Midsummer Mundanities

Today, June 21st, is the longest day of the year. I always thinks this comes far too early – before we get chance to enjoy the summer, the nights start slowly getting darker again!

Today is also about one month before I fly away on holiday. It’s a well earned break, I must say. In the past month at work things have changed, duties are different, meaning I no longer have the cushy safe job with my mates and instead have a mind-numbingly boring job. Ho hum. That’s also not to mention the fact that my hours on Saturday have changed. I’m not a fan of working on Saturdays anyway, I finished at six but it’d kinda ruin the day, but now my hours have been shifted from 2-6 to 3-7. Perfect.

I’m all for looking for new work, but the severe lack of any decent jobs (the Nottingham Evening Post doesn’t even have a proper jobs paper anymore!) has led me to look at some sort of training in something else. I think I’ve approached the point of sink or swim. I’m 26, I’ve been at Royal Mail for three years and if i do nothing now, i’ll be there in three years time. Problem is, i’m not entirely sure what I want to do, and what I’d be good at. Certainly needs a few days off work (like a holiday!) to think long and hard about it.

I’ve been to London a good few times recently. Until the other day, my brother Iain and his fiancee Aleks lived in a ‘leafy’ north London suburb called Colindale. I say leafy, but a short walk down Edgware Road is enough to convince you other wise. They moved across the north of the capital last Tuesday, to a much larger and more interesting place called Wood Green – or more precisely Turnpike Lane – which involved me and my dad helping them both in about three car journeys to and fro.

Wood Green is automatically nicer, seeing as the high street is literally minutes away, there is a Wetherspoons serving non-London priced beer and they have the Turnpike Lane tube stop down the end of their road. Shame that they aren’t staying there longer (short term let) as i’d like to get to know the area better, plus it’s a few miles north of Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium – which I’d like to go gawp at.

Elsewhere, the new iPhone and the iPhone update were released the other day. The change between my iPhone 3G and the new 3GS is minimal, certainly not enough to go out and buy it. Besides, the recently released 3.0 jailbreak has seen to it that a lot of new features brought in on the 3GS can be got on my phone.

Incomplete iPhone

The iPhone is a great gadget, absolutely wonderful. The one glaring omission from this otherwise fine phone was a radio tuner. My old N95 came complete with one, something which came in handy when listening to the forest games at work on a Saturday afternoon!

Anyways, I’m not even sure the iPhone has a tuner inside the phone at all, so chances of a firmware update adding a radio feature are zilch. Something worth keeping in mind for the ‘iPhone 2′?

I bought an app a few days back called Wunder Radio. It’s a £3.50 Internet radio tuner. It works on any 3G or WiFi connection, picking up an incredible array of stations. Not just the UK, but worldwide. It also comes with the utterly useless but indeed curious police scanner feature. Basically a means of listening to American emergency services go about their business. Quite odd, but hearing the New York Fire Department attend to a fire – with the siren blazing in the background – was fun!

This radio app is definetly worth the cash, and the best part about it is it’ll play any internet radio station provided you have an URL. So it’s a chance to hear Nuxaq radio and indeed yours truly on your iPhone!!

(just enter www.nuxaq.com:8000 into Wunder Radio and you’re away)

Go directly to jail

No such London hilarity this weekend, more of a return to the mundane. Although I’ve not long at work before the luxury of a week off – and a birthday to boot!

Decided to see how my iPhone likes being un-jailbroken. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the iPhone since I jailbroke it, far from it, I just wanted to make sure restoring it didnt create some ill effects. I’ve heard some horror stories from people who’ve had their iPhone bricked when they’ve tried to un-jailbreak!

Plus the latest firmware Apple have released seems to have sorted out one major problem. The iPod always forgot where it was when I was in the middle of a shuffle. I’d listen to music on the way to work, go on the Internet on the phone, actually do some work, then listen to music on the way home only to find I’d have to start from the beginning!

I’ve got the option of re-jaiIbreaking it, of course. I’ll see how it goes before I do anything rash.

Exmas excess

Christmas has hit us, wether in the shops or at work – and I couldn’t be less christmassy! It’s not that I hate Christmas, it’s just that you don’t have much time to enjoy it when you’re working all week. It also doesn’t help that I’ve still to buy any Christmas presents yet…

Of course the shops aren’t missing a trick, enticing people in with these 20% off days, persuading hard up people to spend more cash they don’t have. We’ll remain in a recession do long as the high street shops reduce prices to crazy levels. makes you wonder how mad the January sales will be!

I haven’t shaved in nearly two weeks now, a record probably! I normally grow a goatee when in the mood for a beard but decided this time to just let it all grow. It’s a bit ginger though, which is a worry. I’ll see how long I can pull off the scruffy look before getting bored of it.

The iPhone has truly become the gadget I couldn’t live without. Jailbreaking it made it even better, with the 2.2 update smoothing out the edges a little – hopefully making the Internet more stable, but otherwise fine tuning a damn fine phone, I’m using all day every day. Marvellous!

I’ve also discovered Twitter in this last week or so. A social networking site with similarities to Facebook, it goes one step further by having actual real famous people using it. Maybe not incredibly famous, but certainly people I know and like – such as Robert Llelwellyn (Red Dwarf’s Kryten) and Stephen Fry. Twitter apps on the iPhone have also helped this become a little addictive.

Back Again

I have my PS2 back!

Iain gave it back to me when we visited him yesterday. I got to see where he lives, the delights of Colindale, Hendon and Brent Cross and had a go on Guitar Hero he’d got for his newly bought 360.

Having got the 360, he had no use for the PS2 I’d given him in the summer. It comes in handy as my cheap Toshiba DVD player is starting to go wrong, but also it comes in handy as shops are selling PS2 games for as little as £3. So I might pick up a few games I missed at the time, such as Path Of Neo or Bully. I also fancy the look of Guitar Hero, I’d forgotten how brilliant it is!

I joined Twitter the other day, a Facebook-a-like social networking site that has the potential to take over my life. It has done so in as much as I’ve already downloaded a Twitter app for my iPhone.