Why Make Life More Complicated?

In which The Author installs – then uninstalls – an app

(I already had a working title for this entry, then an ad popped up on Spotify this lunchtime which absolutely fucking nailed it!)

Before Xmas last year, I decided to try and achieve one of my life's weird ambitions and learn a few useful phrases in Japanese. It's a long story which will become an entry in its own right (and possibly a stand-up comedy piece), but for now I'll cut to the chase.

A couple of months ago I was in WHSmith (that's the way the company lays out its branding these days, apparently) and I came across a Berlitz Japanese phrase book and dictionary. To be honest, I was surprised to find that in the Pontypridd branch; in South Wales, the general assumption seems to be that the world is only as large as the Schengen area, and that's only the case if you read a newspaper with big words. There were no other Japanese books available, and precious little else if you were planning to venture anywhere that uses a non-Western writing system. Anyway, I decided that £6.99 would be a reasonable price for something to reinforce the large number of online resources I'd already found.

It was only when I was looking through it on the bus home that I noticed that there was a 'Free app included'.

My regular readers already know that I have very little patience with apps, as a rule. In fact, I put something on Twitter a few weeks ago to this effect, addressed to Samsung UK. I pointed out that when the TV ads for smartphones and tablets show a customer shooting through a complex procedure in mere seconds, and the subtitles say 'sequences shortened', they really aren't fucking joking.

In fact, I nearly abandoned an eBay purchase a few weeks ago, when not only would my phone not let me log into my eBay account (for which I'd changed the password merely seconds before), but it wouldn't let me log into my PayPal account either. I'd used PayPal ten minutes earlier to order a drink in Thereisnospoon, and it was set to One Touch login, so I shouldn't have needed to log in at all. Go fucking figure …

Anyway, back to this shitty Berlitz app. It's called Talk&Travel, and according to the inside cover of the book, this is what I needed to do to activate it:

1. Download the free container app called Talk&Travel Berlitz from the App Store or Google Play or visit our website at: www.berlitzpublishing.com/en/apps and follow the link to the App Store or Google Play.
2. Launch the app and open the Catalog screen. Scroll down to the bottom of the page until you see the 'Enter code' field.
3. Enter the code printed below in your book and tap 'Activate'.
4. Download the phrase book and enjoy your digital copy.

Well, that all sounds fine and dandy, doesn't it? And it was – until I actually downloaded the app. Needless to say, things were fucked up from the outset.

Instead of 'Enter code' being at the bottom of the Catalog Screen, it's a separate entry on the main menu. Once I'd found it, I entered the code very carefully, double-checked it, and got a message telling me it was 'invalid'. Quelle fucking surprise, eh?

I tried again. And again. Same result. What's the definition of insanity again?

I searched online and found contact details for the Tech Support people. So I sent them an email:

Hi I recently purchased the Berlitz Japanese phrase book and dictionary (UK edition, ISBN 978 178 004 497 2). This morning I installed the Talk&Travel app on my fully updated Samsung Galaxy J5, but have been unable to get the app to accept the code printed in the inside back cover of the book. I have looked at the Berlitz website, which has no useful advice. A second online search produced your contact details. Please advise. Thanks. Steve O'Gorman

A few minutes later I had an automated acknowledgement, followed soon afterwards by an email from a living, breathing Tech Support person. I think …

Dear Steve, Your support ticket #270423 has been answered by Alexander Bryzgalov. Dear Steve, Thank you for contacting Paragon Software Support Team! My name is Alexander and I will be handling your support request. Please accept our sincere apologies. Send us your purchase confirmation for the dictionary please (a receipt photo), if possible. I would find there some additional information I need in this case. Send us the photos of the top page and the page with the code too, please. Could you attach a screenshot showing the error? Best regards, Alexander Bryzgalov

Well, what's a guy to do?

Hi Alexander I bought the book brand new from WHSmith in Pontypridd, South Wales, some weeks ago. It is extremely unlikely that I still have the receipt, as I had assumed (stupidly) that an app advertised within its pages would work easily and in a straightforward manner, first time, without any need to fuck around by emailing customer service people based halfway across the world. That'll teach me an important lesson, won't it? I'm sincerely sorry for wasting your – and what is much more important, my – time. Steve O'Gorman

This morning I had an email telling me that my file had been closed. I don't really care, because on further reading it transpires that the app is only a six-month free trial anyway. I'd have had to pay for further use, and I bet by then I'll have found something far more useful and comprehensive.

We're less than six months from the year 2020, for fuck's sake! Surely these problems should have been ironed out at least a decade ago, never mind getting past beta testing stage and being unleashed on the general public. Is it any wonder that my brother smashed up his old faithful Thickphone halfway through a 'customer service' call a couple of weeks ago? Can you blame him – the new head of the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Department – for turning his back on technology as much as possible? The older I get, the more tempted I am to do the same thing.

No Timewasters

In which The Author does exactly what it says on the tin

Those of us who remember the old days of newspaper classified advertisements will be familiar with this little phrase. (Like the news stories these printed artefacts contained, they seem to have fallen into disuse at around the turn of the century.)

