24November2009
Posted by Robert under: all posts; games; valve games.
A6BQXSMBXD9S [for Technorati, please ignore]
If, like me, you are looking to round off your Half Life 2 Episode 2 achievements, you’ll want to have a look at the following two guides:
Get Some Grub
Not tricky, just time consuming. Have a look at Nibbles’ guide on GameFAQs (link), which painstakingly walks you through all 333 of the grubs. My advice is to save regularly on different slots, and if the number you have doesn’t match what the guide says you should have, reload. It just saves on headaches further down the road. Should only take you about 3 hours, and that’s if you’re carriny the gnome with you…
…which brings me nicely to:
Little Rocket Man
This one is time consuming as well, but not particularly difficult. Just set him down when fighting and carry him with you the whole way. The tricky parts are the car segments, as the gnome tends to slide out. I would recommend wedging him in the back window; this way he doesn’t slide out while you are driving (unless you hit something, which releases the ‘wedge’. Or you can put him under the steering column and drive slowly.
This is all fine, until you get to the bit with the gunship. Oh, the gunship. It will fire at you and knock the gnome out your hands, hurt you plenty (even on easy), and if it could sspeak I’m pretty sure it would taunt you all the while. What I ended up doing was driving for say 300 metres, getting out, picking up the gnome, carrying him from behind cover (eg under trains), wedging him in, driving for another short bit, leaping out and getting him again, and so forth. The key is cover.
Have a look at Tommy Gun’s guide at Cracked Rabbit Gaming. It gives more useful info, like where you can safely leave the gnome for certain segments.
16November2009
Posted by Robert under: life; spanish adventure.
So, as of yesterday evening, I’ve been here for a week. Since my last post I have moved out of the guest house. I’m grateful for this, the room was dark all day around (or light, if you put the single flourescent light on). It was adequate, but no more.
I am currently staying with a friend (who is technically a friend of a friend, but they are so friendly and helpful it would be an insult to call them that now). A big thank you to Sabela for letting me crash here while I find a place, and for translating things from and to Spanish. ‘Big help’ would be an understatement.
Flat hunting is a monumental task, twice ior three times so in a foreign language. I’ve gone through hundreds of listings on loquo.com and culled a (long) shortlist of 30ish places to view. I have organised them by priority, so I (hopefully) won’t have to work my way though them all! I’ve seen a few… more on that later.
I met my contact who I got in contact with thanks to a friend at the amnesty group I’m a part of (thanks David). She was (brutally) honest about my chances of finding employment here. The fact that I’m Scottish will work in my favour in an Irish bar (close enough, apparently), but even still I’ll be very lucky to get a job. I’ll still pursue the teaching Spanish angle, but even that is less hopeful than I had initially hoped. Might have to burn a bit of money unfortunately!
Flats and the hunting thereof
I. Hate. Flathunting. At least, I hate doing it in a language in which I am not competent. More specifically, I hate speaking on the phone in a language which I am not competent and – to a lesser extent – talking to people in person in a language in which I’m not competent.
Perfectionist, or just a craven coward?
As far as I’m concerned, the main thing for me is that I just don’t have all the words to convey what I mean. This in itself isn’t a nice feeling. I now have a much greater empathy for people who suffer this problem. The other problem is, well… I don’t want to say something unless I’m going to say it right. The fact that I might stuff it up or forget words/phrases creates a whole bunch of anxiety for me, which I something I’m not so familiar with any more. It’s a bit of a ridiculous viewpoint, looking at it coldly and logically, but unfortunately cold logic can;t snap me out of it. I’ve tried.
I mean, trying (and perhaps failing) to speak another language is much better than taking refuge in my own language; and people aren’t going to hate me if I sound silly. On paper (or on a blog) it’s all very straightforward, but see when I go to dial a number for a flat, or even get through to someone, the panic is paralysing.
What I’m going to do is try a fun little technique. When I decide I need to phone someone, I’m going to do it as quickly as possible, suppressing all other thought and hopefully I’ll be able to sneak past myself and have the phone call before I realise what’s going on. Either that or have a couple of beers to take the edge off first…
Serendipity
(ramble, feel free to skip!)
