I feel like I’m the only person in the world who does not like the look of Metro style apps from Windows Phone and Windows 8. I don’t like the simplistic large font with basic colours. I prefer something with more depth. But, the economic beast has to feed itself and we can’t keep the same stuff all the time, so we are moving to Metro.

Apple unveiled its Mountain Lion OS yesterday. I didn’t watch the keynote, but I did see a lot of people talking about it on Twitter. Apple fans were gushing all over the new OS—no criticisms. When you’re a fan, I guess, you can’t criticise. People on the other side—on the Windows side—are gushing over Windows 8 and Metro too.

There’s something very strange about the world we live in where the economy has to be growing or it is failing. If we are not selling, then we are stagnating. Of course, when we have all we need, there is no reason to buy. So, the economy needs Metro. But we don’t need Metro. They need to convince us that it is necessary.

I know it makes me sound old, but I think about the big TV we had when I was growing up. It wasn’t just a TV—it was a piece of furniture. It was huge with a rotary channel changer—but it was a big investment. We had it for at least 10 years that I can remember. If it broke, we could get it repaired.

Now, we needed to go for the flat screen TVs when they came out (they were far better than the old TV Set of the past). Then we needed digital tv. Then we needed to get rid of that piece of junk and get HD. Now, they need to push 3D. We already have a TV—but with that attitude this recession will go on forever.

Was it always this way? I know we never needed economic growth to be this strong before. Or is it exponential? Has it snowballed so much that there is no way we can keep it up. We need this recession. We need the economy to slow down so we can regulate our buying habits.

Because I don’t want Windows 8 with Metro.

I use Virgin Broadband’s top 50Mb cable package.  I do so much work on the internet that I think the cost is justified. It’s lightening fast.

But it is not very reliable.

As I write this, it is 5:10 in the morning and the internet is down again (I will have to post it later).  I’ve been up for over an hour, and I’ve done the routines of restarting the router and switching the cable modem off and on.  I would be on the phone to tech support if it weren’t so early and I would wake up the rest of the house.

I have times like this every few weeks.  I constantly have to reboot the router.  Sometimes it works, but other times I just have to wait.  I believe in moving everything to the cloud – except for this.  No email, no net, no Spotify.  During baseball season, it means I can’t watch Padre games in the early morning hours (I can watch San Diego night games at 3:30am in England).

I know some people who live in remote areas where they have no internet or very basic dial up service.  It’s almost unthinkable now. 

Even people with 2Mb broadband have a terrible experience.  Back when I had 8Mb Orange broadband, the performance was terrible in the evening.  I don’t get that with Virgin.  I love it.  If only it didn’t go down so often.

If you are considering Virgin Broadband.  This is something you may want to think about.  Of course, it could be a faulty switch in my area or something more local like that.  If you have Virgin, I’d be interested in the experiences you’ve had.

I’m going to a client site today.  Hopefully, it will be running again by the time I get home.

On my new Kindle, I’ve been reading a lot of Mark Twain.  I bought the new autobiography that came out in August and it’s great (although very long—I will be reading it for a while) and have also recently read “The Innocents Abroad”.  I read quite of few of Mark Twain’s works in the past.  I don’t read fiction (or even autobiography) very often, so it’s been a real treat to not think about technology or self-improvement for a while.

We had to read Huckleberry Finn in high school.  It had the n-word.  We had to know that “that’s how people talked back then.” 

There’s a big controversy over removing the word in newer editions of the book.  It is being held as political correctness gone amok.  I know the book is often banned because of that word.

But, to be honest, I don’t see the problem changing it.  That word is not what made the book a success.  If it makes it easier for the single black child in an all-white suburban classroom to get through his day, then great.

As a teenager, I also read the “Count of Monte Cristo” and I’m pretty sure the language of that book was changed too (out of sensitivity to the fact that I don’t speak French).  It was still a great book.

So, I read in the Independent this morning that Bill Clinton is a vegan now. I think he won an award from PETA for it. I couldn’t believe it. I remember in 96 when David Letterman said in a monologue (and I’m paraphrasing) “Today Bob Dole challenged Bill Clinton to three debates. Clinton instead challenged Dole to a pie eating contest.”  Now, he’s a vegan?

I shook Bill Clinton’s hand once.

