It is Tuesday. Normally I schedule my blog to publish on a Wednesday and have a few pre-written works of art lined up ready to go. BUT this week I’ve not done that. Why, I’m not too certain. I’ve got three drafts on the go and well this one seemed to make the most sense to start - so if you are sitting comfortably reader shall we begin?

Buzz, whine, ping, buzzzzzz - I want to tell you exactly the noise in my ears, in my head even but I can’t. Perhaps I can tell you by example? Do you remember when you were young and you would go out in the evening and party, party, party? And that then for the rest of that night (normally drunk and therefore not relevant) and possibly the next day you would have this buzzing, hissing sound in your head? Well for the entire of 2012 and possibly as far back as late November 2011 I’ve been tormented by that kind of noise in my ears, in my brain every night, every possible moment of silence stolen from me.

Now hearing things is nothing new to me. I did/do have quite sensitive hearing. Take my apartment on somedays there is a high pitch whine which I can hear and it changes pitch depending where I am in the room. I don’t know the source but it is very annoying. Now it would appear I have a similar issue all the time. Boooooooooooh I say.

This I find very disturbing. I find that if I want to get to sleep that the hiss and buzzing of my ears make it harder and harder and another strange side effect is that I don’t know if the sounds I sometimes hear are real or in my head. So is that an alarm or erm my ears. This has forced me to go off and buy an app for my phone so that I can check if the sound is real or make believe. So far the free version of the app let me see that the sound was real and that it was outside and possibly some stupid persons stupid alarm. I felt so happy I bought the app (a bit like Victor Kiam and Remington razors). Except I was exceptionally disappointed at the full price app which just cost me money did very little more than the free one and then I discovered, well I think I have, that the graphing scales are nonsense and that my pad also hears imaginary noises. Well either that or my phone does not hear the noises that my pad hears. And now I hope you can understand that I have a little bit of erm, anger about this. I bought an app to help me work out if the noise is real or imaginary and the fucking app hears its own fucking imaginary noises!!

I emailed the authors who told me that it could be a calibration issue and had I calibrated my phone and pad. Are you fucking kidding me do I look like a sound engineer. I don’t carry a fucking signal generator around with me - for fuck sake. I politely said no and well then proved by creating a number of images that by pressing stop then start I can magically make lines appear and also that at 44 KHz why does the graph only go to 26.5? I am guessing it is logarithmic but then why does the option say linear? Arrrrrrrrrrrrrh

So far the only noises I am happily monitoring are the sounds of me screaming into my phone/pad and or both devices to help “calibrate” them.

This brings me on to another thing - completely unrelated but - why is it that my browser is now rubbish at spell checking my typing. It use to be better than this Chrome truly sucks at spell checking compared to erm, Firefox.

So the moral to this story is that if an app is free or lite version and you think you will buy it because you want to support the author - first see how responsive the author is and or how truly useful the app is before shelling out £4 for it. Yes you read correctly £4 that I will never see again. Unless it is that the 4 random lines in my audio trace is the £4 coming back to visit me?