I have achieved things today!
And I've felt like I have, unlike normally, when I either don't do things, or do do things, but feel like I haven't got anywhere near enough done.
But first: The Saga of the Nokia 920.
So, we'd been told it had been shipped late last week. We'd been told it would be courier part way, then postal service the rest of the way, so we had fingers crossed it would come straight to the village, but knew we might be driving to Mudgee.
It wasn't there Thursday, or Friday, or Monday. Monday, I mentioned to Ann our postlady what I was waiting on, and she didn't trust that it would have come on from Mudgee at all, that it even might be held up in Bathurst. Wouldn't we get a notification, in that case? She was very dubious that we would. (We had, when our external drive was dumped at Mudgee by the courier, and when we grumbled about the situation, they kindly stuck it in the post for us.)
Now, Telstra had given us a shipping number for the courier website, which hadn't worked from the moment we got it. Just a bunch of 404s. (My guess, everyone else was checking too, and bumming out their servers.) I mentioned to Emma about what Ann said when I got home, and she tried it again, and it was working, for the first time. And it said 'delivered'. It said 'delivered' on Thursday. Delivered to a Postal Depot in Mudgee. So, we ummed and ahhed, and it was twenty to four by this point, and decided to get in the car and drive the hour and a half to Mudgee.
We drove to Mudgee. We couldn't *find* the depot, so at 5pm, right on closing, we walked into the main post office. half the cashiers were counting their tills as we walked up to the desk. We explained the situation, and the man was surprised, that depot isn't open to the public anyway. So we told him our name, and he looked around, looked in a ledger, looked around a bit more and came up with our parcel.
It had been sent to the wrong address.
It had been marked 'return to sender', and would have disappeared that evening, if we hadn't turned up to claim it.
Now, the wrong address thing is a joke and a half. When we preordered, their website refused to recognise our address, despite it having been our billing address for our old phone for over two years. It was giving us dozens of addresses to choose from, and none were ours. We rang up support, and they told us to 'pick any address', ring back an hour later, and they'd change it to our address. We did this. The girl who answered, an hour later, told us that it took a while for orders to come through, and we'd have to call back tomorrow. We did this, and the person who took our address very thoroughly, triple checked and double checked our address, assured us it would go to the right place and we hung up and waited.
And they still sent it to the poor person whose address we'd randomly picked.
And the story doesn't end there, because the reason we ordered online is because they were giving away a free wireless speaker valued at a few hundred dollars each for each online order, and those have been delayed.
So, what's the bet, that even if we ring up and complain and verify our address AGAIN, they still send the speaker to the wrong address, and we play tag with the postal service an hour and a half away again?
*
I have loaded up the new phone with a bunch of things, some of which more interesting than others.
Stitch is an amazing app for ravelry. I have been having so much fun poking it. I love that you can take a photo of your project with your phone, then push a button in stitch and it will upload it to the photo gallery of the the project you're making. So easy! And it is so much quicker to look through my project gallery and queue on Stitch than it is on the actual website. Seriously, it's worth having the app just for that capability. It doesn't let you do everything the full website does, but there's nothing stopping you from signing into the website with your mobile browser for anything you can't do in Stitch.
uKnit is another useful app that gives you basic stitch counter, gauge calculator, and yards<->metres conversion. It also has a built in inches and cm ruler that takes a matter of moments to calibrate, with 'bigger' and 'smaller' buttons to tweak it down or up until it's precisely lined up with your brickspace measuring tape.
Endomondo is a fitness app that tracks all kind of things. I went for a walk and it was really good. I turned off the automatic pausing once I got home, because it kept thinking I'd stopped when I hadn't, but once it actually connected back with my home wifi, it was able to show me a map of the route I'd taken, and everything. Considering that mobile reception, what there is of it in this place, does not extend to most data things (and my phones tend to be 'emergency only' if at all), it's impressive that it was smart enough to work out where I'd gone from where I started and finished.
Lists & Things Free looks like it's going to be really useful - you can make both shopping lists and to do lists, and put a heap of information in about each item, should you choose.
The app for Evernote is also really ace, and there's an alternative to the Twitter app called rowi (it has a kiwi as its icon) that Emma seems pretty happy with.
I've downloaded a bunch more than that, but these are the ones I've found that are really good so far. I'm not planning on loading the phone up with a heap of junk I'm never going to use, but things that I'm actively going to use are definitely getting stuck on there.
*
I've done both cuffs and one heel of my Carousel socks. There are updated pictures here! Now featuring both socks the right way out, and no cat. Sorry, cat people. If it makes you feel better, he's lying next to me, grooming himself, fishy breath and all.
*
I made drunken risotto for dinner, and went with chorizo, vegetables, port, arborio rice and cheese and butter and it was delicious. What can I say, I had cauliflower and broccoli stalks to use up.
