Readings/Signings

Yes, tonight I’m seeing Donna Tartt doing a reading/signing for the paperback release of “The Little Friend“. It should be interesting – rather than the more normal location, of within the Waterstone’s store, this one is to be done in St. Ann’s Church, which I’ve never been inside before. All in all, it should be interesting. It’ll also give me an opportunity to see if the camera on the new phone is any good, which is a bit geeky, but there we go.

Fucking useless bastards

One day – one fucking day – BT will be organised, efficient, and able to communicate. Unfortunately, that day wasn’t yesterday, and won’t be today either. The cunts.

No, the broadband wasn’t installed – well, they don’t think it was. They’re not sure. One system is saying that I somehow managed to order ADSL and cancel it on the same day, one is saying it was installed yesterday, and one’s saying it was uninstalled. As per usual with BT, no-one fucking knows. I compounded the problem, by wanting to be awkward and keep the same phone number I’d had before. Big mistake. Huge, epic, ten-commandments-level fuck-up. Never again. Because the number had ADSL on it through a seperate supplier, and I’d wanted to move everything over to BT. So I organised with Zen to remove the ADSL – which they did on the 25th, no worries. However, that appears to have crossed lines with the system for installing ADSL, so it’s now saying that the BT order for ADSL was uninstalled, and is thus complete. I despair.

I’ve got to call them again today, find out what the fuck they’re playing at. I could cry.

Broadband

With luck, by the time I’ve got home BT will have finally pulled their finger out and connected my number to ADSL (although this time on BT Openworld) again. I haven’t heard any confirmation of this yet, but still, fingers crossed.

Scary Twunt

As exclusively revealed in his comment here Scaryduck is going to be cashing in on his own infamy launching a mini branding exercise with mugs based on the design I re-did for him. And I have to say that I’m deeply chuffed that he liked the design, and I’m on the “definite purchaser” list already.

Ah, vanity vanity. Help him cash in Order the merchandise (when it’s been costed) on on Scary’s site.

Return

Note to self : Never trust people who use a bus service. When they say “Oh, don’t worry, the last one leaves at seven o’clock on a Sunday”, this (naturally) means that the last one runs at six, and you’re then stuck in the arse of beyond ’til morning. Hence a disappearing Lyle. And even with a 3G phone, it’s still hard to blog when you don’t know the web-address for a mobile-compatible blogging service. *Sigh*

I’ll figure out all this extra tech soon, I’m sure.

100,000

I hadn’t looked at the log-file analysis for a while – since moving in fact – so when I looked at the comprehensive report I was pretty surprised to find that d4d™ is now coming close to it’s 100,000th page impression. By my reckoning, it’ll happen within the next week or so.

3G

More and more I’m sure that I really shouldn’t be let out on my own. After a farcical search that will probably end up being detailed in a mini-rant sometime over the weekend, I finally sorted myself out with a new mobile phone. I can semi-justify it (if I wanted to) because the battery life on the old one was steadily getting worse and worse, to the extent of needing to be charged every day.

I’d managed to avoid most of the hype about 2.5G phones, the camera ones and so on – I wasn’t that bothered, and for me the cons far outweighed the pros. Oddly enough, while I’m pretty geeky, I don’t feel a burning desire to own every piece of new technology as soon as it comes out. However, when I do buy stuff, it’s normally current new/cutting-edge stuff. And so of course with the new phone, it had to be 3G on the Three network. The network has had it’s problems on start-up, including some deeply shonky phones <mutter>NEC 606</mutter> but now the next selection of phones has come out, and they’re a lot better.

I’ve ended up with a techie special, the Motorola A920. If (like me) you’ve only dealt with Motorola’s ultra-nasty flip-phones and clamshell designs, then this one has some major surprises up it’s sleeve. The touchscreen interface is – gasp! – actually usable, instinctive, and comfortable to use. I’m still learning the speed stuff, like handwriting recognition, but it’s pretty good. On the geeky side, it’s got fun stuff like built-in GPS, so you can pull up a map of where you are, and it’ll include nearest restaurants, pubs etc. The built-in camera seems good, and will be acid-tested in the next couple of weeks, I’m sure.

All told, first impressions of it are pretty good. We’ll just have to see what time brings.