55 posts tagged “mobile”

This is the poppy I will wear at 11AM to commemorate all the members of the armed forces who have fought - or are currently fighting - in our wars. They've done so much for us that it's hard to put into words. The two minutes' silence will be held, as we have so much to be thankful for, and there's so much we owe them. It seems only fitting that we take the time out of our lives every year to remember. My godfather served in the RAF during WWII, and has so many stories of the people he met (most of them being American girls. Ahem), the guys he served with, and, most importantly, the tales of the many fights he had in the sky with the Luftwaffe.
I will never forget all the things he has taught me for as long as I live.

This is the chocolate-covered profiterole/cream puff I will eat to remember Maddie Spohr, the little girl who would have been celebrating her second birthday today, if she hadn't suddenly died on the 7th of April this year.
I first heard about her when the hashtag #Maddie became a trending topic on Twitter on that very same day. When I finally had a chance to visit the blog belonging to Heather, Maddie's mother (for all of this attention had made her server crash), my first thought was disbelief. There was only a sentence mentioning her very unexpected death, and the rest of the posts showed off Maddie's mischievous and vibrant personality. Someone like Maddie that was so bright and full of life couldn't be taken away so soon, could she?
Fate is cruel.
I immediately changed my Twitter page to purple, her colour, like many others who had read of her passing. As the months passed, I continued to read Heather's blog, and my heart broke a little bit more each day for her. As much as I love her blog, I would have given anything to have never known her through her words, if only Maddie was still living.
Today is Maddie's birthday. Last year, on her first and only birthday, her birthday treat was a giant cream puff. On the other side of the pond, the closest thing I could find were these little chocolate profiteroles.
I will gorge myself on chocolate and cream today to celebrate the birthday of a little girl I never knew, but one who has had such a profound effect on me in the past couple of months in the way no one else never could.

Today will be a day of remembering. Those who have died for us, those who are fighting for us, and all those who were taken too soon. I will hold my two minutes of silence, eat my profiteroles in the messiest way possible, and remember.

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

Daily Confession: I read TNT Magazine although I'm not from Australia, New Zealand or South Africa.

Aside from all the references to celebrities that I don't get, it's one of the better free reads that you can pick up outside Tube stations. There's things like Photoshopped images of the Queen and interviews with famous people - most of whom I know, yay! - but what makes me laugh the most is the reader perspectives on London.

Having lived here for at least 10 years, I feel I can be self-righteous and call them n00bs. ^_^ With the latest issue I picked up outside a Tube station, a reader of the magazine was complaining about having to wait *gasp* between six and thirteen minutes extra for a London Overground train!

Now, London trains work in pretty obvious ways: those that go underground, and those that do not.

London Underground (Tube) trains usually come every 5 minutes or so in central London, but as you go out from the centre, trains become less and less frequent. On a normal weekday, because I'm near the end of the line, I can wait up to half an hour for a train to take me on a 10 minute journey eastbound during the so-called peak times.
London Overground trains, on average, come about every 15-20 minutes during peak times, less so during off-peak times. There can be major delays, but usually nothing that can't be solved within 20 minutes, and most commuters are happy to wait.* Although this may be because they have no other choice.

This letter to the magazine was hilarious to read. Not only because he seemed so put out that he had to wait a bit extra, but that he ended the letter with "This is London, not Sydney!"
London and Sydney have at least one thing in common: they're cities. And what do cities have? Imperfect transport systems!
If the guy who wrote an indignant letter into the magazine was so annoyed with being a whole THIRTEEN MINUTES later than usual for work, he should get up earlier.

...And try waiting for buses more/come to South Harrow or Boston Manor station with me. That should put his lateness into perspective.

*There was a time last year where an unusual 50 minute delay on a London Overground train made me totally miss French and Saunders live, and I was upset for days, but amazingly kind people on Plurk gave me another ticket for their last ever show, but that's a long story for another day...

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

I occasionally use my Vox blog as a place to put memes and other stuff I wouldn't like to post on Wordpress (my blog is generally not treated as a MySpace bulletin). There's not much difference between all the platforms where blogging is concerned - words are words no matter where they are - but the commenting systems and privacy options SUCK on both Vox and LJ.

