3 bills that take the piss


A word of warning:
If you’re with 3 Hong Kong (who laughingly call themselves a communications company) and you go abroad, do not send ANY messages, iMessages, SMS or anything else unless you’re on Aeroplane Mode and you’re using LOCAL wi-fi.

This might seem like common sense to the normal person. I do it every time. However, after visiting the UK recently on something of short notice, and not being able to actually find wi-fi everywhere in the UK, I sent a few international SMS. International in that they were sent using my HK mobile number, bounced around the UK, and delivered by whatever local service as needed. Unavoidable.

Then I get the bill. Charging HK$2 for each international SMS is pretty reasonable, but when they charge an EXTRA HK$3.55 PER MESSAGE ON TOP, I get a bit annoyed. Especially as it turned my $300 phone bill into a $950 phone bill.

Add to that the five days it’s taken to actually get hold of anyone at 3 to ask what in the present continuous bloody hell is going on, and you get one very steamed customer.

Moral of the story? Buy a locally-charged SIM card (that fits your phone’s SIM card slot). Or just leave your phone on aeroplane no matter what.

There. Done.

2011, and all that that means

‘… and a place in the winter, for Di-hig-nity...’

It’s been weird this year, so far. I’ve not been doing the usual things I do, and yet the more things have changed, the more they’ve stayed the same.

I went to Blighty for the holidays. I never do that. I avoid England because there’s nothing to see there. There are people, granted, but I know most of the places and, let’s be honest, I’m not going there to sight-see, am I? And the places - I know them but they’ve changed. They look the same on the surface, but they’re nothing like they used to be. But then again, neither are the people.

I bought a computer. Last time I did that was about three years ago (not counting 1812, my failed ninja project). Still got the three-year-old. Jarvis, my ever-faithful iMac, now has a fellow clan member in the form of Billy, my eleven inch MacBook Air. They get along fine via Bluetooth and memory stick, and between them they take up most of my time. Like I said, things stay the same.

… In that they change. Now, instead of freezing my arse off in my small room (that belongs to Jarvis), I can be found on my sofa, using Billy to read and re-read stuff I’ve written. In fact, Billy has kind of become my third hand, seeing as he’s always attached to my original two. Even JT, my iPhone 4, is starting to give him shifty, possessive looks. She’ll get over it, I know. After all, PCCW can’t make the wi-fi modem work, so only Jarvis is hooked up to (cabled) Tinternet right now. All Billy can do is look on with wistful sighs as I shut him down to go use Jarvis for all Tinternet shite. It’s a shame, but then, Jarvis is quicker, more powerful and pretty much the real brain in my house flat, so it’s only right. And he’s where I’ve spent hours on Photoshop - mostly swearing and cursing at the bloody thing crashing or just plain refusing to work on me. Yes, the ‘known issue’ of Photoshop Elements 8 not letting Mac users change the frame delay on animated gifs is more than a little annoying. So is its refusal to let me resize or rotate layers without first shifting them in some direction by a few pixels. There is a lesson in all this: why did I bother paying for a legitimate version of PE8 when I should have stuck with my cracked, pirated version of CS4 that always worked? Ah well. I shan’t be wasting my money on another Photoshop product. Adobe fall into the Ben Kenobi category of effective teaching styles.

Cafepress. They’ve also incurred my wrath this afternoon - trying to work out why products don’t show up in your own shop is just a little vexing, especially when you’ve read the ‘help’ pages that don’t seem to pertain to your version of a shop. Then again, they were really fast (a matter of hours) in answering my direct e-mail for help. If only the information they e-mailed me were available in the help section to begin with, they wouldn’t get so many mails bitching about the same subject - I’m willing to bet. Still, mystery solved. It’s all sorted, and a lot more quickly than I’d anticipated. Go team Cafepress.

So I sat on the sofa tonight - oh alright, lounged on the sofa - and watched some telly via Billy and a Moshi Mini Display Port to HDMI adapter, and my nice big telly, Tosh (you get to guess what make she is). And the funny thing was, the two programmes I watched were both from my secondary school years. First was ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, with the real, actual Holmes playing himself. For some reason, no-one was supposed to know, so they billed him as Jeremy Brett and kept up the pretence for the entire series. Granada tried very hard to fool people into thinking they hadn’t simply borrowed the TARDIS from the Beeb and whisked him forward in time to play himself, but I saw the signs and I’ve witnessed his little slips with my own eyes - gotcha, Mr Holmes. But don’t worry; when I tell people this they don’t believe me, and simply assume I’ve been on the vodka.

