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 :-(

It's so true.... :-)

Nvidia users, beware windows update!

Here's a word of warning to anyone out there using a HP Pavillion laptop running an Nvidia graphics cards: beware of "automatic updates" on Windows Vista!

I was running a manual update yesterday (I don't trust M$ enough to let them update automatically, they've buggered up too many machines on me), and one fo the updates that windows was telling me I should install was the "NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller". Foolishly I let windows decide that it knew what sort of hardware drivers should be on my machine and checked it for install. Next thing, after I did the obligatory "windows has updated a trivial non-critical piece of software so you must restart" reboot, I realised I had a problem. Windows started no probs but nearly immediately after logging in, my display went crazy, the usual kind of shit you get when a graphics driver has gone screwy. tried rebooting but then got a bigger shock - even the BIOS screen was screwed up! My screen at the moment is a sort of mustard color with a few pixels flashing in the background in a slightly different shade of mustard, in the sort of pattern that indicates it's trying to display about 12 desktops at the same time.

Normally in this situation I'd just curse microsoft under my breath and roll back to the last system restore point before the update, which I've had to do many times before. This time tho it's different: even the BIOS start-up screen is shagged so I can't even see to get into safe mode! Hell, I can't even see the options to activate the system restore partition that comes with the laptop (my only easy way to do a reinstall as no manufacturers ship CDs any more)! System is totally fucked! Am going to have to go off and try to find an install CD for something that lets me access my HD to hose out the fecking bad driver! :-(

Shoud've just gotten a new number to begin with...... :-(

AAAGH!!!!

There's a chinese phrase that I use occasionally, "Ku xiao bu de" (哭笑不得), which translates as "not knowing whether to laugh or cry". Well, that's where I am with vodafone at the moment!

Last update I had here was that I was having problems accessing the voadfone.ie website. Well, that was only the tip of the frickin' iceberg. I tried setting up that "calls and texts to 087 for free" thing on the phone (which the muppet in the shop never told me I had to do, he just said I'd get it automatically) by sending "FREE" to 50222. What did I get back? "I'm sorry, you must be a Vodafone prepay customer to use this service". Eh? Funny, I thought I was, seeing as I was adding and using credit on my account! Ok, rang up the helldesk again, asked them what was going on. Guess what, I wasn't actually a proper vodafone customer! Seems port out #4 failed, so I was still sort of on the O2 network. So, what did I have to do? Go back into the shop and ask for the port-out again!

Right then, off in I went last Friday week. Explained the situation to yer man in the shop (I should just write it down and hand it to them at this stage) and so I got a new SIM Card and told it'd be activated in about an hour. Guess what? It wasn't. Strange that. So, waited until Monday and rang up cust care again (I know the number off by heart now). Guess what? It hadn't gone through! Meanwhile, I couldn't get into the website either, so I asked them about that too. Yer man did a bit of investigating and told me that my account was apparently coming up on different systems as (a) a bill-pay account (b) a pre-pay account and (c) an O2 account, depending on where he looked! Guess what I was told the solution would be? Yup, you guessed it, go into the shop and ask them to do the port-out again. So I did so, and told them "ignore whatever it is you are seeing on your screen, it's a port-out from o2 pre-pay to vodafone pre-pay". So, I left them to it, and went back to work.

That night I got another "welcome to Vodafone prepay" text, so I thought, maybe it's fixed. I go to the website and sure enough, I could get in now! There was one problem tho: according to the website, I was still a bill-pay account, and moreover, I had a bill saying I owed them €38.15 on what looked like 2 pre-pay accounts! So, I go ring them up again, and my account is still in the shagged state it was the day before. I get the usual advice about going into the shop and refused, as it's be the 4th or 5th time I did it (I've lost count at this stage) so the nice foreign girl said she'd put in the call herself and I should see the results in an hour or two. Guess what? No change!

So, I decide to go the route of email, as quite frankly I was pissed off talking to the helpdesk and not getting anywhere. So, I bang off a rather testy email on the website "contact us" form on Friday last. I get a reply about 24hrs later: "Can you provide us with your mobile number?" What? of course, I didn't actually give it to you because I foolishly assumed that as I was logged into my vodafone account and it looked like the number was automatically attached to the "contact us" mail page, that you'd know who I was! I sent it off, and heard nothing back.

