here we go....

Just heading off to the airport now. Yay! Goodbye 8-10 degrees and rain, hello 30+ and sunburn! :-)

Yay Vodafone - again....

Well, here I am again, more fun & games with Vodafone and my new(ish) phone. I'm heading off to Dubai on saturday, and I won't be able to use my Vodafone SIM card over there as for some reason while Vodafone have roaming agreements with post-paid customers in Dubai, they don't have it for pre-pay (as my parents found out last year). So, I need to buy a pre-pay SIM card in the airport when I go out there and use it for the week. One slight problem tho: my phone is sim-locked so I can't put in a non-Vodafone SIM card.

So, I go to the web page to get the network unlocking code, look up the IMEI, put it in, and get told NAC code cannot be found for IMEI entered (MM-NAC-14). Well, this is Vodafone Ireland, it'd be silly of me to expect it to work first time out, right? So, I try to ring up the cust care. Miracle of miracles, I manage to get a human after about 30secs and only 2-3 "please press 1 for blah" menus! So, I tell her what I was seeing on the web page and stuff, I give her my IMEI, and she tries to look for my unlock code. Guess what? She can't find it, she's getting the same error I am! So, what can I do? Well, they can get the unlock code from Samsung, but it'll take 10 working days. Not much good to me seeing as I'm flying on saturday is it?

So, with my lovely new Samsung phone, I can bring it on hols and take pictures with the 8Mp camera, and I can tell where I am using the GPS (provided I have a map with me so I can interpret the latitude and longitude, as google maps still works by the cell info), but I can't actually do such trivial things as make calls or send txts on it. I mean, why would you want to do stuff like that on a mobile phone? Think I might see how much a sim-free iPhone is in Dubai's tax-free shopping....

Pics from Warsaw

Hmm, have been a bit remiss in updates here recently haven't I? Normally I put up a few posts describing my last holiday, but I seem to have totally forgotten it for Warsaw. Well, can't remember all the nuts and bolts of it now, but for a bit of info, here's My Flickr Album.



That's Plac Zamkowy, in the heart of the Old Town BTW :-)

Strangely enough, these pictures have been the holiday pics source of pretty much everyone that was there, as me and Michelle were the only people to (a) get up earlier than 2pm any day and (b) go out, do touristy stuff and take pictures of it :-P

Down the Quays

In part of my effort to get semi-fit (or at least to not get any unfitter), I try to do a long-ish walk at least 1, 2 evenings a week. Normally I take the DART out to blackrock and walk back in, either via Ballsbridge (about 8.3km, 1h20m) or via Strand Road/Irishtown (about 7.5km, 1h15m). Sometimes tho I don't want to take the dart out, as that adds maybe another 20mns onto the walk time, so I walk down the quays as far as the O2 (formarely point depot), cross the East-link bridge, down by Ringsend and come back down by Grand Canal Dock, for a walk of about 5.5km.

Anyway, while I'm doing so I occasionally take a few pictures with my mobile phone, as it's not a walk you'd do very often. So, I've decided to throw a few up here, for no particular reason (descriptions underneath):



Am not sure of the name of it, but it's an Argentinian sail training vessel that was moored on the quay for the docklands festival a few weeks ago. The ship in the foreground is the Cill Airne, a floating restaurant/bar on the quays.



The new Samuel Beckett bridge, just before they actually put it across the river.



The view upriver from the Eastlink bridge, just before the new bridge was put up.



The Jeanie Johnson, an old famine ship which is moored on the quay as pretty much a permanent exhibition (altho I've never actually seen it with ppl aboard...)



The new Beckett bridge in place, looking out towards the mouth of the river.



Looking back upriver from the Eastlink bridge, with the Beckett bridge in place.



The new Aviva Lansdowne Rd Stadium under construction, as seen from the bridge at Ringsend. I dunno about you, but to me the shape of the new stadium's roof always reminds me of the front of the Battlestar Galactica from the new series...

There we go, not too bad for a camera-phone camera, eh? Are reduced from the original 2048x1536 resolution as well. Will maybe add in more here as I take them.