Which is odd, because I haven’t been. Been out to dinner with friends, and haven’t actually felt like drinking. Still haven’t been to a single pub quiz this year, and I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. Must make it next week.

Anyway, point was (when I can get to it), the other show was ‘The Pretender’. Used to love it back in the day, and now I’m watching it again and wondering how I forgot so much. Mostly to do with the fact that, while Jarod is perfectly innocent and lovely (in a Sam Tyler kind of way, meaning I could never give him one), he’s also a complete fucking psycho whose ee-vil face is proper fru-its of the dev-il and he honestly can kill people with his brain - it’s just that he wants to torture them by snaring them in some overly-elaborate yet excruciatingly agonising plan mirroring their own misdeed. He’s ace. And then I look at the fact that I’m watching both TV series via a cable sticking out of a brand spanking new MacBook, and marvel at the distance and time between now and when I first saw them, live on real telly. So much has happened in the time that feels so long, that I really have to just stop and think about it, mentally pick through all the highs and lows. And then I realise there’s just too much and I have to say ‘fuck it’ and leave it alone. Such is the way of all things memory.

Cleverest IT Guy password-cracked some old - nay, fucking ancient - Word files of mine this week, and I found the Holy Grail of Where It All Began, my own original book-wise. All the facts I thought I had in my head, all the back-story and history I thought existed nowhere but my own little nutshell of a brain, had actually been set down on virtual paper by me a over a decade ago. Reading them again was a weird experience; the sentences were mine, the characters remarkably unchanged from when I turned them into real people in the latter half of 2010, the storylines exactly as I knew the foundation to unfold. But I don’t remember having written it down.

Perhaps, at the time, writing wasn’t important in the Grand Scheme of Things. Perhaps, at that time, I had a life and other things that kept me occupied. Which means I was writing, but not really obsessing over it.

How things have changed. I coast along in my job - so that I can concentrate on writing when I get home. I get home late Saturday night but stay up later - so that I can read through what I’ve written in the week. I own an iMac and a MacBook - so I can use MacSpeech Dictate to get things down. It’s fair to say that writing is pretty much my obsession, and even distractions like TV shows and work won’t always be in the way. And so it goes.

And so do I. This post, my first for 2011, has been longer than I’d anticipated. I was supposed to say ‘oh, nearly broke my foot but we’ll find out if it’s just a sprain when I’ve had an X-ray later this week’, but obviously I needed to get a few things off my chest first.

So that, my friends, is all the news that’s fit to print. At least for now. Soopytwist.

Tags:
~ Sherlock Holmes ~ The Pretender ~ England ~ iMac ~ MacBook Air ~ writing

Electronica Moronica

There is a reason I haven’t been here in ages, honest. First there was the whole jetlag thing, which as usual, I don’t believe in until I realise that I’ve been walking around for three days as if I’m just visiting from a different planet. Now, normally, this would not be anything out of the ordinary, but for some reason this time I just felt really detached from everything going on around me.

Then there was the whole “I suddenly have a burning need to put everything in my flat in order” thing. First it was the bookcase - I went through all of the books on said piece of furniture, and basically chucked out everything that has been there for years without me ever having touched it. Then it was the DVD and VCD bookcases, and I have to say there’s an entire canvas shopping bag full of rejects ready to be split among mates. Then came my wardrobe and chest of drawers, which have quite happily housed all kinds of similarly untouched shite for the past two years. That was fun!

And then there was the whole “everything here works wrong, and I’m going to do something about it” thing. Which included me buying an official pair of Apple in-ear headphones, and a Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. First of all, let me explain why I was trying to eschew my Skull Candy ‘Noise isolating bass-rich ear buds with in-line microphone compatible with iPhone and Blackberry Curve and Storm’ in the first place. You see, it all started a couple of Fridays ago. It was the weekend before I was going away to Dragon*Con, and I thought I had to put a few of my things in order before I went away. I spent two and a half hours in the 3 shop, picking up my supposedly “reserved” iPhone 4. Once this was done, I just about had time to race home, plug my new iPhone into my iTunes, have it load my iPhone 4 from the last backup I did of my iPhone 3G, and then get back to work. I was impressed that it took so little effort to accomplish all this, and I certainly kicked the arse out of my new iPhone for (called JT) taking close to 300 photographs and about 30 videos at Dragon*Con. She also worked wonders data roaming in the USA, picking up my e-mail and also using the mobile site for Twitter. I would have preferred to use my third-party app for Twitter, but Twitter themselves decided to change the signing-in authorisation procedure just a few hours before I left Hong Kong. This meant that not one of the three third-party apps on my iPhone 4 were able to sign in to Twitter. I was not a happy camper, as you can probably imagine.

