage
• No more bailiffs
• No more road tax
• No more insurance
• No more petrol
• No more fear the car would get scratched or dented or scuffed or slashed
• No more shoddy and expensive servicing
• No more roadside assist call-outs
• No more fault remedy
• No more depreciation
• No more residents parking permits
• No more parking problems
• No more carrying enough change for parking meters
• No more getting stranded in the middle of nowhere
• No more car crash fears
• No more traffic jams
• No more driving at night through rain and fog
• No more having to leave somewhere quickly to feed the meter or move the car
• No more running out of petrol
• No more having to check the tyre pressure or oil
• No more people driving right up your arse
• No more road joust with Volvo drivers clipping your wing mirrors
• No more waiting behind women on mobile phones trying to get a 4×4 through a mile-wide gap

My car has gone. It’s not so bad.

I’m trying an awful lot of new software on the Mac at the moment. I need to slow down. Why? I do have a full plate right now.

1) My divorce gets pronounced tomorrow
2) My kids were here for a day (oh heavenly joy, you cannot imagine how good it was to be with them again!) - downside is the flat needs tidying up
3) I need to leave this flat by the end of the month - some of you know just how traumatic moving can be
4) I need to have a business plan done by tomorrow night
5) My JSA got cancelled because I didn’t sign on. I completely forgot. This means bureaucratic hell as I try to fill in a stupid number of forms to get back to where I was. Meanwhile…
6) The Halifax bounced four direct debts and charged £35 each for them. This was not funny as the first caused me to go overdrawn by a mere £3.21. This was due to a bill where I was overcharged £5. Great. The next two £35 charges were for direct debits of £1 and £1.69 respectively. Go figure. I tried half a dozen emails and several phone calls. Out of the £140 I got charged for being a couple of quid overdrawn, I was only given back £35 as a gesture of good will. Fuck your good will and fuck your satanic anti-christ of a cunted up bank. Halifucks.
7) Some lousy fucker backed out of buying my bass amp at the last minute, so like a beggar, I’m having to chase the next highest bidder to see if he’s interested. This wastes me time and money that I don’t have. I have to prepare an appeal for my eldest’s school admission and give a ten minute presentation in front of a board. Great.

Other than the above, things are OK. My health is not as bad as it was last week. The first item on the list is supposed to be a serious event, but I’m delighted. I know how Nicole Kidman felt when she allegedly screamed “YES!” after her decree absolute got pronounced. And I got to see my kids for a day. A day out of 18, but we had a fantastic time.

Back to the software:

• Adium - a multi-client messenger application. It works with yahoo, msn and aim messaging systems, so I don’t have to run three clients. It’s not as fully-featured as each individual client, but that really doesn’t bother me in the slightest. It works and it’s fine
• Audacity - A free audio editing tool, supposedly good for creating podcasts. This is not useful for me as I already use Logic Pro, which is the daddy of audio tools
• CopyWrite - a shareware writing tool - this looks as if it might be very valuable. It’s for writers, not copy-editors and let’s face it, Microsoft Word turns us into copy editors and desktop publishers when all we should be doing is writing.
• GarageSale - a shareware Mac OS X eBay lister
• Handbrake - a DVD back-up tool. Nudge, nudge.
• MacTheRipper - I can’t even remember what this does.
• Cocktail - some sysadmin type tool which I have barely touched
• NeoOffice - OpenOffice for Aqua - this works and I use it. Not as pretty as Word, but it’s free and it feels cleaner for some reason. I will probably be using this more and more as the reliability and performance hopefully creeps up
• iPodder - I’ve talked about this - it seems a little flakey, and the nomenclature is a bit haphazard, but it works.
• Transmit - the trial period for this has run out, but it is a really clean, simple, excellent FTP tool
• Feeder - this is the one I want to get some value out of - this is what helped get my first podcast working. The trial will run out before I leave the flat. Shame.
• iLinkPod - I can’t remember - but maybe something to do with getting stuff back off an iPod
• Limewire - I hardly touch this now. Fear of getting raped by America, as if I haven’t already got enough black marks against my name
• MailHere - don’t know why I downloaded this - some tray inbox shit
• Skype - it just needs that critical mass thing for me. When my mum is using it, that’s when it will be worth using
• Soundflower and Soundflowerbed - tools for re-routing audio within the system. You can use this to capture skype convos and the like. I haven’t tried it, but it will be useful for podcasting
• SuperDuper! - the backup tool. I need to use this….

p.s. I will add links to all the above within the message when I can be arsed in a day or two perhaps