The words 'no timewasters' were usually appended to a 'For Sale' ad – for a car, say, or a musical instrument. The idea was to make sure that only people who were genuinely interested (and, more important, who had the money) turned up to check out the item in question. Otherwise, the seller's house could quite conceivably have looked like the scene in The Commitments, when half of Dublin turns up to audition for the band.

Anyway, the next stage of Project No More Nice Guy does just what it says on the tin: No Timewasters.

It seems that my pal Clint has made the same decision independently of me, to judge from his recent decision to stop offering his photography services gratis to 'worthy causes' – who, we all know, have a contingency fund for things like that anyway.

Like me, Clint is (was?) an easygoing guy who gets ripped off because he's too polite to say 'no' when anyone asks for his help. He's a student, so he needs every penny he can get. Every time someone takes him away from his university work, he has to devote time and energy to a project which counts for nothing professionally, and which might – if he's very lucky – earn him a cup of coffee. Last week, he announced on Facebook that he's no longer willing to lug his gear off to some far-flung place (he doesn't drive) in return for fresh air and goodwill.

Relatable post, as the young people say these days. My proofreading and editing skills are also no longer available out of the goodness of my heart. Just because I once met you in the pub twenty-odd years ago, and you now think you're capable of writing a book, don't think I live on Scotch mist and kind thoughts. If you can't at least match the below-NUJ hourly rates paid by Orion Books, then by all means have a search online and find someone cheaper. If you can.

The same goes for my social media skills. I don't claim to have the expertise of my friends Richard J., Chris D., Andrew C. or Siân S., but I can find my way around Facebook, Wordpress, Twitter and Instagram fairly easily. (I've still no idea what Whatsapp or Snapchat are, and since I'm fifty years old I'll probably never bother to find out.) But I know how to use the main channels, and I can use ifttt with only a few hiccups, so I was a lot cheaper than using a web hosting company and trying to tweak all the settings later on.

In fact, just about a year ago I set up a Twitter feed and a Wordpress site for Plaid Cymru Cwm Cynon, our constituency branch of the Welsh political party. I knew that Richard was a member of the Labour Party, and would more than likely be offering his hosting and design services to them when the council elections were on the horizon. A few months later, Andrew (who runs a full-scale multimedia production company) announced that he and a friend were setting up the Cynon Valley Party in order to contest council seats this spring.

Although we'd had the online drop on them both, trying to get any information about the key players in our group was almost as difficult as getting a tax refund. In fairness, Cerith Griffith's 2016 Welsh Assembly election campaign was fairly switched on electronically. He used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram while we were out and about leafletting, and we both contributed to the Facebook page. The rest of them, though, seemed perfectly happy to use the same tired toolkit that Dad and the late Dafydd Roberts had used when they were standing for election in the early 1970s.

At the March 2016 branch meeting I raised (for, I think, the third time) the subject of magic sufficiently advanced technology as a valuable campaigning tool for the next round of elections. After all, how many young people do you know who read (never mind buy) a newspaper these days? Most of them don't even watch the TV news any more. If they're anything like the ones I know, they get virtually all their information about the world through their laptops, tablets or smartphones.

It was a section of the electorate that we urgently needed to reach out to. The media (even the electronic media) are dominated by a small clique of neo-liberal or neo-fascist entrepreneurs. Plaid Cymru's message is being swamped by a rising tide of racist, anti-European, anti-Corbyn, anti-worker, anti-NHS rhetoric. The only way to reach out to younger voters, I told them, is via the Internet.

Well, I tried to put the message out there, but it fell mainly on deaf ears.

Undeterred, I set up a hosted (i.e. free) Wordpress blog. I made Twitter and Instagram accounts for us as well. Cerith made me an admin on the Facebook page, so that I could link everything together via ifttt. Once I was sure everything was running properly, I emailed the login details for the Twitter and Instagram accounts to the people whose email addresses I already had. I thought if we all had access, we could use them as and when the mood took us. I encouraged them to post photos or information about local issues whenever they found something to talk about.

When I told them that all this wonderful magic wouldn't cost a penny (that's the single most powerful spell I know, taught only to Hogwarts sixth-formers), and that I'd do it in my own time, they were sold.

Or so I thought.

I decided to keep the Wordpress login to myself. Any decent first-year wizard can retweet stuff, or make a Tweet up themselves. Anyone with a reasonable smartphone can use Instagram. But using Wordpress calls for a knowledge of HTML, widgets, CSS, and other Dark Arts which would have left the others standing.

I started retweeting stuff (even my own stuff) immediately. A few of the others would retweet things I'd published, but hardly ever came up with anything of their own. I think I'm the only person ever to have used the Instagram channel. But the Wordpress site was almost dormant from the start. It wasn't as though it called for any technical involvement from any of the Muggles. I was going to look after the whole thing. Famous last words in the Land Where the Apathetic Rule.

I wanted to set up a page giving a bit of background about the key players in the local group: the chairman, treasurer, secretary, our councillors, and so forth. All I needed was about 250 words about themselves and a decent photo. Dai W., the branch secretary, is a fluent Welsh speaker; Gwyn M., my old pal from Trecynon, is also fluent. Translation wasn't a problem. Neither were photos – in theory. Nearly everyone's got a digital camera these days, or at least a smartphone.