Anyway, it wasn’t until I returned to Hong Kong and had time to get reacquainted with my iPod aboard my new iPhone 4, that I realised my Skull Candy headphones repeatedly used the sound suppression blip, normally reserved in case of incoming mail or text messages, while just playing music or video. While not exactly the most vexing thing that’s happened to me recently, it did start to annoy me after a while. Deciding that I had tried it out every single kind of in-ear headphones during the last three years, I thought perhaps it was time I gave the official Apple earphones a chance. After spending HK$600 on a pair, I was monumentally peeved to find out that they lack any kind of proper bass - by any stretch of the imagination. Inevitably, I have gone back to my Skull Candy headphones, and now I am quite happy to put up with the occasional suppressive blip if it means I can have proper fucking bass.

So, on to my new Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. Within minutes of turning it on, I had it paired to both my iMac and my iPhone. It works wonders with both Skype on my iMac and also receiving or making calls on my iPhone. However - and this is a huge fucking ‘however’ - it takes a little bit of ingenuity and patience to enable it to work with MacSpeech (which is completely MacSpeech’s fault). It is entirely possible, seeing as that is how I’m writing this blog post at the moment. All you need is Soundflower and LineIn. A little bit of jiggery-pokery later, and here we are dictating a blog post.

The headset itself gives good sound and obviously works quite well with MacSpeech, without being too heavy. Being wireless also means I can wander off away from Jarvis my iMac, and still be heard whilst on Skype. However, having it jammed in your ear for anything up to two hours while you’re talking on Skype can mean it starts to make your ear ache just a tiny bit. This could be due to the fact that the earpiece is roughly the size of a dinner plate. That said, I am enjoying using it immensely.

I think I should leave it there, as it is getting quite late and I’m supposed to be up relatively early tomorrow doing private lessons before work. Oh, and I do have a Supernatural/Doctor Who crossover fanfic to finish for my sister.

Soopytwist!


Tags:
~ iPhone 4 ~ Apple ~ bluetooth headset ~ MacSpeech

Bad Upgrade, No Cookie!

Where the fuck's my SMART SHUFFLE on my iTunes 9?

And while we're at it, where in the present continuous tense is my fucking 'open Twitpic links as webpages' option on my Twitterrific Premium version?

Thieving James Blunts, both!

Major Catch Up

And Sergeant Where Did The Last Fortnight Go? Yes, I know I haven’t blogged in years, but I’ve been distracted. Nay, busy. It’s summer school this month and as such, things are busier, free time is shorter, and the will to do owt but lie ont sofa and watch DVDs when you get home from work much stronger.

First off - been laughing at the audacity but cheeky fun of that bloke as put a sign up on the M60. Yes, you know the one - the wee copy of the Hollywood sign, except it says ‘Hollinwood’. Ace. Pity it were taken it down - he should have kept it up. Except the folks over in Hollywood (that’s in Stockport, not the USA) could be a mite put out that they didn’t think of it first...

Then I heard a rumour that the amazingly successful laughfest that is ‘Evil Dead: The Musical’ may be made into a film (oh, the ouroboros-ity!), as even the mighty Sam Raimi himself has been approached and seems amenable. Please say this is one rumour that won’t turn out to be a pile of shite. I’ve never been lucky enough to get to anywhere running the musical, so I will be the first in line to see a motion picture version.

Then there was going to see ‘Public Enemies’ last Saturday night. Mate may have had unshed girl tears cos she didn’t know the ending ‘fore she went in. Aw, bless her cottons. And it was Johnny Depp, after all. Still, pretty good stuff, if a little typical Michael Mann-ish in that it was Wong Kar Wai with guns and more angst (if such a thing is possible). Good entertainment. We’re off to the ‘The Hangover’ Monday night - which admittedly, would not have been my first choice, but I do need to get out of my work-sofa-work-sofa routine of late. It also looks like I’ll be going to see ‘Drag Me To hell’ on my lonesome, as I’m the only one round these parts as likes a bit of Sam Raiminess int dark. But at least I’ll see it on big screen. Huzzah!

Then there was the arsing about with Twitter and Facebook. Granted, I avoid Facebook unless I get an e-mail telling me summat less boring or inane than usual has affected my profile, so I really couldn’t give a pair of foetid dingo’s kidneys what happens there. I was rather annoyed at the mess that became of Twitter though, seeing as how I’m using it habitually these days. It was rather rude to find out I was unable to connect to the annoyingly addictive timeline anywhere other than on Tinternet - purr wee iPhone Dax did her best, but she was shut out for days. Resetting my blip.fm and Twitpic log-ins was a bummer, but it did seem to restore access. Until Twitpic went tits up again and stopped adding pics and links to my Twitter timeline. Ah well. And blip.fm does keep forgetting to add my blips to my Twimeline, too. Git. I’ll sort it later.

