It’s Friday!

I'm off to York for the weekend shortly. I have two bags of sweeties and 'The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul' on story CD, so the journey should be ok. I hope everyone has a fun couple of days. Oxford crew: enjoy your last weekend of studying!

If you feel in need of amusement over the weekend, I enjoyed watching the finalists for the Nokia Shorts competition. Ten films, all 15 seconds long.

Always remember: chips.

Tribal Wrestling

A tribe of Native Americans named all women according to the animal hide from which they made their blanket. So one woman was known as Squaw of the Buffalo Hide, while another was known as Squaw of the Deer Hide. And there was a particularly strong woman who was known as the Squaw of the Hippopotamus Hide. She was as large and powerful as the animal from which her blanket was made.

Year after year, the woman would enter the tribal wrestling tournament and easily defeat all challenges from the Squaw of the Buffalo Hide, the Squaw of the Deer Hide, the Squaw of the Horse Hide and the Squaw of the Bear Hide. Finally, two of the squaws petitioned the chief to allow them to enter their sons as a wrestling tandem in order to defeat the Squaw of the Hippopotamus Hide.

When the match began, it became clear that the squaw had finally met an opponent that was her equal. The two sons wrestled and struggled vigorously. The match lasted for hours without a clear victor but finally the chief intervened and declared that, in the interests of the health and safety of the wrestlers, he would declare a winner.

The chief retired to his teepee, contemplated the great struggle and found it extremely difficult to decide a winner. After much deliberation, he came out and announced his decision...

O2…Success

The 6600 reappeared on the O2 website this morning. I put my order through again...and it worked! I got the confirmation page (complete with certificate error due to them using a footer hosted on an insecure server) and email, so hopefully it's all gone through ok. This saga doesn't bode well, does it...Oh well, life is full of such adventures.

UPDATE @ 14:00: Apparently it's been 'passed to the warehouse for dispatch'. Well I never. Well, maybe I have, but that's another matter.

My current provider is Singlepoint, who handle the billing on behalf of Vodafone. I get an automated call every few weeks to say they've noticed a "suspicious level of usage on my account". This means I've called someone, and given my lack of use of the phone for phone purposes their software notices a massive percentage increase. They then say that my account will be suspended unless I call them. I have to phone and remove the block, every time. It'll be interesting in a year's time to see whether it's O2 or Singlepoint that are lowest in my estimation.

Another “Interesting” Experience

Continuing the series of news reports you just have to read, I present to you the following headline:

No volunteers for orgasm implant

Where would they come from?

An Interesting Experience

News report of the day:

Broughton returned home and sat in trepidation in front of a mirror. His patience was rewarded when a brown worm-like creature emerged from his right nostril and looked around.

You've got to read the rest now, haven't you...

Connectivity problems…?

I don't know enough about the physical cabling of the UK to say what's going on, but both Nod and I are having connectivity problems. Portsmouth and Birmingham aren't that closely linked, as far as I know It may just be a DNS thing. 1 in 3 domains aren't resolving, while MSN Messenger is dropping messages. ICQ, which I seem to remember is IP based, seems to be working fine. Anyone else having trouble?

O2 Update

I phoned O2 this morning to see how they were getting on.

"There seems to be a problem with all 6600 orders. Try putting it through again."

Still doesn't work

If they only knew the vast traffic my blog gets, they'd be sorry. Many thousands of people, the world over, are reading of my plight and passing word onto their neighbours, children, inmate husbands, psychology teachers, bovine chimps and milkmen that O2 are being annoying at the moment. I wouldn't be surprised if their share price drops through the floor.

UPDATE @ 13:47: As Ed pointed out in the comments, the 6600 is now listed as unavailable. I wonder whether this means they're sorting out the ordering problem, or they don't have any in stock.

Technology Rocks. Generally.

I'm a gadget-freak. Those of you who know me know that already. If it's small, silver and full of LEDs, I'll want one. Given this, it's hardly surprising I like to have a decent mobile phone. My current model, purchased September 2002, is a Sony Ericsson T68i. It's annoying. There are many features, but they're not that well thought out. The T9 dictionary doesn't include words with apostrophes, for example, and said symbol is fifth down the punctuation list. That gets boring really fast. If you synchronize with Outlook it'll grab the company name if there is one, but it won't display it properly in the address book. It gets full after 50 text messages. I can finish typing a text message and the phone takes another 5 seconds to catch up. it's quite happy to send blank messages. Stuff like that.

I'm arguably being somewhat picky, as the phone has many good points. It's rock stable; the bluetooth connectivity works fine; it's small and light; the alarm succeeds in waking me up of a morning. It niggles, though. The lure of a proper operating system is strong. For this reason I today ordered a Nokia 6600. Except I didn't, because I couldn't.

