adoption curve dot net

I can’t honestly say it’s a metaphor I’d considered, but Suw Charman of Strange Attractor compares blogs with Tamagotchi:

Blogs are Tamagotchi. If you don’t feed them, they die. If you don’t clear up their crap – comment spam, for example – they die. They’re more fun when there are other bloggers to play with, just like the new IR connected Tamagotchi are allegedly more fun because your little virtual pet can now interact with other little virtual pets.

But, like Tamagotchi, if your blog pet dies, nothing really bad happens. There’s no body to dispose of, no crying children to whom you have to explain that little Ginger went away and isn’t coming back, no real repercussions at all. And, like Tamagotchi, even if your blog does starve to death, it’s easily enough resurrected.

Like a Tamagotchi, keeping a blog healthy requires time and effort. The question is, how much?

My replacement PowerBook battery arrived this morning, which is a fairly impressive turnaround considering I only sent off the request on Friday. Needless to say, the coverage of the recall seems to tending towards the “hahahadeha another Apple hardware problem” approach, for which I have but one simple and devastating retort. Can you imagine how this would have been handled if it was Dell (or IBM, or HP, or insert_vendor_of_choice_here) recalling the kit? Presumably I’d still be queueing at the post office, looking for a box big enough to fit the whole damn laptop in, and wondering what I’d be typing with for the next six weeks…

We’re still no nearer being moved, and still may not be tomorrow if the fuckwits at the building society continue to deliver the current lamentable level of service. So far it’s taken them a month to get as far as looking at the application, with a couple of sidetracks while they decide whether or not they want to see a particular piece of paper. Today’s reason it’s all falling apart is that the “business manager” (and I use that term in the loosest sense possible) broke her wrist at the weekend, so there’s no-one else who can do anything.

I’m not googlebombing them yet because there’s still an outside chance they may redeem themselves tomorrow, but so far it’s not looking promising. Part of the problem is that we’re using an intermediary – a good thing in that it gave us a vastly wider choice of mortgage products to choose from in the first place, but a bad idea when things start to go wrong, because there’s another two individuals introduced into the communications chain who can screw things up.

The good news of the day – assuming that we do ever get moved, of course – is that we’ll have the pleasure of voting against a sitting Tory MP once more, which is something of a rarity, this being the North. Not only that, but he’s a unreconstructed Eurosceptic hanger-and-flogger who’s only bothered to attend 58% of parliamentary votes, and isn’t particularly good at responding to his constituents. The Lib Dems came second at the last election – which neatly sidesteps any angst that I might have had about wasting a vote on Tory Tony in an effort to get the Tory out.

It looks to be another one of the bizarre constituencies that seems to have no geographic logic at all – currently we fall into the City of York area, which is logical enough – but then moving two miles to the east, but still well within what could be regarded as York itself, puts us into another constituency entirely. It was a similar situation at the last election – although we were well within the town itself, rather than being within the Aylesbury boundary, for some reason we fell under Buckingham.