I chucked it all together, shoved it in the oven, and went for a walk before it got too dark. According to the app, I walked about 1.25km in 16 and a bit minutes. I don't know that I trust it a huge amount, since the pause thing kept turning it on and off, but it gives me a rough idea of how far I went.
And then I came home and ate risotto for tea, but who cares. It was delicious.
*
I've got the fruit and sugar macerating away in prep for jam making tomorrow, since the weather's cool enough right now to tolerate standing over boiling sugar in a room I can't open the windows of, and also because it'll be the last chance I get before we go away on Thursday to Sydney. It's a mix this time. Two yellow peaches that were on the turn, three apricots and half a dozen or so white peaches. I should get a nice jam from them, anyway. Now I just have to sort out jars ahead of time, rather than getting caught with all the wrong sizes like last time.
*
Fic rec today: This is about as different from the last fluffy unicorn rec as you can get, but it's worth it, if it's your thing. I don't read a lot of heavy kink or BDSM, not because it doesn't interest me, or that I think it's always badly written, but often I find the way it's written is either too mechanical, to the point that the characters aren't distinct any more from any other porn stars, or that it includes things that push my DNW buttons, like derogatory language (as distinct from dirty talk), humiliation, some of the darker side of consent play, spiteful sadism, unequal power balance, and some roleplay scenarios. I'm generally not interested in total scene, either.
That said, the right author, writing about something in the right way can sell me on almost anything. I'm a very omnivorous reader, and I think I've read pretty much anything over the years in fandom.
So, I'm really enjoying a series that's currently being written in Avengers fandom. It's called Don't Look Too Closely (all the angles are oblique) by
shaenie, and it's an alternate scenario for Tony and Steve meeting, so it avoids movie canon all together. It's got kink negotiation, safe sex negotiation, boundary exploration, moderate BDSM and kink, and it is blindingly hot. Steve and Tony are coming from very different places and have very different levels of sexual experience, but they are so damn into each other almost from first sight that it startles them both, and ratchets up the sexual tension until it crackles. There's something deep on an emotional level going on, and both of then know it, and are a bit drawn to it while being a little scared. The story that went up today (Will You Strike While He's Still Loading) is the third in the series, and I'm hoping that the story keeps going the way it's going, because it's rare I find something that I like this much in this genre.
And just to illustrate the point I made at the beginning, the author has written another Avengers story that isn't my thing. Not badly written, I finished it, just YKINMKBYKIOK, and all that. :)
This entry was originally posted at http://iamshadow.dreamwidth.org/367175.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
But first: The Saga of the Nokia 920.
So, we'd been told it had been shipped late last week. We'd been told it would be courier part way, then postal service the rest of the way, so we had fingers crossed it would come straight to the village, but knew we might be driving to Mudgee.
It wasn't there Thursday, or Friday, or Monday. Monday, I mentioned to Ann our postlady what I was waiting on, and she didn't trust that it would have come on from Mudgee at all, that it even might be held up in Bathurst. Wouldn't we get a notification, in that case? She was very dubious that we would. (We had, when our external drive was dumped at Mudgee by the courier, and when we grumbled about the situation, they kindly stuck it in the post for us.)
Now, Telstra had given us a shipping number for the courier website, which hadn't worked from the moment we got it. Just a bunch of 404s. (My guess, everyone else was checking too, and bumming out their servers.) I mentioned to Emma about what Ann said when I got home, and she tried it again, and it was working, for the first time. And it said 'delivered'. It said 'delivered' on Thursday. Delivered to a Postal Depot in Mudgee. So, we ummed and ahhed, and it was twenty to four by this point, and decided to get in the car and drive the hour and a half to Mudgee.
We drove to Mudgee. We couldn't *find* the depot, so at 5pm, right on closing, we walked into the main post office. half the cashiers were counting their tills as we walked up to the desk. We explained the situation, and the man was surprised, that depot isn't open to the public anyway. So we told him our name, and he looked around, looked in a ledger, looked around a bit more and came up with our parcel.
It had been sent to the wrong address.
It had been marked 'return to sender', and would have disappeared that evening, if we hadn't turned up to claim it.
Now, the wrong address thing is a joke and a half. When we preordered, their website refused to recognise our address, despite it having been our billing address for our old phone for over two years. It was giving us dozens of addresses to choose from, and none were ours. We rang up support, and they told us to 'pick any address', ring back an hour later, and they'd change it to our address. We did this. The girl who answered, an hour later, told us that it took a while for orders to come through, and we'd have to call back tomorrow. We did this, and the person who took our address very thoroughly, triple checked and double checked our address, assured us it would go to the right place and we hung up and waited.
And they still sent it to the poor person whose address we'd randomly picked.
And the story doesn't end there, because the reason we ordered online is because they were giving away a free wireless speaker valued at a few hundred dollars each for each online order, and those have been delayed.