You can't comment on LJ and Vox blogs without having an account on there (or in the case of LJ, sometimes having an OpenID also suffices).
I don't use my LJ account at all. I don't need another blog to update, and I hate faffing about with trying to remember who my OpenID provider is. Also, my OpenID doesn't link back to anything I want it to, which is annoying when you're trying to get a friendship going via blog comments. "By the way, this is my blog URL, but this isn't spam, honest! My OpenID doesn't lead anywhere."

Vox is apparently an OpenID in itself, but anyone who has a blog on Vox is restricted to only getting comments from other Vox members. So, in theory, I could comment on LJ blogs, but anybody who doesn't have a Vox account cannot comment on my posts on there.
[I forget what happened when Six Apart owned both LJ and Vox, but I believe it was still strictly members-only; Vox wasn't even an OpenID then.]

Most of my friends are not Vox users. The community there is not for everyone. Ever since I started using it several years ago (beta testers FTW), not much has been done to it or changed. You still can't make your own themes from scratch (you're stuck scratching your head on the best size for your custom banner, and what colour of text will make your blog title show up), there's no API, and it's plagued with spam - even after a user is deleted for spamming, their comments are still around for people to delete manually.
Generally, it sucks.

And, like I said earlier, it excludes non-members. People who have blogs already don't really want to sign up to another blogging service just so they can comment. If I didn't have a Google account already, I probably wouldn't even bother reading blogs hosted on Blogger.

I have my name, my email address, and my website URL. Surely that should be enough? I have difficulties commenting on others' blogs as it is, and I'm not going to jump through hoops just so I can leave a comment.

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

I hate waste. Wasted food, wasted resources, wasted time; all these things lead to a very annoyed Rammi.

Even if I'm full up, and feel as if I can't eat any more, whenever someone is about to throw perfectly good food away, I am always tempted to take it from them. And sometimes I do. I'm not greedy, but I just hate seeing something that could easily be salvaged go into the bin.
People in third world countries are starving, and yet some people still think it's OK to throw away half their lunch because they "just didn't feel like it after all". I'm the type who is very particular about the stuff I leave behind. I squeeze and squeeze a ketchup packet until there's nothing left, and when tipping a soft drink can into a cup, will tap and tap until I'm satisfied that all the last drops have come out.

I'm the same with everything else too. It's not just food that annoys me. If there's a tiny bit of paint left in the tube, you can bet anything that I will be the one to spend 20 minutes trying to get it out. I will cut open a toothpaste tube when most of it is gone to try and get the last bits in the tube, and will attempt to use every single inch of paper that I get. Aerosol cans? I press and press until nothing - and I mean nothing - but air comes out. None of this throwing away when it begins to splutter nonsense for me.

People who throw away money also deserve a slap, in my opinion. I've walked alongside people who, after coming out of a 99p shop, will casually throw away their pennies. Statistics have shown that every year, people throw away millions on the streets. Why would anyone waste their money like this?
In the scheme of things, a penny isn't a lot. But when people who frequently throw loose change away calculate how much money they've thrown away, it can add up to quite a lot of money.

Wasted time also irks me. I hate being late (although I sometimes often am), and will often get quite angry at friends who leave me hanging. I know some people don't mind lateness at all, but if a friend I'm meeting up with is an hour late, that's an hour I could have spent at home in bed, or doing something equally as worthwhile. >.>

I don't know where my obsession with saving comes from (besides from not really having enough money to buy all the things I want to buy). It certainly doesn't come from my mother or grandmother. My family are the type to leave everything where it is if they don't like it, and will frequently throw good food away when they feel that they don't want it any more - my grandma is a prime example of this. This makes for awkward mealtimes, when I insist that they at least finish some of their food (one mouthful of a meal they just made isn't good enough), then get tired of arguing and eat it myself, whereupon I am rebuked for being greedy. It's a no-win situation.

