Trust Tommy

Firstly, okay guys, the House jokes were funny at the start, but c’mon, give them a rest, will ya?

Last night I had between 3.5 and 4.5 hours sleep.

Knee pain, which is chronic at this stage, was worst it’d been in a long time, so sleep just wouldn’t come. I finally drifted off some time between 01:30 and 3, finally.

At 4:30, I was woken by the pain. No, this wasn’t me waking naturally, or by some bird calling outside, this was the pain waking me.

I tried to get back to sleep, but eventually resigning myself to staying awake somewhere around 5.

I listened to a mix of audiobooks and music through headphones for a while, until about 8am, when I decided I probably shouldn’t fall asleep during physio, so I tried one last time to fall asleep.

I think my sleep soldiers found a vulnerable weakness in the knee pain’s relentless machine-gunning, as I fell asleep until 09:45.

That was the knee pain interfering in my normal workings. I never took anything for my knee because I said I’d just work through it. It wasn’t stopping me doing anything, so I ignored it. However, if it’s stopping me doing something like sleep, then I’m going to take something for it.

And now of course, despite what I said up top, you’re all comparing me to House with his Vicodin. Two things. I’m not on these full time. This morning was exceptional, because the pain was incredibly bad, stopping me functioning, and secondly, the meds aren’t a solution. They’re keeping me at a tolerable level of pain while we find out what’s causing it.

That’s what I find frustrating about all this. No one seems to have any idea what’s causing this. I’m getting an MRI on Wednesday in Dublin which *should* tell us the cause, and that should give us a treatment.

So, reiterating, the pain meds aren’t permanent. They are for the time being, as I continue to strengthen up the muscle, which should ease the pain. A natural painkiller.

**

I finished writing this at 20:47 on Monday night, but I’m publishing it at 3am on Tuesday as a little nod. I wonder if I’ll be awake when this goes out..

One of my birthday presents was a skin from GelaSkins, for my MacBook Air. I’ve integrated lover boy here into as many places as possible.

My desktop:

My iPhone wallpaper:

And of course, the back of my laptop!

Last Friday’s The Ticket (supplementary magazine all about the arts in The Irish Times) had a really cool article on the back cover about a competition Surfjan Stevens ran, where members of the public sent in self composed Christmas songs and Stevens gave a special secret prize to the winner.

He eventually chose 33 year old Alec Duffy as the winner, and the prize turned out to be full legal ownership of an unreleased Stevens song called The Lonely Man of Winter. There were no conditions to the price, the song could be used/distributed as the winner saw fit.

Duffy had several possible revenue avenues. He could sell it to some company to use in a commercial, or simply sell off the rights again for a good bit of money. If money was not what he wished, he could simply put it up on his website for people to hear.

He ended up doing none of these things. He opted for a social experiment. He wanted to recapture an era when ‘to get one’s hands on a particular album or song was a particular experience’. He decided to hold once- or twice-weekly “listening sessions” in his Brooklyn apartment. He’d arrange tea and biscuits, while the listener would listen to the song through headphones (a preemptive measure against anyone recording it), and, depending on how many showed up, there’d usually be a talk/discussion afterwards. The listening sessions were free of charge.

Over the past year or so, people have travelled from all over the world to Duffy’s Brooklyn apartment. He’s not sure of the exact number of people but estimated it’s somewhere in the region of 100 so far.

For many of those who travelled, the attraction wasn’t only the hearing of a song there were unlikely ever to hear again, but also the fact that they were taking part in something so anti-Web 2.0. It was something so contradictory to the incontinent rush of information and abundance of music and songs. It was an ode to the times when music represented something special, not just something thrown out free in a newspaper to encourage it’s purchase.

Although not everyone is in agreement with what Duffy did (I’m looking at you, music bloggers), with some people going as far as to call him ‘a bastard’, I think it was quite cool.

I mean, he could have simply sold it to McDonalds for a few thousand (at least) for use in a TV ad, but instead he went for the non-profit (albeit cooler) option of these listening sessions.

Rock on.

More info here

Although Mum says this about her sons:

… are as I write ‘cycling around San Francisco’ (Eldest Mouse) or ‘interrailing around Europe’ (Middle Mouse)…

I prefer to think of them as actual human beings, you know what I mean? :)

John is currently touring Europe with two school friends, soon after which he’s leaving for Harvard. Patrick? Well, he hasn’t exactly lived here since 2007.

So that means I’ll be the only son left at home.

I miss my brothers

Who’s going to update Wordpress for me now ?

So, now that my week long acting course is finished, myself and Den15, aka, my dad, got down to getting the internet all fixed up.

That sounds so much more badass than it actually was. We basically just created a new network and fiddled around with some settings.

Having said that, we have working internet now, so no complaints here.

The internet had been down since Wednesday, so all posts since then were posted using the Wordpress for iPhone app, which is quite good, despite the image support being awful.

Normal service, and all that malarkey…

Makeup for my show last night

I saw this term somewhere in my feed reader this morning but I can’t find where. It got me thinking about the subject.

Guest posting, for non techie people, is basically where someone who isn’t the author of the blog writes a post. Say if I let my dad publish a few paragraphs on golfing here on TT.