It was in 93 or 94 at Hickam Air Field while President Clinton was taking a vacation in Hawaii. Air Force One was on an air strip about a mile away from where we lived. When word came that he was flying out, I went to see what was going on. There was a huge crowd at the airstrip already when I arrived and the Secret Service had corralled everyone into a little fenced off area.  One agent (I assume that’s what he was) told us that the president probably would just get straight on the plane from his car and not greet the crowd. However, Clinton is very good about pleasing voters and, when the motorcade showed up, he did approach the rope line and shook everyone’s hand and talk to the people for about 20 minutes before boarding the plane. Hillary did too. I was eager to see him in person.  He was the President of the United States and had been my Commander in Chief for two of my four years in the Army.

When he got close to where I was standing in the rope-line, I could hear what he was saying to everyone else as he shook hands. It was polite stuff – “Hi, where you from? That’s great, that’s great.” It was hard not to like him. He’s a very likeable guy. He shook my hand and looked me in the eye and said hello. It was pretty cool. The entire time, a Secret Service agent stood behind him whispering stuff in his ear like “Theres a curb right behind you, watch your step.”

It was a nice experience, but I hated seeing how everyone in the crowd gushed and how he put on that politician smile and he spoke to everyone.  He wasn’t royalty, after all.

I’ve never been a Bill Clinton fan. After moving to England in 98, I found out how popular he was overseas. So many people over here absolutely loved him in England. I came out here just before the impeachment, so there was a lot of discussions about how up-tight Americans are to impeach him for something so personal. I explained that he was being impeached for perjury, but you can’t disuade fans that easily.

Clinton did a lot of good, don’t get me wrong. In retrospect, he wasn’t all that bad. George W. Bush made him look like a genius. But, like all former presidents, he looks a lot better giving a 5-minute speech at a party convention than he did giving a press conference as president.

What really bothered me most about him was the phoniness. I hated when he told voters at a town hall meeting “I feel your pain.” I hated it when he bit his lip and got all misty-eyed during the national anthem.  He never seemed genuine to me, and he still doesn’t.

When I think about Clinton, I think about the phoniness and the career politician. I find Obama to much more authentic and genuinely believe he is doing his best. When I hear pundits say that he can learn from Clinton the politician, I cringe.

But he’s a vegan now, and it’s big news. I wonder if it wasn’t big news, if he would have bothered at all.

Have you seen this video on Google privacy?  It’s creepy!

Apparently, it’s showing in Time’s Square.

It’s posted on InsideGoogle.com here: http://insidegoogle.com/2010/08/do-not-track-me/

I’ve been with the same ISP for 12 years.  I joined Freeserve in 1998 on a dial-up and went to broadband when they offered it shortly after.  Freeserve became Wannado and Wannado was bought by Orange.

For the most part, I have been happy with the service. I get the top package (Up to 8Mb but my area only gets 6). 

But last summer I got an email saying I was using too much internet in the evenings, so they started throttling our usage.  This really sucked.  I couldn’t want live baseball games anymore and services like the iPlayer were unusable.  I suspect the iPlayer and MLB.com were the culprits for the large net use anyway, and I didn’t like feeling like a criminal because I used too much of the “unlimited broadband” I was paying for.  I was paying about £30/month.

So I finally signed up for the 50mb cable broadband from Virgin Media.  I’m paying only slightly more than I was on Orange and the performance is sooooo much better.  I can watch Youtube in the evenings again and I’m actually able to watch the MLB services I pay for.  I’ve had it a few days only and can’t believe the difference it has made.

I cancelled the Orange account on the same day as the Virgin Media broadband was installed.  They said it would take 14 days which I was fine with.  But then, four days later I get a call (on a Saturday morning) from someone telling me I have to pay a £30 disconnection fee because I was cancelling my service and not just transferring it.  I complained but it got me nowhere.  I asked what the fee covers (like, does someone have to do anything to cancel it?) and the guy couldn’t give me an answer.  I’ll just take the hit and pay them and be glad to have them out of my hair forever.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a lot of help with cancellation anyway.  But I did have good things to say about Orange before.  If they were quicker about increasing the speeds in my area, I would have definitely stayed with them.  But then they screw me at the end.  To hell with them. 

