things of a hardware nature

Well, I finally managed to get a spare battery for my iPod! After trying loads of shops, and each one telling me to tr somewhere else, and then being told the best solution was to send it to AppleCare to get done for €150, I finally spotted it in Maplin on the 3rd attempt (seems they'd just got them delivered in) for €32. So much for AppleCare! Now my only problem is that I left the bloody iPod in waterford last weekend so I cna't replace the batt yet! :-( Looking at the instructions it's not goign to be easy either - they use the word "prise" a bit too much in the booklet for my liking.......

And if only that were all my hardware problems sorted. The phone saga is still going on. I went into them on sat, 2 weeks after I last heard from them and 4 weeks afte rthey told me it'd take 2 weeks to fix. Last time I was told that seeing as I couldn't prve it was under warranty, I'd have to pay €90 to get it fixed and it'd take 2 weeks. So, I go back in expecting to pay out my €90 (or half what I paid for my phone) and get my phone back. Nope! Apparently Ericsson had lost the confirmation order to actually fix the damn thing and sent it back unfixed - a common problem with them apparently. So the guy asked me did I want to send it back and get it fixed again, which would take another week. I bit back my reply of "well, duh, what the f**k good is a broken phone" and said yeah. Think just to be on the safe side I might see who wants to get me a new mobile for Xmas.

Just to top things off, along a similar note, the strap on my fake rolex broke a few weeks back, and I need ot get it fixed. I thought I had some spare links for it but couldn't find them, so I brought the broken links and the watch into the shop to see oculd they do anything for me. Nope, will need a new strap. This of course will probably cost me more than the watch cost originally. Have one last chance, I got another guy a fake rolex of the same model too, will have to see if he has spare links still.....

And on teh last hard-ware related issue of the day, the gfx card on my laptop is acting up again. It seems that whatever they did in firefox 1.0.5/6 to fix the prob where firefox crashes ATI cards & OpenGL, it's back again in firefix 2.0. I upgraded a few days ago and now am lucky to go 5mins of using forefox without the fecking screen freezing or goign black. Sometimes I just get a screen flash and get told "hardware rendeing is fucked, we're gone back to software rendering" which is grand for me when I'm not laying games, but I don't want to be stuck like that for good

It deffo seems to be a firefox issue as well, as I'm using IE7 here for the last few hours and nary a crash have I seen. Thing is, after using firefox, IE7 sucks! It has tabs now which is handy, but you sort of get used to all them nifty little extrensions and stuff, and the font rendering on some of the pages I go to a lot is absolutely brutal (probably the page rather than the browser, but still looks sucky).