Category: Life
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You are not free to roam…
I recently bit the bullet and bought the BlackBerry Bold I’d coveted for so long. One of the primary drivers was that I’m due to spend a fair bit of time in Japan this year, and I wanted a phone that I could use over there. My first trip is fast approaching (next week), and as part of my preparations, I thought I’d check the details of my ‘phone plan. Sadly, it appears that although my ‘phone will technically work in Japan, actually using it there is a whole ‘nother ball game. To start with, AT&T list the international roaming charges in Japan… Read more
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Going Postal
I needed to send some important/urgent papers back to England, this week. I had everything prepared over the weekend, and wanted to get them sent off on Monday. There’s a Post Office about half a mile from my office, but it’s always crowded at lunchtime, so I thought I’d quickly nip out mid-morning. Unfortunately, my plans to be back before anyone noticed I had gone didn’t take into consideration the permanent go-slow that the Post Office staff seem to be on. I was about the 6th person in the queue when I got there. Not great, but pretty good compared to the usual… Read more
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Roadside disservice
I’ve been having a couple of issues with my car, recently. For some reason, when you turn the ignition, if it doesn’t start the first time, it won’t the second, or third, or fourth…you basically have to sit back for half an hour and then try again. If I’d had the time and money I would have taken it into the dealership and had it looked at, but I’m nothing if not a procrastinator (I think – I’ll have to give it some more thought later), so I just left it. As a workaround, I just developed a specific combination of… Read more
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Safety is in the eye of the beholder
Today, I attended the mandatory hour-and-a-half ‘newcomer’ safety training for my current work location. I’ve actually been here at this location for three months already, but I wasn’t able to attend the last quarterly conduct because I was too busy actually doing my damn job (I was on a site visit at another location). I also learned this week that my project team is being moved back to my old location next month. So learning how to ‘be safe’ at this location at this stage in the game seems like a bit of a waste of time – hell, I’ve… Read more
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They delayed the Dancing With The Stars vote for THIS?
So here’s to four years of non-specific ‘change’. After a solid 18 months of tedious, blanket media coverage, Barack Obama finally beat John McCain in the U.S. Presidential Election, and will now be the youngest and blackest president in American history. Obama has (at the time of writing) some 349 electoral votes to McCain’s 163 (and he only needed 270 to win). This looks like a good two-thirds majority, but is it really? Bear with me as we take a closer look at the statistics. (Sorry, but my eldest was reading up on citizenship for his Scouts badge, so I was… Read more