The exception, needless to say, was Brian A., the branch chairman (or Chief Muggle). I knew we'd have an uphill struggle putting his piece together. In the event, Pauline J. ghosted a little biography and took a photo when they were out campaigning together. Gwyn translated it, and I added it to the drafts page.

And that was as far as it got.

Pauline eventually sent me something which I thought needed fleshing out, given her considerable experience in local and national politics, and a stock photo.

Peter F., the branch treasurer, sent me a rather underexposed and blurry photo of himself in his office at home. It was OK, but not great. No text, though. Two and half down, several to go.

Meanwhile, Dai and Karen M. (our councillor in Hirwaun) failed to come up with anything at all. I reminded them frequently that they were writing about the subject they know more about than anyone else alive – themselves – and it shouldn't be too difficult to put 250 words together.

I was wrong, apparently.

Anyway, the council elections are on 4 May. We started selecting candidates back before Xmas. As soon as people came forward, I started pointing out at every single meeting (and about once a week by email) that Richard and Andrew were throwing loads of material out via social media, at least once a day, and occasionally more often than that. We'd gone from being Achilles to being the tortoise in a very short space of time.

Nicola B. (whose father Terry had been a councillor back in the day, and whose brother Geraint ran for Westminster in 2005) sent me a rather elongated photo, which I was loth to use on the page. She also sent me a biog which I thought needed a bit of explanation at one point. I sent back my comments, and I'm still waiting for the revised version.

Between Xmas and New Year, I worked on a draft 'Meet the Candidates' page for a whole afternoon, to give everyone an idea of what the finished design would look like. I sent a couple of page previews out and asked for their feedback, so I could tweak it before it finally went live. The response was exactly what you'd expect. Only Danny A. from Mountain Ash West – a bit of a techie himself – told me he liked the general layout. Nobody else even deigned to reply.

I was keeping the Wordpress site ticking over with a motley assortment of community announcements (blood donation clinics, that sort of thing). They were already bilingual, so I didn't have to fuck about getting them translated, which usually took a couple of days.

In the meantime, I was posting stuff on Twitter and Instagram (see Mind the Gap in my public transport blog) as well; I was mostly retweeting news items and press releases from Tŷ Gwynfor, which nobody else seemed able to do – although Nicola claimed to have used the account a couple of times as well.

Danny sent me a very good biog and a decent picture, which I was able to use without too much intervention. Julie W. from Aberaman South was similarly co-operative, and I had their information ready to go live within a few days of its arriving in my inbox. It never did get published, though, as I had too many outstanding queries from the others to make the page public.

Just after Xmas, totally out of the blue, Danny sent me a scan of a two-page newsletter focusing on the plight of Mountain Ash town centre, and asked me if I could publish it on the blog. It featured bilingual text, a black and white photo of Danny, Nicola and Pauline on Mountain Ash Bridge, and contact details for the three candidates. In spite of my frequent suggestions, it didn't mention our Facebook page, our social media feeds, or the blog.

I published the scans as he'd suggested, but at the next branch meeting I'm afraid to say I lost my temper with everyone. I pointed out that by the time the information got to me, the newsletter was through most of the doors in Mountain Ash, and probably went from there straight into the recycling bag.

I reminded everyone that George Michael had died late on Xmas Day – after the Boxing Day papers had gone to press – and so people who rely on seventeenth-century technology for their information wouldn't have known about it until they read the headlines on 27 December. By way of contrast, within ten minutes of breaking on the BBC website, the news of Mr Michael's death was all over social media.

'We're not in the area of reactive news management any more,' I told them. 'It's all about being proactive these days. If I'd had that information at the outset, it would have been on the blog and all over social media even while Danny was still sorting out the DTP document.'

Dai objected, saying that older people don't use social media (which is true, for the most part), but I told him I wasn't suggesting replacing one means of communication with the other.

I added that we needed to use both channels to complement each other. We had to reach the biggest number of people possible, to convince them that Plaid Cymru is a viable alternative to another five years of Labour domination in the Valleys. Older people are going to be the most difficult to shift from their established voting habits anyway (see No Future); they'll turn out and return the same tired faces to Clydach Vale as they have ever since Clement Attlee was prime minister. On the other hand, younger voters aren't going to look at something printed, no matter how exciting it might be. We needed a two-pronged approach.

That was my argument, anyway.

As it turned out, it was also the argument of one of the other parties. They'd accidentally left behind a briefing document after a recent meeting, and it had fallen into enemy hands. It stressed the importance of social media, and laid out a strategy for pumping material out across all channels every single day between then and the elections.

Pretty much what I'd been telling Plaid Cymru Cwm Cynon we needed to do for over a year, in fact.

Anyway, the slow trickle of information continued. Ann J., who's fighting the Cwmbach ward, was fastest off the blocks. I had her information and photo within a couple of days.

Paul J., from Penywaun, is another first-rate Muggle. I bumped into him after a funeral, so I gave him my number and said I'd sit down with him and work on his biog together. So far, not a sausage.

Nor have I heard anything from Dan B. (Ynysybwl), Karen (Hirwaun), Dai (Aberdare East), Dai's wife Liz, or her father John D. (both Aberdare West). I don't even know who's been selected to fight the other seats throughout the Cynon Valley, because I haven't been to a constituency meeting or event since that night. I realised soon after leaving Mountain Ash RFC that evening that I was talking to the fucking wall, and decided to leave them to it.

