Year: 2006

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I really hate DRM. If ever there’s a technology designed to drive customers away from legitimate music, film, and tv downloads, and back to bittorrents, then DRM is it.

I had an infuriating experience over Christmas recently trying to watch a movie I’d downloaded off LoveFilm. Luckily, I hadn’t paid money for the film: it was part of a special free Christmas offer, presumably dreamt up by their marketing team who were labouring under the misapprehension that, having tried the film download service for free, their customers would subsequently think that having been treated to such a wonderfully simple user experience, they’d be prepared to pay for that service in the future…

So, I’d downloaded my film before heading home for Christmas (rather slowly, I might add) and was all set to watch it on Christmas Eve. It started fine: I hooked up my laptop to the TV, connected to the Internet to acquire my licence, and after I’d downloaded an obligatory update to Windows Media Player, we were off. Sure, the picture quality was a little grainy (despite my having opted for the largest, highest quality download), but nothing too noticeable.

But then, foolishly, we decided to stop watching and come back to the end of the film later. I should have known that doing something so unusual and ridiculous as this would prove to be a mistake.

When I tried to start it up again, there was no sound, unless I restarted playback from the start of the film. Attempts to fast forward mostly resulted in the film continuing to run at some random inappropriate speed (with no sound). I decided that watching the first hour again wasn’t really an option, and tried to do something about it, but in retrospect it would have been a lot quicker than what happened next.

“Hmm,” I thought. “I’ve only got Windows Media Player 9. I wonder if upgrading to the latest version will solve the problem?” This was my big mistake. I installed WMP 11 only to find that this somehow invalidated all of my acquired licences, and left me no way to acquire them again. (Helpfully, Microsoft have a knowledgebase article about the problem, which I can’t find right now, that basically says “yeah, it’s a bug. Sorry”). So I “rolled back” to version 9, but this just did a fresh install of WMP 9 leaving me with no licences at all, and trying to play the file now would generate an “Unknown Error”. Hmm. Helpful.

Then, to add further insult, my new install of WMP 9 helpfully informed me that an update was available, and would I like to install it? When I clicked “Yes”, it started installing WMP 11 again. Thanks Microsoft.

After exhausting all possibilities with my laptop, I discovered that we could watch the rest of the film by copying it onto my mum’s computer via an external drive and re-acquiring the licences from there. I was even able to skip to the bit we’d stopped at.

And so, the entire process of getting the film restarted after pausing it took about 2 hours. I’m not sure it was worth it to be honest, and I don’t think anyone else was remotely bothered about seeing the rest of the film by that point, but I couldn’t let the technology beat me.

Thanks Lovefilm, but I think I’ll stick to DVDs from now on. At least my DVD player doesn’t have to connect to the internet to acquire a licence before it will let me play a disc, I’m allowed to pause films whenever I want, and the disc doesn’t “expire” in 24 hours either, (although I’m sure it’s only a matter of time…)

Via Rhodri, Charles Arthur and mytornadohell.livejournal.com, comes this article by Caroline Phillips from last Tuesday’s Evening Standard.

You’ll want to read it in full for the full effect.
You may wish to read it several times.
You may wonder if it is simply a parody.
It is not.

Of course there’s nothing in the slightest bit amusing about losing your home. But this? Well… read it for yourself and see what you think.

These are some of my favourite bits…

My home has always been my sanctuary, a place of exquisite beauty and calm. I read or sit undisturbed on our leather sofa in our family room with its off-white walls, stainless steel and sage-green stone surfaces, and gaze through its wall of sliding glass doors onto our fragrant cream and lavender garden with its climbing roses, ancient apple and pear trees, camellias and jasmine.

The Apocalypse was not all bad. There was something comforting about watching the Salvation Army dispensing tea and sandwiches. Uplifting seeing people in crisis helping one another. And meeting kindly new souls in the street. As for the house, it’s just bricks and mortar. We’re not in a tent in Pakistan or even Brent council’s temporary accomodation. […]

So presumably in future I should expect not just the cheeky girls to be wandering past our house, but Lembit Opik too?

I’ll start composing my haiku now.

So we finally went down to the Screen on Baker Street to see Casino Royale on Saturday night. Yeah, I know, about three weeks after everyone else, but there you go.

And it’s really good, of course, but that’s more than could be said for our fellow viewers. Just like Rob and Al before us (although admittedly they were distracted from rather more highbrow pursuits) our enjoyment was diminished by being in close proximity to the general public.

