Phone troubles

My phone credit ran out unexpectedly this week. Since I knew I'd need it yesterday, I went into Superdrug to buy airtime vouchers (which is where I've always bought my vouchers from). The assistant explained that they no longer sold vouchers; they only catered for top-up cards, and she was unsure as to where I could buy any vouchers.

Now, I'm very clueless when it comes to mobile phones. I assumed that she meant a credit-card type thing that you hand over, get swiped and then transfer the amount onto your phone. Possessing no such thing, I turned and left.

Having Googled just now, I find that Amazon.com sell Virgin top-up cards, and they look suspiciously like the top-up vouchers of old except in plastic, credit-card-sized form. Was it so inconceivable that this was what I wanted to buy?

It would have saved me a lot of hassle had I been offered this, since there then occurred the Saga of the Phone Airtime Credit. It went thusly:

1. Decide to register a debit card with Virgin so that I could top up.
2. Remember that these calls cost a flat rate of 10p, and I had exactly £0.00 on my phone. So that's out.
3. Hunt for a top up card amongst all the boxes and paraphernalia that came with my phone when I ordered it last year (all still sitting in the same place on my floor as when it arrived. I knew having an untidy bedroom was useful).
4. Look up buying airtime on the Virgin Mobile website. Find a link promising to let me buy airtime. Click it.
5. Get asked to login by filling in my mobile phone number (which I can barely remember at the best of times) and my "Virgin Mobile passcode (6-digit number)". Um. What? Rings absolutely no bells whatsoever.
6. Click the link that says "Forgotten your passcode?". Find another form, asking me to fill in my name (I can cope with that), postcode (got that), mobile phone number (have to look it up, but yeah) and my "Customer Centre password".
7. You what?
8. "If you've forgotten it, you'll need to contact us."
9. Hey, I never set one in the first place. Muppets.
10. Get increasingly worried that I won't be able to get any credit on my phone ever again — or at least before Thursday, when I needed it.
11. Many hours later, remember with overwhelming joy a helpful comment from the last time I ran out of credit, telling me that the calls to their customer centre to register credit cards are FREE! if you have no credit. Yay no credit.
12. Phone up on Thursday morning, talk to helpful and slightly over-friendly woman who takes my money and solves all my problems. All is right with the world again.

Items: various

• This week I took Thursday and Friday off to use up my annual leave. (I'm taking Monday off too, since it's Kevin's birthday on Sunday. Three day week, five day weekend, which is cool.) Since I was working in Salisbury, I was able to leave early too, since I'm still on company time until I can drive back to Farnborough.

  It's not often that you can call 3:30pm on a Wednesday the beginning of the weekend, but I kind of liked it.

• For this long weekend at Kevin's I suggested going and doing something in London, where "something" equalled one from about a dozen vaguely thought-up options. Instead Kevin suggested a mystery visit elsewhere (and then asked me to choose between a vague destination which wasn't decided in the slightest, or a mystery location of which I was unaware :-) ). I inadvertantly guessed the right answer — Colchester Zoo, where there resides a zeedonk. So we went today — photos and write-up to follow.

• On Wednesday I came home and checked my email, and found that I'd been comment-spammed 150 times in the last hour. The good thing was that they all promoted the same URL, so MT-Blacklist came in very handy: despam first comment with Blacklist, search for other comments with same URL, delete all and rebuild all indexes. Job done in 60 seconds. I would have had more comments too; in the minute after I blocked the URL it was denied 4 times. Oh, and then they switched URLs for another 15 comments before I noticed.

  Isn't comment spam fun?

• On the London Underground yesterday, I severely confused someone who came up to me. I had just started reading The Amber Spyglass in French, and was suddenly aware that I'd been spoken to. Being noisy on the Jubilee, and with me having vaugely registered in the recesses of my mind that the man had spoken with a French accent, years of holidays in France took over, and I replied "Pardon?" in French. He repeated with a smile, waving at my book, "Vous êtes français?"

  Having finally grasped what he had said, I grinned and said, "Oh, no! No, I'm English." He stared confusedly at my book, looked like he was about to say something else, and then wandered back down the carriage and sat down without another word.

Going to the zoo

Yesterday we eventually decided to go to Colchester Zoo on a special mission to see their zeedonk.

