GRAH

FFS.

Okay, Orange are not great with answerphone stuff I think, or my phone is slightly gimpy. If I have any messages in my answerphone, and have phoned it or said "no, I'll phone it later," then it doesn't tell me when there are new ones. This is unhelpful.

I just got an e-mail from the seller of two of the PDAs I bought, saying that UPS had contacted them to say that I was "refusing delivery" of the package. Bullshit to that I say, no delivery attempt has been made.

I check answerphone messages just in case and it turns out that yes, there is one on there from last Wednesday from UPS. But I phone the number they left, and there is no answer, no answer at all. Not even a machine picks up.

I need to pay customs and duty charges of about £26.00 - this is not a huge amount of money, considering I should get it back when people buy the relevant PDAs off me, but it would have been a lot easier last week than this week.

Fucking hell this is pissing me off though. No e-mail, no note through the door, one piddly phone message I could barely understand.

Now I guess I get to play "phone the expensive 0845 number to sort things out with UPS" game. Grah.

EDIT: Okay, this takes the piss, the expensive 0845 number puts me through a series of wossnames and then HANGS UP ON ME when the line is busy for 5 seconds.

EDIT EDIT: Right, sorted. Two should arrive on Monday. I wonder what's happened to the other? Bah. Oh, and they'll probably arrive in the afternoon when I'm out at the osteopath. Bah.

Poked USPS for the one. It says "Attempted Delivery Abroad, February 15, 2007, 2:34 am, GREAT BRITAIN" - but does seem to have cleared customs.

What the fucking fuck?

[spam] PDAs for sale

I recently goofed on eBay and managed to buy not one, but three of these Palm LifeDrives, factory-refurbished quality. Two of them are, predictably, surplus to my requirements.

Two of them should be arriving on Monday, hopefully the third won't be much longer than that.

I would like to sell them. Two available; £140 each plus postage will cover my costs (yes, posting these from the US and paying customs and so on was not cheap), obviously if we can meet up then you don't need to give me postage money and I don't need to waste packaging and so on posting the things.

They're coming from the US so they probably have US plugs on the adapters; the adapters are a fairly standard piece of kit and available cheaply on eBay. The adapters ARE multi-voltage, so if you'd rather just use a plug-shape-change device, you can.

A few of you have expressed interest; this is your chance to confirm that interest. I'd rather not go to eBay as having the money in a hurry would be good.

Geek Scrapheap Challenge II

Since the one in December was such a success, it's time for another Geek Scrapheap Challenge.

When: Saturday, 24th March, 13:00-20:00 (1pm-8pm)
Where: The Pembury Tavern, Hackney. They have free wifi, ethernet, excellent beer and food, and plenty of good solid tables for working at. They're also non-smoking, yay, and have no annoying music.

Here's the plan:
Bring computers - alive, dead, or just obsolete. Maybe you pulled it out of a skip. Maybe you haven't used it since you bought your newer, shinier laptop. Bring it. Bring tools. Bring cables. Bring your brain and your ideas, or just willingness help us figure out fiddly things.

You bring stuff, and together we try to make it into something useful. This might be a sparkly new machine for a charity (anyone have any good ones in mind?), it might be a terminal for someone's kitchen, it might be an external hard drive, it might be wall-art with stuff that's too dead to use. We don't know yet, because we don't know what's going to turn up on the day.

Rules:
1) Anything you bring you must be willing to cart away again. Where an item is made of parts contributed by more than one person, those people will be responsible for deciding who keeps it - otherwise it will have to be taken apart again.

2) Don't do anything that will get us in trouble with the landlord. This is my favourite pub and I want to be able to keep going back!

Stuff we'll need:
-spare, known-to-work network cards and cables if applicable
-spare, known-to-work keyboard or two
-ditto monitor (yes, I know they're heavy as all hell, but I don't have room for my very old one along with all the other crap I'm going to be carting around...)
-all sorts of testing and repair equipment
-a few extension leads
-possibly an anglepoise lamp or two


Please respond to this post if you are planning to attend. Feel free to link to this, but make it clear people should drop a line here if they're thinking about coming. (Note: "I'm interested but don't know yet, I'll see how I feel on the day/what else comes up between now and then" is acceptable; saying nothing and then turning up with six desktops at 19.30 less so, and will probably mean you lug around far more computers than you'd like.)

Postal fun and games cont'd; gardening

eBay seller extremely polite and apologetic over the behaviour of UPS; I feel kindof bad now because it isn't really her fault they suck, but thing.
( gardening wibble )