So, I tried ringing up on Monday again (the 8th June, or approx 3 weeks since I started having all these problems). Got one guy who seemed to be making progress on getting a fix - and then I was disconnected while I was on hold while he was talking to the port-out team. Rang up again and got someone else who seemed to actually have a clue. After a bit of digging, she realised that the reason I looked like I still had a billpay account was because I still had - the bill on the website was the last line rental on my previous account, which I had foolishly assumed that they'd included on the last month's bill that they'd sent me after I'd already disconnected. The pre-pay account wasn't set up properly as well - whoever had set it up had apparently not given me a customer number, so the system couldn't register me for stuff like he free texts, webpage etc. So, she got me to give her the number from the back of the SIM and set it up for me, and said the registration for the webpage would take about 24hrs but could be done sooner. So, a few hours later I tried it and it worked! I had a pre-pay setup and could see my balance and send web texts and all! Alleluia, it was all fixed! :-)

And then we come to around 6pm last night.

So, I was leaving work, and was txting Michelle to say I was heading out to Blackrock and would be back around 8ish, but for some reason I couldn't login to the webpage, kept getting "Sorry, logon services are currently unavailable (SRV-WL-57).". OK, Vodafone have screwed up their website again, normally happens around once every 2-3 days. So, tried sending the txt from my phone. "Sending failed". Eh? Kept trying, and it kept failing. Tried checking my balance to see how much did I have, and got "service unavailable". Tried ringing 1741 and got "we are experiencing technical difficulties". Tried making a call and just kept getting a busy tone. Thought it might be that the network had totally gone tits-up, but when I got home, M's phone (also 087 pre-pay) was fine.

So, rang them up earlier this morning. After a bit more faffing around, I got an answer. It seems that despite what everyone had been saying for the last 3 weeks, my account was coming up invalid and coming up as only created on Monday. As my account was invalid, some automatic process must have reefed me off the system. Meanwhile, Vodafone still thought that the number was owned by O2, and O2 were still saying that they didn't own the number. Apparently Vodafone's porting team were refusing to just fully set up my account as without o2 giving their blessing on what should have been the port-out, it would be "illegal to do so". WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T THEY SAY THIS 3 WEEKS AGO?

So, that's it. I fucking give up. I wanted to keep my old number as I've had it for about 11 years, and I didn't want to go though the hassle of letting everyone know of the change, updating the contact info on my bank accounts, credit card accounts etc. I'm sick of banging my head off their tech support people tho, however much hassle it is updating everything and letting everyone know, it is infinitesimally less hassle than actually trying to get the fucker fixed. The original cock-up can probably be blamed on a combination of o2 and Vodafone, but the sheer incompetence of the Vodafone helpdesk/tech support in figuring out the problem over the last 3 weeks is pretty much fucking mind-blowing. Actually no, I'm not blaming the helpdesk people, they seemed to actually want to try to fix it for me, it's the numptys in the porting team and the 2nd/3rd line tech support are the incompetents. I work in 3rd line tech support, and I know if I had a case going on as long as this for a user who tried ringing up to get it fixed as many times as I have, I'd have been shot for it by now.

Given a choice, I'd be dropping Vodafone like a hot brick at this stage, but seeing as there is zero coverage for Meteor or O2 in my house in Waterford, I'm stuck with them. Have just gone into the shop and gotten my new number, and even managed to get the €15 that was still on my old account before they nuked it transferred over. Now to go updating all my accounts and letting everyone know I have a new number......

Funny thing is, I was in the Vodafone shop getting my new SIM card, and there was another girl in there trying to port over from O2. Sales assistant was saying to her "well, this might take a day or so, but don't worry, you'll have no problems porting over from O2 pre-pay to us". I was tempted to run over, grab her by the shoulders and shout at her, "Run! Run now, while you can! they'll fuck up the transfer and you'll be stuck in limbo until you want to beg for sweet, sweet death, but you wont be able to, your number is doomed!"

