Good news:

This IS good news. It's actually much better than the New York Times is reporting it as. Something often forgotten in the last 30 years of the Troubles is that British soldiers came into the north of Ireland in the 60s because the Protestant police force (and the local government) was mistreating Catholics so badly.

It's not just that Catholics see the police as aligned with the British (though they do), it's that to many Catholics, the police are worse than the British soldiers. After Bloody Sunday, Britain lost a lot of credibility in that regard, but at least in the small towns (ie not Belfast or Derry), the police are still less trusted than the paratroopers and sometimes even than the SAS (who, in my experience, really are giant assholes until you pull out an American passport. Then they are only giant assholes to your Irish friends).

Sigh:

I took my DVD player into the store today. This was a $60 DVD player, that, when the guy opened it up to take my DVD out, had multiple blown capacitors on both circuit boards. Two had actually blown off the board, and there were other melted ones. They still have to send it away to "have it repaired." Yeah, they are really going to replace two circuit boards on a $60 DVD player rather than just giving me a new one. I believe that.

This means that I get to watch DVDs for the next at least week and a half on either my 14 inch laptop or my 17 inch desktop monitor. This is going to be fun.

Well:

So I'm watching a DVD today when suddenly the sound goes out. I hit mute a couple of times, but no joy. Then the whole thing dies and there's a pop. There are two more pops and the player starts smoking before I can get it unplugged. I guess to a certain extent you get what you pay for on a $50 AU player (it's less than 4 months old), but the smoking thing is a bit concerning.

The place I bought it from is not open and the company doesn't have a 24 hour number so I can't call and see if there is some sort of warranty, though I suspect not. Perhaps the smoke gives me a bit of leeway. Also, the DVD, which is part of a set and cannot easily be replaced, is stuck in there. Sigh.

In happier news, I passed my dive physical, with a fantastic FEV/FVC of 92%. How did I almost fail that test last June? It makes no sense. The doctor was an ex-military guy who was convinced I was service (and Canadian) and was so sure that I was fit to dive that I couldn't have failed, I think.

So hopefully I'll finally get certified (for diving...Jesus!) in February on the south coast. Exciting.

American morning tea:

I'm putting together an "American-themed" morning tea for my office, and I'm trying to get my order into the commissary in Japan (the closest commissary, would you believe it?).

Here's the current menu (all of these things are not readily available in Australia):
Pop-tarts (multiple flavors)
Cheez-its (Hannah mentioned buying them in Singapore, and now I'm craving)
PB cups
York peppermint patties
fresh chips and salsa (yes, I'm ordering the corn tortillas from Japan, they are totally unavailable in Oz)
Cinnamon candy
Oreos

I realise that the list is a little disjointed, but it's actually reasonably hard to come up with a list of American breakfast foods that are non-perishable, a necessity for ordering from the APO. Anyway, other teas have involved foods that are not strictly speaking breakfast foods.

Suggestions?

Daily Show!:

I just discovered that you can buy 16 episodes of the Daily Show for $9.99 from iTunes. I'd been having Jon Stewart withdrawal, since it's only on here on free TV one night a week. No more!

Stupid laptop:

My shiny, 6-month-old laptop has had some sort of catastrophic failure relating to the video card. Currently, I can sometimes boot into Fedora (sometimes it's unreadable) and never into Windows. I have a feeling that one of the things that they told me to do to try to diagnose the video card problem might have screwed up something else in the system. I got to spend my afternoon on the phone with Dell. Because I'm not located in the US it's even better, let me tell you.

I basically refused to get off the phone with Australian tech support after they told me that I didn't have 24/7 phone coverage (which is false) until they told me that they would have a service tech call me Monday. International tech support in the US will not be open until 8 am Monday CST (which is 1 am Tuesday here), so there is no way of getting the next day service that I paid $400 for. I cannot switch my warranty over to Australia , apparently, though I may try that again and see if I have any luck.

All the people I've dealt with have been polite (and not totally clueless about computers), but ultimately very unhelpful. They seem to want to mail me a video card (though they cannot apparently submit the order until Monday, and I have to call back to do it...um 15 hour time difference and I cannot place international calls from work), but I'm not too happy about replacing something on a laptop motherboard myself. I thought that was the point of the warranty.

I've dragged my 3.5 year old Inspiron that beeps about 25 times at POST every time I turn it on out. Hopefully it will keep working for the week or so that it will take to fix my actual expensive laptop. At least I won't lose any data even if I have to wipe the hard drive. That 40G external hard drive was a good investment!