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…