Stuff

In the past few days, stuff has happened. On Friday night we basically had a night in, which was rather nice! – unusual to have a Friday night in with nothing going on, so we savoured it. Then on Saturday I went up to town to buy a couple of things, including a new mobile phone. Which I haven’t got yet. More on that later.

In the evening, Anne-Marie came round for some dinner and we watched “Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra”, which is fantastic! We’d seen some of it before (on TV they showed a cut down version), but the full version is definitely worth it.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning. My parents also came as they are on holiday, and then afterwards they came back to ours for dinner. After eating we walked up to Hilly Fields, it was a beautiful day for it! So we had a really nice afternoon with them.

After they’d gone we washed up, and then headed round to Anne-Marie and Sarah’s. It was Sarah’s birthday (well, technically the day after her birthday but still), so we had cake 🙂 Phil made a cinnamon and Nutella cake, and Sarah’s Mum had made a chocolate cake. All in all, it was a pretty good evening cake-wise 😉 After eating cake we watched the last of the “Sherlock” mini-series. We really enjoyed it – and that ending! Well, if you’re going to finish on a cliff-hanger, that’s the way to do it 😉

I really, really hope they do more. It’s looking quite likely from what I’ve read, but still.

Anyway. Yes, I was going to mention mobile phones. I mentioned last year that I bought a new mobile. It was an Orange Pay-As-You-Go mobile, which I really bought so that I could update my calendar online and also do basic internet stuff. Well, as they say, “if you buy cheap, you buy twice”: it’s a decent phone but it doesn’t really do anything well enough to use it that much. The calendar still doesn’t sync with my PC – I have to use Google’s online version, which basically means… I don’t use it. The online version is OK, but doesn’t really work as a main calendar. Also, the internet browsing is fine for mobile pages (Twitter is pretty good for that), but rubbish at anything else. And the screen is, well, it’s OK, but nothing like as good a sthe iPhone / iPad style screens.

So, I decided to upgrade to a contract phone. Obviously it would have to be an Android phone (it integrates really well with Google’s services, given that it’s developed by Google…) I did like the look of the HTC Desire, it’s a great phone which has been getting a lot of positive press, but in the end decided it was too expensive and I didn’t really need all the features. I went with an HTC Wildfire, which is the model down from the Desire but had a fantastic review on Reg Hardware a couple of weeks ago.

I went into the mobile shop on Saturday to get one, except … I couldn’t. It turns out Vodafone couldn’t issue me with a temporary number – because of the mobile phone number I already have. I have no idea what kind of weird system they’ve got at the moment: (i) Why should my old phone number have anything to do with it? (ii) when I got my previous phone, I didn’t need a temporary number. I just bought the phone, then transferred once I’d got the PAC code from my old provider.

Anyway, they said I’d need to get the PAC code from Orange before I could have the phone. Doh! It’s been a bit of a mission getting the PAC code from Orange (I will post up a brief blog about that soon), but it’s all done now so … hopefully I’ll be able to pick up the phone this weekend.

At the end of the day, having to wait a week for a phone isn’t really a problem, it was just annoying at the time because it was right there in front of me, but I couldn’t have it! There are some days I think I haven’t progressed since being a child (but then, I am a man, so… 😉