Why did I think, even for a second, that escaping Orange’s clutches would be easy? They’ve locked my phone so that only Orange SIM cards will work with it. That means I either need to give them £35 or something to get it unlocked (assuming they agree) or I need to buy a new phone. Curse them all.
Of freelances and holidays
The trouble with freelancing is working out when to have holidays. It’s not the same as when you’re self-employed. There are so many caveats, most of them of the paranoid rather than the actual kind.
- There’s the whole idea of not doing any work. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. So if you take a week off, that’s five days at your normal day rate (£650) you won’t be earning. Basically, whatever you’re paying for your holiday, freelances pay double. Of course, you factor that into your rates, but you see the start of the terrible thought processes?
- What will happen with your regular clients while you’re away? If you’re employed, someone at work will cover you, or they’ll hire in cover (maybe even a freelance). If you’re not around and you’re freelance, maybe they will find someone to cover you during your absence – maybe someone they like better and they’ll use instead of you in future. So now you have to time your holidays as much as possible around regular commissioning editors, just in case, except print days are just so spread around the month, trying to find a week – or even a few days – that don’t conflict with someone’s urgent delivery date is almost impossible
- What about new clients? Who’ll be answering the sales queries when you’re sunning yourself on the beach? You’ll get back only to find they’ve gone somewhere else because you weren’t available.
- Slippage. I was supposed to be on holiday yesterday, but I got summer lurgy on Monday, couldn’t finish a feature and had to spend yesterday writing it instead. Do I take another day off or just accept that as a day off I couldn’t take? Soon, you find all your days off have disappeared as you fit in just one last article that they begged you to take.
- There’s the problem of what you’ll be doing when you get back. If you don’t set up any work for your return, all those holiday days will be days when you’ve not been pitching. That means the first few days after the holiday will be days without work while you start pitching again. Which means less money again.
I’m supposed to be having a couple of days off right now. I need it after working a fortnight of double shifts at the end of last month (subbing by day, writing by night). Instead, I’ve spent the morning blogging and pitching. I still have to return a prospective new client’s phone call from yesterday. And then there’s all those low-priority emails I have to answer.
I’m going to die an early death of a stress disorder, I know it.
Am I finally leaving Orange?
Called Orange a minute ago to let them know I wanted to leave. Well, I tried anyway. I called 150 from my mobile. After being asked to press 1 to confirm it was a mobile, not a broadband query, I was told that 1 was an invalid menu option. Tried calling back but I couldn’t even get through. So I had to call Orange the mobile phone network from a landline to get through.
Quelle surprise. They hadn’t received my cancellation letter. How did I not see that coming? Oh wait. I did.
Still, the man did I ask why I was leaving. It took a long time to explain everything.
I asked for a PAC number to migrate my phone number over to Virgin. “Well, if you do want a PAC number, you’ll have to pay for a further 30 days line rental”. And if I don’t? “Well, you’ll still have to give 30 days notice you want to terminate the contract.” I did. “Well, we didn’t receive it.”
So 30 days of Orange either way. Oh well. It’ll all soon be over. I’ve already got my Virgin SIM card so I’ll be swapping over today, I think.
Green press trips
Press trips are all very nice. Who doesn’t enjoy flying off to far-away destinations, even if you don’t get to see much except the inside of a hotel at the other end? There is, however, a problem for any journalist who worries about green issues. All those plane flights can overwhelm all your good work when you’re at home. In fact, probably just one trip will result in your using up your CO2 allowance for the year. What to do, what to do?
Turns out that some of the airlines operate a carbon neutral policy. You just go to their web site, work out how much CO2 your trips have pumped out, pony up a little cash and the airline will put that money towards offsetting those CO2 emissions in an approved scheme. It should all result in your trip not having put out any net CO2 at all.
That’s the theory anyway. No doubt someone will point out that it’s all a con, doesn’t work, etc. I’d like to think it does until I hear evidence to the contrary. So I’m off to the BA web site’s offset scheme right now to pay my carbon tax for my last two press trips. I’ll have to see if BMI does an offset scheme for my little holiday in Glasgow.
The trouble with this though is that I’m now paying for my press trip, which offends my natural inalienable journo’s right to freebies. Hopefully, it’s tax deductible at the least. Maybe in future press-trip organisers will pay for the carbon offset, too. How about it PR people?
UPDATE: Turns out you can do carbon offsetting for almost anything at Climate Care; return trips to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Monaco worked out at £15 in total to offset, which isn’t bad, is it?
No word from Orange yet
It’s been a week but there’s been no word from Orange yet. Quelle surprise. Clearly cancelling the contract is going to be as hard as I expected.
Pilger stuff
John Pilger’s one of my personal journalistic heroes (although I occasionally disagree with some of his politics). So I’m always happy to see more Pilger articles. There’s an interview with him in today’s Press Gazette, but I’ve also noticed he’s contributing to the Guardian’s Comment is Free section. That, incidentally, has an RSS feed, making it easy to spot when he writes something new – which would be a handy feature of the Carlton Pilger site if they did it, given that you can’t sign up for their email newsletter any more.