Election posters

I was walking up Westmoreland st yesterday and I saw a few rather interesting posters for the elections:



Translation: "If we get into government we'll fire all the friends and relatives of the last government that they put into the civil service, and we'll replace them with our own friends and relatives!"

And:



I somehow doubt that this is a genuine Fianna Fáil election poster! Either that or they're boasting: "Yeah, we did all this, we know you don't like us but we don't care, this is only a local & eropean election so you can't get rid of us anyway, nyah nyah!"

MORE Vodafone muppetry!

Well, here we go again. More vodafone problems. Now the problem is with their web page.

I decided to login to the web page today to see what the options you get with pre-pay are. So, assuming that after I'd cancelled my last account that they'd deleted my web account as well, I tried to set up a new one. Hmm, nope, got told This number is already registered. Have your password resent by clicking on the 'forgot your password' link below ". Did this and got sent the same passwd that I had before. Ok, no probs so far, I'll just login as before. Ah, this is Vodafone tho, that'd be easy! Every time I try, I get

There was a problem with your account, please contact Customer care (SRV-WL-03).

Well, I don't really have the strength nor patience at this stage to ring up their helldesk, so I decide to just email them. So, I go to the "help & support" page, is no option in the FAQ for "my account won't let me login". Right, ok, so I'll go to the "contact us" page. there's a link there for "email us" under the pre-pay section. Where does it take me? To the fucking login page! if I could login, I wouldn't have to report a bloody error would I?

These guys are really pissing me off. I'm going to have to take several dozen deep breaths here before I try the cust service number (which I now know off by heart). Is no point in reefing some poor sales drone out of it because the rocket scientists in charge of the back-end can't get their shit together.... :-(

New Phone

Well, I've had the new phone up & running & working about a week now, so I might as well give my impressions of it, seeing as it took so much fucking hassle to get it!

Well, first bit I suppose is the touch screen. I've used the iPhone a bit before, and while it's maybe not quite as intuitive as that beastie, it's still pretty good. The icons are pretty big & easy to click, the fonts are pretty legible, you can flick the screen to scroll (and of you don't like that, the volume keys also let you scroll thru menus), and the screen is pretty legible even in bright(ish) light. Well, ok, we haven't had any scorching hot bright days, but it's been a bit sunny and I had no problems seeing the screen. this is apparenly an improvement on previous Samsungs - one of my friends had the Omnia and got rid of it 'cos the screen was terrible. The UI has a sidebar which you can put some of your most commonly used widgets/apps on for easy access, and then to make things even easier, you can drag the widgets to the "desktop" for even easier access. So, at the moment I'm one click away from writing a new message or reading my txts. One niggle with this is that you can't just put anything on the sidebar, just a limited subset that samsung seem to have decided you'll use the most. Is still handy tho.

One of the reasons I got the phone was the camera - is an 8 megapixel, so is 2Mp higher than my sony cybershot! Megapixel count tho is only really a way for camera makers to practice biggerdickism with their devices: at 8Mp I can print photo quality up to an A1 page, how many times am I going to do that? The picture quality is pretty good, about as good as you're going to see on a phone - the only better one may be the Sony Ericsson C905, but I didn't really like the look & feel of that one. I haven't done a huge amount of pic shooting yet but what I have done is pretty decent. The phone doesn't come with wi-fi but I figured I used the wi-fi maybe 2 dozen times tops on my last phone in the year and a bit I had it, so no great loss. the music player is decent enough, and plays most formats, and has a dolby-like option which reall puts a bit of "whoomph!" into your songs - I want to try this out with my Sennheuser headphones! The radio is pretty good too, and has a rather unusual feature that allows you to record off it, altho I haven't tried that yet. The video player on it is able to play DivX movies, I tried it and it works pretty well, and the sound quality is excellent too. Only problem tho is that all bar one of my movie collection on my laptop are XVid-encoded not DivX! The phone ships with the ususal other crap, alarm clock, calendar, calculator etc, and all are adequate enough, and for some reason they are selling it as a "gael fon", so it has an irish-english dictionary built in. Eh? :-P

And now onto the niggly little bits. One of the big selling points of the phone was apparenly that it has built-in GPS, but that's just a gimmick. All the reviews I read of the phone said that there were some built-in apps that took advantage of it, but it seems Vodafone in their wisdom took all them out on their version, so the only thing that uses it is the camera for geo-tagging pictures. I tried installing google maps, but even that seems to use base station triangulation rather than the GPS to find out where you are. In the phone settings you can get the GPS to get your location but it's fairly flakey, about 3 times in 4 it fails to find the satellites. So, if you're looking for a phone that has working & useful GPS system, don't get this one.

