Archive for March, 2008

Stress levels are rising. Ignoring the fact that I have like a week left to finish the first entire draft of my FYP write-up, the fact I have 10 hour shifts at work today and tomorrow, the fact I need to fight Vodaphone over bricking my phone, the fact I need to have a bitch at o2 because my new SIM won’t work, the fact I need to speak to careers, the fact I need to find a job, the fact I still need to catch up on a load of work for my business and the fact I need to sort my financial situation out, Rationalist Week is like 2 weeks away.

So, does anyone else fancy spending every night for the next two weeks in The Terrace shooting pool and getting really drunk until we can’t remember our troubles? ;).

Having got my new phone I requested my network unlock code for my old phone.

I phoned back in a few days when the said it would arrive. It hadn’t. So they requested it for me again. I rang back on the Monday. They still didn’t have it and requested it again. Wednesday I got an email with it. I entered it into my phone. And it bricked it.

Everything worked fine. I followed the instructions and then restarted my phone to find I got a “configuration error” message no matter what SIM I put in it.

I phoned up Vodaphone, several times, and they had no clue. They said back up your data on it and take it back into a Vodaphone shop and they will send it away for repair. So I downloaded and installed the crappy Sony Ecricsson software to backup my important data and guess what – it fails every time.

Any idea how you can recover data off a mobile phone anyone?

Meanwhile o2 is a whole different story. Norm dug me out an o2 SIM card which I inserted into my phone so I would have a pay as you go phone on o2’s network when my Vodaphone one wasn’t working. But the SIM refused to activate. So I tried to activate it online and was greeted with a message saying this was not an o2 number.

So I phoned up customer services who informed me that they had no record of this number in the database.

So I went down to the o2 store to get a new SIM card. Which I did as well as £10 top-up. I got home, inserted the SIM into my phone, phoned up and activated my top-up card and got the text messages to install the “settings” whatever that is. But despite having topped up, I apparently don’t have any credit. Fantastic.

I’ve messed around with the blog a little. The topic links now use /category/ again rather than /tags/ to differentiate them from the actual tags themselves which I am going to make an effort to use from now on. The tag listings are a little ugly at the moment but hopefully I’ll get round to sorting that out eventually.

Earler this evening (I guess it was technically yesterday evening now) this part of Leeds experienced a power glitch.

The power dropped out for a a second, enough time to kill about half the computers and set pretty much everyone’s alarm off. Including ours. Which was annoying.

If it hadn’t been for the lights going out I’m not sure I would have noticed. Both my UPS backups kicked in and kept all of my computers as well as my network online so I was able to continue streaming my movie from my file server to my desktop completely unaffected.

/smug :D.

I’m trying to cut down on my caffeine intake before Rationalist Week (at which point there will be much consumption of caffeine lol). It’s proving harder than expected though. I’m tired! I’m fairly sure most of it is psychological effects but unfortunately that doesn’t really help me. Caffeine!

…and they say McDonald’s staff don’t know how to supersize anymore.

I wasn’t there at its creation btw, before you say anything. I was tucked up in my nice warm bed. Asleep. Like a normal person.

I really don’t understand why half my friends are freaks who enjoy going out and getting cold and wet when such weather phenomenon arise.

I have a feeling it’s going to be a rocky few weeks.

It hasn’t been the best start to Easter ever. I had a nice little square of four issues that knocked me out of my stride somewhat. I feel like they are gradually clearing up but then maybe I’ve just decided they are clearing up and as such is only going to make the fall worse then they don’t.

I guess we’ll find out soon…

It’s not often I feel the need to berate an entire gender.

But sometimes I wonder that if guys talked to each other about relationships more the popularity of the phrase “uh, men!” would soon be superceded by the phrase “uh, women!”

I mean, if I’m not busy being an asshole about what someone did on the previous weekend or having to explain to women how men work, I’m busy discussing the commonality in experiences of woman. Because it turns out they are just all too familiar when you hear them from someone else.

It seems somewhat ironic that they day Michelle leaves the country we get such a heavy snowfall.

Still it provided a somewhat appropriate mise en scene for last night’s activities. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if it was indeed the long dark tea-time of the soul. Anyone for a snowball fight?

I am most enjoying my new phone.

It looks quite good sat on my desk not doing anything.

I phoned up Vodaphone on Tuesday to get my unlock code for my k800i and they told me they would have it by Friday so I phoned back yesterday and they told me they didn’t have it. Not they didn’t have it yet, but rather they didn’t have it. And have now requested it for me again. Fantastic.