Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

This past fort­night has birthed a new tech­no­lo­gical era here at Claire.NU HQ.

With the perks of K’s new job, came a rather fab­ulous “Thank you present” to me; 8 MB Broad­band and a Wire­less Router with USB adapter.

Yes, you read it right, I have now joined the rest of the Developed World and no longer surf via a 56k dial-up con­nec­tion. After years of my online exper­i­ence being akin to that of a brain dead snail, I can now rel­ish in the won­der­ous delights of stream­ing media, sim­ul­tan­eous down­loads and blink-and-you’ve-missed-it load­ing times.

The Wireless-ness has ceased the squab­bling for the tele­phone line and every­one in our house can now surf con­cur­rently, includ­ing K and my sister’s boy­friend, who now can pro­cras­tin­ate online without even hav­ing to get out of bed (via their PSP hand­held consoles).

Unlike those that live next-door (whose Belkin doo-dah is about as secure as an ele­phant sus­pen­ded by dental floss), I’ve made a point of encrypt­ing the net­work so that sister’s-boyfriend’s-mates can’t sit on the drive­way with their PSPs and thieve my broad­band like they do next-door’s.

In addi­tion to my new fan­dangly Inter-webs, I have also con­signed my archaic Nokia 6610i to the bored bucket and pur­chased a rather ador­able Sam­sung E530.

In truth, I’ve been pin­ing over this little bundle of purple cute­ness for quite a con­sid­er­able amount of time, but given my tight budget, refused to pay over £100 for it. I shopped around and even­tu­ally pur­chased it for about £90, com­plete with hands-free kit and match­ing purple leather and suede case. Bargain.

My own­er­ship of this little purple phone now puts me in the ranks with those that own port­able music/video file players.

My year of birth might place me, by default, into the bracket of the “iPod Gen­er­a­tion”, but my music purchasing/listening habits do not. I have never owned any form of port­able MP3/WMA player before and so have never needed to down­load music, legal or oth­er­wise. This little guy plays both MP3 and MP4 files, though I’ve yet to down­load any as I’m without a data cable or Bluetooth dongle.

I bid for a dongle last week on eBay and got fleeced by some scam­mer. For­tu­nately, I paid with PayPal and should get my money back soon. I should be glad that the first, and so far, only time I’ve been duped was just for four quid, but it’s the prin­ciple of the thing — what gives someone the right to steal my money?

I know I can be gull­ible, I was “phished” about 18 months ago and had to call up my bank in a com­plete panic and get them to tem­por­ar­ily freeze my account and issue me with new details. I felt so stu­pid as in hind­sight, it was so obvi­ously mali­cious in its intent. I think my brain just goes on hol­i­day without me some­times. Either that, or I want so much to believe that no-one would really be that much of an arse.

Tele­sales people see me com­ing a mile off too. Friendly, Scot­tish, jok­ing and flir­ta­tious with small-talk? Why yes, of course I’ll pur­chase cut-price Microsoft Soft­ware from you that I don’t even need!

What’s that? I can get a Card Pro­tec­tion Plan to pro­tect me against loss, theft and iden­tity fraud? Even though I don’t own a pass­port, a driv­ing license, a credit or even a cheque-guarantee card? Yeah, great, sign me up! Quite what I thought I was pay­ing to have pro­tec­ted, I don’t know. I’ve got one store loy­alty card and a bloody Elec­tron that vir­tu­ally no High Street stores accept, for good­ness sake. Even if someone did rob me, they’d only get the dregs of my piti­ful over­draft and that’s only if they found some­where that accepts the card in the first place. Need­less to say, once I’d told K what I’d done (and she’d stopped laugh­ing quite so hard), I made sure to can­cel that one.

I swear, a Scot could call me up, strike up jovial banter and within 10 minutes I’d end up set­ting up a monthly dir­ect debit to spon­sor a fam­ily of endangered Siberian Desert badgers.

I’m sure I heard some­where that the reason they have Scots do voi­ceovers for TV adverts so much in the UK is because people are more likely to trust those with a Scot­tish accent… I’ll have to find that online some­where… I’m pos­it­ive its true. I’d buy any­thing off a Scot, me.

Any­way, my point is this time I wasn’t fool­ish. I checked the seller’s feed­back (really very good) and how long they’d been a seller, checked out other sellers offer­ing sim­ilar products — everything eBay tells you to do — and I was still had.

Back to my purple phone of won­der, the spe­cific­a­tions of my new phone are what have led be to begin mob­log­ging. I’ve always wanted to do it, but saw little point as the cam­era on the Nokia 6610i was con­sid­er­ably cack (I used the Nokia to test out my first mob­log, hence dire pic­ture qual­ity) how­ever, my cute purple phone has a mega-pixel cam­era with flash, so I’ll be able to take more pho­tos whilst out and about and then, blog remotely.

Twas a bit of a pig to set-up really, took up the best part of the day, but finally got it work­ing with the help of this plu­gin and some research on Cron jobs… whatever they are.