Touched/Bricked/Booked

In a fit of hubris, maybe thinking that new, benign powers were running the universe after the American election, I upgraded my (formerly Spike's) 2G iPhone to Firmware 2.2.1 and then Pwn'd it as per instructions... They promised a seamless upgrade, and so it seemed to be progressing until I looked at the top left corner where the Telco carrier logo should be. Nada. Not a thing. Zip.

Sigh.

I now have an ersatz iTouch.

Not quite the iBrick of legend, but still, a phone that refuses to recognize my SIM card and give me a phone signal, that ain't much of a phone.

As my friend said of her iTouch, "It does everything: MP3s, movies, games, WiFi... it's like a phone only you can't make calls."

Very much like my iPhone. It looks like a phone but it doesn't do calls.

Sigh. Back to the trusty Nokia E61i for the moment. Next purchase - the latest HTC Touch maybe.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

When will I ever learn?

Anything but Apple.

Anyone want to buy my iMac? Think I'll just upgrade to a new monitor and upload Windows 7 to my old desktop PC. All I ever do is surf the internet with this iBeast anyway. It still strike me as slow, even with 2.8GHz processor. Programs still take forever to load. Things like the mouse and cursor correlation just seem to lag. As does the typing. I can't get a plain Folder view and show thumbnails of the contents (particularly useful for previewing porno). It a nano-sized difference but tangible to an hyperaesthete like me, and just plain annoying.

And whenever I want to do something like real computing I have to run Parallels and use MS Money or One Note on the PC side anyway as the corresponding Mac programs suck big time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm in Kinokuniya today looking in the Literature section. I'm wondering why you can't buy the novels of Anna Kavan any more. She was so popular in the 70's. Now, she's lost. "Ice" was a terrific book. Global cooling, perpetual-victim-type heroine always falls for the bad guy, surreal images of fog and ice... I wouldn't mind reading it again. Nope, not here. Who's next?

There is a ladder right where the next author I am looking for (Lichtenberg) should be and another bookshelf starts right behind me, so where the ladder and I are, the aisle is blocked. Hey, I didn't design the place. Some guy wants to get past me from my right to my left. I squeeze up against the ladder, and he moves behind me. For a second I wait, my attention taken by the misplaced tomes - a Singapore booksellers' tradition I believe. Particularly egregious is how Louis-Ferdinand Céline's "Guignol's Band" has been placed on this L-section shelf... And of course, no Lichtenberg.

And so I step back a little, thinking that the guy must have passed me by now... and I stamp my left foot on the guy's toes. I raise my foot immediately, startled and glance half around. I am aware of him being about 3/4 behind me... he had been leaning forward to look over my left shoulder at the same section of shelf... I see that initially he has a sour look on his face, as if he has been attacked and offended. As we react, I have to step away a bit to my right, and he sort of hops to his left as well... I note, half-glancing at him as we both pretend to go back to looking at the books, that he still has a frown...

I mutter quietly; "Geeze, man I made a space for you, if you're going to walk past me, walk past, don't just hide behind me!"

He is saying almost subliminally something like "Yep, sorry", but not really... if he *was* saying he was sorry, I could tell he didn't mean it and that he actually blamed me for this misstep onto his toes. Maybe his toes hurt... Aw, diddums! Don't come complaining to ME about sore feet, I felt like saying. I have had painful feet for four fucking years... NON-STOP! I could tell you about sore toes, ya whinger! My tummy grumbles with hunger. I feel light-headed with hypo-glycaemia... Where is Izzy, we need to go for lunch?

I sigh and grumble, "Fucken' idiot," loud enough for him to hear me. He moves away. (Ooh the irritated ang moh swore! He must be racist!) Maybe the guy (yes he was Chinese) leaves the store - I don't see him again.

I take the Céline and go to the C-section... only to find all around Angela Carter four copies of Angel's Ashes by Frank McCourt. WFT? I take them back to the M-section.

Why is it after 4/5 years in Singapore I still want to hit three out of every five people I interact with?

I txt Izzy on the E61i: "need food". I meet her at the checkout...

E@L