So on Tuesday I finally took the plunge and ordered an iphone. They are normally nowhere to be found but thanks to the friendly tipsters at the whirlpool forums I was able to snag one. Or so I thought.
When I was ordering over the phone, the salesperson told me it would arrive on Thursday. Now, I have had a little experience with postal services in Australia and I have never received a package in such a short span of time. After I asked her to confirm that, I asked her what I should do if it didn't arrive on Thursday; I got the whole "It will absolutely arrive on Thursday" talk.
So along comes thursday morning and figured I would ring up 3 just to make sure that the package was still on track. The guy on the phone told me that it was, so I headed off to uni.
Now for ethical reasons mobile phones are not allowed to be used inside biology labs (or the ones I'm allowed in anyway) so I couldn't check my phone until about 1:30pm. When I left the lab, I had a text message on my phone saying something along the lines of "we apologize but your delivery will be delayed until after the 27th". Fantastic.
I called up 3 that afternoon and asked what on earth was happening. The only explanation I got was "there is a delay on our end" and that it will absolutely arrive Friday. Where have I heard that before?
Well, it is early evening on Friday and I have not receieved any iPhone, nor any more information. I rung up three and got the delay speech again and the absolutely next week speech.
3, I have no issues with your radio network (in fact it is rather good) but you really dropped the ball on this one. The waiting is not the issue, it is the fact that you are instructing your sales assistants to promise delivery times that are simply not feasable. Just overestimate the date and people will be pleasantly surprised when it arrives early.
Today I picked up a copy of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Unfortunately, it seems I had bought a dud disc; after five sets of I/O error failures ("There was a problem reading the Mac OS X install disc") I rung up NextByte and asked if I could return it and get another copy. The guy on the phone told me that was a-ok, so I headed into the store.
When I got there, I was politely directed to the manager who asked me to explain the problem I was having. He listened, said "yep" and went in the back room for a minute to grab me another brand new disc. No fuss, no messing around, just helpful people. The new disc installed first time.
Thank you NextByte. You absolutely made my day.
Jump into your router and set the wireless auth algorithm to TKIP+AES or AES. Apparently the Airport Express doesn't like TKIP very much.
How to play Wikipedia Racing:
- Choose a start and end page title (like "Gumpert Apollo" and "String Theory")
- Set all players up on the start page and yell "Go!"
- Using only the links on the page (no searching) each player attempts to make it to the finish page in the shortest time possible
For extra fun and for extra obscure titles, allow the use of the "Random Article" link.
Compass is a real CSS framework. CSS might even be fun to write now!
Today it rained quite a lot so I was stuck indoors. I was messing around with python after I finished my uni work, and I decided that it would be cool to hook up Umbrella Today to my graphic LCD module. The image display code I wrote a couple of days ago meant that this would be trivial.
def umbrellatoday(location):
url_stream = urllib.urlopen("http://www.umbrellatoday.com/locations/%s/forecast" % (str(location)) )
html_data = url_stream.read().replace("\n","")
url_stream.close()
try:
forecast = re.search("(?P<forecast>YES|NO)", html_data).group('forecast')
display_image(forecast.lower() + ".png")
except Exception, detail:
print "uh oh. \n" + str(detail)
And here is a picture of how it turned out.
Live Messenger install sucks. It sucks like a black hole.
Install Adium for mac: drag + drop, enter credentials
Install MSN for windows: run, wait 10 minutes for it to connect, tell me that it has connected, wait another ten minutes, ask me to install a bunch of stuff that I guarantee no-one actually installs, realise that even though i only selected one package it has to download 7 of them, wait 20 minutes for it to download the extra packages (we are still in the installer here), wait for it to download fonts (what is this, 2001?), then open, enter credentials and close all the extra windows that open; MSN today and all that crap.
Yahoo, you are relatively awesome.
Dear Yahoo,
- You ask for too much of my time in order to sign up for flickr.
- I just want to get on flickr, not sign up for a yahoo email
- I DO NOT want a yahoo email address EVER. I will not check it and it will just waste your disk space, so why are you forcing me to register one?
- I entered my actual postcode (no fakes) and apparently I am not located in Australia. Well done form validation team.
- If there are rules governing usernames, PLEASE STATE THEM so I can try to pick a name that is appropriate and not just say that I can have my name with 96 or 52 tacked on the end. I am certain that no-one has registered "zbergdfsgrcxfeaerfsd@yahoo.com" and yet I cannot use it.
- Let me make my own secret question. I have so many "favourite musicians".
- I entered a 10 character password of complete gibberish (like "C$buX;#8Q4") and apparently my password is both very weak and contains my username.
I just wanted to create a flickr account and upload some photos. I like to think that I do not give up easily, but I felt that giving up was the appropriate response to that signup form. If you need to see how signups should be done, look at tumblr.
[no] thanks,
jeremy