Which brings me to one of the two major reasons I’ve not been blogging: writing fan-fiction for ‘Supernatural’. Finished a wee one-shot for that challenge back last month (failed miserably, but hey, I took part). Here we go with a shameless plug:

“Triquetra”
Rating: Rated K+
Summary:
SEASON 4 SPOILERS. Written for UnGen Summer 09 Challenge re: The Fire, November 2nd, 1983. One fire, three perspectives, only one conclusion. References episodes 1x09 (Home) and 4x17 (It’s A Terrible Life).
Posted first (as always) at SPNVille.net.
Disclaimer:
I do not own the TV show ‘Supernatural’ either in whole or in part, but I wish I could write episodes full time. Or get a life. Or both.
Linky-link-link:



And that zombie story I started in February? I put it away for the LA convention in March, pulled it out again last month and still haven’t quite finished it yet, but it is finally starting to roll off the post-production line:

“Abra-Cadaver”
Rating: Rated T for language. And maybe the McNasty. And perhaps spades in necks.
Summary:
Set mid season 4. In 1987, John has a bad case of zombies, perhaps his worst yet. Meanwhile, in 2009, his boys discover that while some witches do no harm, objects in the rear view memory may appear hazier than they are. And they carry shovels.
Posted first (as always) at SPNVille.net.
Disclaimer:
I do not own the TV show ‘Supernatural’ either in whole or in part, but Eric Kripke is my dealer.
Linky-link-link:



So all I have left to say is that the other reason I haven’t been blogging is cos I’ve been wetting myself over watching ‘Farscape’ (one day I will have to make a note here of John Crichton’s best one-liners) and finishing that work of ‘Enterprise’ fan-fiction. Which I have technically finished, except for naming the bastard. I’ll sort it very soon.

Can you say ‘when fandoms collide’? I can - especially as I’m trying to get through season two of ‘Psych’ before I get to catch up with season three and the new season four as just started airing. And I’m mourning the airing break that ‘Burn Notice’ is going through right now until bloody January, and still wibbling over the end of ‘Torchwood’ series three and what that smug bugger Russell T. Davies did to my favourite character (yes, over and above my unearthly love for Captain Jack Harkness). GRRRR! Bad RTD, no cookies! And then I’m only up to season three of ‘Farscape’ but have to be ready for 10th September (or 11th in my neck of the woods) for season five of ‘Supernatural’ to start all over again… Another six (or seven) months of start-stop-start-stop sweeps / seasonal breaks / repeats mid-season broadcasting, avoiding spoilers, refusing to look at casting for next week’s episode and generally getting much too excited about each story as it airs. I’m hoping for a re-appearance from Chuck Shurley, the Trickster, Anna Milton (please don’t say she was brain-bleached by God’s minions) and of course Castiel. I can only hope he made it out of the season four finale, even after the way it ended. Oh, and that Dean finally goes postal on Lucifer. Please, please can we have Dean Winchester go Dark Side and eee-vil (like fruuu-its of the devil) and carve him / it / him into small pieces? (And I still vote Lucifer be played by Lucy Lawless - or David Duchovney. Or Jeffrey Combs. Or The God Who Is Bruce Campbell, seeing as he was down to be Big Damn Hero John Winchester but was unavailable…) Yes? Ok, thanks. Many cybercookies your way, Mr Eric Kripke. Love you long time.

Ok, that shallot. Onion. Thing. Time for more Farscape. I doubt anything could compete with ‘Crackers Don’t Matter’, ‘They’re Out Of Their Minds’ or ‘Relativity’ for Best Frelling Episode Other Than ‘Scratch ‘n Sniff’, but I’ve been surprised before. You never know what will come next to trounce all that’s come before. Fuck me, do I love sci-fi. (But not ‘Sy-Fy’. That’s just silly.)


Soopytwist.

Tags:
Hollinwood ~ Hollywood ~ Public Enemies ~ Sam Raimi ~ ED: The Musical ~ Twitter ~ fan-fic ~ Torchwood ~ Ianto Jones ~ Star Trek ~ Enterprise ~ Burn Notice ~ Supernatural ~ Farscape ~ John Crichton

Bollocks!

Having a bad day is one thing. Having someone stomp on your fragile dreams is another. So it's so heart-warming to know that iPhone Dax still loves me.

