Monthly Archives: June 2015

 

Hardly a week goes by on another forum where some gentleman, they always seems to be a male, has suffered what they perceive to be outstandingly bad service. Given that every reputable vendor lists their phone number on their website I can only presume that the UK telephony network is currently creaking like a middle-aged man getting out of a chair. I struggle to think that someone would weight up the option of getting an instant response and willingly opt to write 50 words somewhere that someone is unlikely to read them. And then get really angry there’s been no reply. The solution is simple.

Bored of having a smattering of anonymous people typing abuse on the Internet when someone accuses you of not posting your trade? The resolution can be this swift: Trial by Fire. The process is modest enough; a quad coil is heated using a fresh battery until white-hot then applied to the skin. After three days, when the bandages have been removed, if the skin is starting to heal then it will be clear to all that your wife did indeed post the parcel. Conversely, revealing a festering burn will prove to all that she didn’t lose the receipt from the Post Office because there never was one.

“My mod arrived and didn’t work properly,” might be your complaint. Fear not – Trial by Water will sort everything. After filling the mod with lead it will be tossed into the nearest lake. The serenely floating device will cause the onlooking crowd to gasp with delight and send the vendor rushing to get their chequebook. On the other hand, if it sinks faster than Aston Villa then everyone will know you dropped it when pulling it from the packaging.

Someone sent you a clone and claimed it was genuine? The vendor sent you their shipment of packing materials instead of your order? A person laughed at a picture of a coil you made? A viewer didn’t like your YouTube review? For these and all other situations not yet covered we offer the final solution: Trial by Combat.

For too long disputes like this have (not been) settled by who could type the most swear words into an email. Like Leon Humphreys, we think Trial by Combat is the reasonable way to settle the matter. When faced with a DVLC £25 fine, Leon offered to take on a clerk from Swansea with “samurai swords, Ghurka knives or heavy hammers”.

We can recognise common sense even if the magistrates in Bury St Edmunds can’t – and we’re sure you agree. If you’d like to offer these solutions to people you sell to or trade with then be advised we will be stocking an excellent range of gibbets, stocks, ropes and pointy things. 700 years ago is the future and the future is medieval.

 

 

The thing is it’s true. Science is grounded in errors and mistakes, a process of coming up with a theory and then finding a hundred ways it doesn’t work. Without the scientific process we wouldn’t have cars, microwave popcorn or regulated mods. Without science I wouldn’t have been able to buy an Austin Princess. I wouldn’t have been able to buy it, drive it 40 miles up the M1 and then wait for a recovery vehicle to take it to its final resting home. Stupid science.

Many take up vaping like it’s the same as buying a new computer – that you can turn it on, it works and if it doesn’t you can stand in Comet shouting loudly on a Saturday afternoon. Maybe this is the experience for most; maybe my journey has been different?

My journey is one where I’ve forgotten to replace the head in an Evod and watched the juice pour all over the table. It’s OK, I told myself, as this was a valuable lesson in how not to be an idiot. If you discover that something is stupid then don’t do that thing again.

To date I’ve only bought one bread maker, one yoghurt maker, one ice cream maker and got married once so I am clearly good at learning. The prosecution would probably like to enter that I have two children, owned two Moto Guzzis and frequently consume curries that don’t agree with me in the morning into evidence. Stupid prosecutors.

It probably depends on the severity of the consequence as to how much importance you attach to the error and the efforts you go to in order not to repeat it. I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one who has tried to drive and vape a subohm dripper ONCE before being consumed by blind panic. Being told to touch an electric fence “because it’ll be a laugh and we’ve all done it” is one of those. I remain proud of the fact that I declined to use my testicles.

I’ve had this dalliance with high wattage regulated mods, it seemed like fun. It wasn’t. It transpires I’m a very simple type with simple needs – the kind that are provided by a mech and a dripper. Staring at the instruction for preheating coils and customising the on-going wattage reminded me of the time I laughed at my Dad for being unable to program a video recorder. If you’d placed me in a plaid cardigan and put confused beads of sweat on my brow it’d have been identical. Stupid regulated devices.

The scope for error seems to be logarithmic with those boxes and none more so than when thinking I was increasing the vape by 0.3 watts. Pre-sets: what the Hell?! Instead of the 11.3W I was planning in my head (as I clicked without looking) I got 125W of cotton torching fury. So I think I’ve learnt the lesson that high-powered boxes and me do not go together.

Although the opportunity is slim, I’d never attempt sarcasm in Spanish to the police of Caracas again. Learning lessons at the blunt end of a nightstick in a basement isn’t particularly pleasant but I’m betting such an approach would have made my classes able to cite Newton’s law of Universal Gravitation. Not sure how that applies to vaping at all, but it’s a theory that could work. If someone sees me holding a regulated mod again please hit me.

 

 

I don’t lament the passing of the CE2 top coil atomiser in my affections any more than I miss spending hours carefully splicing out the ruined sections of a C90 cassette before manually winding miles of tape back in. Actually, stop right there, upon reflection the tape splicing kit I got one Christmas was an awesome gift. I’d no idea how to use most of the bits and the tape was inevitably gone beyond retrieval…but it was the nearest thing to my first ever toolkit.

And while I’m on about C90s – I really miss my ghettoblaster, my Amiga and my Minidisc player. Minidiscs were awesome: write, rewrite, digital and all wrapped up in a nice protective case. So awesome, in fact, that I still don’t understand why the rest of the world didn’t buy into the idea.

Coming from a dim and distant time when Top of the Pops albums were as authentic as the bands appearing on the show I really love gadgets and retain a love of almost all of the ones that are no longer with us.

Which is why I’m concerned in vaping terms.

My first step up from clearos and basic regulateds was to a Kayfun on top of a Nemesis. I remember asking people why anybody would bother with a mech mod when my Vamo appeared to deliver everything anybody could want. A thought echoed by my wife who believed that such expense should not be repeated.

But move to mechanicals I did, and loved it. There is something delightfully basic, forever ready for the apocalypse, about them and yet they display a range of design features from functional to the aesthetic. At one point I was holding over twenty on the desk, some I’ve even replaced after selling on more than one occasion.

The thing was I could, we all could, because once you bought into the concept of getting a ridiculously expensive metal tube you always knew you’d be able to move it on or swap it with someone equally deluded.

But deluded no more, so it seems. I’m looking at the sales section of a popular forum. I’m looking at it and seeing brand mechs struggling to sell for £50, mechs that used to fly out of threads the second they were advertised for double that.

In one, a once rare and highly sought after “elitist” brand is sitting without any love being expressed. Not for the first time, a Hellfire struggling to find a new home; it has been the same story for a few months now. The writing was on the wall once the Nemesis ceased to obtain £100, then £80 and now an asked for £60 seems optimistic.

We live in a new vaping world, progress in chip output and features have killed the mech market, in conjunction with a shift in the way most vapers vape. Only a handful of us appear to enjoy just vaping for taste with 1.2Ω+ coils. Atomisers being released onto the market come with ever-larger air holes and vapers pump as much power as they can manage through coils.

But I still love my mechs, they do the job I want them to. I don’t burn cotton on top of mechs and I love the physical interaction with the battery, as I, via the sense cells in my mouth, become a biological voltmeter.

The powers that be in tech refer to the decline of products in terms of decreasing “windows of utility”. Although the satnav is as dead as Python’s parrot satellite navigation continues. Is the window of utility being closed on mech devices? Will we now see companies switching off their lathes as demand ebbs?

In a spirit of defiance I’m going to pop an Igo-W onto the Petit Gros and go off to the garage – somewhere up there is my old Minidisc player.