Monday.  6th.  Backdating because of the Second Great Vodien Outage of 2023.

Slept ok.  Urgghh they forced me to start using Windoze 11 at work.  I hate Windoze 11. So. Much.  Even worse is that notifications are all but invisible.  Skype changes the colour of its icon ever so subtly and there's a tiny red dot under the icon instead of a tiny blue dot.  So I'm missing stuff all the time.  And don't even get me started on not being able to ungroup task bar icons.  Crap in the morning and proxy trialling in the afternoon.  Cooked green spaghetti from RecipeTin Eats for dinner.  I wish books like this would use "real world" measurements, like two or three cloves of garlic, instead of a teaspoon or whatever.  Or the juice zest of one lemon instead of a tablespoon and x mL.  That sort of thing.  It was quite nice though.  Evening was filing "Canberra Life" photos.

Tuesday.  Slept okish although awak for like an hour in the middle of the night.  Proxy trialling all day.  Tony messaged me just before lunch - he was heading out to Four Winds to pick up some wine and did I wanna come with.  And I was like.. sure why not.  The last time I was out there was in 2012 for the Moving Feast.  So that was nice.

On the way back we came across this lizard with a death wish.  It clearly had no idea of what could possibly kill it, as evidenced by lack of body parts.  And it wouldn't even run away until I full on poked the thing.

In the afternoon watched a few horses run around in circles for a couple of miles.  At one point my $2 was coming second, and later my $5 was coming second.  But they finished at 20th and 7th.

Salmon, salad and leftover veggies for dinner.  Then filing house photos.  Watched Amazing Race 4.10, caught up to all aired episodes.

Wednesday.  Took forever to get to sleep - hot and restless.  Woke up early but managed a bit more sleep.  Nothing useful in the morning.  In the afternoon working with Wardie to document what to do in the event of him being away and us having to turn off MFA in the event of Optus being total idiots and breaking their entire network.  Leftovers for dinner then filing "Friends and Family" photos.

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  Good drinks - lots of people.  Popped into Tony's on the way home to pick up my old iPhone 3GS which I sold to Heather in 2012.  And since I'd sold my XS to Tony last year and I'd kept my 5, it meant I could line up every one of my iPhones!!  How cool is this!

3GS - 2010-2012, 5 - 2012 - 2018, XS - 2018-2022, 14 Pro - 2022-present.  We won't talk about the crack Tony got on the XS recently.. 

Friday.  Slept ok.  Got a "How did we do?" survey from Vodien which pissed me off because they still hadn't fixed anything and I hadn't had any contact other than first contact asking for some more information.  So let them know.  Skipped a 4pm meeting because I have zero interest in talking to Certain People at 4pm on a Friday, especially when I often log off around then for POETS.  Had Luv-a-Duck Peking Duck for dinner.  Got as good as Super Bowl obviously, but still very yummy.

Death in Paradise 6.7 and Amazing Race 4.11.

Saturday.  Hurty.  But otherwise slept ok.  Pretty much just did minifig sorting all day.  Except for taking a couple of hours out to do errands in the middle of the day. 

Apparently these are Oyster Plants

Tried to turn the cooler on when we got home but nothing happened.  It sat there for like ten minutes but it was like the pump to suck up the water hadn't run.  And then it errored out.  Sigh.

It wouldn't even run on fan mode which was very upsetting.  So we melted a bit in the afternoon.

So did the house - it even went over the top of the min/max fluid.

Watched David head off to New Zealand on Carnival Splendor.

Had dinner at R&F's with M&M and ChiliRob and Cath and Rob's mother Cath.  Too many Robs and Caths in the room hehe.

When I got home I poked the cooler control panel a bit and somehow got it to run on fan only which was a relief.

Sunday. 

Had a hare-brained idea to go climb Mount Rogers before it got too hot.  It was still too hot.