This is also the only touch-screen phone on the market that has an actual keypad as well, which slides out at the bottom of the screen. it seems tho that Samsung have fallen into the trap of all mobile phone manufacturers and put all the function keys wherever they want rather than in a commonly agreed place - space is on the # key, caps is on the *, punctuation marks/symbols are on the 1 which is normal enough, but t9 options are on the 0. The layout of the keypad means as well that the keys are out to the very edge of the phone, so if you're one-hand texting with your thumb, the space key is uncomfortably close to the base of your thumb, you're nearly stretching your thumb back to get to it. So, most of the time I just use the on-screen touch keypad not the physical one. Also, there's no actual delete key or any direction keys - delete is a soft-key on the touch-screen and to change the cursor position you tap on the screen where you want to go. You also can't select a word you already wrote to change the spelling, you have to delete the word and start again. so, if you type "he" and you wanted "if" instead, you can't just select it and use '0' to change the spelling, you have to delete it and go again. Having said that, the touch-screen typing is pretty fast, faster than I'd manage on my old phone - so long as you don't make a typo and have to go back and change spelling, for the reason I mentioned a sec ago. Also, the T9 dictionary is a bit flakey, it comes up with some "interesting" spelling options. One nice thing tho (which I just discovered today) is it autocompletes punctuation, so to type "can't" you just type "cant". This all just needs a bit of practise I guess, and the phone has at least passed the "drunk test": I was out for a few pints last nigth and was able to text easily enough about 5-6 pints into the evening! :-P

And now onto making calls: The phonebook only holds one number per entry, which is a bit awkward for ppl with multiple numbers, and for some reason when you make a call from teh phone book and hang up, you're left back at the phone book entry rather than at the "desktop" like on pretty much any other phone, so you ahve to exit out of it to get back. Also, there seems to be a lot of "spillage" of sound out of the earphone, when you're on a call you can turn the phone around backwards and nearly hear the other person as well as you could the right way around! There's great sound out of the headphones in a call, and if you don't like the Smasung headphones there's a normal headphone jack on the speaker part where you can plug in your own - the connection to the phone itself tho is a Samsung proprietary one which also doubles as the power port. It has a cover over it but instead of a sliding cover it swivels around and sort of sticks out when you ahve the 'phones plugged in, I can't see it lasting a huge amount of time without being smapped off.

All in all I guess, it's a pretty nice phone, worth the money I eventually paid for it (altho a little less vodafone-related hassle wud have been nice), but there are a few arez it does fall down on a little - apart from the GPS it sort of has the feel that as well as skimping on wi-fi, Samsung went to make a great multimedia camera device, and forgot to put very much effort into the actual "phone" features of the device like calls & txts....

Dirty windows

Am not totally sure what got into me this evening, but I decided to clean the windows on the door leading out to the balcony on our flat - is a good while since they were done and I thought they looked a little bit mucky. A little bit!

I did one window first and the difference between that and the one I hadn't done was pretty gruesomely obvious.



Guess which one is the clean one eh? here's a closer look out through them, that last shot isn't the best:



And now the view from the outside looking in:



I'd sort of forgotten that you should be able to see a reflection in a window!

This is what you get when you live over a busy city center street. I can't remember how long it is since they were done, but the amount of shit that came off them, especially when I wiped down the frame! :-(

Well, maybe next time I won't leave it as long. Only problem now is, the other flat windows, the one where there's no convenient balcony to stand on when I'm cleaning them, look really awful......

The Phone Saga - over at last!