The zeedonk in residence is called Shadow, and unfortunately seems to be very glum and miserable most of the time. I tried to reassure Kevin by telling him that maybe that's how all zeedonks look, and possibly Shadow was actually a very happy zeedonk, but I'm not sure he believed me. I was previously told, and can now verify, that zeedonks look like donkeys with funky stockings.

That wasn't our first stop though — first we went to the Aquatic House where live some reptiles (I know, don't ask) and the underwater creatures. Oh, some toucans too. I didn't manage a photo of a toucan, lovely though they were, but I eventually snapshotted a penguin underwater. We were standing next to their tank for about twenty minutes waiting to watch them being fed, and amused ourselves observing them. There seemed to be a bully among the group who at various times bit and chased the others. Kevin was enamoured with the penguin sulking in its hut in the corner, who stood staring resentfully out at the others having a good time without it.

Afterwards we wandered along to the African section to find the zeedonk, and on the way bumped into an inquisitive otter who posed beautifully for the camera. Credit to Kevin for the camera-work; no credit to me for not being enough of an image-editing software whizz to remove the red stripe from the reflection. We then moved on and found a couple of lions snoozing in the sun.

On, then, to the Spirit of Africa area — definitely my favourite section of the day. It was a large enclosure in which were kept giraffes, zebras, an ostrich, the solitary zeedonk and some rhinos. They all seemed to coexist quite happily, apart from one giraffe incident that we witnessed. It had wandered over curiously to the ostrich, which was minding its own business. It leant down and sniffed the bird, which didn't pay it any attention. We were just thinking what a touching and clichéd animal moment this was when the giraffe's foot suddenly delivered a great kick to the ostrich, which leapt up and down a bit before running off to another part of the enclosure.

We also ambled around to have a better look at the rhinos. Although I determined (from the signs stationed at various points around the enclosure) that they were white rhinos, I didn't find out if they were Northern or Southern white rhinos. We did find out, however, that one was called Simba and the other one was Flossy. Which one is the above, I don't know, but here's the other one. As we headed out we had to edge past a lordly-looking vulture who stared as we went past.

There's not really enough of this entry for the rest of the pictures, so I'll just list them here: there's a group shot with the zebras, giraffes, ostrich, melancholy zeedonk and an elephant in the background. There's also the good picture of the elephant on his own, and another photo that's a bit closer in. There's the ostrich on his own and also one with the zeedonk (I think someone got a bit carried away with zeedonk photos... just as I was a bit carried away with the African photos). And finally, there was the crocodile in the glass enclosure, whose intent seemed to be to get as close to the visitors as he possibly could.

Enjoy.

Addendum: After I'd finished this blogpost I managed to accidentally shut the browser tab and lose all but the first two paragraphs that I'd saved before going down to dinner. Partly to compensate, Kevin then offered to make me a milkshake. We were debating chocolate or vanilla when Kevin remembered that he'd made himself a chocolate milkshake one time when we were chatting on IRC. Unable to remember whether he'd liked it or not, I laughingly suggested that he grep his IRC logs to see whether he'd offered an opinion at the time.

His unheistatingly following my suggestion isn't the geekiest thing he's ever done to my knowledge — but I think it's close enough.

Aaand... relax

Last Friday I came to the end of my 50-week work contract, at lunchtime. I elected to take a half-day, partly to use up my leave but partly because it seemed the right thing to do since at school we always broke up at 12:30 on the last day of term. Truth be told, I'd accrued enough hours to move it forwards a day and leave on Thursday instead, but a) I had already taken Monday off last week, and b) in the last six weeks I'd only worked for 21 days out of 30 possible, so I'd have felt a little silly asking for another day off.

This is when I found it paid off to have been working at two different sites all year — not only did I get two pub lunches last week, but also two leaving cards and two parting gifts. One (Band of Brothers on DVD, which I've been after for almost two years, but which I've always found too expensive) was from my Amazon wishlist — see, Amazon wishlists are really cool! And for which I felt overwhelmingly grateful, too.

Did the year go quickly? It did and it didn't. On the one hand, I can't believe a whole year's gone by. The time seemed to pass more and more quickly; the first few months took an aeon to pass, but the last three months — well, probably everything since the halfway mark — have flown. Not the individual weeks or days of course (which did drag at times), but the weeks plural have gone by like a stampede, even though it seems almost a lifetime ago since I was being shown around on my first day.

I'll miss the people I worked with, but probably not the work itself. There's only so many HTML pages whose content you can tweak before you reach a boredom threshold.

