Since this blog was started in December last year with some posts about Christmas, and thus we’ve come full circle and its that time of year again… well nearly.

Even this weekend I ventured into town, a necessity rather than pleasure of course.  Birmingham city centre is rammed to the rafters already and it’s not even that close to Christmas yet.  It’s worrying that eleven days into November the decorations are up and the deals have started in the shops, it’s only going to get worse.

Christmas, the season of goodwill, starts earlier every year,  and by logic alone we can expect it to be a year round event by sometime in 2012.

At least one good thing about Christmas is that I can be drunk and have a fag in the centre of Birmingham without getting arrested.  It’s fantastic that Birmingham embrace their connection with it’s twin city Frankfurt, in the form of a splendid market, which is widely accepted as the largest authentic German Christmas Market outside of Germany.

I expect that in the next few days my blood pressure will rise, and my heart rate increase as I battle my way through imbeciles buying presents for their family and knocking me over with their shopping bags, wankers.

Whether you’re interested in politics or not, whether you’re a fan of anything, support the Poppy Appeal, without the people the campaign supports we just might not be here today.  So do what you can and wear your Poppy with pride this weekend, just like the tiny Mr. Rant is.

So it was replaced yesterday and it’s still looking good, no cracks as yet.  But there is a new problem which has been occurring on and off for a few days now, it concerns the taking and receiving of calls.

It would seem that O2 have decided that they don’t like me and won’t let me take calls when I’m at home, well that’s not strictly true.  It seems that if you have your 3G connection on, for some reason if you live in the vicinity of my house you won’t be able to receive calls or indeed make them, fairly worrying for a phone really.

Yes, I’ve spoken to O2 at length about the issues and they’ve advised me to make a note of when the problem occurs and how often and then in their inimitable style they’ll look into the fault and make an attempt to resolve it.

Let’s hope it’s soon because 2G is so slow, and it’s annoying that I can’t use my iPhone to it’s full potential.

Well I finally have my brand new shiney iPhone 3G in white!

It took less that five minutes to go and get it from Apple.

I have to say that setting it up was easy and the lovely chap in the Apple store was wonderful about putting my screen protector on, a job which I do not relish.  So now, I’m sittign here in Starbucks, blogging away to you while my restore happens, this could take sometime.

Today as we wake up and enter into the world, we enter a world where America has changed inexplicably forever.

Barrack Obama is not only the new President, but he is the first black president.

What will change? Is America finally changing?

As you can see from the post below the intention was to get the offending article swapped for a new one, all in all it was going well.

I arrived at the Apple Store in Birmingham’s Bullring Shopping Centre, presented the phone to the “genius” and was told he would swap it, lovely.

He suggested I wipe my data which we promptly began to do, no problem.

Then suddenly, he remembered they had none left to give to me. Bugger.

So my data and songs have all gone, but luckily I’d backed up before taking it to Apple.

Now I’ve just got to wait until one comes in…