I haven’t felt that ill in quite a while. At least not since I stopped drinking.

A couple of years ago I thought about smoking cigars. Obviously to learn more I bought a book called The Sensible Cigar Connoisseur and read it. I didn’t quite realise how complicated it can be. It isn’t just a case of lighting the flat end and puffing away you know.

All this undoubtedly stems from watching Gomez Addams and Groucho Marx, the similarity is uncanny. Both these fine gentlemen must have been an influence as well as a film called Smoke, about the customers, and the proprietor, of a cigar and tobacco store in Brooklyn, New York. Another subliminal influence is a cigar store in the Royal Exchange in Manchester that I used to walk past, when I was at Manchester Polytechnic, back in the day. The window would be full of these big heavy glass jars full of cigars of all shades and sizes.

After I finished reading the book I looked around on the internet for cigar stores that would deliver bundles of cigars by post. Yes, I could have just walked into the store in Manchester and asked for a couple to try. But I'm not all that comfortable knowing nothing about a subject and asking for help. So, I look at the prices of the ‘starter kits’ on a few web-sites and think that it’s a lot of money for something that’s just going to go up in smoke.

Rachael at work came back from her honeymoon in Cuba with a cigar for us in the office. Just the one mind. So Andrew and myself try it out in the smoking tunnel at work. I think I was more eager to give it a go as I was the one who cut the end and brought in matches specially. Leo didn’t want anything to do with it, muttering something about his oppressed brothers in the plantations and being symptomatic of the white regime.

A few weeks ago my Dad is sorting out his office and holds up this box of cigars still with the cellophane around the box. To be completely accurate, the glue holding the cellophane together had turned to dust with age. The box was labelled ‘Alvaro Especiales’ and contained 25 ‘Elegantes’ all individually wrapped. They must date from my Grandma’s visit to California back in 1979 I think. Could they really be any good? I took them any way and with my fathers words, “You’ll make yourself sick!”, still ringing in my ears I headed home.

They can’t be any good after all these years surely.

Just to check I did manage to find them on the internet. And they are sold in exactly the same box. The problem now was that if I smoked one how would I know if it was bad or not? Simply Cigars sell a starter pack of a humidor pouch, matches, a cutter and 6 cigars (3 varieties) for about £45. Before Easter I placed an order. That order arrived today.

Because I didn’t want to stink-up my little semi-detached penthouse flat with cigar smoke I had decided to walk to the cemetery and smoke there. I had put one of the new cigars, and another out of the box, into the zip lock bag that the cigars came in. So with my cutter and matches headed out.

Cutting the end of the new one wasn’t a problem. Getting it lit was a little tricky. It only seemed to light in the centre but another match sorted that out. Remembering the cigar smokers mantra, “DON’T INHALE!”, I just started puffing away, swirling the smoke around my mouth. From what I read on the internet this afternoon if you smoke it too much it could leave a nasty taste, if you smoke it too little it’ll go out. The ash was nearly an inch long before it fell off of it’s own accord.

I can’t say that I got a buzz from it, like booze or coffee, I just enjoyed strolling around, listening to my iPod, smoking a good cigar after work. The first one done I started on the second.

I didn’t notice any difference between the two. The aged one certainly didn’t taste all that dramatically different from the recent purchase.

After 2 hours walking around, looking at gravestones and shopping trolleys in the stream, I headed home.

I switched on the TV, sat down on my sofa and haven’t felt that ill in a long time. Honestly all the blood drained from my head and my face was covered in a cold sweat. Not good. Not good at all. I did think that I was going to be sick. Only one thing for it… bed, under the duvet with my eyes closed all I could see was smoke rising out of my mouth.

Expect Apple stock to plummet as I have bought 30 shares at $138.96.

With the way that the Apple faithful upgrade both their software and hardware on a regular basis it looks like a good move. Also the iPhone hasn’t been released in Japan yet and we all know how tech savvy they are. But will the resent drop, from $200 at Christmas, and the drop of the market in general it looked like a good time to buy. If it wasn’t for the form filling I would have bought the stock at $200 in December and been a little concerned now.