I would never subscribe with Orange broadband again—nor would I ever recommend them.  I’ll also probably leave their mobile network when my contract is up.  I went from a satisfied customer (mostly) to an unsatisfied customer.  All they get out of it is £30.

It’s been over a month since I’ve posted anything.  I can’t really say that I’ve been too busy—I’ve been enjoying the summer.  Since the kids got out of school, it’s difficult to get much work done.  So, everything is on hold until September.

I haven’t even been tweeting lately.  I guess I feel social media fatigue and am waning a little on Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc.  Everything I think of to write about seems too mundane to write once I start typing it.  So, I don’t write it.  This is not what a blog is all about.  A blog should allow you to write what you want regardless of whether it is worthy of someone’s attention—if they want to read it, they will (or won’t).  I seem to be experiencing an inexplicable self-consciousness whenever I start writing something lately. It will pass soon, I’m sure.

On the tech side, I’ve been playing around with Silverlight a lot.  I have a hot and cold relationship with it.  Sometimes it seems like such a gimmicky technology which flies in the face of web standards.  At other times it seems like something that is so cool, you shouldn’t ignore it.  I’m getting a lot of agents calling me about WPF work in the banking sector—so it may be picking up soon (since WPF will probably lead to Silverlight work).

I just got back from a week-long holiday in Paris—well, actually most of it was spent at Disneyland.  I listened to some Michel Thomas French CDs before going over and tried to use French as much as possible with varying levels of success.  Despite learning Mandarin and Vietnamese, I failed the only semester I took of French in high school and always had trouble with masculine and feminine nouns (I had the same trouble when learning Hindi and Spanish).  I think I learned more in the past few weeks than I did that entire high school course.  Still, my French knowledge is really lacking—but having finally visited France, I am motivated to learn more of it.  It was a lot of fun, and very easy to travel to from London on the Eurostar.

Now that summer is drawing to a close, it’s time to get back to work.  I’m going to either start looking for more Overpass clients or find a contract somewhere.  The next few weeks will be pretty busy.

Last weekend I took my family to the Cornbury Music Festival near Witney in Oxfordshire.  It was my first music festival—there weren’t many (I don’t know if there were any) near San Diego when I was growing up.  There are loads of festivals in England—they call this the festival season.  We saw some great bands like Squeeze, the Blockheads, Joshua Radin, etc.  I get the impression it’s a festival for the older crowds (30s and 40s), but there were some younger crowds too.

Cornbury was recommended as one of the most family-friendly festivals there are.  It has three stages.  This is only the 7th year, but they’ve had some big names play it.  This year the headliners were Jackson Browne and David Gray.  The kids loved it.  This was their first camping experience.

One of the highlights was watching Charly Coombes & The New Breed on the Riverside Stage (the small stage).  I had never heard of them before and there was only a small crowd watching.  They are obviously a pretty new band, but I’m sure we will be seeing more of them.  I’ve already bought their album on Amazon.  Here’s a video I found on YouTube:

It was a great festival and the weather was reasonably nice.  It was very cool to bring some blankets and a football into the Arena where we could watch the bands while kids could play football off the side if they were bored.  I highly recommend it—especially if you have small children.

So, immediately following my blog post about how great blogging is and how you should get a blog yourself, I go a month without posting anything.  Sometimes, although I have loads of energy, the things I think to write about seem either so trivial or so complicated that I don’t want to sit down and write them.

But here’s a patchy update on what is going on with me.

I’ve been working a bit over the last month.  I’m just doing some contract work while trying to get some business development going.  It’s funny when you’ve not been working a regular job for a while how un-natural it seems to get dressed up everyday and leave your normal life for 12 hours each day.

I’ve also been getting interested in meditation.  I’ve been meditating twice daily for two and a half weeks now.  It was difficult at first, but I’m getting better at it.  I’ve read so much, researched so much, and had so many experiences that I will write a post on this in the future.  I feel more calm and free from some of the anxiety I feel from time to time.  I’m really enjoying it, but it hasn’t been easy getting started (for me, at least).

I’m still getting up early.  I’m still running.  I still have my American accent, but am experimenting with using the word ‘fortnight’ more often.  Life is good.

One day we will tell our grandchildren how difficult it was to look up information in a library when we were kids.

We will tell them about card catalogues and the Dewey decimal system.  We’ll tell them how we would look up a word in the dictionary and it would tell us to “see” another word.