So, last time I left this little problem was last thurs night, when O2 had pretty much turned around and said "well, sucks to be you, we'll maybe call O2 and ask them pretty please to give us the number". Friday morning, I decided to try ringing them again to see was there any more progress. Despite the fact that the previous day, the last person I'd asked said they'd get onto O2 again to release the number, the helldesk person I got this time pretty much told me the same thing the dude had told me the day before, they'd tried 3 times and failed, and someone was going to contact o2. I asked him exactly what I could do here, and he suggested I try to put in the number change as a new request again, seeing as o2 were after blocking the same request ID 3 times in a row, tehy were harly likely to let it though again.

Ok, no problem, I decided to try that. Asked the guy would it help if I rang O2 and got them to release the number, and he told me I wouldn't have to do that. So, I went into the vodafone shop on fri to sign up again. Slight problem: I forgot that for a pay monthly account I needed ID and a bill. Well, there goes that plan. So, I decided to wait until monday to get it done again, as even if I signed up online I'd still have to wait to get the SIM in the post. On Sunday, just to be sure, I rang up O2 and asked them to release the number., What was I told? "Well, your number is a pre-pay one so there shouldn't be any problems with porting it over to Vodafone, should happen straight away". Eh? Isn't what Vodafone were telling me!

I finally got to go into a vodafone shop at lunchtime today. Went up to the counter, said "I'd like to set up a pre-pay account thanks, I want to port this number over from o2". The reply? "certainly sir, what's the number?" and that was it. Number was working before I got half-way back to the office with my sandwich! This begs the question, what the fuck were those muppets who were giving me the run-around on weds and fri trying to do with the bloody number? Then again, is maybe not surprising that they'd fuck something up, given the fact that the helldesk guy I was talking to on fri wasn't aware that the 1800 number had been having "technical problems" that meant you couldn't get through to a human on it for 3 days - "oh right, thanks, I'll pass it on"!

So, the phone is working now, all I have to do is get used to using a touch-screen - pretty much means you can't just txt with one hand now, as it's too awkward using the touch-screen one-handed. Also, I decided to switch to pre-pay instead of bill-pay - if you top up by €20 a month you get free calls & txts to other vodafone numbers and with bill-pay you're paying €19.95 for 50 free txts and calls a month that don't roll over from one month to the next, so for the same price as your contract on bill-pay you get more free stuff, plus you still get to spend the €20 on calls. Besides, I've seen how well they reward their loyal bill-pay customers......

Well, we'd better hope for all our sakes now that there isn't anything wrong with my phone in the next few weeks, 'cos if there is I'll probably be going into the Vodafone shop with a trenchcoat and a shotgun!

Class Reunion

Well, I'm now definitely officially old. I'm just after having my 10-year college reunion. 10 years, Jesus. Where did the time go?

Was a fairly good event, as these things go. Met up with Eamonn in Town for lunch, then headed out to the college a bit early so we could take a look around. The atrium and the canteen pretty much looked the same as it did when we were there, but after that, it looked like a totally different place. when we were there, there were 2 buildings in the college, plus the gym & the Dome (the campus bar) Now there are 6. And even of the two we had, one was unrecognizable. What used to be the library is now more lecture rooms, and the D corridor is now admin offices for the school of business rather than the computer rooms we used to spend our time in. We pretty much had the whole place to ourselves wandering around, as it was the last day of the exams and the place was deserted.

The official reunion itself started at 4 with a drinks reception in the Tourism & Leisure building, which now occupies what used to be a football pitch in my time. Me & Eamonn were one of the first in there, so we settled in with a drink and watched ppl come in. Apparently there were a lot of reunions on, for 10, 15, 25 and 30 year classes (obviously the 20-year ppl never bothered replying), so there were maybe 200 there in total. Out of our graduating class of about 80 tho, there were only 6 that turned up, including myself.

Once everyone was in and settled with at least a few drinks under our belts, there was a small bit of speechifying, followed by a quick tour of a few of the new bits of the college (which I'd seen already). Our "tour guide" was Paul Barry, who used to be head of our department but was now something big in the applied mathematics dept. After the tour, we had a surprisingly decent meal in the Gallery restaurant, one of the new bits of the college. Place is a far cry from the canteen we used to have to put up with - even had a pizza/pasta counter and a smoothie bar! After the meal, we all repaired over to The Dome, which was also twice the size it used to be (which was disappointing, it didn't feel like the place we were so used to). After a few pints in there, it ws into town to Geoffs, which we'd figured out was the only bar we used to go to that wasn't either renamed, remodeled, under new management or (in the case of 2 places) had been totally razed to the ground and rebuilt! So, we stayed there for a few more pints and went our separate ways again around 1am.