As soon as the trailers started up, it became clear that the middle-aged couple next to us had confused a full cinema and the 80-odd strangers seated around them for their own living room and DVD player. Easy enough to do, I suppose. They talked loudly throughout the trailers, filling the cinema with their inane chatter (and to give you an idea of the kind of insightful commentary they were providing, here’s a small sample: at the end of the Orange-sponsored “please turn off your phones” ad, which finishes with just the first half of their slogan, “the future’s bright…”, the moron next to us felt that what the entire cinema really needed was for him to loudly complete the line “ha, ha! the future’s orange…”)

But you sort of expect some low-level chatter during the ads, I suppose. “They’ll stop when the film comes on, won’t they?” I said to Sal.

They did not.

And so, I spent the first 10 or so minutes of the film itself–through the whole of the base jumping sequence and beyond–listening to them present evidence of a complete lack of internal monologue with their idiotic verbal outbursts (at one point early on in the film some cards are turned over in a poker game: “ah! two aces!” shouted the lady, apparently in some kind of service to the partially sighted). As time passed, I tried to compose the wittiest and most efficient put down I could, each time vowing that the next time they spoke I would use it, but by the time I’d settled on “Excuse me, I came to watch the film, not listen to you. Could you please be quiet”, and turned to deploy it, Sal had reached breaking point too, and she beat me to it with her own variation.

They were largely quiet from that point on.

You don’t mess with Sal.

After 4 days in San Fran, it was time to move on. It was about a 10 minute walk from our hotel down to the car rental office, where we were due to collect our convertible. All downhill, though, and not via The Tenderloin, so I figured that we’d be fine to walk down there with our bags.

It was only as I rounded the corner to the Dollar car rental office, struggling under the weight of the backpack (honestly–who needs that many pairs of shoes?) that I realised that we were, of course, there to pick up a car, and that it’s just possible that we could have left the bags at the hotel and swung by later to pick them up.

Once a pedestrian…

Our directions to get out of San Francisco and down to the winery where we were spending the night were ridiculously easy–first right, take the ramp onto highway 101, and drive for 200 miles–so after the ease of escaping from San Fran, we opted to mix things up a bit by stopping off in Silicon Valley on the way. Well, as I said to Sal by way of justification, it is where the computers come from, after all. And so we decided to pull off in Palo Alto, allegedly home to Stanford with its garden of Rodin sculptures, and a pretty town centre.

Not that we’d know it–my pathetic efforts at navigating resulted in us missing the exit and spending 20 minutes driving along quiet suburban streets only to end up in the next town, Los Altos. It has no Rodins, and no world-class university, but it’s another sleepy, quaint Silicon Valley town and I’m sure they’re all the same really.

We parked up in what passed for the town centre, our tiny car dwarfed by the SUVs around it. As we wandered in search of somewhere for lunch, a young girl with a clipboard stopped us to ask if we could “spare a minute to stop global warming”. I’m afraid to say that we said no. Sorry everyone.

Back on the road, we made just one more attempt to stop, this time in Salinas, birthplace of Steinbeck, and home, allegedly, to a new multi-million dollar museum dedicated to him. Again, we wouldn’t know, because after driving round for 20 minutes all we found were some suburbs, a lot of spinach, and a strip mall where we bought cokes and crisps in a tiny shop where the assistant was utterly baffled and confused and stared back at us blankly when we asked the question “are there any toilets round here?”

We decided not to stop again.

Now, most wine country tourists in Northern California follow the well-worn path up from San Fran to Napa or Sonoma, but, never ones to follow the crowd, we opted to spend the wine tasting portion of our trip in tiny Paso Robles, staying in a lovely winery/hotel with impossibly friendly staff (even by American standards) and complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres served in the afternoons.

Heading outside to sip our free wine on the terrace, we realised that we may just possibly be bringing down the average age somewhat. Luckily the oldies were friendly enough–“Let’s go talk to those kids!” said one as they moved over to sit near us, ask us if we were on our honeymoon (!) and give us some good advice on which wineries to visit.

Later, not keen to drink and drive, we booked a cab into town for dinner. Correction: we booked the cab into town for dinner. (And it was just as well we realised just how small a place it was before he dropped us off–it turned out he finished at 9pm).

“Are you the ones who came by cab?” asked the waitress as she showed us to our table. Ah. Small towns. Don’t you love em?

Any plans I may have had to catch up with some blogging in this slightly quieter of weeks have been dashed somewhat by the fact that my ageing laptop nearly died last night. I’m not a happy bunny… it was sitting on the table happily downloading some files when suddenly there was a funny noise.

