Be Excellent To Each Other

Thanks, I'll bear that in mind if I don't get a fix from O2.

Yeah, I'd be swapping - go via Topcashback to make it even more worthwhile. Unlimited texts and calls seems extravagant - I rarely use any - but you can go way under £10. And these days it's just a couple of texts to port your number.

I had a similar situation when I had home broadband and two mobiles with the same telco, they just couldn't seem to change one thing without messing up another, it was infuriating.

Moving to a different telco (and then back again when there was a good deal) seemed to do the trick, it was like starting over. It really shouldn't be that hard though.

I had a call on Monday from Theresa at O2's Complaints Review Service in response to my email complaint. Unfortunately, the screenshots of my account that I attached weren't visible, but she understood the problems I was having. She'd had a look at my account said that it appeared my number is associated with both a Pay and Go and a Pay Monthly account, so she was taking it up with the Migrations Back Office Team.

I haven't had a text to tell me to top up on Pay and Go, which I'd usually have had by now, so it looks like the've been tweaking things. I've also just checked on the phone app and the on-line account and the references to Pay and Go have disappeared, but it's not showing my Pay Monthly allowances yet. Perhaps they'll appear when the first DD payment is taken.

They're definitely fiddling with it, my SIM became 'not provisioned' just after I posted the previous update.

All sorted now.

"Drone art"

Absolutely do one.

MIDI channels are my new SCSI id’s.

I can't, I've only got one drone and I've never learned to fly it.

I'd like to cancel please ........... Oh.

I won an Apple HomePod Mini at work, but we already have 5(?) Echos around the house so now I have to sell it.

The cat sitters got confused about when we needed them to feed the cats and turned up at 6:15am and not pm.

We want to change our broadband provider as the internet keeps going down but we can't as the internet keeps going down.

I went to see a theatrical show that a certain lady friend was involved in. It was bloody awful. There's a limit to just how polite about it I can be.

Was the lady your own mother?

Awful because the writing was no good, or because the acting or production were less than skilled?

The latter! It was a charity thing and so I'm not going to be mean about it but I've said a lot of things like "you all looked like you were having so much fun" and "I can tell how hard everyone worked"

You did good to find those positives, at least. Having seen a lot of Am-Dram you really have to let go of expectations Sometimes you find a lovely surprise. The most surprising piece of theatre I’ve ever been to was a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, done by the year 5s at a local primary school when I was about 17-18. It was excellent, brilliantly acted and the staging was *chef’s kiss*. I think about that show a lot.

"We sat through three hours of so-called acting last night and the kiss was the only convincing moment of it!"

Had to go back and check I didn't scan over that the first time, you scamp!

Haha, me too!

It wasn't quite that bad

On the topic of theatres, the New Theatre in Oxford is so proud of its fading 1930s interior that the closest men's toilets to the stalls remain utterly inadequate.

I know I could wander to other parts of the building during the interval, but that's not the point.

I got the batteries changed in my G-Shock and now one of the buttons doesn't work. The shop is a couple of towns over and my car is currently broken.

So I'm having to wear a nicer Seiko to work and I'd be upset if it gets a scratch or scuff.

I don't want 'romance' options in games.

My selfie camera is still broken.

But that was the best bit of Leisure Suit Larry, although I guess that's using the term 'romance' somewhat loosely.

I should have bought two extra TS tickets and then sold them., looking at the resale prices.

Nah, I would have taken two friends.

You have TWO friends?

More iPod classic/iTunes/file renaming shenanigans.

I've been gradually renaming the thousands of music files I copied from my iPod to my Windows laptop and putting them in album folders, before copying them on to my phone, but I had a lot of tracks in playlists on the iPod so wanted to replicate those on my phone. I couldn't find any way of copying those playlists, so I had to manually make notes of all the tracks in each playlist and then manually create them on the phone. I also suspected that I might have lost some of the files I'd copied off the iPod, so plugged it back into the laptop to see if my memory was playing tricks on me.

For unknown reasons, Windows 11 sometimes doesn't really recognise the iPod and neither does iTunes, so I have to keep disconnecting and reconnecting it until it plays ball. After one such reconnection Windows said it could see the iPod as an external drive, but that it needed formatting. It's done that before and I've just hit [Cancel] and started again. This time, not only did it want to format the drive, but when I'd cancelled the formatting, it said drive D: had been corrupted and no attempts to recover it were successful. But then iTunes offered to reinstall the classic software, but warned that all data would be lost. So now I've got a virtually empty but working iPod classic, and have only been able to make notes of a couple of playlists. At least I HAD copied everything off the iPod on to the laptop.

So I thought I'd better make a backup of all the music files on to the external hard drive I bought a few months ago.

It only took a few minutes, but when I looked at the Music folder I'd copied across, Explorer said it was empty. I wondered if I'd made a mistake of some sort while copying, so I was going to try again, only to find that the Music folder on the laptop was also empty, at which point I had a moment of panic. BUT, when I asked Explorer to show me the Properties for the Music folder, it said it contained 4006 files and 393 folders. Then I had a look at the external drive and found that it also had 4006 files and 393 folders. Windows 11 decided to hide the contents of the folders during the copying process. Why would it do that??? And why did it successfully copy the iTunes folder, with the files that haven't yet renamed and copied on to the phone without making them hidden folders during the same copying process?! Fuck knows.