Spent all day doing minifig sorting and so got to the end of the weekend without having done any of the things I was *meant* to do.  Whoops.  Dug out some beef out of the freezer to have with some roasted veggies.  The Orville 1.11 and Amazing Race 4.12 which was the finale.  I was a bit sad that Emma and Hayley didn't win because they were just lovely people, but then Darren and Tristan decided to call it a three way tie so they split the winnings.  So awesome!!

Sunday.  Our basa bake dinner (with sweet potato and beetroot for another night)

The Crown in the evening.

Monday.  Blerf meeting all morning.  Electricians finally came to replace the inverter.  My eyes got tired mid afternoon.  It was a dark and rainy day, but the solar system does appear to be working.  The battery got up to 84% in the afternoon without any direct sunlight.  Frustrating evening because I was blind and headachey from not being able to see all afternoon.  

Tuesday.  Took forever to get to sleep then woke up around 5.  Sigh.  The battery went completely flat overnight.  It's not supposed to do that, it's mean to sit at like 10%.  So I got super stressed and grumpy.  Then I couldn't get Redactle out because it wouldn't accept "Earth's" even though I'd put that in and it had matched two other incidences, but not the one in the title.  Clear the cache they said.  It'll fix it they said.  Yeah right.  I lost my entire browsing setup.  Which means all my streaks and stats for all my online games are gone.  The waffle one upset me the most.  And I can't see.  I had a full on meltdown because it was all too hard.  And I haven't played any of those games since.  Meh day.  Stu did get Solar Edge to change the battery settings to not go flat.  We're meant to be able to do that oruselves, but as with everything else by Solar Edge it hasn't worked properly.  Had a drink and watched Star Trek IV in the evening because my eyes were too tired to concentrate on anything that required seeing anything on my computer.

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Ok day.  Was having a nice quiet morning then All The Things demanded attention at once.  Made a nice salad for dinner.  The sweet potato and beetroot I cooked the other night, with goats cheese, toasted pine nuts and bacon, with an honey, oil and lemon juice dressing.  Annoyingly the bag of rocket I was going to use (that expired today) had gone all manky.  So this salad really wasn't the same.  It really needed the lettuce to lighten it up.  It was still quite nice though.  We won't talk about the heart attack I had on Friday when my poo was a burgundy chocolate colour!

Thursday.  Did a bunch of planning for a big project at work.  Did up all the doco and passed it onto the others to do when I'm on leave.  Also looked at what logs we might be able to trim down to save space.  Then had to be Neil all afternoon while he had bits removed.  Made pizzas for dinner.  Talked to Kit and Pete for a while in the evening (still too hard to do holiday planning in the evening because I can't SEEEE).

Friday.  Woke up at like ~3am til like ~5am.  Sigh.  Did a bunch of holiday planning before work while I could still see.  Had to be Neil again, and did some cleaning.  I had a good eye day, and I could still see in the afternoon so did some holiday planning after work.  I also went into battle with Optus.  Last year when they put my number on a different plan, they set it up in a new account.  But left the shared data plan number behind.  Shared with nothing.  I'd forgotten to stop the automatic payments on this account, so it was in credit.  But the credit was not being used on the new account.  Dumb dumb dumb Optus.  So needed to get the credit transferred to the account which is actually costing money (the shared data plan is "free".. go figure).  And figure out how to access both accounts.  Because I can only access the old one on the website, not the new one.  Turns out I can manage both of them from the app.  So lame though.  Made some creamy mushroom and bacon fettucini for dinner.  Bad for the sweetie but he'd had a crap couple of days and needed the comfort food.  Watched Star Trek VI together in the evening.

Saturday.  Woke up at like 4:30 and never got back to sleep.  Super busy day doing All The Things - house stuff and holiday prep.  Overdid it on the computer though and ended up with tired eyes.  Cooked butt beef cheeks for dinner and watched second episodes of Spy Among Friends and Death in Paradise.

Sunday.  Today.  Woke up at 4:30 and didn't get back to sleep again.  Another super busy day doing All The Things.  We I even cut the ivy back from the ensuite window..