“What’s happened to your computer?” asked Sal, spotting the dreaded Blue Screen of Death…

Now it’s all like “hard disk error” this and “unable to mount boot volume” that, and flat-out refuses to start up at all. The recovery stuff on the Windows install disc is no help either. The best the disk checking utility can come up with is “this disc appears to have unrecoverable errors”. Well thanks for that…

Luckily, I actually backed-up my most important files last weekend, (for the first time in about six months, I should add) so assuming it is just the hard drive that needs replacing, then the worst case will be that I’ve lost the few blurry photos from the Gomez gig that I didn’t upload to Flickr, the snippit of video I took of Whippin’ Picadilly, and some other photos from Friday night.

(Oh and not to mention the hours it will take to reinstall everything…)

Memo to Self: Make More Regular Backups.

Ooh-err. Post number 500. I feel like I should be writing something all significant and important… A retrospective of the 3 years and 10 months (has it really been that long?) that have passed since my first post on the 20th January 2003. Perhaps the exactness of the time period is somehow fitting. Perhaps it’s all as insignificant as celebrating the changing of the dates at the end of a year, or remarking on one of those occasions when the date is the same forwards as it is backwards. Who knows…

Oh. I know what I’ll do: I’ve spent so many of the previous 499 posts documenting my struggles with customer service in the 21st century (also referred to as “moaning”) that it seems rather appropriate to recount a tale of a new breed of incompetence: the corporation that is so rubbish that it makes mistakes in your favour and doesn’t even realise.

This has happened a few times this year, actually. Back at the start of the year I signed up for an Amazon-linked credit card, mainly so that I could grab their introductory bonus £15 voucher. When this didn’t turn up, I fired off a few emails and eventually got one back with my voucher in it. Then, a couple of weeks later, I got another one. Wahey!

A similar thing happened when I needed to get some about-to-expire hotel loyalty points converted into frequent flyer miles: they didn’t turn up for ages; I emailed; they were credited; time passed; they were credited again. Wahey!

And then just recently I placed a few orders with a photo printing website: www.photobox.co.uk. I’d definitely recommend them if you need some photos printed. The quality of the prints seems to be a bit better than some of the other similar services I’ve used, but that’s not the reason–I’ve now placed three orders with them, and on two of the three occasions they’ve managed to duplicate the order. The first time it all came in the same envelope, and all but about four of the prints I’d ordered were in there twice. Most recently, they actually sent two individually packaged and completely identical versions of the same order.

Even better, they then followed this up with an email apologising for the delay in my order (I hadn’t noticed), and putting this down to problems implementing new systems. Apparently their team “worked round the clock to catch up”. (Perhaps not duplicating everyone’s order would have been a helpful way to reduce the delays. I don’t know…) To tempt me back to their services, however, here was a £5 voucher… Wahey!

*

In other photo news, as observant viewers of my Flickr photostream will have spotted, I’ve recently embarked on a blog/photo project. Inspired by reading this a few weeks before my birthday, on the 15th of October I started trying to take a photo every day, and I plan to continue to do this for the rest of my 30th year. Yes, you might say, that’s awfully pretentious and navel gazing, but so what: I’ve been blogging for nearly 4 years; it’s not as if I’m averse to a bit of navel gazing now and then. And I’m not forcing anyone to look at it…

If you’d like to follow my progress, you can do so here: www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/photos/index.php?set=AYearInTheLife or here: www.flickr.com/photos/mattandsally/sets/72157594329732205/

The plan is that each photo gets a comment, as well, so if I’m neglecting the blog a little bit, at least I’m half making up for it by blogging on Flickr (you could always subscribe to the RSS Feed, if you’re that way inclined…)

Coming soon: I’m going to finally get round to finishing writing up our trip to the US. In September…

I’ve harped on about this before, of course, with other gigs (Hard-Fi anyone?) but I think it deserves to be repeated:

Xfm’s Winter Wonderland Sold Out!

Xfm’s Winter Wonderland sees The Kooks, The Feeling, The Automatic, Boy Kill Boy and more, all playing London’s Brixton Academy. Tickets went on sale this morning at 9am (November 3) and sold out in just six minutes!

http://www.xfm.co.uk/Article.asp?b=news&id=300082

Yeah, course it did. Six minutes. Right…

Then how come I (and some 999 other people) purchased tickets on Thursday in a “presale”. At 2 tickets per person, that’s up to 2,000 of the 5,000 available for the Brixton Academy already sold before the tickets had even gone on sale.

And then there’s the fact that I was able to buy another set of 2 tickets at 8.50am this morning, when See Tickets put them up for sale ten minutes before they were supposed to go on sale at 9am.

I look forward to updating this entry sometime in early December, when the production holds are released and TicketWeb put them up for sale.

But yeah, right, XFM. It sold out in 6 minutes. Whatever you say.