New Laptop

I finally heard back from the computer shop yesterday, after I dropped in my laptop there about 3 weeks or more ago. The news isn't really good. As I was suspecting, the graphics chip is shagged. Unfortunately, the gfx chip is soldered onto the motherboard, so I need a new motherboard. And that ain't cheap. Combined with parts & labour, it'll probably cost me about €600, maybe €700 to get it repaired. It seems that when it comes to HP & Compaq laptops, the build quality isn't exactly the best, they have a habit of subcontracting to parts manufacturers who may not be exactly overly concerned about quality control. They've had to do a few recalls of laptops in their 6xxx, 8xxx and 9xxx series (mine's a 9500 series, wasn't any recall on them), and in quite a few other cases, ppl have had laptops die on them just after the warranty expired, with similar problems to mine. Some have gotten HP to extend their warranty and so didn't have to pay for it, most didn't.

So, my options are not very appealing:

1) I get it fixed by the guy who has it now, which will take a few weeks, cost €6-700, and I'll have no real guarantees that the same problem won't happen again with the new card.
2) I get it back from him, send it off to HP, have them charge me €300 for just looking at it as it's out of warranty - and then probably have them charge me as much as the other guy for parts & labour.
3) I keep using my 7 year old Alienware laptop running OpenSolaris (so no games, videos) whose DVD drive works when it wants to, whose PCMCIA slot doesn't work so I can't use wireless (is the last-gen laptops before wireless came in as standard), which reboots spontaneously every now and then, whose battery life is about half an hour, and whose display flickers on and off if you have the screen tilted at the wrong angle.
4) I say "screw it" and go out and buy a new laptop with the money that I would have to spend on the repairs, and just use the old banjaxed laptop for parts (RAM, HD etc)

I reckon I'm definitely leaning towards option 4 at the mo. I know one thing for sure tho, if I do get a new laptop, it won't be a HP......

And I thought vodafone phone support were bad......

Well, I just rang up HP tech support to try to arrange to get my laptop fixed. Jesus christ! I tried to avoid doing this in the first place by trying to use their email support, but the only reply I got on that was "yeah, your laptop's pretty much screwed, contact our out of warranty people to arrange a pick-up" at which point I got directed to the UK cust care web page to get the number. So much for email....

So, in my misguided attempt to avoid talking to the UK, I go looking up the irish site. So, I ring the irish cust care number for out of warranty support (a 1550 number so I'm being charged 80c a min). First thing I hear is a voice with a British accent telling me I'm being charged 60p a minute for the call - so great, their Irish number automatically redirects to the UK anyway. Next thign I get a guy with an extremely thick accent which I can barely make out (and I'm normally good at working around accents), who after I explain that I need to get the laptop picked up for repair, forwards me to the tech support team. So, after about 4-5mins on hold, I get a guy with a Sitt Iffrikan accent (so is 50-50 whether I'm still onto the UK), to whom I have to explain things again. As soon as he hears that it's out of warranty, he says "ok, you have to talk to the special out of warranty team", and passes me over. This time I'm definitely talking to Mumbai. So, I explain the problem yet again, and then I get told that they have a standard rate for an out-of-warranty repair of £257.61 and I'll need to ring this other UK number to get a pick-up arranged!

So because I'm about 3-4 weeks out of warranty, I have to pay €301 (or just under 1/3 the price I paid for it in the first place) to get it fixed and talk to yet another 2-3 helldesk drones to arrange it! Think I'm going to try to find someone else who'll fix it......

Well, that's my laptop fucked.......

OK, have tried a few things here with my laptop, and it looks like it's totally hosed. Whatever that windows update did, it was bad. It looks like it was trying to do a firmware upgrade and fried the graphics card, 'cos even the bios screen is screwed up. Tried getting into the system restore partition, and was no good, couldn't see it. Tried putting in an opensolaris liveCd and still couldn't see anything, so I know it wasn't just windows. If you can't see your bios screen tho it's a pretty good indication that you're screwed. And to make it even more fun, I took out the HD and put it in another laptop, and now it seems that with all the constant restarts that were happening 'cos of the graphics card being screwed, the windows partition was screwed up as well! Luckily, most of my important files are on the 2nd HD.......

So now I have to go looking for the receipt for the fecking laptop now, and hope the shop I got it in does repairs - if not I have to rely on the tender mercies of HP's customer care dept! Have the machine about 13 months as well so is just out of warranty too :-(