Paranoia

OK, so my X-box 360 has just given me a heart attack. DVD tray would not open. Repeatedly. For 45 minutes. Finally managed to open it manually. Then it wouldn’t close properly. For an hour. Cue visions of my entire day off tomorrow being spent on the phone to a call centre. Turn to trusted British tradition of shaking faulty electrical items. Magically starts working.

I am sure the corporation that produce it have been spying on me and are punishing me for using Mozilla and being in the process of buying an infinitely more fruity laptop. Or maybe not.

Enjoying

William Dalrymple - From the Holy Mountain
Brendan Behan - Confessions of an Irish Rebel
Sinead O’Connor - Throw Down Your Arms
Apple - Ipod
Fawlty Towers DVDs

Hello again

I have had a cold again. Knocked out for a couple of days and I still don’t feel human. I am, however, being drawn towards the conclusion that I must, one day, inevitably get an MP3 player. I have avoided for years. Being an consumate audio-snob (yet lacking the funds to really indulge in the more extravagant end of the market), I have soldiered on with my trusty Minidisc. Even with extended play, the compression does not become too intolerable. MP3s, however, as far as I have been able to tell suffer the worst excesses of distortion throughout the audio spectrum. Bass is heavy, but uncontrolled. The middle is wafer thin, and the high’s are thin and harsh - all symptoms of the compression, no doubt. Yet now I feel the urge to just be able to transfer several hundred tracks over with no hassle. Without having to record to Minidisc (in the same way you had to with cassettes). A 4GB MP3 allegedly holds around 1,000 songs - enough for a couple of weeks commuting. So what to do, dear readers? I, like Natalie Imbruglia (only far less attractive or female) am torn…