Irony and Retirement

Receiving mailings from finance companies these days could be quite painful if I didn't have a robust sense of humour. Just yesterday I got an update on an endowment policy, with the now familiar warning of a 'high risk of under-performing'. Yes, indeed. If it manages to grow by 4% per year it will end up worth less than two thirds of what I was told it would make when I signed up for it in 1986. Twenty-five years seemed a long way off back then; now it's next April, and my investment needs to grow by over 50% to hit its target. Or I need to snuff it before then.

Today I got an update on a pension scheme from a company I left in 1989. It informs me as to the size of my pension pot, notes that once again I haven't added anything to it in the last 12 months, and cheerfully tells me that when I retire I can expect an income from it of a staggering £1200 a year. Just to add insult to injury, that income will be taxable.

However, that's not the funny part. That goes to the three identical enclosures:

It's these little touches that really show how much you care.

Another Fine Ale

Working my way through the Brakspear Classic English Ale collection I received in my stocking for Xmas, I get to Brakspear's Triple Ale. This is a truly lovely beer, that flows down your throat without a hint of its 7.2% alcohol content. At least, at the time.

Their web site observes that, "this is a beer that will go on to develop further complexity as it matures in its bottle". Alas, that's a development I'm unlikely to ever experience. Fortunately the branch of Threshers in Haxby currently stocks Triple Ale, so I can continue to taste it in its less mature, though still delicious, state.

It's been a good week for beer, following the news that "moderate beer consumption may help fight osteoporosis". Excellent! The word 'moderate' tempers my joy a bit, but in the end that's such a subjective word.

Years ago we were told that every time you drank alcohol you suffered a small but irreversible loss of brain cells. That's now been shown to be untrue. All we need now is the discovery that alcohol consumption aids liver function, and the rehabilitation will be complete.

That's probably pushing it a bit far, but I suppose we might yet hear that beer helps to fight hepatitis, say, and so could be regarded as a net positive for your liver.

Truly, we live in the Golden Age of scientific discovery.

Are Amazon scrumping apples?

Just now I wanted to go to Apple's home page, but I mistyped and asked to go to www.appple.com instead. Imagine my surprise when I was whisked straight to Amazon.com and presented with the results of a search for 'apples'. This surely can't be accidental. Also, surely Apple must have heard about it by now. Maybe they figure they're more likely to get a sale through Amazon than through their own web site. Based on a highly representative sample of one product, Amazon are definitely the cheaper option.

There's a 'http://www.apppple.com/' as well, which doesn't feature Apple products, and is harder to imagine anyone mistyping, though what the name stands for is beyond me.

Upwardly Mobile

So I finally cracked yesterday and signed up for a Premium Spotify account. I'd got to the point where I'm not sure I could have listened to one more of those banal mobile phone adverts, or 'Roberta from Spotify' announcing yet again the same new service she was telling me about last year, without having to numb the horror by repeatedly hitting my head into my monitor.

It was a very painless procedure to convert from Free to Premium (apart from the £10 a month bill, but that's no more than a CD a month, and I'm listening to several new albums a week), and now I can enjoy ad-free music, and also an ad-free user interface. Oddly, for the first few hours I actually found myself missing the interruptions. That passed.

I still have my Napster subscription, as there are a number of albums that they have and Spotify still doesn't, but the gap is closing. Spotify is a far faster service, while napster.exe is a horribly slow program to start up, and one which often decides to hog the CPU and hard drive for long stretches, presumably re-indexing my music files. Okay, I have over 23000, but it's not as if they move around or anything.

It would be nice if Spotify could detect music on the hard drive, just as it would be nice if it would order all an artist's albums by title, rather than in a long list showing all their tracks, including whole compilation albums even though they only have a single song by the artist you're after. That may well change one day, when they get round to improving the UI. According to the plugs that I now no longer get, Spotify seem to be putting all their technical efforts into their mobile phone offerings. Which, now I think about it, I can access using my Premium account status.

Off to spotify.com...

Stunning Presumption from Nokia

I've just noticed that my PC now thinks that .jar files are 'Nokia Application Installer Files'. And to think, all I had to do was load their mobile phone synchronisation program. Thanks, Nokia. Another classic example of Software Manufacturer arrogance.

I should be used to this by now. Every browser I've ever set to be the system default has always immediately celebrated by claiming ownership of the .htm and .html file suffixes.

