The Reluctant Radio

There is something wrong with my radio. It's a DAB radio, which I'm not sure it it makes any difference, but possibly does. With the facility to search out and find radio stations this is pretty useful, however it's not so useful if the bloody thing is taking a tizzy fit and showing constant signs of petulance. It used to be each morning I would plug it in turn it on and there would be the World Service to listen to in pretty good clarity. However, this is not the case now. It sounds as though someone has walked in front of the aerial and is obstructing it. On and off they walk and sometimes this imaginary individual just stands there for the fun of it disturbing my morning ritual. It's not a nice thing to do.  I'd kill him if I could put my hands around his imaginary neck, but it is not a man at all it's the radio itself. Last time this happened I found the mains wire was not fully connected to the back and it didn't take any effort to fix it. Now though the irritating interference has become stubborn and an uninvited guest who just isn't getting the message to feck off.

So the morning ritual has changed. It's plug the radio in, turn it on, put on my toast and the kettle, return to the radio and begin the first round of diagnostics.  Set the auto retune on, for a moment or two there is now audio, it sets itself up again and then returns to the radio station, but it still has interference. What is the use of having an auto retune if it doesn't work I wonder. Toast gets buttered, tea gets made and I sit down with the radio and try moving it to a different place on the table. Eat my toast, drink my tea and see if there is any difference. A momentary laps of audible sound comes out and then it reverts again to squeaking, squelching audio diarrhoea with intermittent speech.  This morning in frustration I reverted to the age old give-it-a-thump repair method. This is used by many a man and helps rather to make one feel better than it does to cure the problem. It wasn't a hard thump and a kind of palm of hand juddering thud. I didn't want to make it any worse than it already was although the thought has procured to me just to throw the thing out, which would solve the problem, except I'd have to purchase another one. Till such a time it would be me and silence. With silence probably winning out and breaking me down in a strangle hold of broken ritual versus coping with my own company. Sometimes I find I don't want to be with me but I can't very well run away from myself and the radio is a distraction. What an arsehole I can be. It's true, I'm sure a lot of people have the same self reflections, just some don't listen to it.

Being a Sunday and a bank holiday tomorrow, there is no rush to do anything much. I made a second cup of tea and listened to the thing doing an impersonation of a radio.  Yet gradually the audio was becoming a little clearer. It wasn't like I had successfully found a position the radio liked to be in. The thing was actually sounding the way it should sound. The voices on the radio were clearer. I could make out conversations, amazing.  It now worked.  Probably about forty minutes had passed before it decided to warm up and be accommodating. Maybe I shouldn't of thumped the thing? Or maybe it was working because I did thump it and it was afraid not to fix itself.  The rest of the morning was even more relaxed as I did little else and merged into the day knowing my skills of radio repair had temporarily been successfully.  Well, we'll see if they work tomorrow, I'll not change job just yet.

Three IT problems

I'm having a bad IT day today. It has happened on three items, this computer which I write BLOGS on, a laptop computer which is used to while away hours in the pub and my new smart phone.  This computer just refused to switch on and work, it kept freezing in the Windows start up screen. Eventually it has re-booted but it doesn't look like good news because a new computer will likely mean I've got to get a new internet set up and go wireless.  My laptop would not connect to the internet in the pub, I turned it on and off at least three times but it would not connect on the browser. This has happened before and cuts short what would of been a relaxing doing very little time. Lastly my smart phone just decided to turn itself off and not turn on no matter how much I pressed the button. I thought maybe it had somehow ran out of charge. Which didn't make sense.  So I took the battery out, put it back in and it worked.  If bad luck comes in threes I'm about to have three lots of IT bad luck in the coming days or weeks. Though this may only actually be one, and it's the biggest one of all, this computer I use every day. Shite.  As the saying goes sometimes shite happens.

BLOG counters being fooled

Recently there has been a higher number of views for these blogs. Some part of me was hoping people liked had a mild interest in what I'd wrote, but unfortunately it's not the case. There's some nasty bits of software out there which fool BLOG sites they are being visited, when in fact they are not being visited by human beings, just pieces of software.  Then when you check out the audience for your blog you get redirected to an advertising site. I've been referred to a slimming site now a few times when trying to establish this additional audience. I've also pulled those popular blogs which seemed to be getting all the hits because they are effectively skewing the stats. I'm not as popular as I thought I might be. It's one of those typical little disappointments in life I'll just have to get over.  I'm sure it wont be the end of the world, but I'm not going to be fooled into a popularity contest. Or a slimming contest, whichever it may be.

I then started to do some research into those blogs which were more popular than the rest.  On why it is their traffic sources are that much higher. It seemed there was a common theme amongst them. They would be populist in much the same way a tabloid newspaper is.  For instance talking about famous personalities and how they were living their lives. I got enticed for all of twenty minutes as the nosey Parker in me took over.  Then found them to be boring, not things I'd want to follow for any length of time. Then I thought about something I once heard. It's not what other people think, but it's what the most important person thinks which matters. To me this is Sparkling Eyes. She reads my blogs on occasion and she thinks I have a writing talent. So what matters is measuring up to Sparkling's ideas not the rest of the world. The rest of the world can sleep and wake up in it's own time.

The question is whether I should keep the blog counter or whether I should take any notice of the stats the blog site keeps. For we're both being fooled.