A better day than yesterday…

October 16th 2005, 0915B

The retail therapy idea fell a little flat yesterday, but the day was pleasant enough all the same. Pretty much all I ended up doing was consume more beer than is healthy & pig out on Chinese food, but it did the sense of humour some good at least. The fuse is still very short, but I’m not quite so likely to indulge my homicidal urges :P

Speaking of the retail therapy not happening, could someone please tell me what the fuck is wrong with Apple? The demand for I-Pods far outstrips supply, so why don’t they increase production? Hello, Steve Jobs – this is costing you money, dumbass! How many people have bought something else rather than face a 12 week wait for a glorified bloody walkman? In a consumer driven economy you’re taking chances making people wait 3 days, never mind 3 bloody months. Sure, an I-Pod is nice to have, & I understand there’s a certain cachet to owning one, but if it wasn’t for the fact that I could really use the storage space & ability to transfer files directly from my camera to the I-Pod, I’d buy something cheaper & available in a heartbeat. Function beats “nice to have” any day in my book, & I avoid brand names like a dose of the clap, so all that restricting supply to artificially increase the status of owning one does for me is piss me off. Does annoying a potential customer sound like a good idea to you? It sure as hell doesn’t to me. And they wonder why far more people own pc’s than Macs.

At least I also got to check my mail & catch up on everyone’s blogs while I was on the net yesterday, so it wasn’t just time wasted on a fruitless search for a bloody I-Pod. It was great to get a mail from G, but I wasn’t too happy to hear about the fun & games he had with some over aggressive moron in traffic the other day. Kudos to Shirlz for running him off, & also to Gareth for not escalating the situation. I can well imagine that braining the guy with the gear-lock would have been very satisfying, but it’s by far a better idea to let the law sort the prick out. And potentially a lot more profitable :P
Something else I didn’t have much joy with was trying to find info on that wireless internet provider I mentioned the other day. I called them, & also had a look at their website, but language proved to be a problem in both cases. One of these days I’m going to have to make a proper effort to learn French, especially if I’m going to be doing any more of these external ops in future. Besides, chics dig guys who can speak French, though the reason why escapes me :P
The net café I go to uses this wireless isp though, & the manager speaks English reasonably well, so while it may be a little cheeky to milk a guy for info so that I can stop giving him money, I’m going to go back there today & see what I can find out from him.

Otherwise, about all else that happened yesterday was that I got to watch Sin City, which is every bit as good as I’d hoped it would be. I managed to borrow one of those pirate “5-in-1, handy-cam in the theatre” copied DVD’s that are so popular around here that had it on, & while the quality sucked and there was some tall bastards head in the bottom right corner through the whole movie, I still really enjoyed it. I’m really looking forward to watching my original copy when it gets here in a few weeks though. I also got my hands on a copy of War of the Worlds, and the brief 5 minutes of it that I watched was enough to suggest that I would have been better off spending my money on something else. I’ll sit down & watch the whole thing someday, but I’m hardly in any rush. Maybe I’m just getting really fussy in my old age, but there are very few movies being released these days that interest me, & I’m often disappointed even by those I’ve looked forward to watching. Sin City is a very rare exception to this trend, & it’s about the only movie I’ve seen this year that has lived up to my expectations.

Anyway, I’m going to finish this off so that I can head off to the net café & get it uploaded, and also hopefully get the info I’m looking for on that isp.

Till next time then ;)