Unfortunately, WH has a serious communications problem at the moment – of the electronic variety, obviously. I have been assured that normal service will be resumed shortly !
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Tag Archives | Technology
Music and Murdoch
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra play at the Glastonbury Extravaganza. Music, picnics, cocktails, fireworks, dancing fountains, a thrilled and enthusiastic audience... put THAT on an MP3
I think we can all agree that Rupert Murdoch is an arse, for so very many reasons. At the moment there’s all the stuff with the ‘phone hacking and the media buy-outs. All ghastly, no doubt about it. But he is an arse for more reasons than that.
Technology is changing the consumption of music. As a child or teenager, the sight of an undisguisable LP under the Christmas Tree was a beautiful moment and record collections were prized and protected. Young people would gather to, genuinely, listen to records and music was shared and joyfully consumed.
CD’s then made one’s record collection more portable and less bulky, whilst remaining scrumptiously tangible and ‘on show’ as a testament to one’s taste and general grooviness.
But now there is the MP3 player. I love my iPod with a big love, but I use it in the same way that I used to copy my LPs onto cassettes; it is a way of making my physical music collection portable. I also download podcasts which is utterly marvellous because now I never have to miss my favourite programmes from my beloved Radio 4. I then burn these podcasts to disc, catalogue them and place them on a shelf so they become REAL. MP3 files don’t feel really real to me – they feel like a backup. But before you say it, I am clearly an old git.
The one thing that seems to have evolved from the intangibility of downloads is that live music is more popular than ever. The public spend on live concerts has rocketed in the last few years and, if that is a side-effect of digital music, then hooray to that.
There is nothing, but nothing, to compare to the joy of hearing live music performed in front of you. I remember, as though it was yesterday, the night that Sister the First took me to the Albert Hall to hear the soprano, Margaret Marshall, perform. I was twelve years old, we sat in a box to the right of the stage, and I had never heard anything so enrapturing and beautiful in my life. I could feel the tears in my eyes as the combination of her voice, the orchestra and the company of others enveloped me and swamped my senses.
The point is that the people who make the music are playing the music, right there in front of you, and everybody present shares your enthusiasm and your desire to be there. I have floated to Madame Butterfly, roared along with The Proclaimers, crooned (in harmony) with The Andrews Sisters and lost half a stone through excessive pogo-ing to The Undertones. Live music is brilliant beyond words.
Not according to Rupert Murdoch though. According to Rupert Murdoch in The Times a couple of weeks ago, “If you love music, instead of paying £100 to go to a great concert, you pay 99 cents to get it on your iPod and you’ve got it for life, wherever you are.” Not instead of, you tosser – as well as!
And while we’re on the subject of Murdoch, here’s another tossy thing he said to the poor beleaguered Times correspondent (and I paraphrase): All children should have computer tablets and through such advances … the finest teachers in every course, in every subject, in every grade will be available to every child.
Now, children. Can you guess who owns 90% of a $360 million company called Wireless Generation in Brooklyn, USA? And can you guess what they sell?
Well, well, well.
Thought for the Day: Water
Many of us in the UK have finally had a bit of rain which is finally soaking into the ground. Anyone who has a garden will be grateful for this, although, of course, what we want is warm sunshine during the day and good old downpour at night. It is heartbreaking to see flowers and plants wilting during a hosepipe ban.
Just be aware though, that putting a garden water sprinkler on for two hours is the same as a family’s water consumption for a day. If you love your garden, get some water butts or any old water container which can collect rain water or drain water and use that. Washing up water that has had washing up liquid in is useful for pouring on paths and patios as it helps to keep down the weeds.
Another interesting fact that I learned recently is that the geology of an area can seriously affect water supplies. We always raise our eyebrows in wonderment that somewhere like Manchester, where it seems to rain for 28 hours a day, could possibly suffer from drought. Well here’s the science bit.
The South East has a high proportion of chalk rocks which hold water in natural aquifers, while the North West has little natural underground storage, being predominantly sandstone, mudstone and shale, so they experience regular cycles of drought and flood.
I like stuff like that.
Blackberry Surprise
My Currant mobile phone *
The Wartime Housewife is very excited. I have a very old Nokia mobile ‘phone that does everything I want it to do i.e. make and receive telephone calls and text messages. But over the last week, it has begun to let me down. Every five minutes it beeps and tells me I have a sim card error. It has taken to sending all my texts three times. I fear it may be suffering from dementia.
Boy the Elder has also lost his mobile ‘phone so I frogmarched him down to the High Street Shop and made him hand over his pocket money to purchase a new one. I warned him, he paid the price.
While I was there, I asked about the possibility of replacing my old ‘phone without having to change my number. I have been on pay as you go for years and I only top up by £10 a month, but, crucially, all three of us can currently remember my mobile number.
