Conversations with myself

I found out this morning that Google is retiring Google Buzz in a few weeks. Now where am I going to rant about the crazy things I see in this world? I guess I’ll go back to having conversations with myself in my own head again.

Update 20 Feb 2015: When I finally migrated my rantings to this WordPress website, I had to come up with a name for the blog. I toyed with calling it “Conversations with myself in my head put online”, but that was a little too wordy.

[This content was originally posted to Google Buzz, #188]

Phone fiasco #1

My former internet service provider was bought out by a larger competitor about 7 weeks ago. All was fine with the transition until yesterday, when suddenly we find that we have no home phone service anymore, and I discover that without any input from me or notification to me, I have been converted to a Naked DSL plan (i.e. internet only, no phone service)

With the combination of my former ISP’s systems and personnel, my new ISP’s systems and personnel, a different phone company, and telephone exchange work tending to be sub-subcontracted out to multiple levels, I have grave concerns that this mess will get sorted out any time soon. In the meantime, if you need to ring us, ring my mobile phone number.

Update: I was right in my prediction. It took an entire month, and interactions with 27 different people from numerous companies before I had both phone and internet restored!

[This content was originally posted to Google Buzz, #186]

Owls

We discovered today that we have a tawny frogmouth owl nesting in a tree in our backyard. Cool. Sadly, the reason we discovered this was by finding a baby owl that had died and fallen from the nest, (Or possibly the other way round.) There is at least one other baby owl in the nest, so here’s hoping it hangs on.

Update: It did.

[This content was originally posted to Google Buzz, #185]

Amazing footy

There are three things that amaze me about going to a big footy match, even four that astonish me.

  • The price of food and drinks;
  • the vast amount of advertising squeezed into the stadium;
  • the lameness of pre-match and half-time ‘entertainment’;
  • and the unfettered blind optimism of 4WD owners attempting to park 100m from a 30,000 seat stadium in an illegal and impossible position 30 minutes before game time.

[This content was originally posted to Google Buzz, #183]

iOS 5 Upgrade. Further pain

After taking most of the day resyncing my music to my iPhone (as it was downconverting music files to 128kbps) I then found that every time I connected my iPhone to my computer iTunes would pop up with a dialog saying that the previous restore had failed, and giving me the option to “Cancel”, “Continue Restore”, or “Delete Backup”. It didn’t seem to matter what option I chose I ended up with either iTunes not recognising the phone, or producing another error, or offering me the choice to set up the device as new phone.

Eventually I got things sorted out (but had to resync all my music again ). I have no idea what exact steps finally fixed my problem. Needless to say I won’t be that keen to rush into installing future iOS updates.

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[This content was originally posted to Google Buzz, #182]