Living in fear of the iMac
My iMac wouldn’t start up yesterday. Well, first it just turned itself off while I was in the middle of something. Then it wouldn’t start up again – most of the time, I got nothing other than a glowing light when I pressed the On button; sometimes I got as far as the Apple logo.
I’d had the mysterious shutdown happen to me before, but this was the first time it wouldn’t restart afterwards. All things being equal, I figured it was a hardware problem, particularly once I found the iMac wouldn’t even boot into Target disk mode when connected via FireWire to my PowerBook. So I unplugged all the peripherals. Nothing. Final resort: I took out the extra 1GB of RAM I’d installed the first day I got the iMac.
Hooray! It worked. The iMac booted just fine.
I would then have tried to get Crucial, the company from which I bought the memory, to exchange it, but it was 8am and no one was in yet. So I waited and carried on using the iMac.
I tell you something: don’t even think about using a new Intel Mac without boosting the memory beyond 512MB because it’s unusable otherwise. A complete dog.
Anyway, deciding there was no way I could work in a glacier, I took a risk and decided to put the RAM chip back in. This time though, I swapped it with the chip that Apple had included in the first slot.
The results:
- The iMac works just fine again and is actually usable
- It seems a little/a lot faster than it did before the whole disaster occurred. Maybe the Crucial memory is faster than the Apple memory and it’s being used by the system for most operations, rather than the Apple memory.
- I’m mystified about what caused the freeze. Maybe the iMac had overheated and all that moving the iMac around, unscrewing the memory hatch, etc, cooled it down a bit. Or maybe one of the chips wasn’t quite seated properly and when I swapped the chips, I seated them correctly.
- I’m now working in constant fear my iMac is going to have another hiccup. After that incident with Linux a week ago, my backup strategy is becoming meticulous.
Where are the teachers going to come from, Gordon?
Following on from my little rant about Gordon Brown’s new plan to force immigrants to learn English, this particular item of news from Private Eye came to my attention today:
“Since November, immigrants wanting to take the UK’s citizenship tests must be able to demonstrate an ‘acceptable degree’ of skill in the English language. But how are people supposed to learn it?
”An interim report from a study by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education has uncovered ‘enormous problems’ with the availability of English classes for speakers of other languages (ESOL). As demand for the classes has risen (by 65 percent in the past two years), little has been done to boost the number of courses and there is a national shortage of qualified ESOL teachers.
“Many areas have long waiting lists for courses and the inspectorates looking after colleges and adult education services say ESOL is ‘probably the weakest curriculum area’ in the whole learning and skills sector.”
So not only has Gordon come up with a policy that is really just an extension of an existing one, albeit a stupid extension that couldn’t possibly work in practice (how exactly are unemployed immigrants going to be able to afford these English lessons? etc, etc), he’s overlooked the fact that there’s no one to actually teach English anyway. Assuming this isn’t pointless posturing to attract the Daily Mail vote but which he’s never going to actually implement.
It’s his hands on the economy, folks, and soon he’ll be looking after the whole country…
Pictures from Monaco
Here are a few pictures of Monaco. Average temperature yesterday was 25ºC. As you might expect, since I had approximately 15 minutes to explore Monaco during my whole time there (deadlines is deadlines, as they say, and although I could have stayed the night, there’s an article I need to write today, and a few interviews that need conducting), most of these are from within 100 metres of the Meridien hotel in which the press briefing was being held. All the same, I think you can see that Monaco’s really, really nice, particularly in June.
Be wary of the PowerBook battery
I bought my laptop about three years ago. It’s a PowerBook G4 12“. There have been things wrong with it since day one, including an odd tendency to crash at random intervals, no matter what operating system I’m using, if I happen to have moved it recently – obviously a useful feature in a laptop.
However, it’s been getting worse. The ”7“ key keeps falling off; there’s some great big black marks on the wrist-rests, either caused by fused toner cartridge or by the G4 superheating its outer coating to the point where it starts to carbonise. The battery life has also dropped off, and until a couple of days had dropped to about an hour and half during normal usage and less than 40 minutes if I’m playing a DivX. I had bought an extra battery at the same time as the laptop, but about a year ago it started to refuse charge.
Miraculously, though, I tried charging it again yesterday and it works just fine. I’ve now gone from under 40 minutes of battery life to over three hours. The moral of this story, then, is always to buy a spare battery, but to avoid using it until your main battery has gone pear-shaped. And also, never trust Apple to produce a battery that has any kind of longevity in everyday use.
UPDATE: Incidentally, finally having battery power again meant I was able to test the Notebook feature of Word 2004, which allows you to type notes as Word records via your Mac’s microphone. It’s actually pretty good. The quality was fine, the file didn’t get too large and you’re able to play back the audio at (almost) the corresponding points to your typing. I’ll be using that feature again, I think.