Really need a longer ladder though.  The sparkies had one that went right to the top of the tip of the roof.  

Both days this weekend the Solar Edge inverter has lost contact with the server, so we haven't been able to see the stats in the app (or website).  We have to go flip the switch on it to reset to reconnect.  Solar Edge is CRAP!!  The other annoyance is when it was sort of working briefly last year the panels were doing over 11kw.  But I haven't seen them get much over 9 since they got it working again.  I don't know if that's just because the angle of the sun is different or what.  We'll have to wait til December to find out I guess.  We had an inspector come Wednesday morning and they found the sparkie hadn't done a couple of minor things.  So they were back again Friday to finish up.  I asked him why, once the battery is charged and we're maxing out the 5kw back to the grid, does it say we're consuming ~3kw, when we're *actually* only consuming about 1kw.  He had no idea.  He said he'd find out and get back to us.  He hasn't.  #grunt.

Oh, and the neighbour parked on our side yesterday morning while he was shovelling gravel from his trailer.  And hasn't moved his damned car back since.  At what point do I pile a whole bunch of crap behind his car in protest??

Went on strike this afternoon because I'm sick of everything, so the sweetie is getting Chong Co for dinner.

Sunday.  24th.  Had leftover lamb for dinner with All The Veggies.  Watched the fourth episode of Obi-Wan and more of The Crown.

Monday.  Spent a bunch of time going through my todo list and tidying it up and actually doing some things on it.  Went and got my fourth jab at lunch - moderna this time to spice it up.  Tidying and cleaning in the afternoon.  In the evening fought with Optus' website.  OMFG their personal portal is just as bad as their enterprise portal.  Literally went round in circles three times trying to get myself re-registered and logged in.  I was trying to find out why I'd been charged for an international SMS when I hadn't made any.  But Optus' bills are completely useless and don't give you the time/date/number of SMSes, even online.  So got online with a chat bot and eventually a human, and the first thing they did was credit the account as a "valued customer" and I'm like, thanks, that's great, but I want to know why it's on the bill at all.  But she was like, oh we can't see that information.  hrmm.  So then she was like, oh btw, we can save you some money on your plan.  So that took a while longer.  But hey, it'll save me $15 a month, so the fact I lost an entire evening sorting it out was not all in vain.  But I was still like, is the date of that sms actually the date it was sent, or was it just because that's the last day of the billing cycle.  So she went off and found the date/time/number.   WTF??  Why say you can't do that when you totally can??  With the date/time I was able to find the offending sms.  I'd been replying to a message my real estate agent sent me that day, but the contact information was faulty, and the reply didn't go to a "real" number, it went to some text which got translated to a number.  The number was 0011 23553776774 which is like Chad or something.  If they'd have just put that information into the damned bill I wouldn't have had to waste an evening chasing them.  Le sigh.  

On a lighter note, we had very delicious stuffed capsicums for dinner.  This mix had bolognase mince, feta, spinach, mushrooms and parmesan.  I then topped them with cheese and roasted them.  Delicious!  And no leftovers ;)

Tuesday.  Slept okish.  Very sore arm.  And quite tired.  Had a quiet cleaning day.  The sweetie cooked some Pialligo duck breast with spinach and mushrooms for dinner which was very nice.

Wait what?

Wednesday.  Still a very sore arm.  Did more cleaning planning at work.  Brought home my hard drive from two weeks ago and did a restore of my desktop/documents/downloads.  Turns out the files I thought OneDrive had deleted weren't actually there - they must have been there from an ancient backup of my old computer.  Those files had been filed when I moved to my new computer.  So all it's done is make faulty restores of files that weren't there just to confuse things and potentially create duplicates.  Sounds like something Apple would do.  And Microsoft is no better at it.  Hopeless.  My old computer doesn't load OneDrive at boot anymore.  And my laptop wasn't signed in, so I was able to clear things out before OneDrive got its hands on things.  Signed in on the laptop, and sure enough it tried to restore the same old files to my desktop.  Will have to go and completely clear out whatever is online with OneDrive.  I also turned backups OFF thankyouverymuch.  