I went to view a flat today. It was one from the top of the pile, so it was one I was quite keen on. €310/350 a month (two rooms available).
So anyway I walk there for 2PM in shorts an a t shirt, which I mention only to gloat about how blissfully warm it is here. I get there, check the number, ring tthe buzzer. No response. Again. And a third time. I get a rather irked voice telling me that I had the wrong place, I think. He has speaking fast and I was expecting to be buzzed in, so I was a bit overwhelmed. So anyway I figure I could phone one of the two people I had a number for, but I figured I should check I had the right street first. I did.
When I got back to the place, there was someone with a piece of paper and who was getting the same treatment from the now-presumably-even-more-irked man. I ventured an “Hola” and stuttered my way through asking if we were looking for the same place… which eventually amounted to just pointing to my corresponding piece of paper. She agreed we had the same place. In English, I should add. It turns out she had booked a viewing for the same place at the same time. She phoned the contacts. Y didn’t answer, but A did. We were told to press the buzzer that we had been pressing all along, so we did again just for the sake of the thing. Nada. My fellow-flathunter (M) phoned Y again and we told that the place had been rented. Most curious.
M didn’t have another viewing till 4, so I suggested a coffee over which we could compare notes, so to speak, on flats. M said she was here from Paris to look for flats for January, when she will be coming to start her PhD. No easy task – I think all the flats I have seen on loquo have been entry 1) now 2) a week or 3) December. Anyway, potentially mutually useful came of it – M had seen a flat she liked, but was unable to take it as they wanted her to enter in December, which of course would mean paying for a month unnecessarily; so she offered me the details and so I may have a place to stay till December. While it is lovely of Sabela to continue to let me crash here, I don’t want to wear out my welcome. We shall see! I did my best to be helpful by furnishing M with the details of a place with 2 smokers, which would suit her better than non-smoking places.
As an aside, it is surprising how many places are listed on loquo as ‘non-smokers only’; it seems (seems!) like there are a lot more smokers here than in Glasgow. Even if that isn’t true, there are a lot more pedal bikes, motorbikes, and scooters.
So I have several places to view tomorrow, and many many more to phone. Good luck to me! I have rambled enough, if I think of anything that needs added, I will below.
9November2009
Posted by Robert under: all posts; life.
Another after-the-fact post. This is written at about 1420 on the 9th of November.
Right. So after sleeping in this morning (my room has no external light and my phone had no charge) I went down to the nearest movistar shop to get a SIM card. Once again, I found the place mostly through luck (I didn’t even know what it was called). It took me about 2 hours in total to go, go the phone and get back. 2 hours! Also, i seem to have ended up with 2 phones instead of the single SIM card. Why? BEcause they didn’t have any SIMs alone in stock, a single cheapo phone was €26, while *two* cheapo phones were €20. Mine’s not to reason why.
So I’ve gotten in touch with home to let them know I’m alive, etc etc; and contacted my contact to let them know I am here, and I’m still waiting to hear back from them. they themselves may be en-route back here but who knows.
I also discovered that my Wifi switch was off and there is in fact a LOT of wireless acess points in range. Sadly, all are encrypted. Even *more* sadly, the strongest wignal is WEP encrypted which means if I hbad been able to install Linux before I left I could have had a shot at, ah, decrypting the signal. For funsies, of course. Sadly my drives are in a RAID that I couldn’t get the standard or alternate Ubuntu 9.10 installer to like, so it was not to be. the alt. installer did see the RAID, to be fair, but it only would let me partition the whole disk when I had already partitioned the space. Sigh. I didn’t want to risk it and install anyway as I’ve had bad experiences with that recently.
(For those that are interested: I decided to upgrade my dad’s machine from 9.04 to 9.10. It seemed to work okay at first, in fact I went away while it was downloading the packages and came back and it was sitting at a 9.10 desktop. Sadly, after a cold boot things went bad. It refused to mount /tmp for some reason (I think) and I couldn;t see a quick way of fixing it (this was on Saturday morning when I had to leave in a couple of hours). So I decided to reinstall 9.10. Still no luck. So I decided to go back to 9.04. it then decided there was a problem reading form the CD or hard drive (it wasn’t specific) and refused to install. It did this three times, before a firm reboot got it to co-operate. This was with literally about 15 minutes to go before my train arrived. Needless to say, it added to my stress somewhat.)