However, I now have six whole weeks of nothingness before I trek up to university. Which sounds rather nice, really.

New toy (or: why Novatech sucks)

In preparation for upcoming university decampment, last weekend was spent searching for and ordering computer components. The plan was, order them on Sunday, pay for prompt delivery, and spend next weekend assembling it.

This may still happen (although I might have to cross my fingers to achieve it). I'll come to the complications later; for starters though, here's what was ordered:

Processor

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ S754 512Kb. That's a 64-bit (2.2GHz) processor, in case you missed that.

* Cathy squees *

Motherboard

Gigabyte GA-K8VT800 Pro — with many goodies including RAID controller, soundcard, 2 SATA connectors, and a maximum of 3GB RAM. And it was recommended in Personal Computer World magazine for use with AMD 64-bit processors.

Hard drives

Two Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 160GB SATA150, as a mirrored RAID array. I was going to go for 120GB disks, but then Kevin noticed it was only £3 more for the extra 40GB.

RAM

Two lots of Crucial 512MB 184Pin DIMM PC3200 DDR RAM Non-Parity CL3. I think a gig of RAM should be enough for now, don't you?

Graphics card

GeForce FX5200 128MB 8XAGP (Novatech's own). It looked nice, it looked cheap, the most graphics-intense thing I'm likely to do with my computer is to watch DVDs.

Monitor

Samsung SM710V 17" LCD Silver — again, one of the cheapest 17" LCD monitors I could find, of decent quality.

Speakers

Altec Lansing VS4121. They sound quite nice and I did want good speaker quality.

Case

DabValue Midi Tower 400W Silent Beige. Since Kevin was pimping expensive and menacing cases at me, I went to PCWorld's website, found the cheapest and said, "That'll do" (much to his chagrin). However, I then spotted this one, which a) looked nicer, b) had a higher-powered PSU, and c) includes a case fan. And it's not that much more expensive either.

DVD Writer

NEC DVD+-R/RW Dual Layer 8x — very nice, and quite cheap too

DVD ROM

Samsung 16xDVD 48xCD Int IDE RP (quite basic). I was going to get a DVD writer and CD ROM drive, in case I wanted to copy CDs, but then I saw that it was very little money more for a DVD ROM drive instead.

Floppy disk drive

Sony, internal (the cheapest one on Dabs).

Mouse

Logitech MX500 Optical. I fell in love with the first mouse I saw when Kevin took me to PC World, and this was it. Well, to be honest, the one in the store was the wireless version, but I preferred this for reasons of batteries and price.

Keyboard

Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard (that's the split one). I did try out a number of keyboards in PCWorld and found some quite nice ones, but then I became besotted with this split keyboard.

It's nice because I've had minor RSI problems with my wrists all year (since I've been literally sat at a computer all day) and luckily I can touchtype. Unfortunately, as I was trial-typing, I discovered that I use my right index finger for typing the letter B. The split keyboard has B on the left.

Luckily, Kevin says this isn't an issue — all I have to do is use a thesaurus, find a good replacement for any word that contains the second letter of the alphathingy, and I'm away. I mentioned that it might cause difficulty with my first-year Java programs: what if I need to return a boolean type? (Since you have to declare what type your function will return at the start of it.) Simple, he says. Just return an int instead, 0 or 1.

On balance, though, I may just learn to use my keyboard properly.

Processor fan

ThermalTake SilentBoost K8 for Opteron. We thought a separate processor fan was possibly not necessary since my processor comes with a heat sink, but we thought it was a good idea to throw it in.

Rounded IDE cables

To improve the airflow inside the case. Unfortunately, the cheapest we could find were "Glow in the dark Yellow", but it's not like I'm going to see them often.

O/S

Windows XP Home. Later on I'll be partitioning and putting a Unix in there too.

My budget was £1000, initially (and surprisingly) I was under budget by a whole £9.75, including delivery charges and such. I was going to go for next-day delivery on all of them, but since Dabs was going to have to wait 1-2 days to get the processor fan, they wouldn't let me select next-day delivery, since they obviously knew they couldn't get it in time.

I tried to order most items from Dabs in an attempt to keep down delivery costs, but there were a few items that I had to order from Novatech instead. Notably the motherboard, since they are seemingly the only place online from which it is possible to buy that model. On the page it didn't actually say they had any in stock, but it said they were getting some from suppliers very soon, and in brackets had "Usually delivered in 24 hours" underneath. This seemed reasonable, and so I opted for next-day delivery with them.