A radiant male child in the guise of a shop assistant began to ascertain my current and imminent telephonic needs and, as I talked, a gleam came into his eyes and his tiny hands began to tremble.
“I’m going to be really cruel now,” he said “I want you to look at these.” Whereupon he lead me gently to a row of gleaming units, with screens and buttons and slidey things; black, silver and pink shiny machines, some of which had no buttons at all. “For not much more than you’re paying now, you could have a Smart Phone, you could do e-mails and internetting and that, and have apps to take you straight to the things you like.”
As he spoke, his skin began to turn a strange wrinkly grey, he stooped, his eyes bulged slightly and he started to stroke the Blackberry, muttering “You could have one of these, precious, yes you could, you could, shiny, shiny precious…”.
“Pull yourself together,” I said. “Stand up straight and take your hands out of your pockets when you speak to a grown-up! Now tell me how much more it’s going to cost.”. He stepped back, a strange faraway look in his eyes and we thrashed out a deal. We filled in paperwork, he made ‘phone calls, he rang my current network provider, he offered me a free in-car charger. We were there for an hour.
And I was declined. It was very embarrassing. I have a perfectly good credit rating, I’m borderline solvent and I hardly ever smell funny, but nonetheless I was declined. I was bloody furious and I stomped off home in a huff, leaving the radiant child sobbing at his desk like an eighteenth century poet whose laudanum dealer has just left town.
My new Raspberry
When I got home, I rang Customer Services and spoke to a delightful woman with a reassuringly north-eastern accent (I love a Geordie, me). She accessed my mobile ‘phone records, tapped my details into an on-line form and immediately offered me exactly the same deal for £10 per month less, urging me not to take out their expensive insurance policy as my home insurance would almost certainly cover it. It took ten minutes. My Blackberry should be with me by the end of the week.
I’m so excited (and I just can’t hide it). I could be in the park or at someone else’s house or even on the lavatory or in the bath and be able to read your comments on my blog at any time! I can up a bid on ebay even if I’m not at home. It’s like bloody Star Trek in this house now, there’ll be no talking to me. Oh hang on, yes there will…..
* don’t even think about claiming this is a spelling mistake.
The Wartime Housewife is very excited
I have just effectively been granted an extra two hours sleep. My new computer has been set up and, although there are still a couple of programmes to be installed including my camera software and Photoshop (so no pics until further notice), I am up and running.
Yesterday afternoon, it only took 5 minutes to check, edit and reply to my e-mails. The night before the same exercise took 45 minutes. It was also taking approximately two and a half hours to write a blog, upload a photograph and publish it. You chaps don’t realise how lucky you getting a post virtually every night – I can’t remember the last time I was in bed before 1am. It’s so exciting I can’t tell you.
The old machine is going to be stripped down, cleaned up and installed in Boy the Elder’s room for the entertainment and edification of both boys. A wireless router will be placed halfway up the stairs so we will all have internet access, on the condition that they don’t attempt to look at pictures of girls with no vests on, or games with too much fighting in.
I have a functioning webcam. I can’t for the life of me think what I would do with such a thing, but if I think of anything, I now have the wherewithal to do it. ‘Word’ has changed quite a bit and I’m going through the usual frustrations of things not being where I expect them to be and I was completely locked out of the whole system last night because I wasn’t listening properly when Wonderful Bruce from pcsorted was sorting my pc.
My darlings, the world of the speedy intraweb awaits me and once I’ve caught up with my sleep, I shall be unstoppable, I expect.
TalkTalk doesn't want me to Talk, E-mail or anything else
Having taken nearly a month to re-connect my internet after moving house, I discovered on Monday evening that I had not only lost my internet again but also my telephone. Numerous calls to TalkTalk resulted in nothing but a recorded message telling me that, due to a high volume of calls, it could be some time before anyone gave a toss.
Finally on Wednesday afternoon, I happened to be at the home of Viscount Drayton when he received a call from TalkTalk asking him whether he was happy with his service. “I am” he said, “but my friend bloody well isn’t” whereupon he passed the ‘phone to me and I refused to get off the line until I had obtained satisfaction.
After 45 minutes, I had extracted a promise to recive a service call and regular updates on my mobile to let me know when it would be repaired and by whom. While I was out this morning, a bloke turned up on the doorstep (luckily the Aged Parent was in), fixed it and buggered off. I have no idea what was wrong, whether I will be charged or when I will get some compensation for the inconvenience and the £15 worth of mobile calls I have had to make in the interim.
Who do other people use and are you happy? I’m seriously thinking about going back to BT.
Dabbling in Radio: Analogue versus Digital broadcasting
Radiohead
I really love radio and I listen to it all over the place; I wake up to it in the morning, I listen in the car, in the kitchen while I’m cooking, whilst soaking in the bath, on my PC and, when I have no access to a radio, I listen to my favourite programmes downloaded to my iPod.
