domdavis.com

There is much glow in Colchester tonight.

As promised [threatened] last week this week it’s all gothy and miserable with Dyonisis. I saw these guys at the Simelight a few weeks ago where they were a support act for someone who’s name I can’t spell and I can’t be bothered to look up. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a small support band that actually impressed me but these guys rock. The debut album is a little raw but I’m pretty sure they’ll shape up to be quite a good act and, for the first time in ages, I actually went and bought a CD based on a live performance. My favroite track from the album is Distance [ITMS] which is well worth a listen (which you can do if you toddle over to their myspace profile.

Sometimes distance is good
When you fall for someone who’s not who you should
When you miss someone
Cos you kissed someone
Then they’re taken away
Get away from me, I don’t want to see you happy this way
Get away from me, I don’t want to see you happy.

So we’ve all seen the idiot moron on television telling us how great Halifax is and how thier rates of interest leave all the other banks standing. Well a few weeks ago I found my old university ’savings’ account passbook (I say savings, I’d put money in there, then skim it back to £50 which was the minimum you needed to keep in there for them to pay interest so I never really saved anything) and low and behold did the last entry tell me that on the 12th of March 1998 there was £51.31 in the account. I was really quite excited, it was a savings account with a high rate of interest and over 10 years surely there should be some apreciable ammount in there now. Somewhere I think my maths went a little wrong and the interest rate kind of sucked. It goes thusly:

• June 1998: 44p
• June 1999: 26p
• June 2000: 26p
• June 2001: 23p
• June 2002: 9p
• June 2003: 5p
• June 2004: 8p
• June 2005: 43p
• June 2006: 37p
• June 2007: 41p
• June 2008: 58p
• Today: 4p

Sum total removed from account when I closed it: £54.55. Yeah. Hardly seems worth it. anyway, it’s an extra £50 to go into the ‘my God, I’m so poor I’ve had to stop getting every single channel that Sky does and just pay for the ones I actually watch’ fund.

So the new iPhone gives me many many more G’s than I had with my old one. There is a whole half a G more in data tranfer speed (3G instead of 2.5G), a G in GPS which is now has and 8 more G’s in the 16Gb of storage it has. So thats 11.5G’s more than what I have with my first gen phone, so naturally I had to get one. Of course, what with the massive interest this time round stock has been somewhat limited and it’s taken me until today to actually get my hot and stickies on one and… well… I’m a little underwhelmed.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my old iPhone and was a seriously heavy user and I’ll no doubt get on very well with the new one, it’s just that none of the new shiny stuff leaps out at me yet and there are a few niggles.

Niggle the first: The old school iPhone is a seriously sexy peice of kit and feels good and solid in your hand. The new one is a little wider which, to my eyes, makes it look more clunky and is a little more plasticy in its construction. It’s still a good looking phone, but the old one was prettier.

Niggle the second: Due to it being wider the old iPhone docks I have setup dotted round my house don’t fit. So I need to go buy new ones. Bum, and quite possibly poo.

Niggle the third: There is no way to see how good the GPS signal is, how many satelites you’re locked onto or anything like that. I’ve yet to really play with the GPS (my Garmin GPS unit doesn’t workin indoors so trying to get the iPhone to work inside would be a little unfair) but I would have thought something like that would be more than useful.

Hopefully as I use it out and about and start to make use of the 3G data connection and the GPS it’ll start to whelm me more otherwise I could (shock horror) be returning it and going back to my oldskool one.

I had a ‘fat day’ this morning as I got up and tried to take my rings off for a shower. Both of them were damn near impossible to remove. It was, of course, just water retention. They were fine last night, their fine now (and after 7 hours on a dancefloor one of then practically falls off by itself). I can at least look in a mirror and decide that, with the exception of a beer gut, I look OK and I do do a lot of excercise in order to shift the last few pounds, or at least turn them into muscle. This is probably due to the fact that I have half a brain and understand that I, like everyone else, suffer from bad lard retention and thus try to match my lard intake with my level of excercise. It seems that the poor unfortunates who have hitherto been hiding behind a medical problem now also have to face up to this fact. Welcome to the real world. Now are we allowed to finally say that half this country wouldn’t know a well balanced diet it it slapped them round their fat butts or is that still being fattist?

So my jazzy post things from the iPhone app keeps refusing to publish stuff and just crashes instead. This means you’ve missed out on two highly amusing posts penned by me as I travelled to and from Norwich today. I may rewrite them when I get home, but the moment may have gone. In the mean time I’m back to WPhone until I can either get an update or work out how to stop it crashing

It would seem my premise that 99% of the worlds population should be shot us slightly wrong. Shooting is too good for some people.

So I’m officially unemployed. My last pay cheque goes into my account tomorrow and I get my redundancy (or lottery winnings, depending how you view it) payout on the 28th of next month. From then until I get a job I’m living on my savings (of which there will be a considerable amount thanks to the payout). For those who have been trying to call me an unemployed layabout for the past 2 months you can actually officially do so. Knock yourselves out

As regular readers will know (on my phone so no linkies back to the relevant posts) I recently had Lloyds phoning me up about suspicious activity ok my card. I also decided I was going into Norwich to buy stuff. So this morning [just] I got up, got dressed, sorted a few things out and headed to the train station whereupon the ticket saga started.

I’m getting an intercity so I go to the flash intercity ticket vending machine as it gives you more blurb about when I can use a super saver advance daypex cheap day return and gird myself for the argument that invariably ensues about my card (it only likes it about 1 time in 5). After we have that argument and it finally allows me to try to pay it then tells me there was a problem with payment. Great.

So we move to a normal ticket machine. I know which ticket type I want now and they don’t seem to have a problem with my card… except today they do. Sod it, it’s only 18 quid, I’ll pay in cash, but noooo, this machine wants exact money only. Great.

Machine number three. Once again the card is refused but this time it’s accepting all denominations of pounds sterling so I can actully buy a ticket.

Then it occurs to me that there is probably still a block on
My card due to suspect transactions so I give Lloyds a ring (music fades out, god I love my phone) who confirm that, yes, for my safety and cinvinience they’d put a stop on my card. I pointed out it wasn’t very convinient and could they perhaps unblock it so I could take it shopping. Anyway, all sorted now. Ironically enough the song that I’m listening to now is quite apt for what is going to happen to my John Lewis card as I spend my ‘gorgeous things’ budget: Bind, torture and kill!

This week I went for pink roses as they were reasonably priced. I was going to go for some blue smelly things but they didn’t seem to have any nice bunches so roses it was.