Today being three days after having ordered, I checked the order status online. For the motherboard, it now says "1 due on 26 August". This seemed to slightly scupper my plans for building my computer this weekend, and I was also incredibly annoyed at the way they'd promised it in 24 hours when I ordered it, and also let me pay about double for fast delivery, and then changed their minds after the fact, saying, "Oh no, we'll probably have it in about ten days' time".

So, I thought, I'll cancel that item. But no — they don't let you amend an open order at all on Novatech, not even to cancel items. If you go to Order Management, they do have a link for "Modify Open Orders", but when you click it you get a JavaScript alert telling you that this feature is coming soon. The only option I had left was to phone them.

They removed the offending motherboard (I'm now buying a slightly better one from Dabs — Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro) but refused to refund the next-day delivery which clearly hadn't happened, since everything else will be despatched speedily once it's ready. I would have considered simply returning the motherboard to them once I had it, but a) it was holding up the whole order, and b) their returns policy states that they only accept returns of faulty products. Whilst this is illegal for a mail-order place, and thus should be able to be sorted out somehow, I don't think I'd have had much fun in the process.

I checked the balance remaining on my debit card a couple of hours later, to check there was still enough with ordering the second motherboard. I noticed that an amount had been taken off it today, roughly the same amount as the Novatech order.

But. Not only had they taken the full amount, including motherboard (even though the full amount on the Novatech order page comes to a minus-motherboard total), they'd taken even more than that — £264.81 instead of £261.03. Bastards. It's going to be a real pain having to sort that out too.

So, the two morals of the story:

1. New computer. Whizzy. Yay!
2. Don't buy from Novatech. They suck.

Up and running

After many many hours of heartbreak and frustration, my computer is finally up and running. Kevin came over last weekend specifically in order to help build it since we figured that everything should be there by Friday at the latest really. However, with the ever-helpful Novatech, Friday was pushing it a little for the delivery of my replacement motherboard.

It didn't come on Friday. I was foolishly extending hopes of it arriving on Saturday but then found that (of course) Parcelforce doesn't deliver on a Saturday. So then it finally winged its way to my house on Monday, about three hours before Kevin had to go home. (Parcelforce parcel tracking informed me that they had attempted to deliver the motherboard on Friday lunchtime, but "could not locate address". Silly people. It was quite frustrating, since the motherboard is really one of very few essential components for building the computer. (Kevin assures me that even the case isn't absolutely necessary.)

Anyway, parts assembled and unattended installation floppy made, we configured the RAID array, partitioned the drive (four partitions — one for Windows, one for data, one for music and one for Unix), started with Windows setup and were confronted with a nasty error time and time again. I was all ready to blame Novatech for a faulty Windows CD until Kevin's research led us to realising it was due to the unattend file — for my ProgFilesDir I'd specified D:\Program Files\, and in early stages of installation it thought that D:\ was my DVD drive. Hence error, abort installation.

The buildup to Working Computer went in stages — Tuesday night: XP. Wednesday: software, data and speakers (the one piece of hardware I hadn't bothered to connect). Thursday: move everything upstairs to my room, and gain internet connection (by way of a long cable trailing its way across my floor, down the corridor and into the router-containing room). Now I just have to get used to it.

I'm also slowly getting used to this split keyboard (slowly since I've not had much practice other than this blogpost). I'm at the stage where I don't have to look down at my fingers while I'm typing (as is the natural order of things). Well, actually, I probably do have to, I'm just not. As a consequence of which I'm making a tyop on about every third word (but at least I'm getting used to the Backspace key). And also, my slight degree of familiarity with the split keyboard means that I am starting to find it awkward typing on a standard one. I'm sure this awkwardness will only grow, unfortunately.

I still think there should be two Bs and two Ys though, one on each side of the split. (Doesn't everyone use their right hand to type B? Well, other than split keyboard users, obviously.)

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go. My Windows Update keeps popping up in my face every ten minutes telling me to restart my computer, and it's annoying the hell out of me.

*restarts computer*

Invite, anyone?

By the way, I forgot to mention in the last post — I have a few Gmail invites, and a sore lack of people on whom to bestow them.

The only condition is that I'd like to give them to people who I vaguely know, so you're eligible if you've ever commented on my blog. Would anyone like one?