Going out and about with an iPod Touch, you get into the habit of seeing which areas have unlocked wifi in the hope of checking your email as you walk along. It’s a bit like fishing — you’re always hoping to catch something rather than just eat frozen breaded haddock at home. Over the past six months I have noticed a big drop off in the number of people leaving their wifi unlocked — the rivers have been polluted by those who abuse the privilege by downloading gigabytes of porn.
Until yesterday I left my wifi unlocked — I enjoyed seeing that numerous passing iphones and iPod touches had connected using it — then I got an email from my ISP saying that I had almost reached my monthly download limit. I checked and saw that someone had downloaded 2.5gb of stuff — I was scandalized and promptly added two layers of security, joining the paranoid multitudes.
Alas, the iPod Touch isn’t much good when you’re out and about. You can scour around for a cafe with free wifi but then you have to get a drink, but it’s no good when you’re going from A to B and just want to check Google Maps. I suppose I could subscribe to BT’s roaming openzone thing if I am willing to stump up £6 a month for the privilege but I am someone who only spends £2.50 a month topping up his mobile so it seems a bit much. And, of course, once you’ve bought it you’ll be scrabbling around like a rat searching for places that have it in order to get your money’s worth.
So is the Touch worth having in a world without wifi? Definitely. Music, photos, videos, notes, contacts, calendar, chess, feeds, oblique strategies, books, dictionary, converter, sketches — all of these applications don’t need the internet and can keep you from scratching your eyes out in boredom in moments of solitude. It’s just a shame that wifi hasn’t become a friendly sharing thing.
Yesterday at 9pm I completed my first ever firewalk. In the grounds of Kelvingrove Museum, along with 15 other people, I conquered my fear walking of over burning hot coals. In the words of Errol Gordon, who conducted the 2 hour Learn or Burn Seminar before the firewalk, I made nature my bitch.
I had long known it was theoretically possible to radically alter limiting perceptions and beliefs, but the actual practice of doing so still surprised me. Simply repeating negative phrases was enough to make everyone in the seminar weaker, and vice versa. By utilising NLP techniques of anchoring(1) and acting ‘as if’(2), we were able to banish fears of getting burnt and really enjoy the experience.
The seminar was about proving irrefutably that your physiology and the words you use (in the world and in your head), affect the results you achieve in the world. By getting people into their peak state it is possible to do almost anything.
The event was organized by the SAMH mental health charity (no, the firewalk wasn’t a recruiting drive for more people who need help) and implemented by Men in Black (or, rather, Men in Grey after too many washes). I would definitely recommend doing a firewalk with them, especially if they have the excellent She-Boom playing.
A fellow firewalker asked me on arrival why I wanted to do it. I said I didn’t know. I was sure I had a really good reason at one point, but I had forgetten it. The words ‘Do a Firewalk’ had been sitting on my todo list for over a year and this was the first time I’d seen the opportunity to do one. Right now I am just very happy to have done it.
1) Anchoring is where you come to associate a phrase or a touch with a specific state. These states can be positive ornegative.
2) Acting ‘as if’ is where you hold your body in what you imagine to be the state you want to get into. So if you wanted to be depressed you might slouch, bury your chin in your chest and tell yourself you’re an idiot. If you want to be upbeat you might stand tall, smile and tell yourself you’re a cool dude.
I would go a long way for a laugh. From where I sit now, I would probably be willing to walk, ooh, four miles if you promised me a mild chuckle at the end of it. I would endure the discomfort of bad acting, sexism, racism, homophobia, any prejudice you like, as long as there is a great punchline. Laughter is not the meaning of life, but life has no meaning without it.
Unfortunately, most so-called comedy is bereft of wit. I don’t know if it’s because the comedy formulae become stale so quickly or because the people performing lack that ineffable comic touch, but hardly anything on telly makes me laugh. So, to fill this hole in my life, I download podcasts and rent out films.
Last night, for instance, I enjoyed Le Dîner de Cons, a brilliantly funny film about a man who gets lumbered with an idiot one evening. It was the fifth time I’ve seen it, yet it hadn’t lost anything of its sublime comic genius.
