Charlie Brooker is one of the few television critics I have time for because a) he’s very funny b) he doesn’t take it seriously c) he doesn’t spend the whole time hinting he’d rather be bathing in Camembert while deconstructing Derrida and d) he’s very funny. Here he is on Apple’s new and increasingly ubiquitous ad campaign:

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, “PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.” In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

Which leads into a glorious diatribe against Macs:

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, “I hate Macs”, and then I think, “Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?” Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

Obviously, he is not entirely serious. A possibility lost on most of the commenters, but then this is Comment is Free where if you don’t disagree you simply aren’t trying hard enough. It’s worth reading the first, though:

Hello. Charlie Brooker here.

I wrote this piffle. Then it was subbed. And whoever subbed it decided to add a bit describing Doom as “the first shoot-em-up game”.

Words fail me.

They also changed every abbreviation -– so “they’re” becomes “they are” and “it’s” becomes “it is”, and so on — presumably in an attempt to inject a bit more plodding, impersonal joylessness to the whole thing.

Bet they did it on a Mac, too.

I’ve never used Macs much, so don’t have an opinion one way or another. I am entertained by Apple’s telling people not to upgrade to Vista because iTunes isn’t ready yet, mind. It’s a bit like me saying ‘I know there were nine months of betas and release candidates, but my website doesn’t work with Internet Explorer 7 and it’s your own fault if you have any problems - you should wait until I’m ready’.

On my desk I have a small magnetic chair that keeps hold of paper clips / screws / pins etc., and a few days ago I knocked it off the edge while playing with iDog cleaning. It landed on top of the printer, sending assorted tiny bits of metal down the paper feeder. The printer is now rather broken. Bugger. Epsons aren’t really designed to be taken apart (it’s not responding to the turn-it-upside-down-and-shake-it technique, sadly), but it’s either that or buy a new one. Bad Rowdy.

Plus, Windows just let me know that it restarted itself due to a ‘hard drive read error’. Urgh. Oh well, my computer’s been circling the drain of b0rk for a while now, what with being scared of USB devices and all, so this is probably a good early warning that it needs scrapping. Extra hard work for a while, I think.

I finally managed to fix my parents’ network this evening. A few days ago I’d replaced their original router, which was starting to play up after 15 months of heavy use, at which point everything went crazy and putting the original router in place didn’t solve the problem. If there is a time in an accountant’s year that you don’t want this to happen, it’s the end of January when all the tax returns are due in. I shored up their six computer network so that it mostly worked, albeit very slowly, and they had to jump through a few hoops to read and send emails for a couple of days. I couldn’t find any kind of software explanation, so resolved to start replacing hardware until it started working again. It turned out that the replacement router was broken on arrival. This was always a possibility, but had seemed unlikely enough that I checked everything else first. A shiny new Netgear is now sitting in its place, and everything (as of this evening, anyway) is going swimmingly. Phew.

Just back from dancing, where the teachers were working on my posture. Good grief. I had to start taking notes in the end, there was so much to remember. I must not lead with my arm. I must keep my ribcage up. I must move forward with the body rather than the feet. I must rise and fall less in the foxtrot. I can make outside steps easier using ‘contrary body movement’, where the left shoulder comes forward with the right foot and vice versa. And this is all walking in a straight line! I’m glad they’re getting more picky with me, but it’s difficult to concentrate on all of it at once. It feels great when I get it right, but that didn’t happen often this evening. Hopefully I’ll get there with practice.

Speaking of dancing¹ here is a Cockatoo named Macky doing the Makarena:

and speaking of things…that…are…er…something to do with the sky²…I like this picture of Comet McNaught too:

Time for bed, I think.

1. bow to my segue awesomeness [↩]
2. lost it [↩]

It’s 0215 and I’m only just home after trying to fix my parents’ network for much of the evening. It has, to lapse into technical jargon for a moment, gone completely doolally. Their old router makes no sense at all, and a replacement seems to drop to 1/5th of its usual speed as soon as it gets an IP address from the cable modem. I’m hoping it’ll all become clear in the morning.

On the bright side, at this time of night my route home is full of bunnies who stand up and watch as I drive past. It’s like Watership Down, except not so frightening.

I was struggling with a friend’s laptop that refused point blank to even detect the wireless network I knew was up and running. It turns out that there’s a button on the laptop itself that needs to be pressed before wireless access is enabled. I guess it’s to save battery life, or something. XP doesn’t seem to know about it and continually reports no wireless networks detected by the built-in device, but everything springs to life once the button is pressed. New one on me.

I don’t like wireless networks. Well, that’s not true. Wireless networks are actually great, what I don’t like is supporting wireless networks. There are approximately 900 causes than result in the same symptom: the network disconnecting. It’s surprisingly difficult to even start pinning down the reason, you just have to try things until it starts working again. And even the most stable of connections will just drop off sometimes - that’s just the way it is (once every couple of months is perfectly reasonable behaviour). As you may have gathered, I’m struggling with this at the moment. It seems to disconnect at all security levels, on all channels, with the latest router firmware and card drivers, and never when I’m around and watching. I’m close to replacing the hardware bit by bit, which isn’t a very sophisticated solution.