I last posted something on the group's Facebook page on 10 February; the Instagram feed hasn't been updated since 29 January (me); nobody has used the Twitter account since 5 February (again, me). As for the Wordpress site … Well, I regret to inform you that it went out on the piss for St David's Day, and choked on its own vomit during the night. It seems that nobody else in the group has noticed, because I haven't had any emails asking me what's happened to it.

I've since withdrawn my long-standing offer to the Colstars to look after their Internet presence, as well. It's obvious that Derek would rather rely on an obsolete website, Facebook shares, and a few posters in key locations, to publicise their forthcoming events, than have a full-blown website with links to social media and a rolling blog with news items and features on the group.

It's obvious, too, that he doesn't want me to get involved in any way. I don't know why. We don't have any history between us; I was briefly a member of the Little Theatre group in the late 1980s, but that fell by the wayside when I started working in Treforest. I certainly wasn't party to the Great Cynon Valley Performing Arts Earthquake three decades ago, which gave birth to the Colstars in the first place, and the aftershocks of which continued to ripple down through YES, TUSC and even Showcase, none of whom were even born at the time.

Considering that every amateur dramatics group I've ever known has been crying out for older men to take to the boards, it seems nothing less than fucking rude that Derek has spurned all my attempts to get involved. My old pal Adrian T. told me a few months ago that it's a very cliquey organisation, though; if your face doesn't fit you'll never be welcome, no matter how enthusiastic you are.

(By sheer coincidence, the Colstars have just announced a fund-raising quiz this Sunday night, a couple of minutes' walk from my house. I think I'll have to have a subsequent engagement.)

My own involvement with other people's websites and social media will be limited to Alwyn's artwork site when that's up and running. At least he's going to give me a cut of his online sales, so I'll get some reward for my time and effort. Everyone else, though, is going to be rebuffed with the words NO TIMEWASTERS. Alternatively, in the words of the film, show me the money!

A Flashback to 2012

In which The Author finds history repeating itself again

Now that I've relocated my base of operations from Wordpress to here, I'm taking the opportunity to retrofit the disused blog to a consistent 'house style'. Every so I often I go through the original posts, tweaking the text and the HTML to a standard format. I usually call this 'extreme proofreading for geeks', incidentally.

Anyway, this afternoon I've been revising an entry from the summer of 2012, called Courting Controversy. If nothing else, it goes to prove that there's nothing new under the sun …

Spot the Difference

In which The Author sends his latest despatch from the front line of the War Against the Machines

I've been running Ubuntu Linux on a variety of Netbooks since 2009, and I think I've explored just about every release of the operating system from Lucid Lynx right through to Trusty Tahr. I haven't gone any further down the alphabet (they're currently at X) purely because I don't think my system will handle it. Still, Trusty is Long-Term Stable until at least 2019, so I should be able to manage until I can upgrade my hardware too.

In all that time, I've noticed an interesting trend developing. I don't know whether it's just me, or whether other Linux users have spotted the same thing. Maybe I'm just sensitive to the ways of the Cyberworld – even though, as I assured my pal Huw D. a few weeks ago, I'm not actually The One. I know I spend a lot of time online, and I wear a lot of black, and some young people think I'm cool (for whatever reason), but I can't actually reshape the Matrix.

No, what I've got in mind is the way that certain programs seem to start running slowly all of a sudden, when they've been working quite happily for ages. When LibreOffice begins to chug, freeze or close abruptly in the middle of a university assignment, that's bad enough. When it starts to chug, freeze or close abruptly in the middle of a 400-page novel you're working on, that's another matter entirely. We're talking about a fortnight's work here, not a little creative writing exercise you can (mostly) rebuild from the handwritten drafts.

That was what was happening on Friday night, while I was putting the final nips and tucks in my current project. After the fourth sudden shutdown, I got a bit worried, so I saved everything to a USB drive and continued work on the desktop setup.

I recognised the symptoms straight away. LibreOffice wanted to be updated. It's like a puppy, really (and one lightweight version of Linux is called Puppy – maybe with good reason). Normally it plays nicely, but every so often it feels a bit poorly and just wants your attention.

The problem was that I'm running Linux Mint on the other computer. It hasn't been updated since 2011, either. I had to give up the Internet at home when my university career crashed and burned. I can't really lug my entire system to the library and attempt to connect via an Ethernet cable. So the version of OpenOffice I was attempting to use is quite different from the current release. It didn't make a huge amount of difference until I saved my Notes and Queries and promptly lost everything I'd done, except for the numbered outline.

It's all marked up on the hard copy, of course, but it still meant that I had to start afresh and reconstruct the whole thing from memory. It turned out to be a happy accident, because I'd missed a few things on the first read-through that I've picked up subsequently. I'd have done a second pass anyway, but now I had a good reason to do it.

Anyway, this afternoon I had a few things I wanted to check online, so I've come to Thereisnospoon to use the Internet here. And – exactly in line with the Oracle's predictions – my system has just downloaded and installed the very latest, brand new, showroom-shiny and still slightly warm release of LibreOffice. It didn't even need to be prompted. It just went ahead and did it after I'd been online for ten minutes or so.

