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The F Word, and no not F*ck and not that programme by Gordon Bloody Ramsey

Well, by posting our little announcement and then not adding anything new to the blog for a fortnight, I think I've squeezed every last possible comment out of my readership. Thanks for all your kind words, it really was nice to hear from you all. Thanks for turning out!

Speaking of large turn-outs brings me on to the big news of the day, the fantastic election results in the US. It's hard to believe it's all over, especially since even in the UK the US election has been headline news for well over a year now.

American democracy seems to be a strange beast, sometimes inexorably slow, other times remarkably swift. Americans appear happy to spend years preparing for each election, conversely on the day of voting they're impatient for the results, often declaring results just after the polls have closed and well before all the votes are counted. But then, after the result is known, weeks pass before the incumbent hands over to the President Elect.

Coming from a country where snap elections are called with a few week's notice, the results aren't declared until all the votes are counted, and leaders change overnight, it all seems a little arse-about-face.

But what I do I know? We only invented democracy. Or was that the Greeks? I forget. Or are we the ones who've been doing it the longest? Something like that. We're definitely the best at it. We should get a cup or something.

Anyway, thinking about Obama's victory brings my thoughts full circle, back to my life and the new life that's coming. In particular I'm thinking about the F word: the Future.

The Future isn't something I've thought about much in my life, to be honest. It's just something I've allowed to arrive and wash over me. One of the creeping realisations that's dawning on me since Junior started setting up shop in Wombsville (population 1), is that the future isn't a blank page anymore, it's got a definite structure and form, and certain things are going to have to happen.

The blank page is now more like a sheet of A4 feint ruled. With a margin and everything. Begging to be written on.

I've already started with the first line: "stop making crap analogies".

That will do for now.

Just a little thing I want to tell you about

It's been a rather fraught couple of months here, to be honest. I hesitate to use a tired phrase like "rollercoaster of emotions", but until they invent another thing that has the same exhilarating highs, unexpected and terrifying lows, and twisty bits where you just don’t know which way is up, then the rollercoaster analogy will have to do.

It all started a couple of months ago. Jane didn’t like the taste of a cheese and pickle sandwich I’d made her. She was also feeling strangely tired. She told me both these things, and my brain took the two facts and cogitated upon them for a while. Eventually it reported back with a hypothesis, namely: “woohoo! I get to eat her sandwich!”

I think women’s brains works differently from men’s, because given the same two facts Jane arrived at “I need to go to the bathroom and wee upon a small white plastic paintbrush thing.”

You see? It’s like they’re from a different planet. Someone should write a book about that sometime.

Anyway, I was blissfully unaware of Jane's activities (probably distracted by the extra sandwich) until she reappeared clutching the aforementioned paintbrush thing and said tremulously “I think I’m pregnant”.

There was a line on the indicator that meant something but it was the wrong way up to the way it was shown in the diagram next to the legend “positive”. There was also a very very faint line running the other way which kinda made it look like a plus sign, and the limited information on the indicator itself didn’t mention plus signs at all. Jane, of course, had thrown away the box with the proper full instructions on, so all we had to go on was the rather limited diagram on the plastic paintbrush thingy itself.


Cue a late-night dash to the supermarket to buy another, more expensive, pregnancy test. Jane retired to the bathroom with another plastic paintbrush thing and a small empty Gü pudding bowl (which we'd saved for making crème brûlée in but i'm never ever going to eat out of again, even if it is thoroughly washed). Anyway, that pregnancy test gave a more emphatic “yes”. Cue lots of excited jumping about and ringing of close family, just because we had to tell someone.

The next day Jane came back from an early appointment from the doctor, her face ashen. The test the doctor had carried out had given an almost invisibly faint line, and he was worried about a couple of other indicators Jane was experiencing. There was also talk of the possibility of something called “ectopic pregnancy”. After being so happy the night before, it was all a bit of a shock to the system.

Because of the uncertainty, the doctor decided to throw the NHS at us. For the first time since I’ve worked for the organisation it’s big guns were wheeled out for me, in the form of endless blood tests, scans, and friendly ladies with reassuring dark blue uniforms. This simultaneously heartened us, and played on our worries, because as fantastic as medical science is these days, it can’t make Mother Nature work any faster than she wants to. We’ve had a few weeks of news which was never actually terrible, just never particularly good. And lots of lots of waiting.

Until today when I sat with Jane (who has a new blog address, by the way), and we watched as a little comma-shaped blob swam into focus on a computer screen. In the middle of the blob, a couple of pixels flickered away, the pulsing of a tiny brand-new heart.