Anyway, time for me to have a wander around this place to see if there is a notice up regarding wifi passwords in here. If not, I’ll pop round to the (do doubt extortionate) internet cafe a couple blocks away.
ADDENDUM: No, not that I can see. No-one to ask either. Oh well, time to start contacting people about flats…
8November2009
Posted by Robert under: all posts; life.
This post is retroactively posted as there’s no wifi at the place I’m staying. It’s 2242 local time (so 2142 UK time), and by now I’ve arrived, checked in (kinda, more on that later) and eaten. Getting here was, well, interesting.
Firstly, I saw Eddie Izzard at the MEN arena last night. He was pretty damn funny from where I was sitting anyway – and I was in a pretty good seat. Some good jokes, although a lot of callbacks to his old material. Not too much I suppose, but a couple of them felt more for the audience’s sake than because it was funny in and of itself. Anyway, I hold Eddie to impeccably high standards, so it’s natural that I find a small fault which probably only existed in my mind. If you can, go and see him.
Getting to Manchester Airport was a dawdle, thanks to the airport rail link. I really do hope Glasgow does get it’s airport link, it makes so much sense.
Checking in, etc, was fine. Although I think airports generate ’stupid fields’ as my IQ definitely slipped a few points going through there. The flight itself was fine, at a short 1 hr 40 min. I fall asleep so easily on flights. Like, there’s something about the engine droning that just sends my brain straight into delta waves. Or something. i’m going to try to recreate that when I go to sleep at the end of this post.
The temperature was 12°C on touchdown, which is a very pleasant temperature. Once I got off the plane, things started to get interesting.
Barcelona airport is member of the “Brotherhood of Airports that Generate ’stupid fields’”. I say this as I went and stood in the non-EU citizen line at first, and wondered why it wasn’t moving. D’oh. Sorted myself in the right line, got trhough and started looking for baggage claim. Well, it wasn’t by the place we came out of. Apparently we had to go out of the exit and get it from another part of the airport. Another terminal, in fact. So, confused me went a-wandering through the airport, through more security (where the ’stupid field’ intensifies and is compounded by the language barrier), and eventually found the correct baggage claim, partly through luck. Got my bag whchi by now had a broken strap – thankfully non-critical.
So I went to find some transport. My initial plan had been to find a taxi, but having looked at a map, I found that the place I was staying in was pretty central, probably a 5 or 10 minute walk from where the bus terminated. What’s more, the bus probably costs about a tenth of what the taxi does. So, getting a bus was now my plan. Then I met an Irishman with a Scouse accent.
Yes, an Irish man with an accent that wouldn’t sound a bit out of place in an episode of Brookside. He was ranting and raving about Ryanair buggering him about (i’ll spare you the grisly details) but he recommended I get the train into the city, reasoning that a T10 card works on both the train and the metro and is fairly cheap. Fair enough said I. So I wandered back through the airport to find the train station, which I did eventually. The trains left every half hour, so of course I arrived 5 minutes after one had left. Sigh.
I eventually got on the train, and as it pulled away at the station at high speed (Spanish trains don’t run on electricity, they run on pure WIN) I realised I hadn’t the foggiest idea which station I was meant to get off at. Oh dear. So I sat on my seat, alternating between vaguely terrified and a Twoflower-esque calmness as I reasoned that I could sort it out eventually, even if I did end up in Valencia. This was a real worry, as there are trains to Manchester airport from Glasgow, so there was a real possibility I’d end up in another city hundreds of miles away.
I got off at a station that had metro signs up (phew). I wandered upstairs and found a map and realised that the place where I wanted to be was only 4 or 5 (or somewhere up to 8, the map was imprecise) blocks away. Did I decide to walk it? For a change I was sensible and decided not to, reasoning I had nealy 17kg on my bag and another bag that was around 10 kilos. So I got a metro train instead. The Barcelona metro is a wondderful thing. I’ve always supported the simple Glasgow circle, but seriously we could learna thing or two from these guys. Oddly enough, it was curiously reminiscent of the Newcastle metro, and I mean no disrespect by that.