Windows users will no doubt be used to the deluge of updates, patches, licence agreements, online registrations and other virtual hoops they're expected to jump through every time they switch their systems on. Rhian first had her laptop back in 2010 or so. She couldn't connect to the Internet via Wifi until her system had been updated – and how do you update your system if you can't connect to the fucking Internet? Well, boys and girls, what you do is to take your laptop to a mate's house, connect via the Ethernet cable, start everything running, and then repair to the Llwyncelyn (in our case) for a couple of pints while Windows downloads and installs no fewer than 178 updates.

I really have no idea how many patches it's had since. Windows reminds me of the old TV advert for Allbright bitter ('the most popular pint in Wales' – allegedly). The landlord of the Sheep's Head had started selling Allbright. So many people started coming into the pub that he had to build an extension. Then he had to build an extension on the extension. Windows seems to be a bit like that. It's no wonder the system gets bloated and starts to chug over time, with all those extra downloads and patches cluttering the place up.

With Ubuntu, you can decide which bits you want to update, which bits are working fine, and which bits you can strip out entirely (the games, for example). And when critical updates come through, or when a whole package is upgraded (as with LibreOffice just now), it just goes ahead and installs them. You just need to authorise the procedure, and you can carry on doing whatever you're doing in the meantime.

Furthermore, it doesn't cost you a penny – apart from beer money in Thereisnospoon, of course. But I'd have come out for a pint this afternoon anyway, so I'm killing two birds with one stone.

Elsewhere, the War isn't going so well. In a few short months, my microwave, washing machine and my fridge/freezer seem to have packed in. The loss of the microwave is inconvenient, but nothing too alarming. The loss of the washing machine isn't desperate yet. I've been able to wash stuff by hand, and hang it outside during the nice weather. There's also a new laundry service in Aberdare, so I can drop stuff in there for the time being. My machine might be persuaded back into the fray if I can track Mike G. down. It's probably just a fuse or a bearing. I hope. I think the fridge/freezer will be buried with full honours, though. I think I'll be paying a visit to TooGoodToWaste this week and seeing what they've got for sale.

You haven't beaten me yet, you bastards!

Another Piece of Shit

In which The Author is selling on Ebay once again

If you've only looked at the title of this entry, you're probably thinking 'Steve's being remarkably self-deprecating about his writing today'. But you'd be wrong. I'm not getting my paranoia in first – it's a reference to the latest skirmish in my ongoing War Against the Machines.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I've had an idea which was partly inspired by the lives of the Aberaman cyclists of the late Victorian era. However, before I attempt to put this idea to some friends of mine, I need to find out if it's even practicable. With that in mind, I've been trying to use my so-called 'smart'phone to see whether the inbuilt GPS locator is anything more than a 'cool' gimmick.

You see, this phone is absolutely jam-packed with 'cool' gimmicks – most of which wouldn't appeal to anyone over about six years old, unless they really haven't learned to read or have yet to grow out of playing Pokémon (like several friends of mine). I haven't used the majority of these features – or 'apps', as I believe they're called – since the day I took the bloody phone out of the box. This isn't because I don't want to use them.

It's because I simply don't need to use them.

Why the fuck would I need an app to tell me what the weather's like? If I want to know that, I can look out of the fucking window. And who the fuck can read a book on a screen which measures precisely 100 × 56 mm? There's also a Music Player and a Film and TV viewer. For films and TV, please refer back to the visible screen dimensions. For music, please give me something with slightly more advanced specs than 0.1 W output and a speaker so small that it makes the UK five pence piece look like the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank.

Even if I wanted to listen to music or watch films on a tiny piece of shit that makes my Netbook look like Goliath, I couldn't. For a start, there's fuck-all memory on the inbuilt chip. Most of that is taken up with the aforementioned pointless 'apps' like Music Player. They can't even be uninstalled because it's an Android phone, and Google apps are built in to the firmware. The best you can hope for is to disable them – which doesn't solve the problem – and/or move some apps to an SD card. Needless to say, the SD card doesn't come with the phone, so even the 'free' software ends up costing you money in the long run.

A couple of weeks ago I experimented with a couple of 'apps' which claimed to use the inbuilt GPS locator to track my movements. After playing with three different software packages, I gave them all up as a bad job. You see, in spite of what my friend Mark W. told me, it isn't enough to simply have the GPS enabled. You also have to be connected to the internet at the same time. Now I have a Pay As You Go phone. I accidentally enabled the mobile data one morning, soon after I bought the phone. I learned a harsh lesson when a fiver's worth of talktime vanished before I had chance to disable the fucking roaming. I've never enabled it since, and I almost certainly never will. I can't afford to be using mobile data for a few hours at a time, which is what I'd be talking about for this project.

So – Plan B: a smart wristband.

I know a fair number of people who use these devices when they're out running, cycling or whatever. I assumed that they just connected them to a PC and the software produced a map showing exactly where they've been, based on the GPS data stored in the wristband. So when I saw one of these things on sale in Cash Solutions in Aberdare, I decided that it might be worth a punt.

That was on Friday. I couldn't actually use it on Friday, because I had to charge it up first, of course. The little 'user guide' told me that I'd have to charge it for thirty minutes. However, there was nothing in the 'user guide' to indicate how you knew it was fully charging, or even whether it was switched on or off. There are little flashing lights on the side of the module, but they don't mean a thing in isolation.