Speeding up my PC--the cheap way

Personal computers, in my experience, tend to silt up and slow down. My Dell at home was little more than a year old and already noticeably slower than when I first booted it up. Of course, I look at what's running in the background from time to time, and remove anything that looks suspect or unnecessary (such as the Adobe and QuickTime quick start tasks), but it never seems to have much effect.

I'm toying with the idea of buying a solid state hard drive, of which I've heard many good things. Trouble at the moment is that they're still so pricey that it wouldn't be much more expensive to just buy a faster PC.

Last month I lost it during a particularly slow session, and decided to take drastic measures. I would often hear the hard drive working, even though Process Explorer (this is a brilliant program, that replaces Task Manager with something really informative--highly recommended) showed no significant CPU activity, and I decided to remove stuff I'd installed that might be responsible. First to go was 'Everything', a nifty program that indexes the files on your hard drive. It's really quick at finding files, but I hadn't made much use if it, so I ran the uninstall program. "Uninstall Everything?" came up the prompt. With clammy palms I clicked on Okay. That didn't seem to do much, so I moved on to Google Desktop.

Google Desktop is another program that indexes the hard drive, as well as your e-mails and any web sites you've visited. It too is really fast, and, on the occasions I've needed to find a lost e-mail, has proved invaluable. However, I was desperate, so out it went. From now on I shall rely on the fact that all my e-mails come in via a Google Mail account. I'll search through them there instead of on my Dell.

And amazingly, that seemed to do the trick. My PC is once again a fast machine, and the hard drive doesn't (often) sound busy when nothing's supposed to be happening. Is this a known drawback with Google Desktop, or just a side effect of my PC configuration? All I know is that I feel like I've saved two or three hundred pounds.

Still, those SSDs do look tempting.

Nostalgia comes in Box Sets

Xmas brought two new DVD box sets into our home, both TV series from my childhood, namely Wacky Races and Top Cat. I got to see them when they were originally aired in the UK in the sixties, and the contrast when viewing them again for the first time in decades was rather surprising. Top Cat is still charming and funny; Wacky Races, on the other hand, after getting to know the line-up of competitors, is largely a one joke show, with the same plot rehashed in every episode. Dastardly and Muttly establish a commanding lead, which they then throw away in trying to set up a completely unnecessary trap for the other competitors, which naturally backfires, leaving them to come in last. Again.

I never noticed this as a child, but my nine year old son, who has been happily watching Top Cat episodes with me for the last week (not continuously, mind), summed up his opinion of Wacky Races five minutes into the first episode: 'This isn't funny'. No, it wasn't. But then, he's grown up watching The Simpsons and Futurama, which I realise sort of raises the bar a bit.

Another interesting observation was how up to date the plots of Top Cat still are, despite being nearly half a century old. Except for Officer Dibble having to keep in touch with his station via a police phone mounted on a telegraph pole (why not in a large blue box?), the only real clues to it being set fifty years ago are the clothing fashions and the car styles.

I probably watched every episode the first time round, maybe more than once, but I could only remember vague details of one show. Watching them again, my recall doesn't get any better, though occasional scenes and gags do ring bells. I did remember not being quite able to make out some of the lyrics in the opening credits. "Close friends get to call him TC, providing it's wikitity...". Never been too confident about that last word. Now, using the awesome power of the Internet (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A249842), I am finally able to decode it as "with dignity". No wonder I could never make it out, as it's a really crap lyric. At this point I remember that there is a word for misheard lyrics, but I can't remember what it is. Back to that awesome power--it's 'Mondegreen'.

And one last piece of Top Cat trivia. In the UK the series aired on the BBC, who have a policy on not running commercials. Back in 1961 the policy was so strict that the existence of a brand of cat food called Top Cat was sufficient to make the BBC rename the show to Boss Cat. They even trimmed out the first part of the closing credits to remove the Top Cat billboard. For full effect they should have gone through each episode dubbing over every 'Top Cat' and 'TC' (preferably in a clipped British accent) , but that was presumably thought to be over the top (or maybe just too expensive). Anyway, as a consequence British kids were left puzzling over the following exchange at the start of every episode.

Continuity Announcer: "And now, Boss Cat."
Opening Credits: "Top Cat! The most effectual Top Cat! ..."