I didn’t put one on my HTC Desire because:

1. I treat my phone carefully.
2. I store my phone carefully.
3. The screen is pretty damn durable, and seemed entirely scratch-proof.

Perhaps needless to say, I now have a scratch on the screen deep enough to be felt under my finger.

Infuriatingly, I have absolutely no idea how it happened.  Even more infuriatingly, it can’t be removed without replacing the whole screen because of the way capacitive touch screens work.  But most infuriatingly, with minimal prior thought and investment I could have avoided this happening altogether.

The shop on the corner of Lonsdale and Swanston Streets in the city sells screen protectors cheaply ($10 for the HTC Desire) and installs them for free.  I can’t vouch for their quality as I don’t have a point of comparison, but frankly I don’t care—even if I have to replace the protector every month, at least I’m still preventing further permanent damage to the phone itself.

So put a screen protector on your phone.  Ignore how durable your screen is.  You don’t necessarily know what can scratch it and once it’s scratched, it’s probably staying that way.

Magic Passenger Information Display is immune to photo capture.

20 seconds ago, this sign said 9.45.  Now, it says 10.04.  Evidently it’s possible for a train to disappear off its tracks halfway to its destination.

9.55am: And now, apparently it’s coming again.  Only ten minutes late so far…

Whatever.

10.35am: I’m now waiting for a tram in the CBD because my train went directly to Flinders Street and missed its City Loop connection.

Melbourne’s public transport system makes me feel so incompetent.  I could run to work faster (if I could run non-stop for an hour at least).

10.58am: Finally at work.  The 7.3-kilometre trip took 83 minutes in total.  I could have walked it in ten minutes less time.

Metro Trains, I salute you.

Dear Fiona Hayes,

Reference: CIDN 2004779785

Thank you for your letter dated Monday April 12, 2010 in which you report company-wide improvements to your handling of complaints.  I am responding to you because I want to quell any assumption, should it exist, that “resolved” at your end implies satisfaction at mine.

My complaint only appears resolved to you out of my own abandonment.  It wasn’t; I simply had no more time or energy to devote to the cause despite the TIO’s involvement in the process.  I gave up after what felt like yet another brush-off with no genuine interest in the customer’s best interests or even what they had to say.

If you have access to the details of my complaint—which I find unlikely given Telstra’s alleged policies for archived material—those details may verify that I had enumerated on multiple occasions a short set of very specific, simple concerns (maybe five in total), one of which regarded my potential referral to a debt collection agency over failure to pay for a service that I had never requested or even received.

I made very clear what information I wanted and how I would consider the complaint resolved.  I ensured that my concerns could be answered simply, in bullet points like I had presented them.  I can only conclude however that the officers responsible for handling my complaint either were completely disinterested in what actually concerned me, or were following rules from above along the lines of, “don’t address anything directly.  Refuse to look at records older than a few months.  Throw money at the customer in the form of credit until they shut up.  For the love of all that is sacred, don’t listen and don’t admit fault to anything.”

I still don’t know if Telstra referred me to a debt collection agency over their errors and hence impacted my credit rating.  I will probably never know until my next request for finance is rejected or something like that.  I admit that I don’t know how that stuff works but I’m sure that a company of Telstra’s presence could certainly do damage to an individual’s reputation in the money-lending world.

Please know and try to understand from my perspective that while I appreciate your gesture, I hold little faith in Telstra’s improvement of complaints handling.  I don’t expect that you have seen my complaint, I don’t expect that you will, and I would be very surprised to receive a personal response to this letter from you indicating that you have read and absorbed it.

I am grossly disappointed in Telstra as a business; the image that this company portrays to me after my every experience with it is one of money-grubbing arrogance.  Quite frankly I find supporting such a business embarrassing, and the HomeLine® Budget plan I worked so hard and for so long to obtain is the last Telstra service I will ever seek.

I am sorry that you, Fiona, are the one who (I expect) personally has to deal with this letter.  It is my hope however that all customers in my position are voicing their dissatisfaction so that you can obtain an accurate picture of the true effectiveness and outcomes of your company’s complaint resolution processes.

Best wishes,
Alex Peters

Garage door at work closed on me as I was driving through.  It won.