(When I say 'user guide' I'm being extremely generous. It consists of a few little pictures and no text except for a note telling me to look at the website – in eighteen different languages.)

It turned out, having downloaded the full 'manual' from the website, that I needed to install three apps to my phone. I'd found two of them by trial and error on Friday afternoon. The third one, needless to say, was the key to the whole operation. I went up my own orifice on Saturday afternoon, trying to work out how to get the fucking thing to track my progress from Thereisnospoon to the Cambrian, and thence to the Coliseum. It turned out that not only does it have to be permanently tethered to my phone using Bluetooth, everyone's favourite fucked-up data exchange standard. It also has to be permanently connected to the internet.

As I'm on Pay As You Go, that really isn't an option. When only about a third of the pubs and a quarter of the public buildings in Wales have any sort of free wifi, I'll be lucky to mark the start and finish of my walk, never mind the bits in between.

I tried again on Sunday, and gave up again when it couldn't even tell me I'd walked from Thereisnospoon to the Glosters. I was rapidly running out of patience (and battery life).

This morning I decided to look at the Sony UK website. That was what I typed into Google, anyway. It appears to have taken me to Sony Europe, because the first thing I had to do was choose my location. Well, if their site is so badly designed that it can't even pin down the fucking country I'm in, the GPS in their fucking gadgets can't be up to much, can it?

I eventually found my way to the support site, and left them the following message:

Well done, Sony.

Your SWR10 Smartband is undoubtedly the most pointless piece of crap I've come across since my 'smart'phone. I wanted something that I could take out for a walk, and then use it to chart my route via Google Maps. Having experimented with a couple of apps, they didn't come up to the mark. Where I live we're lucky to have a 1G signal a lot of the time, never mind 4G. I'm on Pay As You Go, so I really can't afford to spend a few hours connected to the mobile network – even if it was available in some of the places I've got in mind. When I came across your SWR10, I looked at the packaging, saw the simulated phone displays of maps, and decided that it might be just what I was looking for. I was wrong. Completely wrong.

For a start, your 'user guide' was of absolutely no use. The ancient Egyptians used pictures to communicate with each other. In the intervening four thousand years most of us have progressed to things called 'words'. I once did a psychology module on 'Product Usability' – maybe your people could sit in next time. I hadn't realised before purchasing this gadget that I'd also need to download THREE – count 'em – apps to my phone. I located LifeLog and the SWR10 app, but not Smart Connect. I spent the next two days, on and off, trying to set the damn thing up. I downloaded a 19-page 'instruction manual' the following day. It was a little more help – but not a lot. You still need to be connected to the internet, and your Bluetooth needs to be permanently on as well. I'd be charging my phone every five minutes even if I could afford to be permanently online. Last night I gave up entirely.

As for Lifelog – if I wanted something to tell me how long I'd spent reading a book, I'd use my clock. Nice idea, very badly executed.

Utterly pointless. It's now on sale on Ebay.

That last bit's true, incidentally. I've just listed it. In the meantime, if anyone nearer home would care to take it off my hands, you can have it for a tenner. After reading such a masterly sales pitch, it's unlikely that any of you would want it, but if you do, please leave a comment. I really don't have the fucking patience to fuck around with it any longer. I'm going to buy a little map measurer and do it the old way instead.

Ex-Captain's Log

In which The Author's new project starts to bear fruit

A couple of weeks ago I told you about my new research project, which can basically be summed up as No More Mr Nice Guy. Well, last week I published a summary of my first week's findings on Facebook:

• Told a fat chav using his mobile phone at the cashpoint to either piss or get off the pot.


• Told another chav to get out of the fucking doorway in Cash Solutions.


• Left an extremely rude message on the phone of the guy who couldn't be arsed to ring me back yesterday.


• Walked out of at least three pubs because the barbint was more interested in what was happening in Pokemon Land than in selling beer to customers.


• Told one of the Debating Society to belt up because he was in a public library, not a pub.

I had thirty-nine 'likes' within a couple of hours – which is on a par with my friends' reaction when I signed up with Gollancz back last year. I think I must have struck a chord with a lot of people.

I'm pleased to say that Week Two has been equally productive. I didn't do karaoke last night (again). I walked into the Lighthouse at 6.30 p.m. and the jukebox was already turned up to 11. I had a quick pint, gave up trying to chat to Philvis, and made my excuses shortly before 7.30. I headed to the Glosters, where a gang of my friends were sitting at the bar. I needed to go online, so I connected to the Cloud and posted this very angry status:

I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to look at everything I put together online for the Cynon Valley Quiz League last week. It's just a fucking shame that the prime mover behind the whole reboot couldn't be fucked to pick up the phone and arrange a time to meet me and sign everything off. I'll be deleting every sign of it at 1237 tomorrow, which is exactly one week since I asked him to spare half an hour from his packed schedule of daytime TV and pints with pub bores. Liz B., please don't waste any of your time on the logo, because it won't be fucking appreciated by the person concerned. Good luck to anyone putting a team together, but if the organiser can't commit to half an hour to tidy things up, I certainly won't be committing myself to every Sunday night for six months or so.