I got off at Place Catalunya, which seems to be the Barcelona equivalent of Times Square. On reaching ground level the first person I encountered tried to sell me drugs (told you it was like Times Square). Anyway, after a quick look around I realised that although this place was undoubtedly close to where I wanted to be, I didn’t actually know where that was. Bugger. I set off in what seemed like an appropriate direction until I came to a map. I would say that it wasn’t a very clear or helpful map, but it did get me going in the general direction I wanted to go, although I claim some of the credit. I walked up the big road which I forget the name of (big, wide, apparently famous street), and after a block or two another realisation hit me. I was on the right road (hurray), but I had no idea if I was going in the right direction. I decided to hedge my bets and kept going in the direction I was already heading in, hoping I’d find the street that crossed it soonish.
After a couple of crossroads of not recognising street names I must confess my hope was dwindling (and my back and shoulders were killing me) and I stopped and asked for directions in a smallish hotel. The rather nice chap informed me that iwas indeed going the right way and had only another block to go till I hit the correct street! So I found the street (hurrah!), and then promptly failed to find the guest house (horroo.). I found the correct number, but there was no facade, and no sign to indicate there was a guest house there. In fact it just looked like a residential block.
It is hard to convey the sinking feeling I had at that moment, without involving the Titanic or quicksand or other things of that nature. I could see things unravelling, spiralling out of control… But wait! First I decided to get a damn good grip on myself and make a quick enquiry in the restaurant beside the place. The buy at the bar knew what I wanted to ask before I had asked it, bless him. Apparently the guest house was where I was trying, I just had to puch the right buzzer. Hmm. I got it on the second try and after some strainedshoew conversation I was buzzed in.
I showed the nice-if-rather-confused lad my booking confirmation. You see, the proprietor (Vincent, if memory serves) was not there and so they didn’t know I was meant to be staying there. He and the person helping him out (who seems to be English, but hasn’t said “God bless the Queen” yet to confirm) agreed that I had thew right place, and I should probably come in. I was shown to a rather small room and asked if I wanted it. I answered yes, of course, as I figured my alternative was to say no and leave, and my neck and shoulders would just not have put up with that by then.
I gave myself a rinse and a change of t-shirt (walking while burdened is hot work) and went out to get some food. I must confess that I opted for a Burger King that I espied on Placa Catalunya> I was not in the mood for adventure. Also, I figured if language was a problem I could grunt and point at the pictures. I wasn’t lowering myself to McDonalds though (I passed two on the way to BK). I do have *some* standards. After a BK Doble Cheese Bacon (with chips and water) I felt a lot better and headed back to the guest house. I had to buzz twice to be let in (they had no spare keys to furnish me with). I was on my way in when the buzzer was answered (the street door was ajar and I figured I could hammer on the internal door) which was momentarily confusing.
So anyway I went for a wash of the face and to put some aqueous cream on my face. My skin has been quite dry and itchy lately; I have removed part of one of my eyebrows with scratching. It’ll regrow. I know this from experience, sadly. All I’m saying is don’t eat a LOT of vodka jelly in the company of some poeople you do not know. My aqueous cream seemed to have been opened by inspectors (joy). I don’t know what they did, but it seems to have been diluted. It’s now a proper sloshing liquid instead of a viscous cream. Most peculiar.
Right. Bedtime. First I must go ask for some water (I’m hilariously thirsty… no, deliriously thirsty) from one of the other residents. I know they’re awake as I can hear music playing. So goes my first night.
ADDENDUM: I’m told the tap water in this place isn’t good to drink. It has cement in it (?!). Fuckery.
7November2009
Posted by Robert under: all posts.
Well, I’m actually leaving tomorrow… which is technically today. Actually, Sunday if you mean the country. But still the strains of the Divine Comedy’s mournful leaving song echo in my ears. My work got me a going away card + cake(s) + present, which was jolly nice of them. The card was especially lovely:
Aww.
