Skyrocketing downloads and plummeting laptops

I am having one of those traditional British days where one is forced to wait in for the arrival of something. Like all services, this secure mail one, delivering my passport, has suggested that it will visit sometime between 9am and 5pm. I can’t leave the house until it arrives, which could well be at 4.55pm. Instead, I have supplies to keep me going and a plan to get a few things done while I wait. These included paying taxes, agonising over the failure of BTYahoo! mail, and the discovery that my laptop is utterly and irredeemably obsolete.

Watching Amnar’s downloads has been one of the most exciting things I’ve done in… oh, twenty-four hours. I’m still hoping Dan the Producer will set up some kind of phpBB system so we can all talk on a forum that isn’t utterly impossible to use, but in the meantime, I’ve been stunned by the speed at which downloads have increased this week.

We had a chat about the way it sounded, and now it has new music, which is a lot more intense than the old, Al-Jazeera Local News-style jingle we had before. I wanted the podcast to reflect the intensity of the story more. It’s quite difficult because being British, we have a tendency to be a bit reticent about it. Have you noticed that the English struggle to sound really excited about anything? We just sound rather desperate when we do. While Americans can say “Ohmygod this is so amazing!” the British can only really say “Well, I thought it was rather good.”

It gets more exciting (even more than rather good) during this week’s episode, as I move off from the original, narrow plot onto the more complex themes of the new Book One. The experience of Io as she struggles to resolve her learning with her intuitive knowing – plus her confusion over who really is on which side – is going to get very intense very quick. And even better than that, we have Zoriel and the Ta Dasi to discover. If you’re reading this at random and you want to listen in, the podcast is completely free and can be found at www.joelyblack.net.

Meanwhile, a little alarm went off in my head at about 4am this morning when I realised that I hadn’t paid NICS or PAYE for my last contract. I called my accountant when it finally reached a more reasonable hour and discovered that they’d sent me an email last week. For about two or three weeks now, I’ve been having problems with BTYahoo email. You can’t download it, or access it via the site most of the time. You just get a far-from-reassuring message that they are aware of the issue and are within moments of its resolution, which then never arrives.

I asked my accountant to change my email to one of my Google accounts, and then decided I should set up that account to download directly to my Apple Mail. I followed the instructions and saw that I needed to have Apple Mail version 3.0. Surely, I thought, I’d have Apple Mail 3.0 on my laptop. I looked in the “About” section of my Apple Mail and found that I had Apple Mail v1.3. Oh. My laptop is obsolete. Utterly, utterly obsolete. It won’t download new versions of software because they’re all for OSX 10.4 and I’m only OSX 10.3. This is why, as I await the arrival of my passport, I have been counting down to the arrival of the new Macbooks and Macbook Pros.

Meanwhile, I should edit a chapter, or do something equally useful with my time…