The aforementioned Liz B. is a very talented artist and illustrator whom I've known since her student days. I asked her last week if she'd be interested in making a logo for the CVQL which we could use on social media and in our documentation. Fortunately for us both, she had a bit of a backlog, and she was planning to make a start on it this weekend.

I was true to my word – even if I was a little late on cyberparade this lunchtime – and I've now deleted the Facebook page, Twitter feed, Gmail address and Wordpress site. I've also trashed the contents of a folder where I'd stored everything I'd drafted in the hope of getting it finalised this week. Since that hasn't happened, I really can't be bothered to piss about chasing people. Don't go looking online for the CVQL, because in a couple of weeks – the 'cooling-off' period, so to speak – it'll be as though it never existed in the first place.

And it ain't gonna stop there.

At the last Plaid Cymru branch meeting, Item 5 on the agenda was 'Social Media'. As usual, Brian's eyes glazed over as soon as Cerith, Danny A. and I started talking about our Magical skills. I asked the remaining members of the committee, and the people who have already decided to stand in the 2017 local authority elections, to send me photos and potted biographies which I could publish on the website.

Bear in mind that I'm not a Welsh speaker, so I have to get my old pal Gwyn M. to translate everything before it can go live on the other half of the website. That all takes time. The sooner I get this information, the sooner I can use it.

The last meeting was on 6 September. It's now 16 September, and silence has well and truly fallen. I'm not going to chase people for this stuff. Instead, I'm going to rock up at the next meeting with a sheet of A3 paper bearing a couple of photos, a few columns of text, and a shitload of blank space, and present it to the members.

I'll apologise to Brian in advance and say, 'Thanks for your contributions, everyone.'

Then I'm going to go for a pint in another bar just up the street, and they can ring me up if they've got anything to say to me.

I'm really getting too old for this shit now. It's not as though I'm kicking my heels all day. I've got a lot of things on, between proofreading, the Colstars, music events, and organising another trip to London. I'm also having to set aside a big chunk of my time for fuck all financial reward and precious little gratitude.

If I haven't got something from the Plaid gang before the next meeting, their cyber presence could well go the same way as the CVQL's. It takes quite a long time to set these things up, and (as I discovered this lunchtime) it'll take me less than five minutes to eradicate the lot.

During my last visit to the surgery, my GP tipped me off about a Stress Management course which started in Aberdare last week.

I told him, 'I don't need stress management. I need a semi-automatic and a shitload of ammo.'

I don't know if he thought I was joking. At this point in time, I'm not entirely sure myself …

Your Non-Starter for Ten

In which The Author takes the path of most resistance

After a long absence from the big chair, I've finally given into Ian the guvnor's nagging and agreed to set a quiz in the Cambrian. Bear in mind that the Wednesday Night Wingding was my idea in the first place, many years ago. It seems only right that I should come out of retirement – especially as my old pal Alan Everett wants to try and reboot the Cynon Valley Quiz League after a nine year absence. Doesn't time fly when you're not having fun?

Alan captured me at Iwan's leaving party on Friday evening and gave me a couple of posters to hand out. He's hosting a meeting tonight, to discuss the plans seriously and invite teams to register. I've spread the word around over the weekend, but a bit more notice might have helped. He's got my number now, so he can keep me updated on developments. Suddenly my 'social life' is actually starting to resemble a social life.

Anyway, I put my name down originally to do the first Wednesday in November. It falls neatly between Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night, so I've got two possible themes to explore when I start putting it together. Then a space in my diary opened up unexpectedly over the weekend, so I've agreed to set the quiz in a fortnight's time. In fact, during the most sleepless night I've experienced for several weeks, I sat up all night making notes and jotting down possible avenues to research. In fact, last night the creative juices were definitely flowing.

I was having a pint and a chat with my old pal Mel C. (who's a male musician and singer, not a former Spice Girl) before the Cambrian open mic night got underway. Mel was born in Nottinghamshire, and – perhaps unsurprisingly for a folk singer – is very interested in history. He mentioned an important sporting figure who was from his local area, and it gave me an idea. It's sort-of related to the exhibition at the newly reopened Cynon Valley Museum and Gallery, about the legendary Victorian cyclists of Aberaman. I wrote a couple of pages of ideas, sketched out a couple of drawings, and made a list of people to sound out about it. Describing it as embryonic would be overstating the case – it's still more of a zygote than an embryo – but the idea might have legs. Watch this space …

This afternoon I decided to plunder the YouTube archives for music for my first quiz in several years. I'd drawn up a list of possible songs overnight, so I listened to my choices for real (as opposed to vaguely remembering most of them). After that, I pulled a couple from the field of play and sent the substitutes on. Having compiled my definitive list, I decided to acquire them for real.

There's a nice Firefox add-on which allows you to convert video files to mp3. I've used it before (primarily to source offbeat karaoke backing tracks), so I knew it was perfect for my requirements. I converted all the files, shoved them into a subfolder, loaded them into Audacious (Ubuntu's answer to iTunes), and saw that it was good. Then the fun really started.