Then it hit home, really for the first time.

I’m going to be a dad!

Stupid people shouldn't be allowed on the internet

Once more into the depths of my blog to fish out comments on long-dead blog posts, dear friends!

A while ago I had a whale of a time researching the (sadly now defunct) vanity publisher Protea, publishers of (how could we forget), the truly awesome Off the Hook phrasebook for Japanese wannabe gangstas. In the course of my research I also turned up the some of the other titles that Protea released before it folded, as well as their work on bespoke oil paintings from photographs.

The paintings are stunningly awful, and certainly looked nothing like their subjects, unless their subjects were both boss-eyed and had lips that didn't line up with their noses.

The mistake I made though was not realising that because the pictures were both of American soldiers, any mockery of the artist's skill was actually mocking the looks of the soldiers themselves, and therefore a direct insult to all men fighting for Peace, Justice and the American Way. Ungrateful bastard that I am.

Well, according to the last couple of commentators, anyway.

Enjoy the new depths of imbecility, I'm off to put on a bhurkha. Auf Wiedersehen!

How to turn your iPod Touch into an iPhone

Well maybe not a full iPhone, you won't get the actual phone bit (yet) or the SMS messaging, but you will get a 3G-enabled iPod Touch that you can use to send emails and browse the web anywhere.

Firstly I should say that I adore my new iPod Touch. It's quite simply the best, cutest, most gadgetty gadget I've ever bought. I have developed a polishing fetish, it's just so damn shiny.

But the shininess of it's chrome behind is a subtle reminder that it's the poor relation of the iPhone when it comes to connectivity. It's not got 3G, so no web surfing outside of WiFi areas.

I also love my Nokia N95. Compared to an iPhone it's a brick, but it's a clever little brick, chock full of interfaces and much more open to modification and adaptation than Apple's sleeker but more locked down fare. The N95 also supports WiFi and 3G.

Which got me to thinking, what if I could turn my little N95 into a mini WiFi hub, and share it's 3G connection? Then I could simply hook up my iPod to my N95 and surf the web anywhere! That would be a Very Cool Thing.

Thankfully the guys who came up with JoikuSpot also thought that would be a cool thing too. :-)

Definitely worth a purchase if you have one of the supported phones (mainly Nokia models), and it really does work.

Who knows, with any luck the new microphone-included iPod headphones will work with Fring, and you'll be able to make free Skype voice calls from an iPod Touch too.

Geek post ends. :-)

ID

In the Wild West days of the internet, one of the huge attractions for trannies wasn't the perceived "anonymity" you gained by interacting online, it was actually almost the opposite. Trannies don't want to be anonymous, they want to be known, identified and recognised. They want to go into a tranny chat-room and be greeted like a regular at Cheers. Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name... you just don't want it to be the same name that your boss or mum uses.

The beauty of the early internet was your feminine side could have an identity on the internet, in a way that she couldn't in the real world. You could also readily maintain multiple identities, keeping real and assumed personae separate and unique.

These days the Internet has cleaned up it's act, somewhat. Your identity on it has become more important, and systems like Google, Yahoo, and OpenID allow your identity to "flow" naturally from one service to the next. Anonymity has been sacrificed for seamless access to personal and personalised content. Which is great...

...if you're happy to be one person. Which most trannies aren't. One of the biggest problems I have these days is striking a balance between keeping my online identities for Simon and Becky separate, and still making the most of the integrated services that the internet provides. I'm fed up with having to log in to two different Facebook profiles, for example, but that's the only way I can do it without steadily outing myself to every friend-of-a-friend-of-a-work-colleague that finds me on the net.

I want to keep two sides of my life separate to others, but integrated to me. The annoying thing is that this isn't a desire unique to trannies. Surely everyone would like to have a bit of distance between their various professional and personal personas. The online services don't seem to get that, or if they do get it they don't do enough to support it.

Take Flickr, for example, which allows you to mark pictures as available to friends or family only. The Flickr people have recognised that we don't always want everyone to see pictures that we're happy to share with our closest relations. But it goes no-where near far enough.  How about being able to mark pictures as only visible to my drinking buddies, or only available to my professional clients? And even better, how about if my professional clients saw my Flickr ID as "Hyperglobal Mega Consultants" and my drinking buddies saw my ID as "Beermonster Dave"?

I'm not pretending it wouldn't take a lot of programming, and I'm not suggesting some kind of identity fraudster's charter. I'm just saying that maybe we all have more than one identity, and it's time that the social networking sites realised that a bit more.