Darfuria

It’s funny how, in one thing not happening, a whole other stream of things occur, which eventually conclude in a given period of time later.

I’m taking Tallis and myself to Download festival this year. I hadn’t yet booked the train tickets, until today. I would have booked them on Saturday, as I got paid, but unfortunately my bank was closed and my account was overdrawn, so I couldn’t pay any cash in.

I went into town today to pay £200 into my account, which was a further £20 overdrawn than it was on Saturday. It’s annoying that money can be taken out of your account on a Saturday, but you can’t go to pay cash in. I asked the Chinese lady to tell me what my account balance was now that I had paid that in, and she told me it was around £120, which I knew was enough to buy train tickets for both of us (which I had previously looked at online, and calculated that they’d come to £110).

I went to the train station to book the tickets, and discovered that they don’t take Electron cards (fucking things; I want a credit card). So I walked up to the cash point, which I have to say is in a fucking stupid place, as it is 5 minutes away from the 30 million cashpoints on the high street, wondering why I bothered paying all of that money into my account in the first place. Checking my balance revealed that the transaction hadn’t yet processed, and I only had a small amount of money available (which was odd, because I was overdrawn and don’t have an overdraft). I withdrew £10 because I was stupidly hungry, and retired to the cafe for chips and a hot chocolate; it was raining.

I came home and went to purchase the train tickets online. I was going to use thetrainline, as I had seen the tickets on there, and knew how much they were, but I decided to type “cheap train travel” into Google anyway, which is when I stumbled upon raileasy. A few clicks on their fantastic website, which I am very pleased with, and the train tickets to Derby for Tallis and I are booked for £43.80, so I saved myself a good £65.

So, if you’re planning on travelling by train anywhere, do check out raileasy.

It’s odd though, isn’t it? How, at the train station I was ready to hand over £110, and would have done it if they accepted my card or if the money had been available at the cash point. Silver linings are nice.

After giving up with Tiscali, who have been our ISP for a few years, we made the change to Sky Broadband.

It’s a funny story actually. I contacted Tiscali in March some time, requesting a connection upgrade. We were paying £15/month for an unlimited 1Mb connection. I noticed they were no longer offering that broadband package, but were instead offering an unlimited 8Mb connection for the same price, which made me feel as if we’d missed out on a connection upgrade. I was aware that we are living too far away from the exchange to receive a fast internet connection, but most line tests returned that we could receive up to a 3Mb connection.

Two months passed since the request for the connection upgrade, with little contact from Tiscali. It was only supposed to take 15 days. Eventually I heard from them saying that there was a problem with our account, and the transfer had been put on hold.

Being quite irritated, I finally decided to call the cancellations line and request the MAC code. I was a little hesitant to do this because I had heard that Tiscali often don’t release the MAC code, and I didn’t want to spend a long time offline, going through the disconnection and reconnection process with BT. However, I spoke to a delightful English woman who was very helpful, and after dribbling through the typical “Oh we can improve that now for you, and offer you this”, she got everything sorted very quickly. Our MAC code was e-mailed to us not very long after, and two weeks later we are connected to Sky Broadband.

I was unsure whether to go with Sky, as they’re one of the few ISPs who require you to use their own networking hardware. I am rather fond of the Netgear DG834GT that I usually use, and didn’t want to use their hardware. However, they were the cheapest, fastest option, and after a little research, it turned out that they use that exact model with their connection, which I was very pleased about.

When the router came in the post, roughly 5 days after we requested the transfer, I opened the box to see a horrible grey SAGEM box. Not what I was expecting. Apparently the Netgear routers were the version 1 Sky routers, and the SAGEM ones are version 2. Anyway, when the connection had been transfered I plugged it in and got it running rather smoothly, which was very surprising. The UI isn’t as nice as the one you find on the Netgear routers, but as a product, it seems to be working rather well so far.

So, I now have a 16Mb unlimited connection. We can only actually receive a 3Mb connection right now, but it only costs £10/month and I wanted the unlimited package. Hopefully as the exchange gets upgraded I will benefit from a faster speed, we’ll see. Currently I am very happy with it though. My transfer speeds both up and down have tripled, and I don’t have to deal with such a terrible technical support team anymore.