So, what's the bet, that even if we ring up and complain and verify our address AGAIN, they still send the speaker to the wrong address, and we play tag with the postal service an hour and a half away again?
*
I have loaded up the new phone with a bunch of things, some of which more interesting than others.
Stitch is an amazing app for ravelry. I have been having so much fun poking it. I love that you can take a photo of your project with your phone, then push a button in stitch and it will upload it to the photo gallery of the the project you're making. So easy! And it is so much quicker to look through my project gallery and queue on Stitch than it is on the actual website. Seriously, it's worth having the app just for that capability. It doesn't let you do everything the full website does, but there's nothing stopping you from signing into the website with your mobile browser for anything you can't do in Stitch.
uKnit is another useful app that gives you basic stitch counter, gauge calculator, and yards<->metres conversion. It also has a built in inches and cm ruler that takes a matter of moments to calibrate, with 'bigger' and 'smaller' buttons to tweak it down or up until it's precisely lined up with your brickspace measuring tape.
Endomondo is a fitness app that tracks all kind of things. I went for a walk and it was really good. I turned off the automatic pausing once I got home, because it kept thinking I'd stopped when I hadn't, but once it actually connected back with my home wifi, it was able to show me a map of the route I'd taken, and everything. Considering that mobile reception, what there is of it in this place, does not extend to most data things (and my phones tend to be 'emergency only' if at all), it's impressive that it was smart enough to work out where I'd gone from where I started and finished.
Lists & Things Free looks like it's going to be really useful - you can make both shopping lists and to do lists, and put a heap of information in about each item, should you choose.
The app for Evernote is also really ace, and there's an alternative to the Twitter app called rowi (it has a kiwi as its icon) that Emma seems pretty happy with.
I've downloaded a bunch more than that, but these are the ones I've found that are really good so far. I'm not planning on loading the phone up with a heap of junk I'm never going to use, but things that I'm actively going to use are definitely getting stuck on there.
*
I've done both cuffs and one heel of my Carousel socks. There are updated pictures here! Now featuring both socks the right way out, and no cat. Sorry, cat people. If it makes you feel better, he's lying next to me, grooming himself, fishy breath and all.
*
I made drunken risotto for dinner, and went with chorizo, vegetables, port, arborio rice and cheese and butter and it was delicious. What can I say, I had cauliflower and broccoli stalks to use up.
I chucked it all together, shoved it in the oven, and went for a walk before it got too dark. According to the app, I walked about 1.25km in 16 and a bit minutes. I don't know that I trust it a huge amount, since the pause thing kept turning it on and off, but it gives me a rough idea of how far I went.
And then I came home and ate risotto for tea, but who cares. It was delicious.
*
I've got the fruit and sugar macerating away in prep for jam making tomorrow, since the weather's cool enough right now to tolerate standing over boiling sugar in a room I can't open the windows of, and also because it'll be the last chance I get before we go away on Thursday to Sydney. It's a mix this time. Two yellow peaches that were on the turn, three apricots and half a dozen or so white peaches. I should get a nice jam from them, anyway. Now I just have to sort out jars ahead of time, rather than getting caught with all the wrong sizes like last time.
*
Fic rec today: This is about as different from the last fluffy unicorn rec as you can get, but it's worth it, if it's your thing. I don't read a lot of heavy kink or BDSM, not because it doesn't interest me, or that I think it's always badly written, but often I find the way it's written is either too mechanical, to the point that the characters aren't distinct any more from any other porn stars, or that it includes things that push my DNW buttons, like derogatory language (as distinct from dirty talk), humiliation, some of the darker side of consent play, spiteful sadism, unequal power balance, and some roleplay scenarios. I'm generally not interested in total scene, either.
That said, the right author, writing about something in the right way can sell me on almost anything. I'm a very omnivorous reader, and I think I've read pretty much anything over the years in fandom.
So, I'm really enjoying a series that's currently being written in Avengers fandom. It's called Don't Look Too Closely (all the angles are oblique) by
shaenie, and it's an alternate scenario for Tony and Steve meeting, so it avoids movie canon all together. It's got kink negotiation, safe sex negotiation, boundary exploration, moderate BDSM and kink, and it is blindingly hot. Steve and Tony are coming from very different places and have very different levels of sexual experience, but they are so damn into each other almost from first sight that it startles them both, and ratchets up the sexual tension until it crackles. There's something deep on an emotional level going on, and both of then know it, and are a bit drawn to it while being a little scared. The story that went up today (Will You Strike While He's Still Loading) is the third in the series, and I'm hoping that the story keeps going the way it's going, because it's rare I find something that I like this much in this genre.
And just to illustrate the point I made at the beginning, the author has written another Avengers story that isn't my thing. Not badly written, I finished it, just YKINMKBYKIOK, and all that. :)
This entry was originally posted at http://iamshadow.dreamwidth.org/367175.html. Please comment there using OpenID.