Thursday.  No notes.  Probably cleaning.  Probably drinks.  Blah blah blah.

Friday.  Ok morning but super busy crazy afternoon trying to get All The Things done in the limited windows we have to Get Things Done.  Because I also wanted to log off early so we could go do the food shopping for the club Christmas in July event we were doing.  So went and did that after work.  All the pork and all the food.  Fun times.  Leftovers for dinner then watched the fifth episode of Obi-Wan.

Saturday.  It was cold.  Got up and ready then headed out to the club.

Did I mention it was cold?

Got out to the club and brought in All The Food (and a bunch of lucky door prizes on the left).

Then my whole day got thrown into dissarray because John bought a brand-new-second-hand oven!  So instead of having to do the turkey in advance and reheat it later, I could actually do it independently in the separate oven!

So spent a couple of hours prepping all the foods.  There was 8kg of pork, 3kg turkey, two epic potato bakes, 2kg peas, my (Coles) "winter salad" which I totally forgot to take a photo of, apple sauce and gravy, and I made a tray of "Christmas skewers" as well.

Two epic potato bakes

This was the sweet potato for the winter salad (which I didn't get a photo of!)

8kg pork!  So good!!

3kg turkey.  There would have been four except when I opened one, it had been dropped while still unfrozen and the seal was open too, so decided it would be safer not to use it.  We did run out of turkey (after everyone got seconds), but there was still pork so noone starved ;)

The potato bakes cooked

Mulled wine anyone?

These were the "Christmas skewers" I made - bocconcini balls, olives, tomato, basil, with balsamic glaze and olive oil.  A little time consuming to make, but actually simple and effective and they all got eaten.  

My dinner.  I might have already pigged out on pork and crackling so wasn't feeling super hungry at this point ;)

Stu and Chris helped decorate the pavlovas

All in all it went really well.  The food all turned out well and we didn't get much leftovers.  We won't mention the one woman who literally made a vomit face over the olives.  And when I said I'd be putting rocket lettuce with the sweet potato I asked if she'd vomit over that too, and she said yes so I said well maybe you could grab a few pieces of sweet potato before I do.  Seriously who does that?  If you don't like something you can just say "yeah not a fan" and not eat it.  But to make vomit faces and say you hate it makes you look like a three year old.  For someone in their 60s or 70s.  Lame.  Later she came into the kitchen and literally stood right behind me while I was cutting up the crackling obviously hoping to get some and I said NO!! OUT OF THE KITCHEN!!  Sigh.  But other than that, pretty damned awesome night!!  And not too late either, I think we went to bed around 22:30.

Sunday.  So last time we were out at the club I couldn't sleep because even with two doonas I was COLD.  So the other week I went and bought a 75% down doona.  And it was awesome!  We were quite comfortable all night.  Well other than be being awake for a couple of hours feeling bloated.  All that eating and drinking I guess.  Eventually got up and I spent an hour and a half packing up chairs and tables and vacuuming and washing up to get the place all tidy.  Although I didn't put away all the decorations because I didn't want to ;)  Got home and the house was COLD.  7 degrees!!  Craziness.  Two hours of running the heater later and it was still only half way to 19.  hrmmm.  Pretty nothing afternoon, although did download all my photos and do some music practise and blog.   

I also had to laugh at this.  This is a meme I saw this week about skies:

Which is so damned true!!  

This was the sky on Monday night when I went to Chris' for supplies

and this was at Jamo on Friday night

Merry Christmas in July!

I've been keeping wifi turned off on my phone since the massive wifi bug was announced a while back.  This weekend I finally got around to backing up my phone (manually backing up the important stuff cause I don't trust Apple), clearing space, and upgrading it.