I knew from bitter experience that it's almost impossible to regulate the playback volume of videos uploaded to YouTube. Luckily, Ubuntu comes with a nice little utility to batch tweak the gain, so they all come out at more or less the same level. It only takes a couple of minutes to equalise a cluster of files, so I let it run in the background while I updated my Answer sheet.

Then the fun really started. I had to use Audacity to cut out the chunks of the song I'd be using on the night. After watching a parade of clueless Loteks trying to skip to the exact same spot on a CD using the remote control during the second play through, I discovered several years ago that there was a much better way to go about it.

Audacity is a nice (if rather fiddly) open source mixing console, with a huge range of features and bugger all documentation. I've been using it for about ten years on and off, and I've still only scratched the surface. Since I wasn't trying to lay down live guitar tracks, like my pal Louis M. was failing dismally to do a couple of weeks ago, the basic features were all I needed. I snipped, tweaked and shaved the samples individually, saved them to a subsubfolder, and then loaded them into Audacious to make a playlist. After a great deal of fiddling around, I was able to save the music round in an easy to use format.

Have you spotted the flaw in the argument yet?

Neither did I, until I was walking from the library to Thereisnospoon for a glass of Pepsi and a piss (I'm not necessarily listing them in the right order). You know the moment in cartoons when the light bulb goes 'ping' above a character's head? That was pretty much what happened to me as I was passing the old St David's Presbyterian Church.

I didn't need to make a bloody playlist. I just needed to stitch all the samples together into one big mp3 using Audacity, insert a couple of seconds' silence between tracks, mix it down, load it into Audacious in one shot, and Robert would be my father's brother.

When I got to the bar, I told my friend Casey what I'd just done, then told her about my amazing conceptual breakthrough and Gibbs-slapped my own head for being so bloody dim. Still, I guess that's what happens in the early stages of sleep deprivation. There was a young chap at the bar, so the three of us started chatting. He told me that after Day 3 of enforced insomnia, people start to hallucinate. On that basis, this week could start to get really interesting by about Wednesday …

Plug and Don't Play

In which The Author gets up to sing

Last night was karaoke night in the Lighthouse. I hadn't planned to go there this week, because I'm going to London tomorrow and didn't really need a late night. But you know what they say about the road to Hell, don't you?

I bumped into Lee and Hannah when I was leaving the library, and they were making their way to the pub. I had to call to Wilko first, and then popped into Thereisnospoon for a glass of Pepsi before heading to the Lighthouse. I had to go to Wilko because I needed a new memory stick. And that was almost where the fun started.

Several weeks ago I asked Tara if she had a song which I've fancied singing for about fifteen years or so: a Jacques Brel song called 'Jackie', in the rip-roaring version by Scott Walker. I first heard it on Jonathan Ross's Saturday morning on Radio 2, and it was pretty amazing. Then I found out that Marc Almond had covered it as well. Marc's version was okay, but Scott Walker's take is pretty much the definitive recording.

Tara hunted through her hard drive, but drew a blank. Then we had a quick look on YouTube, but the only videos we found were unavailable. I thanked her for checking and fell back into my tried and tested songs. But I knew there had to be a backing track out there. The only question was where?

Yesterday afternoon, in the library, I scoured the World Wide Web until I found it. Then I had to go through the palaver of registering with the website, downloading an app to my phone, and finally downloading the backing track itself. In the meantime I'd found another backing track on another site, this time as an mp3. I downloaded that to my hard drive as well, just to be on the safe side.

I knew there wouldn't be any lyrics on the screen, but that wasn't a problem – I'd already written them out in my notebook. I knew about three quarters of the song by heart, but three quarters doesn't cut it on karaoke. (Contrary to popular belief, it helps if you've got at least a working knowledge of the song you're about to attempt.) At least I had the music. That was a start.

And that was the reason for my trip to Wilko. My existing memory stick has decided not to play any more, so I needed to pick one up at short notice. Wilko doesn't close until 6.00, which is handy. I saved the mp3 to the memory stick, had a good chat with Martyn E. in Thereisnospoon, and headed around the corner.

When Tara was setting up her gear, I told her I'd found the backing track, and she was pretty surprised. But I haven't been using the internet for fifteen years without learning a thing or two about searching for odd things. Then the problems started. I asked her if she could copy it over to her hard drive. She said that the last time she'd tried that, her laptop had crashed and she'd had to reinstall all the karaoke software and song data from scratch. Understandably, neither of wanted to take that risk. Then she asked me if I had it on my phone. Bingo! We were able to jack the phone into her PA using the lineout socket. I grabbed my notebook, we fired up the song, and I smashed it.

Afterwards, my pal Martin – a very experienced singer – told me it was one of the best songs I'd ever done. Everyone else seemed to like it as well. I'm going to give it another go in a few weeks, as there's nothing worse than doing the same set every time. I'll have to do it again at some point, because Shaz was late on parade last night and missed it.

The mystery still remains, though, of why Tara's laptop won't work with a memory stick. I strongly suspect it's a Windows issue. I don't encounter any hardware problems on my Ubuntu setup because everything works straight out of the box, so to speak. As Sherlock Holmes observed, 'when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' Is a Windows glitch really that improbable, I ask myself.

As I told Tara afterwards, I have no doubt that Plug and Play will become a real thing on Microsoft systems at some point. I doubt if any of us will be around to see it happen, though.