Frugalness isn't an admirable trait to have when you live in a developed country, where practically everyone wastes what they have without even thinking about it. I know I can get quite obsessive over this, but it's difficult not to be. I would be able to understand throwing things away if people at least made an attempt to use them, but when they don't even make an effort, why should I bother trying to understand?

If I ever get the chance to be a parent, I wonder what I will be like. I hope I'm not one of those parents who forces their kids to eat all their greens and clear their plates even if they don't want to, but I can see myself heading that way already. ^_^

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

I don't see the point of categories and tags. How am I supposed to define a post?

In all the posts I've done on the Wordpress platform, I've never ever used a single tag. On Vox, my tags are just set to "mobile" and "post", because of the way I crosspost things. I've never really sorted them out, but I know I should someday, as Vox doesn't really allow me to organise my posts in any other way. But when Wordpress already has categories, what is the point of having tags as well?

Sadly, I never know what category anything I blog fits into, nor do I know what to name these categories. What I do know is that I hate "Uncategorized" with a passion. At the moment, I'm sticking everything in my "NaBloPoMo" category to save myself from this horror. But how do I categorise what I write? Does a certain paragraph make it fit into my "Nostalgia" category, or does a word make it fit into "Random"?

What I do know is that I need to get better category names.

I think categories and tags are great for some blogs that write about certain themes (technology, for example), but when I just write whatever comes into my head at the time, it's difficult to organise my blog posts into topics.

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

I have so many ideas in my head. Grand pictures with beautiful scenery, website layouts that are perfect in every way, songs with lyrics that are actually relevant to my life, and perhaps even videos that people favourite thousands of times because they're just that awesome. Oh yeah.
The problem with this is:

• Art: I can't even hold a pencil properly, let alone draw a masterpiece. I wasn't blessed with the ability to see shadows and light, and could never shade appropriately in art lessons, making my art teachers bang their heads against the wall in frustration.


• Websites: I could probably make the website layout of my dreams if I was prodded really hard, but there's that laziness thing. It creeps up on me on the rare occasions I'm actually feeling quite motivated, and makes me give up before I can get into that "OMG! I NEED TO FINISH!" mode, which usually only happens around an hour before I have a project deadline. Things I do for fun don't have deadlines, therefore making me drop them like they're hot whenever I start to get a little bit tired.
  I know I have major issues when it comes to completing things - most of my posts on this website seem to be rants about how I'm not getting anything done. Meh.


• Music: Song lyrics come to me easily (much like ironic poetry does), but my one attempt at a musical career was taking a Grade 1 violin exam many years ago (I passed, but never bothered to practice). I suck at theory; it takes me ages to read notes, and even then I'm not thinking in proper terms. For example:
  Me: "That's where I'd put 3 fingers on the A string! Oh yeah, it's D!"
  Other musicians: *facepalm*
  My singing voice is also of dubious quality, so I'm not even going to attempt that. I've watched the X Factor and American Idol. I've covered my ears and cringed for the contestants. What may sound good in my head doesn't neccessarily sound good in anyone else's.


• Videos: I have all the right equipment to make a kickass video, but I'm a n00b at editing, and too shy to rope other people into making them with me when I'm not sure how they're going to turn out in the end.

I know people have different talents. I'm happy with the ones I seem to have been given - sarcasm and the ability to call people out on their grammar and spelling mistakes. But when I have so many weird ideas swirling around in my head that can never come into fruition, I sometimes wish that my skills extended to the media I consume obsessively on a daily basis.

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

In the past few years, I've morphed from a Microsoft-lover to a fully-fledged iTard. How did this happen? Clever marketing? Good SEO? Growing annoyance with Microsoft?
This may seem a bit strange to you, but I actually blame Last.fm.

You see, back in April 2006, I joined Last.fm, mainly because my peers at the Rathergood forum were joining it, and I didn't want to feel left out... It's bad enough being a loner in real life, but being a loner on a social networking website? That's just sad.

I've never been a heavy listener of music, and I didn't listen to it on my computer at all, because it was just too slow. My computer was a crappy Windows XP desktop that I had bought in early 2004, but 256MB of RAM really isn't good enough when you have a hundred applications open at the same time. >.> But as time went by, I slowly began to love hearing music on my computer, despite its flaws.