Anyway, it is money that I could loose, meaning that I'm not going to go hungry, but hopefully it won’t come to that. Apple really are the only tech company that I believe are releasing good, well designed, products and the great software to run on them.

I’ll just leave the stock in the Maxi ISA for 5 years or so and see how it goes, so I am in this for the long term… but I’ll just check the price again to see if it’s gone up any.

CHRONOS CD

For the first time in a long time I woke up hearing the radio instead of switching on a TV.

Ever since I've had a television in my bedroom I've set the alarm early so that I can have a little snooze and listen to breakfast television. This no doubt started when TV-AM was being broadcast on ITV. There wasn’t much point before that because all you would get was the test-card.

So many years and three televisions later I've switched to the wireless, or DAB to be precise. One reason is that I don’t think that the loft aerial won’t be good enough to get a digital signal after the switch over. If it is good enough then I don’t really want to buy a set-top box just for the couple of hours in a morning. And finally GMTV started to get on my nerves. So much so that I've stopped watching it altogether. It’s just the same reporters, the same actors, the same boy-bands miming in the studio and even the same adverts being shown at the same time every day. “Does searching for car insurance drive you crazy?” “But will I get 100% of my compensation?” I honestly think that the last straw was Heather Mills McCartney getting, more or less, a full half hour to rant on and on.

Now I just wake up to BBC Radio 5 live.

The Pure CHRONOS CD works really well and sounds great. The display dims depending on the light in the room and you can set the brightness for ‘on’ and ‘standby’ modes. It has 4 alarm settings so I have an early alarm for during the week and another a little later for the weekend. Setting the alarm can be a little tricky, the user manual isn’t all that great, but a couple of tests and you get the hang of it. The remote is a little overkill considering that it will be at the side of your bed anyway. The IR beam seems to only work if you are pointing directly at the sensor on the front and at the correct angle. Apart from these little niggles it works great. Clear digital sound, no hissing or crackling and no adverts.

I will miss Penny Smith though, that is the only downside.

Upside Down Tree

Wandering around John Lewis today I spotted this upside down tree in the Christmas section. The product information on their web-site says:

A fantastic space-saving idea which originated in the U.S. This upside down spruce effect tree leaves plenty of room underneath for all your Christmas gifts. Includes stand. Excludes lights and decorations.

Who in their right mind would buy a tree that was upside down to save space. John Lewis have more than 10 in stock. Expect them all to be in the January sales.

Vinyl

Watching High Fidelity the other night and I realised that my home town no longer has a music shop. Sure there’s still W.H.Smith and Woolies but no actual shop. Some thing that Henry Rollins has said a time or two on his radio show is that it’s good to talk to the people who run music shops, they generally know what they’re talking about, they can recommend music. If you like this band you should check out that band and this other band. Just people who are enthusiastic about music and who aren’t there because McDonalds wasn’t hiring that day.

When I started buying music Macclesfield had quite a few places to go. Terry Blood’s in the precinct, A&A Records in the marketplace and BJ Records on Park Green. Then Disco One opened on Mill Street. I would go to all of them, and bought records from all of them. It was always a case of trying to memorise who had what vinyl and at what price. This was back in the days when pocket money was the only means I had of feeding my addiction. I don’t think that I've ever bought more that three vinyl albums at one time. It was always a bit of a task trying to get the 12 inch bags, and it’s contents, past my mother. “You've not bought another one have you?”, as if having more than one record was a crime. With the advent of the CD that was no longer a problem.

Back when I used to commute to Manchester, to attend the Polytechnic as it was then, HMV, Virgin, Piccadilly Records and a store that was in a cellar called Yanks (I think) was where my money went. Wednesday was the day to check the stores, usually armed with a list of potential purchases courtesy of Kerrang! magazine.

After I'd bought my first CD player I'd been working for over a year so the majority of my shiny discs were bought locally. Except for the occasional day off/Saturday when I'd make a special trip into Manchester. It isn’t the same though is it? Not the same cover art. Not the same tactile quality that you get when you slide the vinyl out of the inner cover.

I think that only A&A Records had survived. I'm sure they had two stores at one point, both the precinct and in the marketplace. Then Margin Music started selling CD’s and vinyl as well as instruments. They expanded and A&A Records closed down. Music Zone opened and Margin Music closed the CD side of the business.