Ah well. Today was nevertheless good, as I saw a kingfisher. I like kingfishers

I never know what to do when the customer support desk hasn’t understood what you’re asking them to do, but think they have. You try to explain, but it makes no difference. Do you ask for somebody else and risk annoying them? I just put the phone down having achieved absolutely nothing, after it became clear that anything I said was making no difference. It’s ridiculous because it’s only a configuration issue and should be something I could adminster from a web interface, but that doesn’t seem to be possible…Grump grump grump. Ignore me, I’m just cross that something which should have taken half an hour has so far taken three.

It looks like AMD have / are in the process of buying ATI. Interesting. Won’t mean anything to people outside of the tech industry, but it’s a fairly major move. AMD make processors while ATI handle the graphics cards. I wonder whether this’ll lead to NVIDIA allying strongly with Intel. Hmmm. Hard to predict where this’ll lead or if anything will really change - even the folks at Digg aren’t too sure what to make of it. Interesting times, though.

Me: I have won.
Laptop: What is this? I am running smoothly and without issue? I bow to your greatness.
Me: Don’t say that. It’s not even true. It only took half an hour once I had access to IDE connectors. I’ll be putting this conversation on the website, and that kind of statement would just be tempting fate.
Laptop: Oh glorious master, I…
Me: Shut up.
Laptop: As you wish. By the way, did you dream of somebody wanting you to repair their dead horse?
Me: Yes I did. How could you know that?
Laptop: I am the devil.

Just back from London. I went to see my uncle, and to replace the hard drive in his laptop. The task was:

Replace a hard drive, using only the surrounding laptop, a USB hard drive enclosure and a replacement drive, preferably without reinstalling Windows.

Not to be smug, but this is the kind of thing I can normally do with without much effort. It’s easy, especially when the drive is dying extremely slowly (chkdsk fixes it for a few days), and the whole process only takes a couple of hours. This time, however, my tech conversation went something like this:

Me: Hello, computer, I’d like to change your hard drive.
Computer: Dunno what you mean, I’m a plant.
Me: No, I think you’ll find you’re a computer. Look, see, you’ve a keyboard.
Computer: No I haven’t.
Me: Yes. Yes you do.
Computer: Don’t believe you NAA NAA NAAAAA NA.
Me: That’s as maybe, but, happily, I’m the one in control here, and I shall force you to my will.
Computer: Well, if you’re going to be like that, I’ll just break in mysterious and infuriating ways, until you either die of exhaustion or hurl me through the wall.
Me: I’ve faced stronger than you, my friend. Prepare for battle!

[three days later]

Me: See my white flag? I mean it. Give me a chance. Please. I’m begging you.

After three days, I had to give up and bring it back with me. I shall break its spirit. It will be vanquished. I feel like the various problems I had should be mentioned, although I’ll hide them from the front page…

Continue reading ‘Back, with a laptop’

This looks very interesting…The guy has bundled every hardware driver he can find into ‘DriverPacks’ for graphics cards, storage devices etc. and configured them for the purposes of slipsteaming a Windows XP install. I’d like to know whether it’s compatible with a BartPE CD, as that would immediately become the most useful boot CD in the world. Via digg.

Dear Broadband Provider,

I am very happy with my broadband service. I have had no problems since signing up with you three months ago. Indeed, I have recommended your service to others. I’d like to make one small suggestion, however.

If my payment method fails for any reason (let’s say, I changed bank and forgot to update the card details in your system) it would be pleasant if you could let me know before disconnecting the service. An email, a phone call, or perhaps a couple of days leeway would be appreciated. This would spare the feelings of a poor innocent router, who was on the receiving end of a number of insults this afternoon.

I note that your notification email does state I’ll have 14 days to fix the problem, so I imagine this whole thing was due to a glitch rather than actual policy. Please, though, think of the routers.

Andrew

When you turn up to a computer job to find a dot matrix and a 5.25inch floppy disk, you know it’s going to be an interesting hour.

I’m back! Did you miss me?

After much hardware shunting, Windows is finally up and running and my backup is being restored as I type. Phew. Ben figured out the below solution during the course of a marathon phone call - thanks, Ben!

For googlers: If your A8R-MVP will not boot from SATA hard drives, resulting in messages that ask you to insert boot media (or it just sits there with a flashing cursor), as well as seemingly interfering with CD-drives, it can be fixed by enabling the SATA boot rom in the bios. Why? Not a clue.

For somebody who makes a living fixing other people’s computers, I do seem to break my own on a worringly regular basis. By 1100 yesterday I’d swapped out the motherboard, and spent the rest of the day trying to talk the hard drive into booting properly so that I can install Windows. I think I need (mother of all evils) a floppy disk¹, which is problematic since I don’t have a floppy disk drive. I think I know one I can steal. Back sometime, hopefully in the near future.

1. so that I can press F6 and load SATA drivers during the initial install procedure, which currently works ok. The motherboard claims to ‘emulate PATA’ for SATA drives, but, well, doesn’t. [↩]