Anyway, as I travel tomorrow I should round off my packing. I’ll leaving you with a short joke I came up with while writing this. The idea’s been done before in different forms, but I think my version’s timing works best:
I suggested to my swimmer friend that he should shave all over. He looked surprised.
Thank you, and goodnight.
2November2009
Posted by Robert under: all posts; life; pointless crap.
The title of this post conveniently ignores all the other pins I’ve earned, which must be at least…. for certain… that I know of… to be sure… 1 other. If not more. Maybe. Anyway, having earned pins in games such as the Battlefield series, it was interesting to actually get one. What’s more fun is it’s in the same style: “Do X, Y times, get pin”. In this case instead of “revive 8 people in a round” it was “have your blood drained 10 times”. I thought it had been more, but obviously I’ll need to visit the vampires more.
In other semi-interesting news, I bought a laptop. It’s a Dell M1730 and it’s big, beefy, weighs about the same as a 2 year old and draws enough power to dim the lights when I turn it on. In the neighbourhood, that is. Also, while we’re on ridiculous things, the display has the same resolution as my 28-inch monitor and they keyboard has a numpad.
I’d give you a picture of the laptop too, but my camera has electric arthritis and just grinds and whinges in a manner reminiscent of a small child in an antique shop. Still, that at least gives me ANOTHER thing to buy for going away, which is happening this Sunday by the way. Yay! Or rather, I’m going broke like I have a terminal disease.
PS Twitpic doesn’t like it if you link to files from outside of it, which should be obvious except to me.
(If my writing seems out of sorts it’s because in my head it’s the rapid sardonic babble of Ben Croshaw, or Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation to give him his Sunday name)
27October2009
Posted by Robert under: all posts; hardware.
Edit: Forgot to include noise-cancelling / in-ear / tin can headphones as an option. Thanks George! Jump to the choices if you want to skip the blah.
Between my last post and now I have had the opportunity to load up my shiny new iPod Classic with some of my music and give it a spin, so to speak. Everything seems hunky dory (my Bowie collection is going on tonight), apart from the fairly major issue of volume capping.
It seems that Apple set a cap on all EU iPods due to a French law limiting devices to an output of 100 dB or somesuch. As usual, the internets are somewhat confused on the issue – I’ve seen posts blaming it on “the socialist EU government”, “EU health and safety regulations”, “the Frenchys” [sic], and Apple. Except the ones about Apple don’t blame it as such, just say they did it because a French law exists. Interestingly, I’ve also seen reports of this affecting our antipodean friends’ iPods, although I think this is probably because Apple feel that if someone is getting screwed in electronics they might as well screw the Aussies (and NZ) in case they start expecting not to get screwed. One day they have iPods that aren’t volume capped, then they start saying that $100 is a bit pricey for a video game, actually. It’s a slippery slope.
Anyway, I don’t really care *why* my iPod is capped (well I do, but I’m not going to moast about it any further*), I just want to know how to fix it. Now, had this been an iPod Touch I might have been in luck, as apparently you can edit a certain .plist file, or just jailbreak it. Alternatively, had it been an iPod Nano or another model of a certain generation, gopod might have worked, but it doesn’t. Apparently, there isn’t much you can do to fix a current model iPod Classic (160 GB) due to the firmware being encrypted.
However, user maniacco posted on the macrumours forums (linky, page 3 for that post, but the whole thing is worth reading) saying that deleting the iPodPrefs file (in a hidden directory called “iPod Control”) made things louder for him. As an aside, he does say it may be due to the placebo effect, which I find pretty insightful. Try it, it may work for you. Back the file up first, of course.
Another user (Wills) posted the following:
I also bought an Ipod classic 80 gb from the UK after I had an american one and was dissapointed from the volume cap 
Tonight reading the forum and looking for solution I also tried couple of things using iTunes. And I managed to make it sound louder!!!
1. First look at you iPod settings and SOUND CHECK must be ON and the volume limit must be set to maximum.
2. I connected the ipod to my laptop and waited until iTunes show up on my screen
3. I clicked on EDIT and choose the PREFERENCE option (last one)
4. After second window was open I clicked on PLAYBACK and choose the SOUND CHECK option on. SOUND ENHANCER was already set to HIGH.