The last time I made a music purchase was at Margin Music. I hadn’t been in for well over a year. At one time I was quite a frequent visitor. It had changed a lot. A good three quarters of the store was taken over with DVD’s, and not good DVD’s at that. Mostly films that are classed as a now famous actors first tentative efforts. The covers have this stars name in lettering that is usually bigger than the title of the film. Not a good sign. They were playing the new Wildhearts CD but I bought the first Velvet Underground CD and Green Mind by Dinosaur Jr. When I was paying for the discs the chap behind the counter asked if I owned anything else by The Velvet Underground. I didn’t. He said that that album was one of his favourites and that I should checkout White Light White Heat, which I also saw in the rack. He said that Lou Reed was going to perform at Manchester Apollo and that he'd be playing the Berlin album in it’s entirety. Would you believe it? Some one in a record store who is passionate about music. Margin Music is now gone.

The journey back from Liverpool on the train requires a change at Manchester Piccadilly. It’s just a case of walking, or standing on the moving walkway, back to the main platforms. I found the London Euston train and a seat about 5 or 10 minutes before departure. The train stopped at Stockport, then moved off again and I'm listening to Penn Radio on my iPod. I heard the announcer mention Stoke-on-Trent but I thought that I had missed the fact that Macclesfield was the next stop. Near home I got out of my seat and moved towards the door, only to see Macclesfield station whizz past at high speed.

Thankfully Stoke-on-Trent isn’t all that far away. It isn’t like it’s as far as Birmingham or London even. But I panic slightly thinking, “Do I now need to buy a Stoke-on-Trent to Macclesfield return ticket?”. I got off the train and bought a single ticket back to Macclesfield. There was no point getting a return because I was already there. £6.30 lighter, after already spending £15.10 on the return trip to Scouseland, I walked over to the other platform and waited 5 minutes for the next train home.

Of course no one checked my ticket from Manchester to Stoke-on-Trent else they would have been able to tell me that the train doesn’t stop at Macclesfield. And no one checked my ticket from Stoke-on-Trent to Macclesfield. So I could have travelled for free. Or just bought a ticket on the train if I was asked.

For 2 years I travelled from Macclesfield to Manchester when I was at Manchester Polytechnic, as it was then known. Countless times since I've travelled on the same route and always the train has stopped at Macclesfield because it is a main-line station. The video monitors on the platform were only showing a list of departures instead of the details of the train on the platform. The displays on the side of the train either weren’t working or hadn’t been set-up.

So, is honesty the best policy? Not if it costs an extra £6.30 it isn’t!

Today I received an envelope in the post which looked familiar. I used to see the same envelope each month when I bought Premium Bonds by standing order. At first I thought it was a confirmation that the bonds that I sold last month had been processed. I had checked my bank account the other night and noticed that the bonds had been sold and that the money had been credited to my account.

I opened the envelope to find that I had won £50 worth of Premium Bonds. When I sold the bonds I had kept a note of the numbers, as recommended on the form. Low and behold the winning Premium Bond was one that I had just sold. Luckily I had ticked the box to only sell the bonds after the next draw.

Panasonic DMR-EX75EB-S
HDD/DVD Recorder

A few weeks ago my trusty JVC video recorder stopped showing the on-screen displays. As with most things now-a-days everything is done through menus and cursor movements so if you can’t set the recording times you are a little stuck. But I thought that I could just use the display on the recorder itself. At least you can see the start and end times and the program number. This worked fine for a few weeks. I would check what I had already set-up to record and add any new programs to record at the beginning of the week. Great. Until the clocks changed. I dug out the user manual and tried to set the time using the display on the unit but all the manual said was ‘move the cursor down to the Clock Set option’ not much help if you can’t see the display on the screen. I did try to re-set the times of all the programs using British Summer Time but realised that this kind of messing about wasn’t going to last long.

Time for a small purchase, a Panasonic DMR-EX75EB-S HDD/DVD Recorder.