I know she does, cos waiting fert bus home tonight, I put the iPod function on shuffle and she did her stuff: 'Mentally Dull' by the South Park crew first, followed by 'Jenny Needs A Shooter' by Warren Zevon, followed by 'Whistle For The Choir' by The Fratellis, followed by '我的問題你沒回答' by Aaron Kwok. Even 'Ain't That A Bitch' by Aerosmith, and then '海嘯' by Soler. And now what do we have? Oh lookie, it's 'Good Lovin' Gone Bad' by Bad Company.

See? She loves me, alright.

Tags:
iPhone ~ South Park ~ Warren Zevon ~ The Fratellis ~ Aaron Kwok ~ 郭富城 ~ Aerosmith ~ Soler ~ Bad Company

Incredible adventures

The Incredible Adventures of iPhone Dax (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Her Resourcefulness)

Granted, I might have been several more than three sheets to the wind (see: Encyclopaedia Of Life, entry on Being Totally Fucking Hammered, page 42). And iPhone Dax is usually glued to either hand or my pocket during my waking hours, pisht or not. But when I woke up with a hangover registering 8.6 on the Just Let Me Curl Up And Fucking Die scale, I admit it took me nearly half an hour to realise my partner in crime was nowhere to be seen.

As the Hitchhiker’s Guide teaches us, it’s always important that you DON’T PANIC.

So I didn’t. Considering I was fucking mardy as all hell that something was not measuring up to my personal definition of playing fair (see: Encyclopaedia Of Life, entry on Not Needing To Be Kicked When Vulnerable, page 23), I think I displayed the self-restraint of an aged Vulcan by not going off on one during the increasingly frantic search of my weeny flat.

Sitting down in the world’s most comfortable chair with a laaaaarge cuppa tea, things looked more manageable. I was remembering fragments of the night/morning before I woke up. iPhone Dax in my hand. iPhone Dax in my pocket. Me checking she was still there as I left the taxi. Me stopping to Tweet someone at the door to my flat, cos there’s no net reception in the foyer or lift. Dax in my front pocket as I stumble into my bedroom.

Sigh of relief as I realise she’s got to be in the flat somewhere.

And then I hear it: that DING! of a text message. I heard it! She was definitely there somewhere… Jumping ont net, I mailed and Tweeted folks to ring me, and not stop ringing me till I answered. Plan? Plan.

She started ringing and I became convinced she was behind my bookcase. Except I’d already pulled that out and checked. She was ringing again, so I gave up second-guessing both myself and her and just pulled the bloody thing out again. It was then that I realised she was close but sure as vodka don’t freeze in my top compartment, the way I was going there was not going to be a cigar in it for me.

She must be behind the partition wall, I realised. So close, yet so far - as most things in life. I scrabbled round the other side, puzzled as fuck cos my bed is against that wall - and it’s a built-in bed. There was no physical way she could have been between the bed and wall, but it was the only option left. If there’s one thing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has taught me, it’s that once you’ve eliminated all the possibilities, whatever you’re left with, no matter how improbable, must be the solution.

So I wrenched and yanked and shifted and swore and groped. And, as I heard her ringing (Billy Squier’s Everybody Wants You - how’s that for irony?), I found out two things about the flat I’ve lived in for nearly a year.

One: there is, for some unknown reason, the weeniest gap between the bed frame and the wall, one that my wrist had trouble squeezing into AFTER I’d pulled it wider. Below this, as secret as Earth’s satelite Cruithne, is a depression that could pass for a sunken platform, approximately ten inches wide.

Two: under the flukiest of circumstances, should a small, flat item fall from, say, a pillow and arrange itself just so, it would be possible for it to insert itself in this sliver of space. Trapped inside the same miraculous bubble of crazily random happenstance, it could turn around and slide itself round to push itself into the hidden pocket of darkness.

And right there, ladies and gentlemen of all ages, is where I found iPhone Dax, lying there as if she hadn’t chosen to take herself off for some quiet reflection without some impatient human constantly playing with one or two of her apps at once.

We’ve had a chat, and I’ve conceded that I do need to give her more time to herself, to go exploring every now and again without me, and of course, time to dream. So I’ve agreed to turn her off for a few hours every day. In return, she’s agreed to tell me in advance when she plans to run off, Indiana Jones style, to have an awfully big adventure without me. Oh, and to let me know when she’s fucked off and just wants some time alone, so that I’m not a biscuit away from totally fucking losing it when I find her gone.

And so it goes…

Soopytwist, everyone.

Tags:
Apple ~ iPhone ~ Hong Kong