Eventually, I thought, "Hey! If I don't want my music to stop because my computer keeps crashing, I should get an MP3 player!" *claps self* I have awesome logic.
When I was a little kid, I owned a portable cassette player, which soon got upgraded to a portable CD player when I broke the other one (I've broken a lot of gadgets; explained in more detail here). My younger self only listened to Madonna and Cliff Richard on repeat, and needed a portable CD player when they stopped releasing their songs on cassette.

And so, all was well in the Rammi world, until something dreadful happened. I dropped it. As I was changing Cliff Richard's Greatest Hits from 1994 to Madonna's Ray of Light, the CD player slipped out of my hand, and right into a puddle. Despite my best efforts - talking to it, hitting it, coaxing it to work - it was never the same again.
I remember crying for a week.

I got a replacement eventually, but that one soon stopped working. After that, I just gave up. In hindsight, this was probably a good thing, because it gave me a much needed break from Madge and Cliff.

When I joined Last.fm, my music taste was just as bad as it was when I was younger, but thankfully did not involve me vogueing down the road. I was just starting to get into this whole "scrobbling" business, and wanted every single song I listened to to show up on the website. Last.fm's website at the time told me that the only way you could scrobble was through your computer (duh) and an iPod!

I wasn't too impressed by iPods originally, because they didn't seem to be *that* special, when you compared them with other MP3 players... They didn't look like Hello Kitty or resemble something rude, they didn't come with pretty matching earphones, and they didn't have as much space as some of the other brands available.

Yes, I judge gadgets on appearance first, and then glance briefly at the specs. Shh.

But all my negative thoughts about the iPod disappeared when I saw that it could SCROBBLE. And so, I grabbed my money, ran off to the shop, and became the proud owner of a second generation silver iPod Nano. It went everywhere with me, and I dutifully plugged it into my computer every night just so it could scrobble what I had listened to earlier that day.

Soon, I realised I wanted more Apple items, and more Apple stickers to stick around my house. When the first generation iPod Touch was released the next year, it quickly became my next pet - to coddle, access websites with, dress up in pretty cases, and, most importantly,  jailbreak the hell out of the software. There's only so many times you can play Solitaire with the second generation Nano.

I sense that my beloved iPod was feeling jealous around the newer model surrounding it, because a few months after I had bought the iPod Touch, it kicked the bucket whilst I was listening to Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush... "Oh let me have it, let me grab your soul away..." With lyrics like that, no wonder it croaked.

However, I still wasn't satisfied. After my iPod Touch came the iPhone 3G, because I had gotten sick of carrying around several devices when one could easily do the same job as them all. I promptly jailbroke my iPhone, dressed it up, used it to phone people and accessed the internet on the bus. Oh, and of course, I used it to scrobble all my music every day.

Later that year, my Windows desktop computer finally died. And with it, so did my music collection. After many years of using Windows, I guess I wanted a change. Looking around at my collection of Apple items, there seemed to be only one choice for my next computer...

See? Without Last.fm, I would never have been sucked into that abyss of font smoothing, rounded corners and shiny shiny things without interchangeable batteries. While my music taste hasn't improved much, my collection of gadgets with the Apple logo emblazoned on them has grown and grown.

And I have lots of stickers!

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

How old do you think children should be before they join social networks like Facebook and MySpace?

The Vox QoTD got me thinking. I'm not a parent, nor will I be for hopefully a very long time. But I am an internet user, who has been part of the online world from a very young age. I've looked at the answers to this question on the Vox homepage, and most of them come from parents who are scared of their children being corrupted/groomed online, and suggest ridiculous ages before they let their kids join websites like Facebook and MySpace. Numbers like 12, 14 and 16 pop up frequently, and even then they say they'll put in parental controls to keep tabs on their children.

Just FYI, parental controls are bloody obvious. When you're on a public network or a work area, where your activity is monitored, you subconsciously don't visit the sites you normally visit at home, because you don't want your boss knowing what you do on Facebook. It's the same with parental controls. Children with parental controls installed on their computers will know not to go on the websites they normally go on at friends' houses, in case you might be watching.

