An odd thing happened to me on the way to work today. I was standing on Platform 3 at Hither Green railway station and a non-stopping train slowly rolled through. It blasted its horn and a plastic bottle hit me on the head.
Two women standing behind me explained that the bottle had been balanced on a roof beam above my head and must have been dislodged by the sheer air pressure of the train’s horn.
Still could have been worse: at least the bottle was empty.
This is a lovely Straight8 film. (Straight8 involves shooting a film, in sequence on one roll of Super 8 film – no editing!)
http://chillibean.net/perl/sohosoho/player/player.pl?token=CKVC34LS&source=WR
Now don’t get me wrong – I think Watchmen is a work of utter genius. And it has more superheroes than you can shake a big, shiny stick at. But I’ve found myself immersed in some great graphic novels lately that don’t match most people’s idea of what a graphic novel should be.
First there was Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds. I loved her cartoon in the ’80s and ’90s in The Guardian about middle class family life, the academics and business people portrayed so insightfully and with a gentle but slightly savage edge were so much like the parents of some of my school friends back in Bristol. I tried but failed to follow Tamara Drewe in the paper, and one day I found it in a bookshop and treated myself… devoured it in a day or two, unable to tear myself away from it. Such a compelling story, such wonderful artwork.
Today I had to go shopping to buy a present for someone, found myself in Waterstones, looking at graphic novels. Trying to find to find a new graphic novel by Shirley Hughes. She breaks the stereotype a bit. She is female, she is famous for her picture books for young children and she is 82 years old. Bye Bye Birdie is a sinister, wordless, black and white story of a man being consumed… by a creature he takes to be a woman, a bird… but who is actually a bird.
I also saw Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds. Had to get it. Man on till asked me if I’d read it. Said no, just read Tamara Drewe, loved it so much. This is better, he said. And from the first page I’d say he’s right. Perfect first page. Perfect opening paragraph:
Gemma Bovery has been in the ground three weeks. People have begun to forget – or anyway I don’t hear talk in the shop any more. But I – I never stop thinking of her. The nights are the worst. If I sleep, I dream of her eyes which are the blue of stained glass.
Times are hard and my Apple PowerBook G4 is on its last pixels… its Firewire port doesn’t work, I think the Bluetooth is bust and the final straw was the screen – most of the time two thirds of it has bands of grey or garbage across it and I have to fiddle with the screen for ages to get a picture, like messing with a set-top aerial on an old TV. I can’t afford to replace it with a MacBook let alone a MacBookPro, so I turned my attention back to netbooks again.
Price Barrier
I was on the verge of buying the Samsung NC10 – it’s quite cute and the battery life is excellent – when Amazon shoved the price back over the psychological £300 barrier. I think netbooks should cost under £300, preferably closer to £200. Amazon then sent me some spam about the Lenovo S10 and I couldn’t believe the price – £255 inc VAT and shipping.
In many ways this is a very ordinary netbook – small, 1024×600 display, WiFi, WindowsXP Home Edition, ethernet, webcam, 3 USB ports and an SD card reader. But it had a few features that made me make an impulse purchase: its 160GB hard drive – the same size as my £1700 PowerBook’s – is removable, which is neat as it’s the thing most likely to go wrong. It also has Bluetooth and a PCI Express card slot, which is unheard of for a netbook this cheap.
It’s possible Amazon made a mistake with the price, as I then saw it listed at £320. But it is a lovely machine. Best of all is the display, which is very bright and crisp. I know my PowerBook was getting a little old, but it’s like someone has cleaned my glasses. Not that I wear glasses. The keyboard is fine, the trackpad better than some I’ve tried – not as good as an Apple one I grant you. It has a switch on the side to turn WiFi and Bluetooth off, useful if you are on a plane, want to save power – or you’re just paranoid.
I put this solidly-built little machine to good use yesterday, perching it in the kitchen, playing stuff off Spotify all day and keeping me entertained while I did battle installing the world’s most fiendish dishwasher (if Ikea made dishwashers, it would be the Fisher and Paykel DishDrawer, but that’s another story…)
Little boots
It boots fairly quickly into Windows, but I discovered that it also has a button marked QS; this stands for QuickStart, and boots the machine very quickly into a Linuxy SplashTop kind of OS, giving you a basic web browser, Skype, photo manager, MP3 player etc. It’s possible this will do enough to hold me off putting Linux on this machine… but…
The Linux Question
Now, I’m no fan of Windows, but I do admit I find it quite useful that I now have my first ever WindowsXP machine of my own and I can run all sorts of software. I want to keep XP on here, even if I add Linux. This should’t be a problem, but it brings us to one big drawback with the IdeaPad. Lenovo do not supply a system restore DVD or a Windows install disk. There is something called One Key Recovery – a button that rebuilds your machine, but this relies on code stored in a separate partition on the hard drive. Clearly if you add a new OS, you risk trashing this backup. Not good, expecially as you have paid for a legal XP licence – the key is stuck on the bottom of the machine.
So what to do? Firstly I need to get me a USB DVD writer and back up the hard drive and make a bootable Windows recovery disk – there are a few ways to do this, but frankly I shouldn’t be doing this, Lenovo should supply one. Another option is to get a new SATA drive, keep the old one intact, and muck around with a factory fresh one and then I can go back to Windows and the SplashTop Quick Start OS if I want. A third way is to use WUBI – this a Windows installer for Ubuntu that installs Ubuntu inside Windows without altering the disk partitions, although I fancy using the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and there is currently no easy way of installing this netbook-friendly Linux from WUBI (I was running it off a USB stick in the screenshot above).
Cake and eating it
And then there is OS X. Yes, OS X. Some people have got OS X running on the IdeaPad, admittedly with no audio and no ethernet but they do have graphics and WiFi working. This seems quite astonishing to me – I could have the best of both worlds: an insanely cheap and an insanely great laptop.
I was clearing out some of my old stuff from my mum’s house – my name’s Alex Drake and this box of old papers has taken me back to 1989 – and, amongst other things, I found this untitled poem I’d written out several times on both sides of an envelope addressed to my then-girlfriend’s mother. I had to look it up to find out who it was by. Good, though.
Oread by H.D.
Whirl up, sea -
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us -
Cover us with your pools of fir.
I also found stashes of NMEs, lots of newspapers from the 1980s, most of which I have no idea why I kept, so I’ve binned them. And a shoebox full (okay, half-full) of letters and cards from an ex-girlfriend. An entire relationship in a box. The one where she tried (unsuccessfully) to end our relationship was a good read. Even better the one where, later, she explains why she cheated on me. Reading between the lines now I think I deserved it and she was doing me a favour. At any rate it made me smile and it’s quite a thing to think that it’s taken twenty years to get from there – standing, alone on Stockport station waiting for a train back home, my life falling apart around me, to now – standing alone in a loft reading her letter about her night with Andrew – with a big, silly grin on my face.