First I had to upgrade iTunes, so I did that.  But iTunes was separate to the software updater, and so it (not sure which) went off and downloaded the upgrade.  Meanwhile I came back to the software updater (or was it iTunes??) and it wanted to me to restart.  Whoops.  So I quietly ignored that until the download had finished, hoping I'd be able to do it before I started the upgrade.  I also left my phone plugged in for the entire process.

Three hours later.

At our crappy internet speed of 2Mbps it took three hours to download the 2.4GB update.

But when it downloaded it just went off and did the upgrade quietly, I think with a couple of reboots of the phone (it did it while we watching tv).  Then it was done.  No drama, no errors, no hassles.  I know this is how it *should* be, but my experience has always been a lot more awful than that.

It removed the Game Centre and added "Home" and "Videos".  And made the notifications and home button behaviour different.  Haven't really used much else to comment on anything else.

And in related news, Optus finally have 4G where we live.  It's been 3G until just this weekend.

Didn't kill anyone today, I suppose that's an achievement.

And got my flex time back in the black for the first time in nearly six months.

Also went into Optus and halved what I'm paying them each month *and* am not locked into a two year contract.  Definitely an achievement.

Cooked our second night in a row of Costco ribs (beef last night, pork tonight).  Both pretty good.  Completely evil though.

Also got our wedding photo book delivered today.  And they didn't dump it next to the letter box to get rain soaked this afternoon.  Epic achievement.  And it turned out really well, the lightened pictures look a lot better.  

Pulled out all the paint from all my paint-by-numbers sets going back thirty years.  Funnily enough all the paint has dried up in them.  Even the more recent ones.  Which is a bit of a poo because I was hoping to be able to use some of those paints to finish another one I got a while back that I never finished because the paints dried up *while I was still doing it!!*  Was pretty annoyed about that.  I can use one of the paints from the last one I did (even though it dries matt) but don't have two of the other colours I need which is a big poo.  Oh well.

Moved to https://kazza.id.au/oz_holidays/2014/09/day-5---cobbold-gorge-to-karumba.html

Did you know phones have a thing on them called "APN", which stands for Access Point Name, and is a configuration set to make mobile data and MMS work?

I didn't.

Until it didn't work.

Backtracking a little.

On Monday night while watching Cities of the Underworld, I saw an ad for Optus that lets you get additional sims for $5 each that you can use on other devices using your main data plan.  And I thought *brilliant* !! With that I could play Ingress on Stu's old phone without having to setup a wifi hotspot on my iPhone (which has been destroying my battery).  (As a side note, as soon as I saw that ad and told Stu how cool it would be, he said, oh, Ingress for iPhone came out today.  I decided I'd rather destroy the old phone battery not mine).

So yesterday I went into Optus to get one.  I figured for $5 there'd be no service, they'd just give you a sim and tell you to go online to set it up.  But no, you actually sit down with them while they set it all up.  That must cost them a lot more than $5!  Whatevs.  Turns out you also need one of their new data plans, so had to switch over to that.  Anyway ten minutes later it was all going.

Except Stu's phone was still locked to Vodafone.

So popped up to the Vodafone store and asked what's the process for unlocking it, and they said you just go online, put in the IMEI, and get a code to unlock.  Simple.

Unlike doing it on an iPhone.

So did that when I got back to work and that worked fine.

The phone could now connect to Optus, except the mobile data wouldn't work.  I looked in the settings and found this:

"Connection failed due to incorrect APN setting"

I googled it and found plenty of other people having similar problems.  But none of the APN settings worked for me.  I got super frustrated with the whole thing, and was facing having to go back to Optus today to get it sorted out.

Then I was talking to @StuartCRyan and he's like "have you tried "connectme"?"

!!!

It actually connected!!

So here's my APN settings for Optus on a HTC One X:

Name: Doesn't matter, but I called mine Connect Me
APN: connectme
Authentication Type: Not set
APN type: default

Everything else was defaults or not set.

Thanks Stuart, you made my night!