If you don't think your tween/teen has had some form of persona on a social networking site already, then the chances are, you're wrong. Maybe they signed up at their friend's house, putting in a variety of fake details so they won't get caught by you; a fake name, a different picture, a relative's birthday. Your children are smarter than you give them credit for.

You see, an online life is just an extension of real life. Parties are planned, pictures are uploaded, and gossip is discussed on websites like Facebook. All too often a person without an account on one of these websites will be left out because people just forget; they assume that everyone is on the same website as they are. 12/13 year olds are no exception to this - they plan birthday parties, arrange meetings with friends and do the same things a college student would do, only possibly in a more innocent way. More and more young people are moving their social lives to the internet, and leaving others behind.

I started playing around on the internet when I was 8 or 9 without any parental supervision. My mother is computer-illiterate, and there weren't that many parental controls for the Windows 95 system, anyway. In all my time on the internet, I managed to learn the good and bad things for myself. I chatted to many people online, but if someone made me feel uncomfortable, I blocked and/or reported them.
If someone asked me personal questions like where I went to school or my address, it just seemed logical to ignore and block them. The one thing I was encouraged not to do was to upload pictures of myself online. I didn't have a webcam, there were no photos scanned in, and with the vast number of free avatars and display pictures available for free, why would I need a picture?
Without being encouraged to explore, I probably would never have learnt how my computer worked, how websites were created, and who I could and could not trust on the internet. I've developed ninja skillz from being left to my own devices. ^_^

The one thing that's different from my internet experience and the experiences of those using it now is the abundance of social networking websites, where people are encouraged to put down every single detail of their lives. But, to balance it out, younger people get much more education than I did when I first began using the internet. From an early age, young people are constantly being surrounded with tips and advice on how to stay safe on the web. Don't meet anyone you know online, never give out any personal information, never share any pictures of yourself... All the stuff that took me years to learn for myself.

Most of it boils down to common sense, really. >.> Anyone you're communicating on the internet with is basically a stranger, no matter how long you've talked to each other for. You don't know how they walk, talk, if they have any neuroses - all the things that would normally form your first impressions of someone.

Would anyone go off into a secluded park with some stranger they've met on a bus? No. It's not that much different with an online acquaintance. To stretch out this long metaphor, you're all on an online bus. If a random stranger you met on the other side of town offers to walk you home alone, well, you see where this is going...

If parents don't let their children become experienced in the online world, then they're going to have problems when they finally get a chance to experience it. As long as good judgement is taught from an early age, then parents shouldn't have any qualms about trusting their children to make the right decisions. After all, trust is what it all boils down to in the end; the earlier parents learn to trust their children online, the better.

Just think about it this way: an 8 year old needs help when they want to go somewhere. A 14 year old doesn't. It's easier to stop an 8 year old from meeting their online friend than it is a 14 year old.

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

I don't blog that much. I blog whenever I feel the need to, whenever I need to yell about someone/something. I'm not a fan of those "ZOMG, I'm so so sorry I haven't blogged in so long!!111!!!" posts any more. I used to like knowing why people had disappeared for so long, and thought it was common courtesy to apologise for my inactivity, but then it dawned on me: why should I apologise simply because I've run out of things to say?

There are four blog post drafts on this website that have been sitting around for years. I just don't find them interesting enough to post, but I will never delete them, on the occasions that I do improve them enough to be something I'd actually want to read. Sporadically, when I have time, I'll open up this website, add a few lines, edit some more, and possibly save them again for another day.

My Inner Editor is more serious when it comes to tiny little blog posts than with the novels I used to write for NaNoWriMo. The problem with NaBloPoMo is that I find trying to think of something relevant and intriguing to my life to turn into text difficult. With novels, there are plots, and there is some structure. It may not seem like it, but no matter how much drivel is in there, things will happen. Your character will fall in love, get killed, fall out with someone, meet a ghost, etc.