Having used it for a couple of days I really wish that I had bought one sooner. On long play mode it can record about 170 hours of programmes. In the past I've recorded using long play onto a 4 hour tape but the picture quality does suffer. This is only the 160GB model they have one that has a 250GB drive in it. I can’t honestly see why I would need to store 170 hours of TV. I’ll usually watch something and then delete it. If I want to keep it I’ll burn it to a DVD-R and delete it from the drive. Of course this time next year I’ll wish that I'd splashed out the extra £100.

The thing that sold it for me was that the machine has a Freeview tuner built in. At the moment only the TV has a digital tuner so if I wanted to record from one of the other digital channels I could but I would have to have the TV on and set to the right channel. I've only ever done this once as you can imagine. With this Panasonic recorder I just have to select the programme from a TV guide on the screen and that’s it. You can even watch a programme while another programme is recording. I know, I'm getting too excited. But this is a joy for someone like me who rarely watches live TV because it stops you doing other things. It even records the full wide-screen picture whereas the video would only record a 4:3 screens worth and I would have to zoom in which made the picture look even worse.

Of course I can’t just ditch the VCR as I do have about 200 videos, some-of-which aren’t available on DVD. So I did have to buy a new SCART lead, to run the video signal into the HDD/DVD, and a fibre optic cable to run the audio signal into the amplifier.

After I had finally plugged everything in what I really wanted to try was transferring from video to HDD, so that I could archive some of my videos. This all worked perfectly except… the on-screen display came back on the video. It may have been a loose connection after all.

iPod nano 8GB

A few weeks ago I bought a little 8GB iPod nano. Yes, I realise that I could have spent about £30 more and bought a 30GB iPod but, to be honest, I didn’t want something that big. The iPod isn’t that big, when you think of the storage and the display, but I did need something that would easily fit into the top pocket of my shirt.

The first generation 1GB iPod shuffle, which I ordered when it was announced, has served me well. I never needed a screen because I only ever used it when I was doing other things. I just loaded it with songs and switched it to shuffle play and that was it. Of course there were times that I needed a display. I would buy a new CD, import it into iTunes and transfer it to the shuffle so that I could listen to it. If the shuffle already contained 200 songs then the new tracks were completely lost in the mix. You could listen on shuffle play and hope to hear a new song or you could switch it so that it played the songs in sequence and press the skip button until you found the new album. Obviously, on occasion, I would just transfer the last few albums that I'd purchased and leave the rest of the iPod shuffle empty.

The other thing is pod-casts. The iPod shuffle isn’t built for pod-casts. I listen to a few pod-casts while I'm sat at my iMac. But, I find that I can’t do anything that requires concentration when I'm listening to something. Yes, I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes, I can’t walk and have a telephone conversation at the same time. Not that anyone ever rings me.

Last night I transferred the pod-casts that I hadn’t listened to during the week to my iPod nano. Just so I could listen to the Penn Radio and Ruby on Rails pod-casts while I was washing clothes and cleaning and hoovering. Of course I don’t know what the neighbours think. They no doubt hear me laughing when I'm watching something on TV but to hear a laugh surrounded by complete silence must seem strange. No stranger than usual I suppose.

Premium Bonds

I've owned Premium Bonds for many years and always thought of them as a way to have a little flutter without loosing my shirt. Over the years I've invested quite a sum of money, always thinking that the more I own the greater chance I have of winning the jackpot, or one of the smaller prizes. I mean £10,000 would do me just fine, tax-free, I'm not greedy. A couple of years ago I set-up a standing order so that I bought £50 worth each month. Obviously this was just money that wouldn’t end up in my savings account. Recently I had started to think about stopping the standing order and cashing some of them in. Only because I ended up with more money in Premium Bonds than I had in accessible cash. Also I did wonder whether they were worth it.

On Wednesday I received the weekly ‘Martin’s Money Tips’ e-mail and the top headline was ‘Premium Bonds: are they worth it?’. What Martin says is that for someone like me, a basic rate taxpayer, I would be much better off investing in a good savings account than investing in premium bonds. It’s just that people would much rather have a chance of winning big than earning interest on savings each month.

So, last night I filled in the form, you have to ask for this at the Post Office, to cash in the majority of my bonds. Of course I checked the box which says that you want to sell them after the next draw… it would just be my luck to miss out on a big win.