This morning, as I ambled to the library I listened to my favourite podcast, The Collings and Herrin Podcast. Unscripted, unedited, recorded using a Macbook’s inbuilt microphone, it consists of two immature men talking about stuff. I like it because the humour is completely unexpected, they can never build up to a gag because they don’t know the gag is coming. They often ruin the punchline of their jokes by laughing, surprised by their own neuronal connections. Just as with Herring’s blog, the material is raw but a sensitive mind can reimagine it being used in some future fictional stand-up show or sitcom.
If you want to them but don’t know where to start, I particularly recommend episode 13.
I really hope that top level domain names aren’t opened up as planned. At present, there is a certain beauty in invention of a great domain name when all the good ones appear to have been taken. New words have been created, old words adapted. Web 2.0 was defined largely by its punkish denial of formal language with its flickr and del.icio.us, just as the first dotcom boom was redefining names like boo and egg. Rather than open a pandora’s box endless list of possibilities like .shop or .books or .you or .cotton, why not turf out all the cybersquatters who make a living from people typing in words like sex.com in the hope of accessing the web’s adult resources.
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I stayed up late last night deleting every extraneous application on my evil vista laptop. I originally bought it to be a modern typewriter, used solely for writing but I gradually started accumulating applications like fireworks, firefox, filezilla, GTA:III, until it was as bloated with distractions as everything. So last night I had a purge, almost to the point of deleting the internet itself.
I used to worry that I was addicted to the internet. Then I got myself a job that forced me to be in front of a web browser for at least 7 hours a day. My addiction became socially acceptable by getting paid for it. What worries me is that the addictive parts of my internet habits (the things I do instinctually rather than consciously) are all so dull: facebook, stats, guardian football, and others. None of these are particularly engaging. I may have to go on another diet.
The Clutha on Stockwell Steet recently sent around a flyer outlining their new marketing strategy. It consists — wait for it — of selling food and drink so cheap a tramp could afford to dine out there every night and still have money for a pint of meths.
In the age of Wetherspoons and Yates you’d think it would be difficult to make food and drink much cheaper than they already are, but the Clutha are trying hard. They are currently offering a 3 course meal for only £3. The menu consists of such delicacies as Lentil soup or Scotch Broth for starter, Fish and Chips or Burger and Chips for main, and Vanilla Ice Cream or Strawberry Ice Cream for dessert.
It doesn’t sound like a strategy primed for success. No one ever made much money from being the cheapest — the best value, maybe, but not the cheapest. With these kind of prices and menus, the Clutha are saying to their clientele “you are scum, fit only for bargain basement fare.” When I was a child, going out for a pub meal at, say, the local Beefeater was a special occasion. No more!
Of course, the pub has never really been the same since they changed the name from The Clutha Vaults and replaced the classic old signage with glossy gold on plastic Wetherspoons-style lettering. I didn’t complain at the time, because I am in love with new forms and disdain authenticity but I now see that there was definitely something malign in the introduction of continental cafe outdoor seating.
Perhaps the reason for this terrible situation is that the Clutha is in intense competition with the Scotch Corner and The Scotia Bar, the other two pubs that make up the “Stockwell Triangle”. All three offer similarly priced beer and live music, none of them seem able to differentiate themselves from each other. There is an interesting page on the Scotia website about the history of the area which helps illustrate the kind of changes that have formed this curious situation.
Talking about the Clutha at lunch, a colleague suggested that they might be trying to use the Ryanair strategy of ultracheapness. I disagreed, saying that the beauty of Ryanair is that they discovered that people didn’t want a meal and a film, they really just wanted to get from A to B. With food, don’t people take account of taste and quality? Possibly not, especially not in anhedonic Glasgow where they wolf down the most grossly fatty food imaginable.
