Other What currently makes your life awesome?

After a fairly intense period of stress, illness, much time at the hospital, more stress and even more illness (of the less severe, but still majorly inconvenient kind), it's looking like we're all out of the woods?!

I got some catching up to do!

 

You've caught yourself a doge!

 

Two things!

The Prague Philharmonic was very good last night

And this morning I successfully replaced the microswitches on my G500, which means I don't have to buy yet another mouse.

 

Snap, i got ideeded (!) yesterday too.

Had a chat with the delivery guy, apparently the day before he had to ask for id off a lady in her nineties - he wasn't best chuffed about that.

 

You'd think that they could check via your account and whether you're using a CC.

Any other way and you have to think they're concerned about fake accounts.

 

I've had that a few times recently - I suppose it's to stop underages buying booze off Amazon. The thing that makes me laugh is that the 'couriers' have not once entered the details from my drivers licence correctly (DoB or name).

 

A driver was chatting to me about that recently as well whilst I was digging out my license - he hated it as he'd been chewed out a dozen times in a week by 40+somethings fuming about it.

How bleak does one's life really have to be to get angry about being carded, even to the point of ranting at the poor delivery driver?

 

Aye, i just said it'd been years since i'd been id checked and i was a bit chuffed about it

Not sure how you'd get angry unless you generally have issues.

 

Upgraded my VM bundle to get an unlimited data SIM card for an extra tenner a month...one of the side effects was this...



Still cheaper, even after the "introductory discount", than I used to pay for Sky & BT combined plus I get Sky movies as well.

 

Show off...

 

The most awesome part of it is how much I am saving.

Previously the Sky TV (no movies, 1 Sky box), BT BB (36Mb/s) and 3 EE SIM's (one with 500mb data, 2 with 250mb) was costing me just over £180 a month, now I am paying £108 for Sky TV with movies, over 500Mb/s and 3 SIM's (one with unlimited data, 2 with 8GB) for the next 12 months, rising to £153 after that. You can't complain about a saving of nearly £900 in the first year then a saving of £363 a year after that.

As I am one of the first in the street to get VM, I have a few years before they start over-subscribing to enjoy a speed that the household will likely never fully utilise.

 

It was about two years between me registering interest on their website to get cable and it actually arriving in our street. I found out it was coming about 6 months before I got it.

The trick is to get the cable BB first in your street before they start over-subscribing. I first got cable in the late 90's (10Mb/s) then moved house with it twice, constantly getting free upgrades in speed. Eventually in 2006 or 2008 there was a fault in the local "box" feeding my house (caused by oversubscription) which they wouldn't fix for about 6 months (they were about to replace all the boxes) so, as I worked from home and couldn't do without a working connection, I moved to ADSL before moving to my current house.

My cable went from Cable London to Blueyonder to NTL Telewest to Virgin Media. When it works it's great, it just works. When it doesn't then the support is appalling - when I had the local box fault in the last house, the only way I could find out what the problem was to post a message on a Usenet board frequented by VM engineers, the "support" lines wouldn't tell me anything other than "we'll give you a discount" - I got free (unusable) cable BB for 6 months.

 

Virgin cabled all around our old house and the surrounding area, it was done by the the we got back from NZ.

Nearly 3 years on and we've moved house and Virgin still wasn't available there.

 

Yeah, it will vary greatly depending on where you are. I am in suburban North London so the density probably made it worth their while to install it quicker.

 

I suspect the main problem here is Amazon requiring age verification, where there is no apparent need.

I have bought wood carving knives, wood chisels, hammers, axes, screwdrivers and a splitting maul, from Amazon in the last year or so and have never been asked to verify my age. Amazon need to look at how the requirement is applied.

 

At least if you live in an urban/suburban area you have a chance of getting cable. VM don't do villages and Connecting Devon and Somerset are as much use as a chocolate teapot that has already melted before you try to use it.