O2 have for the last 18 months had a quite unbeatable tariff on their website. £25/month line rental gives you 100 free minutes (anytime/anynetwork) and 500, yes that's 500, text messages per month (or 125 MMS). That's quite shocking. I send a stupid number of text messages per month, but 500 should just about cover it No other network can even touch this offer. This annoys me, because I've seen people try to deal with O2 before. Their customer support, in my opinion, sucks. Kate spent three weeks trying to get the unlock code for her mobile. Google abounds with horror stories. However, in the end money talks louder than principle (in this particular circumstance, anyway), and given that my monthly bill would be at least double with any other tariff, I went with O2, hoping nothing would go wrong.

It did.

I selected the phone and tariff, entered my bank details and credit card number, then put the order through, creating an account in the process. It thought for 30 seconds, then told me there had been an error in the system. Damn. At this point, coincidentally, my POP3 server fell over. Half an hour later it was resurrected, but no confirmation email had appeared. The help section on the O2 website requires you to enter your O2 mobile number, or you can't access it. I phoned their customer support line, which diverted me to another number, which just beeped in an i'm-not-working way. My account showed no sign of me having ordered anything, so I tried putting it through again, only to get a 'you may only order one phone at a time' message. Eventually I called their sales line, where a very helpful (really) man told me that they'd been having problems. I gave him all my details and he created another account. I didn't realise until half way through that their telephone sales system consists of the website. And that's all. So 15mins later he gets the exact same error I did. Apparently my order will sit there until the system gets fixed. So that's at least two phones on their way to me, then. He said I should phone each morning to see what's happening.

Aaaaanyway. I watched The Wedding Planner last night. I didn't enjoy it that much, but while watching I consumed perhaps half a two-litre bottle of Orange Tango. Big mistake. Really big. My parents had to stop me having orange squash when I was a kid, as the orange colouring made me go hyper (sound familiar?). Orange Tango, in large enough quantities, seems to do the same thing. I got 2hrs sleep, and that's optimistic. Apple Tango is fine, thankfully, as that's my favourite . Fanta makes me ill, Orange Tango makes me nuts...as Ben pointed out, I wonder what Orangina would do.

In an attempt to get something useful done today (and to upset my bank balance even more) I signed up to dvdsontap. I'm on their £15 2 DVDs at a time plan, as then I always have something to watch. There's a 14 day trial period, so I'll do a proper write-up once that's over. My 'rental queue' has over 70 DVDs in it atm

There's a hell of a lot of moaning in the above paragraphs! I apologise. I sound like an old person. It's not like it used to be...I blame young people. To make up for this, I'd like to point you in the direction of this roundup of the Christmas number-one contenders. 'Mad World' by Gary Jules is the aforementioned Donnie Darko song. 'The Closest Thing to Crazy' by Katie Melua is also lovely, so my hopes are on one of these to win. There are short clips of all the songs, so give them a listen and let me know what you think.

Finally, Ed posted something today which amused me greatly.

The Funny Pages

Headline from this week's Onion:

Porn DVD's Commentary Track Just More Moaning

DVD Rental (again)

As I think I've mentioned before, I'm seriously considering signing up to a DVD-rental website. Nod very kindly sent me a long list of them, which I've been working my way down. dvdsontap seem to be pretty good, and newsgroup posts seem to like them too. They've got a large selection, including a lot of TV shows box-sets, split up into their constituent DVDs. I quite fancy watching Law & Order or Miami Vice, but the box sets cost £45ish in the shops, so I've never wanted to take the risk. Renting just the first DVD would be a good solution. However, there's a large caveat to dvdsontap. You can rent...I can barely say it...Midsomer Murders. I'm assuming they store it in some kind of pressurised container or something, or it might contaminate the surrounding DVDs. What if CSI was next to it?

Witness: I didn't see anything at all, I wasn't there
Grissom: Hmmm. Get me some tea, Catherine.
Witness: I only met the victim once...
Grissom: Hmmm. Stop making eyes at my daughter, Catherine.
Witness: Would you care for a scone?
Grissom: Scone! That sounds a bit like bone. Bones are dug up by dogs. You've got a dog. Did you by any chance happen to buy your dog recently from the local dogs home?
Witness: Why, yes I did.
Grissom: And while you were there, did you happen to see anybody?
Witness: Come to think of it, yes I did. I saw [insert baddie's name]. He was asking whether he could rent a rottweiler.
Grisson: That's a lie! I know, because I saw a school photograph of you and [insert baddie's name] when I was helping my wife clear out an old room full of junk just yesterday. You did it together!
Witness: I admit it. I did it. But [insert baddie's name] is planning to steal a candle from the old church! And the only person there is Mr Tod, the 90-year-old vicar who's just had the hip replacement!
Grissom: Quick! To the Troymobile!

Moving on...

Why did the absurdist cross the road?
Seventeen fish sticks.

--Stolen from JLA #88. Plastic Man rules.