I used to think that you had to hit rock bottom before you could get clarity on life changes. It was as if rock bottom were the only place you could find the necessary leverage to make important changes. Then I found equanimity. I stopped raging against the dying of the light and just replaced the bulb. What I found is that self-disgust isn’t the best motivational force in the long term, mainly because it can only be sustained for short periods of time. Far better, perhaps, is to have a system of checks that stop you from ever getting into the bad situation in the first place.
A large part of GTD is about learning that you can only do some things when you are in the right context. So, for instance, I am currently suffering from post-prandial tiredness which is leeching my desire to do anything. Given that taking a siesta is not possible, I search for stimulation. I hit upon trying to write something that isn’t just some mind splurge or surrealist poetry. If this works, I should remind myself that it works. If it doesn’t, then there is no point wasting time on it again and again.
People can generally be broken down into 3 groups: those who do what they want to do, those who do what they ought to do and those who do what their instinct tells them to do. The latter camp includes alcoholics and telly addicts, people who are neither pro-active or guilt-ridden. It shouldn’t really be a battle to get the brain to do what the mind wants it to do. If only there were some way to get all three aspects in alignment (without the traditional method of hitting rock bottom!).
I am waving the white flag. I accept defeat. Hayfever has got me, I am imprisoned in its snotty grip. (Where does all the snot come from? I seem to have limitless supplies of the stuff).
At times like this, when your thoughts are fuggy it helps to think about something shocking to shake you out of your vagueness. Thinking about Hotel Rwanda does exactly that — slapping me into clarity, making me unable to dwell on my suffering after seeing those who suffer far more.
Hotel Rwanda is the story of a chap who shelters Tutsis and moderate Hutus from the genocide committed by machete wielding Hutus. Using his position as manager of a Belgian hotel, he somehow staves off the militia with a combination of his contacts and his sharp wits.
Perhaps because it was directed by a Northern Irishman, Terry George, most of the focus is on the idiocy of arbitrarily saying that one group of people are inherently bad. There are no scenes of really brutal machete attacks — it is all out in the world of the radio show that tells its listeners to “cut down the tall trees” (Tutsis are apparently slightly taller) and stamp out the “cockroaches”. The underlying reasons are also ignored. There is no mention, for instance, of the sense of over-population and lack of resources that Jared Diamond talks about in Collapse.
Despite the simple liberalism of its explanation, it is an excellent film — well-acted, beautifully tender in places and an unbearably tragic depiction of the depravities man is capable of committing. It certainly puts my hayfever into perspective.
I spent Saturday morning singing adapted Shostakovich as part of Play it Again, a BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra event of participatory music. Led by Tim Steiner, Play it Again is a fantastic experience. There is nothing better than losing yourself in sublime music, getting into flow, wondering where it will take you.
At the start, the orchestra introduce the full piece then you go off into groups (percussion, voices, strings, brass) to practice before the big performance. As singers, Laura and I did proper voice exercises and learnt more about rhythm and not letting your voice get carried away by the music.
After coffee, we went down for the performance. You can see a video I took below showing the coffee break and the last practice before the performance. No video of the performance itself — I wanted to make sure that I was 100% focused on the music. Thank you to all who made it possible.
The other day, during the purchasing of hosting for a client, I was offered a free .com domain name. Nothing much sprang to mind and the phrases that did spring to mind, like theendoftheworldasweknowit.com were already taken. Fact is, I don’t really know what I would do with another website, so it was almost as if I were getting the domain to define what I was going to do with it. I thought about having something with the word design in it, but all the good ones are taken.
I eventually plumped for the shortest, most inspiring domain name I could think of: f91w.com. The Casio F-91W is famed as the best watch ever made — it is a classic of functional design and it is difficult to imagine how it will ever be surpassed. It is also known as the watch which helped keep Muslims in Guantanamo. Apparently, merely having an F-91W is enough to keep you locked up. So buying the domain allows me to associate with functional design and terrorism, two of my favourite things. I’m not sure what this will translate as in terms of actual content, but I am still quite enthused.
My immediate reaction was to have a blog of design excess — or ugly design — but I’m already beginning to tire of that genre. So what should I put on there? Any ideas? The more ludicrous the better.