John Humphries
I wake up to the Today programme on Radio 4 and then either continue with it in the car or occasionally switch to Radio 1 if Chris Moyles isn’t being too silly (cos I is dahn wiv da kidz), or Radio 3 if I think the boys needing calming. Harborough FM is a local and extremely useful delight which I use to check traffic and local news and often drive home to. At lunchtime I like to hear the ‘phone- ins on Radio 2′s Jeremy Vine show, then back to Radio 4 for The Archers and the Afternoon Play. It goes on again in the kitchen while I’m cooking and we often listen to the Archers whilst eating dinner. Radio 4 then goes back on again at bedtime and, if I’ve failed to have an early night, one of my deep joys is to lie in the dark listening to Sailing By and The Shipping Forecast, trying to imagine storm-tossed seas in Lundy, Fastnet or Forth/Tyne/Dogger.
My iPod is the grateful recipient of the Friday Night Comedy, Thinking Allowed and In Our Time. I am often engaged in repetitive, manual work and Melvyn Bragg’s unashamedly intellectual In Our Time opens windows into subjects that I would simply never have time to learn about. This is the importance of radio – there is virtually no situation, particularly with the advances in broadcasting, in which you cannot have access to music, news, current affairs, philosophy, comedy, gardening, poetry and the rest.
I have learned about Hildegaard of Bingen and the Philosophy of Mathematics whilst cleaning lavatories. T.S. Eliot, the Magna Carta and the Problem of Measurement in Physics whilst ironing shirts. I feel cleverer for having heard it. I love hearing all sides of an argument that I didn’t even know was raging on Thinking Allowed. I listen to the comedy shows again and again to cheer myself up as I scrub out an oven. This could not happen with television, because it is designed to be watched, it precludes other activites.
Melvyn Bragg
This week I heard a debate about the proposed switch-off of the analogue signal in 2015 in favour of digital broadcasting. At the moment, I don’t possess any DAB radios and at least half of my radios are rather crackly and ready to be replaced. But I can’t afford one digital radio, let alone several, they are expensive items. One problem with this switchover is that not enough of the population are buying digital radios and until such time as the majority of people own them, the decision would be completely undemocratic and would have an incredibly detrimental effect on broadcasting. Additionally, the digital signal is pretty ropey in many areas of the country; certainly in Leicestershire it is erratic to say the least. Nevertheless, it is planned to sell off the analogue frequencies to mobile ‘phone and broadband companies.
An AA Battery in 2015
There are millions of analogue radios in this country which would be condemned to landfill, should the switchover take place so soon. Currently, the technology for digital radios means that they use vastly more electricity to use which will have a knock-on effect on battery usage and the amount of power needed to re-charge portable storage devices such as MP3s. I’m sure that eventually the technology will catch up, but not by 2015. These considerations are quite significant at a time when the environmentalists are howling night and day about cutting nightly emissions and re-cycling our toe-nails. How many unsightly and inadequate wind farms will be forced on us to power that lot?
I like digital radio and I wish I had one; I like the additional information displayed about programmes and I like features such as being able to pause a live programme, but I still can’t afford one. The price of DAB radios has to come down and the technology to make them energy efficient needs to catch up. I reckon twenty years should cover it.
No Post Today
The Wartime Housewife really is a bit rubbish with computers and if the slightest thing goes wrong, I wail and gnash my teeth in a way that I would never do in any other walk of life. Luckily for me, Mr PC Sorted was on hand to provide me with another virtual lifeboat and I am back in business. Hurrah! Up the wooden hill etc….
The Wartime Housewife has been Enhanced
My Office
Not in a surgical way of course, for The Wartime Housewife is already a perfect specimen of housewifely voluptuousness.
No. For tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I have finally been upgraded. One scrumptious gig of Random Access Memory has been inserted lovingly into my hard drive and I can now run four – Yes Four!- programmes at once and still finish a perfect blog in time for the Ten O’Clock News.
I can check my mail, write my blog, marvel at my ever soaring statistics and doctor photographs without once poking my own eyes out with a crochet hook in frustration and rage because of the binary alzheimers which has increasingly been my personal dis-ease.
And if you’re lucky, I might even stop banging on about it to you, when I’m banging my own head on my desk at two o’clock in the morning.
For I have been visited by none other than Bruce Edwards, better known as ‘PC Sorted’ (or was that Inspector Morse?) the Domestic IT Specialist of this parish. He cruised in like a rooster and upgraded me in a flash, then disappeared into the darkness, as the words “Just doing my job Ma’am” floated by on the mist-laden breeze.
Actually I made the last bit up, but I want you all to share my joy.
I may even sleep now.