It was a good day, but was a bit depressing in ways It was good to be able to wander around the college and recall stuff like "remember when mick duggan brought the pint of guinness into the computer room during rag week?", but it was a bit of a shock to the system to see how much the place had changed. Also, the turn-out was a bit disappointing, 6 pl out of 80? I knew when I'd signed up for it back in early april that there weren't many going, and I know everyone has their own lives to lead and all, and that some ppl were living too far away to be able to make it, but still, a 10 year anniversary isn't something that crops up every day, and I know of at least 5-6 people from the class that are still around waterford that could probably easily have made it. Also, the people that did turn, up, with the exception of Eamonn, weren't really people I would have hung out with much in college, they were in different classes to me in 1st & 2nd year and most had done the commercial stream rather than the industrial stream when the classes split in 3rd year. I'm not saying that we didn't get on, but there were ppl I would have seen a lot more of in college that didn't come.

Well, at least it wasn't a secondary school reunion - altho if we have those, it'll be 15 years next year. The only reason I'd go to one of those would be to see how many of the fuckers I went to school with have ended up stuck on the family farm, in prison or as single parents on the dole. I could count the no of ppl from my Leaving Cert class that I wouldn't mind seeing again on the fingers of one hand, just about.

(update)

I was tidying out my press there today as well, and I found this tucked inside an old college prospectus....



Damn, that brings back memories! Am not sure what happened my face tho....

New Phone

Well, I have my new phone at last. There's only one problem with it: I can't actually use it. :-(

I finally figured outhow to get around the Vodafone problem of getting a new phone without paying full price and still keep my same number. Seems that while I couldn't go from one account to another on Vodafone and keep my number, I could switch to o2 and keep my number - and then switch back. So, that's what I did, mostly.

So, I rang up vodafone and told them I was leaving to go to O2, and could they cancel my account. Guy on the other end of the phone told me it'd take maybe 2 days to port my number over to O2, but I decided to try it anyway. So, at lunchtime that day, I headed up to grafton st, went onto the 2 shop and asked them could I get as pre-pay account and keep my vodafone number on which I'd just cancelled the account. I told the sales dude waht Vodafone had said about how long it'd take and, he laughed and said that they always said that and it'd be a lot quicker. Sure enough, after I left the shop I decided to drop into the Bagel Bar on Dawson St to grab lunch to bring back, and before I'd even gotten my bagel, beep beep on my phone, "welcome to O2". Easy peasy!

So, I had just bought a O2 pre-pay SIM for €10, and had €10 credit on it, all I had to do was wait til my last vodafone bill cleared and I used up my free tenner's o2 credit, and back I go. THe Vodafone bill duly arrived, so I decided to get my new phone. And this is where Vodafone started to spanners into the works of what was up until then a prefectly simple plan. I ordered the phone online on monday, the new Samsung Tocco Ultra, touch-screen, 8Mp camera, GPS, real fancy like, plus free bluetooth headset, for €99. THen the trouble started. While I could have the phone by tuesday, the web page wouldn't let me swap the numbers over until weds at the earliest. Fair 'nuff, I thought, I have enough credit left til then (I actually got an extra €2.50 off O2 for registering online), so I chose to have the number ported over between 8am and 10am. The order went though, but in the email confirmation I was warned that "We'll strive to switch you to Vodafone at your preferred tine, but on the rare occasions when this is not possible we'll ussually complete the switching process later on your preferred day.". Ok, fair enough.

The new phone arrived early on tuesday afternoon, all shiny and new, so I was all eager to get it up and running and playing with it. Slight snag tho: no signal on my new Vodafone SIM, and the phone is SIM-locked so I can't use my o2 on in it! So, while I could play with it and get used to the menu system, using a touch-screen phone etc, I couldn't actually use it. Is a nice little entertainment system, has a decent enough music player & radio, camera is pretty good as well, but it isn't actually a phone yet. That had to wait until I'm not an O2 member any more.