5. Then I clicked OK and waited until all my songs were adjusted.
6. I disconnected the iPod from my laptop
7. Then I changed the SOUND CHECK option on my Ipod to OFF.
8. Now you can try is the volume different 
You can also fiddle a bit with the EQ settings and choose the best for you. I prefer R&B.
It definitely worked on my iPod.
I’m skeptical, as I can’t see how this would work around the firmware-based cap. However, I did both of these things and blow me if it doesn’t seem louder. it may be that it is now loud enough for me, or it may be that I had a particularly quiet ride into work. My (highly unscientific, subjective) tests conclude that my new iPod is definitely quieter than my own one.
(The test for those that are interested is to play B.Y.O.B. by System of a Down on full volume. If I can listen to that without discomfort I know it’s too quiet. This is how I originally noticed it was too quiet too.)
Choices
The question is, what the hell do I do if I still find it too quiet? As I see it I have 4 options:
- Grin and bear it. Less than ideal, although the iPod does work, and it doubles as a portable hard drive.
- Return the iPod Classic and buy an iPod Touch for either jailbreaking or the plist mod. I’m loathe to do this as I’m paying significantly more for something with less storage and a lot of facilities I don’t need. it also seems wrong to reward Apple with additional money for a limitation they imposed.
- Return the iPod and buy a different MP3 player. This is certainly possible, however it does require me to re-research the market (and trustedreviews doesn’t seem to have reviewed anything worthwhile in the last 3 years) and possibly end up spending a lot of time and money to end up with something inferior. Potentially. I could end up with something much better for cheaper, but I doubt it. Time is against me here.
- Buy a Boostaroo for £20 or so. Upsides: it should work, it’s an amp. Downsides: increases the effective cost of the iPod to £200ish; requires batteries which will require replacing periodically; another device to carry around (and potentially fail). Despite this, it is actually quite tempting – it means I get to keep my iPod Classic, which is so far otherwise fine. It can also split (duplicate?) signals, which is pretty cool.
- Buy noise-cancelling / in-ear headphones. Another tempting (and to be fair, the most sensible) option, except these tend to be even more expensive than 4, and I’m not sure about comfort – I’m very picky with my earphones. The other concern I have is that by blocking out weltjammer (I totally made that up, I mean world noise) I will step in front of a car by accident. I do pay attention, but the problem is if my mind wanders at the wrong time, I’m not going to have my ears to override my brain. Tough.
It’s a tough call. Well, between 3 and 4 (and 5, now that it is included) anyway. I will do some preliminary research and see if anything jumps out as an iPod killer, although I’m not that hopeful – it didn’t when I was looking to replace my broken one. Meantime, I will see how I go with my capped iPod.
(* Okay, just a little bit more. According to the Wikipedia page, the 1.1 firmware update made the cap even worse. Also, how difficult would it have been for Apple to leave people be? Make it an obscure option in a file somewhere. Leave the firmware unencrypted. Anything, really. But no, not only did they make it incredibly difficult (I won’t say impossible), but they send Cease and Desist notices to those that *do* figure it out. There’s no need for that.)
23October2009
Posted by Robert under: all posts; hardware.
…or as I like to call it “the place of Temptation, so tempting it requires a capital ‘t’”.
So I moseyed into the Apple Store, like I said I would. Pricing of the iPod Classic is in-line with the online Apple Store – £189. I wasn’t able to talk them down from that price as such; instead they let me know that they offer a 10% trade in, bringing the total to £170 ish. The guy in the store said the final price would be £161, and if they want to change me that that’s fine. I have student discount through my uni for the online store, but it no longer applies to music players, just Apple’s line of computers. Actually, the new MacBook is very steeply discounted (just over £110 off) which really, REALLY tests my willpower.
Now, the Geniuses upstairs in the store may be able to do something with my hard drive. I don’t know what they would charge for data recovery, and so I’m not sure if I’d be willing to pay; especially when I’m not sure of everything that’s on there. I think I’ll do my best puppy dog eyes when I go, and see if they at least offer to tell me what is on there for free.
23October2009
Posted by Robert under: all posts; pointless crap.
