At one and a half years I figu­red my phone could last at least dou­ble that and I wouldn’t have to fork out for a snazzy new gizmo for quite a while. I’m not par­ti­cu­larly enthu­sias­tic towards mobile pho­nes, yes I am fas­ci­na­ted by their all-in-one capa­bi­li­ties and ongoing impro­ve­ments (as, after all, I am an elec­tro­nic engi­neer) and I would love to have a 7 mega pixel camera, built in digi­tal radio, 4gb hdd, javasc­ript ena­bled inter­net, blue­tooth and all those other perks but one sim­ple fact remains; I do not use my phone as a telephone enough to warrant a monthly paid con­tract agree­ment. Thus I am left with the low end pay as you go options and all the shitty fallouts, or the one off cost of £300 for something high spec.

Because everything is gea­red towards con­tracts and the tech­no­logy is moving along so fast it seems nothing is built to last, this rules out my second option — a £300 price tag is not a worthy invest­ment if it wont last me 2 years, that and I am lia­ble to lose it and phone insu­rance is a scam. My pre­vious two pho­nes both died a mise­ra­ble screen-fading Nokia death before their time and all the other in-betweens have had atro­cious bat­tery pro­blems; I have yet to lose a phone and I don’t drop them — they just are not built to last. And so onto my Moto­rola story; having aban­do­ned the faulty scree­ned Nokia pro­duct lines I ven­tu­red towards a new manu­fac­tu­rer, Moto­rola paying a lowly £40 for the V220 model. I vie­wed this purchase as an inter­me­diary until high spe­ci­fi­ca­tion models became affor­da­ble and I plan­ned for it to last 3 years. Come Satur­day after­noon, a windy but rela­ti­vely warm winter’s day in Lei­ces­ter, my fully char­ged un-dropped never bashed phone with already defunct camera is sit­ting quietly in my poc­ket. Oh, my phone is on vibrate-then-ring, set to loud -  I have a mis­sed call that I somehow mis­sed while wai­ting expec­tantly for the phone to go off (this hap­pens often). Unloc­king the clam I am pre­sen­ted with this:

Pretty colours. My first ins­tinct is to reset, remove bat­tery and SIM, replace and res­tart. The error con­ti­nues and this con­firms my fears: c’est cassé! All the func­tions of the phone still seem to work, I can ring peo­ple (if I know their num­ber) and change the ring volume, etc, I just can­not see what I am doing. My first guess as to the cause was faulty soft­ware — a nasty bug that I could fix if only I could get to that “reset to fac­tory set­tings” option somehow (why isn’t there a but­ton inside to do that?). Howe­ver I am now thin­king it may be due to wear and tear on the clam’s hinge which would explain why the camera went first. Ulti­ma­tely I plan to open this all up and take a look inside, my sis­ter has the same phone that she doesn’t use so I can raid it for spare parts, etc.

Con­si­de­ring I have just finished a safety cri­ti­cal sys­tems course where requi­red fai­lure rates are 1 in 100,000 years, this per­sis­tent fai­lure of pho­nes within 24 months when no mis­treat­ment has occu­rred irri­ta­tes and annoys me to no end. The irony is that I was for a short time over the sum­mer an “honou­ra­ble Moto­ro­lan”, i.e. an emplo­yee of theirs (somewhat). I guess now I shall move on to Sony Erics­son and then another manu­fac­tu­rer when that model una­voi­dably fails.

What do you get when your favou­rite local art house cinema starts giving away its reserve of ori­gi­nal thea­tri­cal pos­ters from over the past 10 years? A lot of frea­kin’ awe­some and huge pos­ters, that’s what. The rest of this blog entry is just one giant boast and a list of pic­tu­res. The most impres­sive of finds was the Wel­come to the Dollhouse pos­ter, a rare little Todd Solondz fea­ture from 1996 that is hard enough to find on DVD and the David Lynch/Disney team up in “The Straight Story”, the sound­track for which con­tains “Lauren’s Wal­king” by Angelo Bada­la­menti, one of my con­sis­tently favou­rite tracks.

Here we go:

Signs

Note the weights to hold down the pos­ter and pre­vent it rolling up again — some of these have been rolled in sto­rage for years.

The Machi­nist (sorry for the blur on this one)

The Woods­man

About Schmidt

Lower City

Memento

Me and You and Ever­yone We Know

Birth

A pretty shitty Starship Troo­pers

Bro­ken Flowers

The Squid and the Whale

The Royal Tenenbaums

The Sixth Sense

Requiem for a Dream

Metro­po­lis

Wel­come to the Dollhouse

To illus­trate how big these pos­ters are the next pic­tu­res are of the ones pos­ted on my walls. These were the first pos­ters I found and I haven’t chan­ged them for my more favou­ra­ble films yet:

The Others & Memento

The Straight Story, Doom the Movie (heh), The Talen­ted Mr. Ripley, Corpse Bride

If peo­ple have inte­rest in any of these I might be willing to “swap” for a large Ghost World or Lost in Trans­la­tion (ver­ti­cal with Scar­lett Johans­son) poster.

So, I am in the same house as last year but this time I have been rele­ga­ted to the sma­llest bedroom. While this may seem bad, the room is actually the war­mest in the house, feels very homely, plush and is just much much nicer.

My works­pace, com­pu­ter and shel­ves. Note the JS, MySQL and Elec­tro­nics text books.

My large fit­ted war­drobe and bed­side cor­ner with God­father fra­med poster.

The house plant in the cor­ner and an open war­drobe that reveals its tech­no­lo­gi­cal glories.

An Overview

More of the tele­vi­sion and hou­sed Xbox and PS2.

Pim­ping my foo­bar, whisky ash tray (I don’t smoke) and iPod.

I abso­lu­tely des­pise cables and their assor­ted mes­si­ness. In these pho­tos you should only see a cou­ple, the hun­dreds of others are quietly and neatly hid­den away from view. The one trai­ling the bot­tom of the war­drobe is the anno­ying net con­nec­tion to the Xbox that wouldn’t fit through the dri­lled hole at the back (inside) where the power enters. It’s nice being able to hide away the TV and con­so­les when they are not being used. The room also has 5.1 surround sound setup with correctly posi­tio­ned spea­kers in cor­ners. The small shelf lying behind the screen makes a nice cosy area for con­nec­tor cables to come through from below (away from view); hou­sing the DVD wri­ter, iPod con­nec­tions, card rea­der and such. The screen also dou­bles as a USB hub. So I am happy.

In a bid to clean up parts of the house we deci­ded to rum­mage through our attic to make space for more boxes of things we don’t really need but like to keep. We remo­ved some old boxes and loo­ked through them, most of it was junk. Door hand­les, screws, locks, metal brac­kets, paint brushes, wall­pa­per, bro­ken things and lots of dust. Howe­ver we did come across a bag con­tai­ning two large rolls, upon clo­ser ins­pec­tion they were my Dad’s old pos­ters. These pos­ters look pretty darn cool and I’m trying to value them at the moment.