So, yesterday morning 8am arrived, so any time now I should be back on vodafone. Problem tho: no "beep beep, welcome to vodafone". 10am arrived, still no port out. I decided to ring them at around 3pm, to see was I one of the "rare occasions" and when could I expect it to be done. First thing, to get support on the Vodafone helpline, you have to enter your vodafone number. Oops, didn't really have one yet. Got though to a human after having to wade though several menu options and listen to several "We are pleased to announce vodafone have brought out several new offers X, Y and Z, which you won't have any choice but to hear us talk about, your call may be recorded if you ever get through, but your call is still important to us" messages, I got a human. So, I explained that I was still waiting to be welcomed into the Vodafone fold, and got put on hold a few times while she figured it out. Apparenly Voda had tried to get the number off O2 but o2 had refused to release it as I had only been a customer a short while. Instead of letting me know, Voda had decided to sit on it and do no more about it for a while! I told them to tell O2 I was a genuine port out, and she promised someone would get back to me soon.

That was around 3pm on weds, it's now about 11pm on thurs night and no word. I tried to get through earlier but depending at what stage in the menus I got to, I was told either "All our operators are busy" or "we are experiencing technical difficulties, please call again later". So, I now have 2 useless phones as I'm at my parents house and there's fuck-all signal for anyone except vodafone here, and besides, I'm down to about 20c O2 credit as I was expecting to be swapped over by now and I don't want to buy more as I could be transferred over at any time (yeah, right). So, am going to have to make some rather unfriendly phone calls tomorrow (from a land-line) to get this sorted.

Vodafone pt II: "All customers are equal......"

"...but some are more equal than others.

Well, I rang up Vodafone like I said I was going to do, to see could they do anything about the upgrade for me. Nope! According to the support guy I got (who was actually Irish, I was nearly shocked not to hear an Indian voice), the way they used to determine upgrades was how long you were a vodafone member, but back around December they moved to a new system which adds in a whole load more qualifications. Now, your eligibility is determined by stuff like how long you've been a member, whether you pay on time, whether you pay by direct debit or not, what price plan you're on and how much you spend on it. Am all good there apart from the last one - apparently since the new system went in, no-one who's been on the lower price plan (perfect fit 50) for less than 18 months has ever gotten an upgrade. Seems ppl on that plan don't spend enough according to Vodafone...... Guy even asked his supervisor could they push the upgrade through anyway, but the new automated system doesn't even allow them to do that

So, given my current account, I won't be able to get a new phone for at least another 6 months. So, I'd need to set up a new account. Asked the guy would I be able to do that and transfer over my existing number to use that. Apparently I can't, the only way to do that wud be to move my existing number to pre-pay, set up a new account to get the new phone, and keep the old number as a backup. Now I know that last year when I got this phone, I got the number transferred from my old account to a new account, and then back again - but then again it was a company phone so the new account was a business account, so vodafone probably bed over backwards for those guys.

So, according to Vodafone, the easiest way for me to get a new phone and keep my existing number is to move to O2! You'd think that these days that any company would want to keep their existing customers if they possibly can, especially given that the turnover in accounts with mobile phone companies is quite high. Apparently Vodafone tho don't think my business is important enough to them to allow exceptions, despite the fact that they've been getting my business since I left college. Well, is off to ebay etc for me for my new phone so, and if I can't get a good price there, Vodafone will not only be losing the potential €120 from my upgrade, they may be losing a customer too!

Vodafone: "your call is important to us - but not your loyalty"

Well, as if I needed it, another indication that once you sign up for something with one of the big companies, they don't care about you any more. I decided I wanted a new phone for my birthday, so I picked one out (Samsung S8300, the new 2Tocco Ultra") and went into the vodafone shop. Phone is €429 SIM-free but only €129 on Perfect fit 50, which is the price plan I'm on. So, I go up to the counter, say "I want XYZ phone", dude asks me if I'm already a vodafone customer and I say yes. So far so good. Next thing tho, I get told "sorry, you're not eligible for an upgrade". I ask how much the phone wud be if I wanted to get it, and he said €429, or the full whack. The only way to get it at the discount price is apparently to get a new account with a new number.