Well, it’s not really a tale, as a tale implies length. More of a cautionary anecdote… or cautionary aside. All right, a cautionary mentioned-in-passing.
I had intended to fix my iPod’s screen tonight. I’ve previously replaced a broken laptop screen, which has plenty of tricky, footery bits. However, in my attempt, I broke it completely. My humble, 4 or 5 year old player at least played music before… Now it just spins up the drive, has a quiet think to itself, then collapses into a sobbing heap on the floor.
I don’t want to put people off DIY repair, its possible to do. The screens are only like £10 ish. It’s not really that hard, even if the cables are footery, incompliant wee buggers at times. But it is very easy to mess up, especially if you don’t take care.
Also, really fucking important point here: no matter how confident you are of your repair skills, BACK DATA THE HELL UP BEFORE YOU START. Since the device was doubling as my portable hard drive, and since I’m occasionally a dribbling fool, I lost some important things. Mainly bookmarks from my portable Firefox installation and some documents I’d digitised. And some stuff I don’t actually remember putting on there, but believe me, it’s there. Or was. Or still is, just in inaccessible form.
Serves me right for not having a backup script for removable media in place. I will do that just as soon as I procure my replacement. I’ll mosey over to the Apple store tomorrow and see if I can’t haggle their price down from ridiculous to merely hideously profitable. If I can, then comes the act of restoring all my music and data. Joy of joys.
22October2009
Posted by Robert under: all posts; cool; life.
Well, not completely useless. A follow up to my post from a few months ago.
–
So, by now I have decided to go to Barcelona. I will be entering medical school next September, so don’t worry, I haven’t given that up! I don’t have any particular job lined up, but I have heard from various people that teaching English is the way to go. Importantly I have a very useful contact out there who has been most helpful in answering my many questions about accommodation, learning Spanish, the city, and a million other things. Don’t worry; they will be suitably rewarded.
Anyway, I figured it would be useful to have a bank account set up out there. I’m not really a pick up and go type person (I’m trying), and I figure that paying a bank to spend my own money (overseas fees FTL) is a form of ridiculousness I don’t want to be involved in. So, I went and asked my bank about their subsidiary over cashing a couple cheques, and the helpful chap actually went and phoned the Spanish team, who very promptly sent me an information pack and application form!
I must confess at this stage I dallied a bit, partly because the form was all Greek to me (well, Greek would have been an improvement, let’s say, oh, Finnish*) and partly because having it filled in would mean I actually have to leave.
So anyway eventually I got my rear in gear and went back to the branch and had some help from the lovely John (I think… might have been Dave. Sorry, whichever you are) who was as helpful as helpful can be.
The next day I went back with a couple questions I missed. Sadly, on this occasion I got someone somewhat less helpful. She said there was uncertainty as they didn’t really get many people in to do the Spanish stuff, only yesterday John/Dave had said the exact opposite. He was in close contact by email with their contact on the Spanish end, he even serendipitously got an email with her phone number which he used to clarify a couple of my questions. Confusing.
Then I had to convince the person dealing with me to certify a copy of my passport. Never mind this is something the same bank said I needed to do to as a prerequisite for opening my new account. Part of the problem was I wanted to take it away with me, as I was intending to send my documents next day delivery due to an impending Royal Mail strike. More on that later. Anyway I finally got out of the bank an hour later after going through the rigmarole of the international monetary transfer. Did you know the FBI can get information on your transfer (and you) pretty much just by asking nicely? Or any other organisation, bound or not bound by Data Protection Laws. What fun. At least the person doing the transfer was quite pleasant, although she did question my being at university for 9 years – purely from a financial point of view, right enough.
Anyway, after all that, the bit that restored / boosted my confidence (apart from JohnDave and his helpfulness) was that I put a handwritten note in with my application saying essentially: “THERE’S A STRIKE ON, PLEASE BE CLEVER AND NOTIFY ME BY SOME MEANS OTHER THAN POST”. The next day, they phoned me and did just that. The system works. In this specific circumstance. For me, anyway. Kinda.
So now all I have to do is sort flights and accommodation. After that, I’ll probably do something even more fun, like self immolation.