Unlike my characters, I can't guarantee what will happen to my life. In general, I dislike spontaneity; I like to plan everything right down to the last detail. But I know there are many things that will never be fully under my control. Like, who reads this blog, for example. I'm a lurker by heart, and rarely ever comment on others' blogs, no matter how much I love them. I'm not sure who actually reads anything I write, and although I'd prefer to know, one of the great things about the internet is the ability to stay anonymous and lurk as much as you want.

I have four carefully planned drafts sitting here on this blog. I won't tell you what they are, but it should soon become be apparent which ones I've spent a crapload of time on. I've worked on them for months and possibly years, but still won't be satisfied with them after they're done. After they're posted this month (because I promised myself that I would get them out of my system once and for all), I'm not sure what I can, and should be writing about.

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

I love going to concerts; feeling the atmosphere, meeting fellow concert-goers, buying overpriced drinks and merchandise. But I'm apathetic. I hear stories of people travelling across cities and sometimes even countries to see someone perform - I think one of my friends travelled to Liverpool to see Elvis Costello live last year - but I'll never be that person. I'm quite laidback when it comes to seeing musicians I like. And I mean,
really, really
like. Artists I only slightly like don't make the cut.* Unless I'm in the area for another reason already, then NEVER, EVER IN A BILLION YEARS will I go further than a few miles to see anyone I listen to perform.

It may be, no, probably is, someone I love listening to (if I wasn't sure about loving them, then I wouldn't even consider buying tickets). It may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It may even be the last chance I'll ever get to see them alive. But unless I can get there and back within an hour or two for about £3, then it's not worth it.
The furthest I'm willing to travel for my favourite performer is the length and breadth of London - well, as much as my Oyster card covers. Anywhere I can't touch in/touch out in London? I'm out.

The average gig (or what usually happens to me)

7pm - You have paid £10-£50 for the privilege of coming here, being felt up, and having your 'professional' camera confiscated whilst everyone else is allowed to keep their point-and-shoots. You may have also parted with £1 - £3 of your money for a cloakroom charge, depending on whether you've had bottles of water/bags/cameras taken off you.
7:30pm - £2.50 of your money disappears as you buy a drink.
8pm -  £1 vanishes as you get a tiny packet of crisps.
8:30pm - £25 goes for a T-shirt that you just had to have because everyone else in the crowd has bought one each, and you don't want to be the only one not wearing one.
8:45pm - Another £3 drink! [Prices have gone up because everyone wants one now]
9-9:30pm - The show might begin. Otherwise you're left chanting the singer's name whilst they're on the loo or getting drunk backstage.
11:30pm - The show finishes. You may have made some new friends, had the night of your life, etc., but you are exhausted, your knees and feet could kill you, you're thirsty and could really do with a drink without being ripped off.

If you've travelled from far away to be there, add about 4 hours each way for travel, or fork out another £50 to stay overnight at some crummy B&B. Travelling is tiring. And you're never gonna feel as comfortable sleeping on a train or a bus than you are in your own bed. Why should I waste several hours of my life travelling back and forth for a few hours of entertainment?

The way I see it is if musicians want my money, they should come to me (or at least somewhere I can easily get to). If the artists I like have gigs near me, I promise that every gig they do, I'll be there. I'll buy their overpriced drinks, their T-shirts that don't fit properly, and won't throw that much of a fit when they confiscate my camera again. But please don't expect me to travel for anyone. If I won't travel for a close friend, why would I do it for a stranger who doesn't even know me or care?

The best example of a concert venue for me is the Shepherd's Bush O2 Empire. It may be dirty, the food may be of dodgy quality and pictures may be banned, but there's a bus stop right outside with a route that deposits me in front of my house. This is the lazy girl's dream. Whenever someone has a show here, all I have to do is get on a bus half an hour before, and saunter up when it's time to go in. Who could ask for more?

I'm lucky in a way - I live in a big city, and most of the people I want to see come here after doing a big tour. But I know some will never have the budget or the time to, and this means I'll probably never get to see some of my favourite performers live. And I'm pretty much cool with that, if it means I can get a few hours extra sleep at home.

*My one exception to this rule is if it's free. I'll see anyone within the borders of London, or wherever I am, if it means I won't have to pay for the ticket. This is why I love the iTunes Festival so much.

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.