So, despite the fact I've been with vodafone for about 10 years, pay my bills by direct debit so I never miss a payment, and have my existing phone a year already (literally, was apparently a year yesterday, dude in the shop said), I'm not enough of a "good customer" to warrant getting an upgrade. Come to think about it, in the last 10 years I think I've only been eligible for an upgrade 2, maybe 3 times - most of the times I get my phones myself. Apparently a "good customer" is one who spends lots of money with them, and I keep my bill pretty low by using the 300 free web texts a month that I'm entitled to as a customer, and make most of my phone calls from work.

If however I was someone who wasn't on vodafone and decided I wanted to drink the kool-aid and be enfolded in their warm embrace, I'd get the phone at the cheaper price. Then again, even if I was like that, I still couldn't get the phone I really wanted: vodafone ireland, in their infinite wisdom, seem to have decided that the Sony Ericsson C905, which every other network in Ireland have had out since before Xmas, is still too new to offer to the their customers. So, instead, they're still trying to plug as their #1 high-end phone the Blackberry Storm, which no-one who has a choice in the matter actually wants, and those who have to have it (i.e. office types) don't like. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to change network: both my parents and my g/f are on vodafone and have free calls & texts to me, which they wouldn't have if I switched to say O2. so, I'm stuck with vodafone.

So, what do I do, suck it down, and pay the full price? Yeah, right, screw that. Ebay is an option, but the last time I did that with my Sony Ericsson w800i, I had no end of trouble when the phone went tits-up and I had to get it repaired. I could cancel my account and sign up as one of the new customers that vodafone seem to favour over me. Problem with that is I'll prob lose the number I've been using these last 10 years, and I don't want to go having to let everyone in my phone book know and then memorize a new number just for vodafone's convenience. So, will try ringing the customer support line tmro and hopefully if I get someone who can actually speak english, I'll try to see if I can get the upgrade, or at least switch accounts and keep my existing number. I'm not doing it tho because I love vodafone and can't imagine life without them, but because I'm not being given any other choice.

Sobriety - one month to go!

Well, I've been off the drink now since New Years Day. The only time I've had a drink since was on my ski weekend in the beginning of Feb, and the few special occasions I also allowed myself like birthdays (and most of my friends have b'days in september/october - bastards). I said at the beginning that I'd stay off til my birthday at the end of april, so I'm most of the way there now. This time next month I'll be back on the booze! Is a good job too, am not saying I'm an alco or anything but nights out are a bit boring and I'm getting sick of 7up and orange juice!

Bit of a change

Well, I got a bit sick of the look & feel of the blog, so I decided to change it a bit. So, now the text actually goes the whole way across the page! :-)

Microsoft - muppets!

Well, curiosity got the better of me yesterday, and I decided to see what Windows 7 looked like. So, I downloaded a beta copy to try out. Rather than fucking up an actual computer by installing it and have it fuck up (this is microsoft after all - and even worse, a microsoft beta!), I decided to give it a go on a virtualbox VM. This is what I got.

I kicked off the install and got to the window where it asks for the registration code. Having got this build off bittorrent, I didn't have one, but though "no problem, normally you get 30 days trial before you have to put in the key". Nope, not with the beta, even tho it says you can when you're at the registration page. You get through the rest of the install (which half the time tells you you're installing vista, half the time windows 7), you get to the point where you have a user created and are logging in, and then you get told that the license that you never entered has expired and you need to enter it or get a new one.



If you click "access your computer with reduced functionality", then you might be expecting to be logged into some crippled version of the OS where you can do some stuff but not everything - but it's still usable and browsable. Nope, you forgot this is Micro$oft you're dealing with! All you get up is a browser window asking you to buy a license. Or rather you should, but some of the time MS can't even seem to find their own webpage!



So, I looked around a bit on the web, and found that if you have a windows live account then you can sign up and get a beta license key. I have one of those (never use it), so I signed up and got my beta key. Guess what? Like everything else to do with this beta, it didn't work!



There ends my experiment with Windows 7, I just couldn't be bothered putting in any more effort trying to get the damn thing working any more. Microsoft - telling you one thing, doing something else since Windows 95!