Besides a heap of scratching and a broken antenna, the roof is bent to buggery across the entire width of the car.  It’s probably not the best idea to have electronic circuitry exposed to the elements like that either.

Really not proving to be a great month.

Oh, the irony.  The bittersweet irony.

You can really feel the love down at the MetShop today.

“Hmm.  Platform on left.  Must release doors on right.  Eeexcellent.”

Time passes…

“Why are all those silly people just standing on the platform?  Actually, why are people waving out the non-platform side of the train??  Let’s put a stop to that tomfoolery!”

The right doors close.  The left doors remain locked.  People inside the train start to panic.  More time passes…

“Oh!!  I know what I need to do!”

The doors on both sides unlock.

I like being able to use the newer versions of things like Eclipse and Ratpoison, but my Edgy experience has otherwise been quite average.  Here are the gripes that are fresh on my mind:

• My computer likes to freeze rock-solid at some point after the screen saver kicks in.  Sometimes I can SSH into it from another computer and restart GNOME; sometimes that doesn’t help and I have to request a reboot.  Sometimes I can’t even SSH in and I have to pull the power plug.
• The text-mode terminals no longer clear the screen on logout, but that’s the least of the text-mode terminal issues that I’ve faced.
• On my computer, the ‘text-mode’ terminals seem to have been changed so that they’re actually graphically based somehow—the font is really weird—and as a result if I try to drop into a text-mode terminal my computer will sometimes instead present me with a screen full of purple-ish and grey-ish noise.
• On the other computer, at random times if you ‘accidentally’ move the mouse to the top right-hand corner of the screen, you get the same purple-ish noise all over the screen as mentioned above.  If you then move the mouse around wildly for a little while everything seems to go back to normal.
• GNOME likes to present some random non-existent floppy drive in the Places menu due to a bogus entry in /etc/fstab, which now seems to take care of business using 128-bit UUIDs.  What the?
• GNOME doesn’t let me assign Ctrl+Alt+Del (or any keyboard combination for that matter) to the Log Out action.
• It no longer seems possible to disable rebooting and shutting down from the login screen without also disabling the XDMCP chooser (and I could swear I was able to do this before, but maybe not…).
• It seems necessary to hack around in GConf to disable suspension and hibernation.
• GNOME likes to open some random number of Home Folder windows when a user logs in.  Sometimes it’s none; sometimes it’s six—often it’s a number inbetween.
• There is no longer a Disks administration applet, apparently due to the fact that no one maintains it anymore.  Great, but no alternative is installed by default in its place.

All in all, Edgy has proven to be quite unusable for all of us here.  I was a total moron to rush off and overwrite a perfectly working system without testing it first.  I suppose I should have acknowledged beforehand that Edgy isn’t meant to meet the standards of Dapper as a distribution since Dapper is a long-term release and Edgy has gone through some substantial under-the-hood changes, but at the same time I feel that Edgy really shouldn’t have been released in this state—surely some of this stuff should have been picked up?

And now to go and re-install Dapper…  I hate sitting in front of computers installing and configuring software for any long period of time…

All spiders are strictly forbidden from biting me on the face while I’m asleep. Any party refusing to comply with this new law will be severely punished (i.e. look out if I find you in the morning).

My timetable for the semester

So far one of the lectures has literally put me to sleep—it is only the first week though.  The course itself should become more interesting soon enough.

Finally, it’s important that you’re aware of these random things if you’re not already:

• Some people in the world are amazingly ignorant/rude. No one owes me a prize for my holding the door open for them, but it severely irritates me when they just walk through as if I’m not there—especially after I’ve stood there waiting for them.  A mere ‘thanks’ or a nod or a smile would do; surely you can do one of those things even if you are in the middle of a conversation.
• Dislocating your knee is &#@$!%* painful. You should avoid this when possible by not running for trains.
• Participating (passively) in a car accident is majorly inconvenient. When electing your positional preference in a three-car pile-up (i.e. front, middle or back car), don’t choose the middle.  Damage to both ends of your car means it’s off the road for twice as long.
• The ability to read other people’s thoughts would be extremely handy and awesome. Someone should teach me how to do it.