I’m not sure what I think of it. I’ve done it before, but I’ve never let anyone do it here. I’m not sure about it. Should you keep your blog for your (hopefully) intellectual ramblings, or should we get a break from the author’s writing style once in a while?

I think that if it is indeed once in a while, it’s good.

And that’s why I’m doing it.

From the 11th to the 26th of July, I’ll be in France, camping. Because of this, strong and dependable WiFi will be hard to come by. Which is why I’m taking a blogging break.

Instead, I let 14 of you write something for me, if you so wish. 14 entries of medium (150+ words) length will be published (1 daily) over my holiday, which means I can actually do that thing normal folks do, relax.

Want to contribute? Leave me a comment or email me at tommy@nospamCollisonie (remove the ‘nospam’ and fix the to a .)

Any subject matter (within reason though, my parents read this!) is welcomed.

I hate thinking of this as an ‘oppertunity’, you’re doing me a favour more than anything else.

I would just like record to show that Karma’s a bitch. A big, huge, of-gargantuan-size, ginormous bitch.

On that note, the first one to mention “you never miss the water until the well goes dry” gets violently stabbed by yours truly.

Out Internet is fubared. Currently lying on a couch (how wonderfully apt, think of shrinks) using the lifesaver of Meteor EDGE (see karma being a bitch comment earlier) to write this.

I suppose this is irrefutable proof that not only am I addicted to the internet, which I knew and had accepted earlier, but also to blogging.

This is actually serious. This isn’t your willy nilly showoff nansy pancy lark of blogging, that you can quit anytime I want. No. I can’t quit. Like my cane, I’ve come to accept it.

The internet is my lifeline.

I did a radio piece for someone a good few months back with Ben K., about how Irish kids these days are growing up in, like, a completely different world to when Ben would have grown up, back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, in the 90s.

Yes. I am dependant on the net. Sue me

I was talking with Sinéad on Monday night, and we got talking about the new cane, of course. She asked if I’d spoken to Aislinn 2. I replied no, but I would. So this is kinda what this post is about!

WANTED: Someone who talks with canes/walking sticks (think Dr. Dolittle with less fur).

To basically explain to my previous cane that while 3.0 is cool with all the flames and whatnot, you were a great cane who was quite literally with me all the way.

OK, this is a lie. We got the cane because Aislinn 1 and 2 were too weak. But, I’m sure any guidance counselor worth their salt could invent some sort of spiel, couldn’t they?

Now I’ll probably get someone giving out to me. “No Tommy! Aislinn is dealing with severe feelings of inadequacy right now, you’ve got to be serious!” Oh well. I was never taught that.

Meteor are my mobile service provider, just like Vodafone, o2 or AT&T

In some ways, they’re good, like offering free any network texts if you top up by 20 euro every 28 days. Since most of my calls are to Mom, Dad or John are “Hi, you on your way?”, which equal about 7 seconds in total, I invariably have a lot left over which usually goes to data. Data is using the internet on my phone, by the way.

Data, for me, consists of 50 MBs per day, costing me 99c. I can use up to the 50, and it won’t cost me more than a euro. It’s completely out of contract, meaning it only gets charged the days I’m using it.

I had it all set up on my iPhone. The first day I got the settings (you need a web address that the iPhone can access, plus a username and password) was the day after my iPhone arrived. I was in Dublin with Alan Costello and Cian McMahon (who does a spectacular podcast called View from the Quad, incidentally).

I call them up, navigate my way through their rat’s maze of an automated answering system, every avenue of which leads to the same place, talking with a customer care person. (Press # at the start to get to the end quicker). I give them my number, name, address and PIN code.

“Okay Mr. Collison, how may I help you?”

I ask politely if they could tell me the settings for accessing Meteor’s WAP settings.

“What phone you running?”

I reply that no, I wanted to do it manually, could they just tell them to me.

“Oh now I couldn’t do that, you have to tell me”

an iPhone, 1st generation.

“We don’t support them.”

*Hangs up*

Ehh, thanks. I call them up again and meet similarly frosty attitudes to my choice of telephone. I tried to tell them that these things did work on iPhones, but they seemed not to hear. How professional.

By hanging up, I’d usually be connected to a different person each time, and I’d be met with a different reaction. Eventually, I got through to someone who was willing to actually tell me the settings over the phone. Thanks, Phil.

Fast forward 3 months to Sunday evening, when I discovered I could upgrade to 3.0 without locking up my phone. Just in case I cocked up, I decided to do it on my old iPhone with the broken screen, just to make sure I did it right.

I did it and got it working with old iPhone, so it was time to plug in my current one and upgrade that. I did, and it went smoothly, and I’m loving 3.0 and all, but I noticed that my EDGE settings had been deleted. Time for a call to Meteor!

Exact same story.

“Yeah, we don’t support Apple phones”

I tell them calmly that they do, as mine was working before I upgraded. Cue me hanging up on them to talk to someone different. Eventually, I got through to someone and just said I needed the settings for my Nokia 5310, and they gave it to me. They were the exact same settings.

So, Meteor, please, you do support iPhones. Please try and be more helpful. Love, Tommy.