Recently I have begun to embark upon a quest to obtain minimalism in my life. I have set about this by ridding myself of any physical property that I no longer need, or can otherwise be replaced. For example, I recently sold a lot of my PC games, and a couple of other games too. I did this because digital distribution is ever-growing, and eventually it will dominate the retail market, and most people won’t bother buying copies of games in the shop when they can be obtained, often cheaper, online. I haven’t needed any of my CDs or DVDs for a long time, and hopefully I’ll find somebody to sell those to as well.

Part of me feels a little bad for getting rid of so many belongings, but at the end of the day, none of it was particularly sentimental, and the things that need replacing digitally will be. I am a technology enthusiast, and therefore I like to keep up with the way the industry is moving, and eventually digital distribution will take over. Also, by getting rid of physical posession, it frees up a lot of space, which is always a nice, comfortating thing.

When I can afford to, I intend on selling my books. I will keep some of them as pride posessions, such as my Lewis Carrol book, but most of them can be sold. I am doing this because I plan on purchasing an eBook reader. This is another technological development, and I think eventually it will kick off really well. Being able to minimalise all of that space taken up into a single device will be fantastic, and although books are really nice to own and read, I think I’ll rather enjoy the benefits of having a device that can store thousands of books quite easily. Then if there are any books that are precious to me, they will be appreciated as they should be, instead of sitting on shelves next to lots of other dead trees.

Perhaps it’s bad of me, to let technology become such a big part of my life, so that whether I am listening to music, watching a film, talking to a friend, playing a game or reading a book, there is something going on involving a computer of some kind, but it’s what I enjoy. I can truly appreciate the sentiment of actually owning something physically, but from an organised and upkeeping perspective, this is the right way to go.

T-shirts are a really interesting method of memorising events. When ever you go to an event such as a concert or a festival, merchandise such as t-shirts and hoodies will be on sale, and it is obviously rather popular to purchase such a thing.

I’ve not been to a huge amount of gigs, but I’ve decided to backtrack on the ones I have been to and attempt to buy t-shirts for them, such as the Placebo 2007 gig, and every event I go to from now on, I’m going to purchase a t-shirt for, just for the sake of having the memory. In 20 years or so, it would be nice to be able to look at a pile of t-shirts of various colours and reminisce over the various experiences they remind me of.

I bought tickets for Tallis and I to go to Download festival this year. Whilst the line up hasn’t gone down too well amongst the crowds of people that usually go, there are a few bands that I am looking forward to seeing (and more are to be announced). Generally though, I am looking forward to the atmosphere that everybody talks about. I can’t wait to be on a campsite with thousands of people who love music, and getting to meet lots of new people.

We’re also going to see Pendulum soon, which will be an interesting experience. Hopefully I’ll be able to get tickets to go to Beautiful Days as well. I’d love to see The Levellers live.

I have tried ignoring this, really I have. I have tried putting it to one side and just convincing myself that I’m a very observant person, and that it actually happens to everybody; they just don’t notice it, but it is beginning to get stupid now.

About a year ago, I think, I started a category on this blog named “Haunted by Coincidence”, the idea of it being for me to make posts detailing when I noticed or was victim to a really bizarre coincidence. I actually began to believe that I was haunted by coincidence - hence the title of this post. I can’t remember any of the particular occurances back then, but I do remember that they were quite frequent, hence me wanting to blog them in the first place.

Amusingly, as soon as I decided to start doing that, I noticed these coincidences less and less, and eventually gave up on the whole idea and forgot about it, and when I did that they started occuring again. I thought nothing of it, apart from the occasional speculation when I did notice something extremely odd and perhaps a little too coincidental, but now I have had enough.

I don’t know whether I am just really observant, or if I’m just living my life on a string of extraordinarily coincidental events, but about fifteen minutes ago I just signed into Facebook. I looked through the news feed on my home page and saw that somebody had joined a group called “Of course my bag of peanuts contains nuts!”, which I obviously knew would be a group where people pointed out the idiocy of warning labels on various consumer products. I furthered this by Google searching “peanuts may contain nuts” to see if there was a good reason for the warning label to be on there, other than, of course, obeying the laws of our very stupid health and safety regulations. I didn’t find any spectacular reasons to state something so fucking obvious.

I put the whole labels thing behind me, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to watch an episode of The Simpsons that I hadn’t seen before. Three minutes in, Marge opens a letter from Bart’s school, reads it, and says “someone at your school has a life threatening peanut allergy”.

Am I just being completely stupid and/or paranoid, or does that just seem a bit too much? It really freaks me out, and I really dislike noticing things like this.