UPDATE [04/12/2006]: “I look forward to updating this entry sometime in early December…” Oh yeah. That would be today, then…

UPDATE [04/12/2006, a bit later]: Oh, and they’re gone again…

A couple of apologies:

1) Well (if anyone still cares) I will get around to documenting the rest of our trip to America eventually, but, you know, it’s just finding the time and all that…

2) Then again, most of the times recently that I’ve thought I might pop over and write a blog, the bloody site has been down. I think Freedom2Surf fixed the database problems I was moaning about the other week, but now their server seems to have packed up altogether.

If anyone is ever actually able to read this, then I’m sorry. If it’s not sorted out very quickly, then I’m going to have to seriously look for a new host…

And if anyone is in any doubt that the problem is pretty bad, then this makes pretty conclusive reading.

(The irony of trying to use this blog as a medium for informing people about the website being down is not lost on me, of course…)

UPDATE: Of course, now I’ve posted this things seem to be back up and running ok. How long that will last is anyone’s guess though. As a possible interim solution, I’m now mirroring the site at the old address: www.pastemagazine.f2s.com. I think it’s hosted on a different server, so if you can’t get on to www.pastemagazine.org then there is just a chance that that version of the site will still be up.

UPDATE (2): And then this weekend I received an email reply from F2S to my support ticket about the downtime. Although they can’t say when they will be able to fix it, they do at least acknowledge that there is a problem and that they are working on it. Perhaps most surprising is that fact that they emailed me on a Saturday (especially given that they’d previously let a database outage go unfixed for an entire weekend). Things seem to be back up and running properly again for the time being, and I don’t really have the time right now to be looking for a decent replacement, so I guess I’ll leave things as they are for now and see what happens… (I choose the devil I know. For now…)

In the evening, after we’d biked the bridge and had some fun, we went down to the Mission, an area named for the Catholic missions built a couple of hundred years ago in an attempt to convert the natives, but now famed for its Mexican food. In particular, burritos.

We caught the bus down. As it pulled up on the corner of 16th Street, we realised that this, too, was an, ahem, “interesting” part of town: the square above the metro station where the bus had stopped was just like you’d see on some American movie when they want to show a rundown downtown. It was just what I’d imagined LA would be like, actually–lots of people pushing around shopping carts containing their worldy goods, and others just sitting around drinking, taking drugs, and panhandling for change. They weren’t quite crowding round those drum fire things that you see on the TV, but it was definitely in that ballpark. It’s not as if London and the UK don’t have their fair share of homelessness and poverty, of course, but there’s something about poverty in America (when you encounter it) that’s just on a different scale altogether. Then again, maybe you just don’t expect to go to the world’s richest country, and see such a gap between rich and poor.

(The burritos were great, by the way…)

The following morning we went back to The Mission. As we waited to catch the bus near our hotel, a guy approached us and struck up a conversation. He looked like a rocker from way back in his black skinny jeans and leather jacket. Might have been in his 40s, I suppose, and he had the kind of worn, leathery face that suggested he been around the block a few times. Maybe he’d roadied for Ossie Osbourne, or the like. When he found out we were from London he started telling us all his stories. How he’d been there in the 80s and stayed in some hotel in Kensington for about £3.50 a night in a massive room where, he had been told, “Lord something or other used to bring his tarts”. “I didn’t know what a tart was,” he told us, “but I found out soon enough”.

He probably had many more stories to tell, but then our bus arrived to whisk us away–back to The Mission, where we headed straight for Mission Dolores, one of the oldest missions in the area, and which gave it’s official name (San Francisco de Asis) to the city. Luckily when we arrived we just managed to beat a double-decker coach tour, and so we were able to wander around alone; only as we were leaving did the coach open its doors and flood the tiny, previously tranquil, church with its cargo of bumbag-wearing turistics.

We kept moving, to Castro–home of the city’s gay community. On the advice of our Time Out guidebook, we stopped in at a deli on the high street, got lunch “to go” and made our way up a steep, steep road to the park, Corona Heights, for a stunning view of Castro, the Mission, and the city beyond:

On our way up to find a lunch spot, after climbing up a road with one of the steepest inclines we’d seen so far in the city, we stopped to take a breather. Suddenly, from nowhere came a piercing siren, like an air-raid warning.

We both looked at each other. We were both thinking the same thing: Oh my god, there must be an earthquake coming… what do we do? Should we stay put, out in the open, or was it better to go somewhere and shelter? I looked up–we were standing directly underneath some power cables and a telegraph pole, but we were both rooted to the spot, unsure what to do…

Then, from out of nowhere, two old ladies were suddenly walking towards us.

“Excuse me,” said Sal. “Do you know what that noise meant?”
“Oh yes dear,” came the reply. “It’s 12 o’clock.”