Given the election news from last night/this morning, I’ve been needing lots of Byron cuddles today.
Today has been a bubba-cuddle day
Tag: ducks
Phone says screw you, hard reset!
My phone has been iffy for the last few weeks, with random freezes or reboots. Yesterday, I got a notification for an official OTA software update. I hoped that it might fix the situation. I did, but in the most f’you way possible. The update caused the phone to get stuck in a perpetual reboot cycle. The only way out of it was a full, hard, reset.
Now this was something that I’d been thinking of for a while, but still, really bad timing. Although I had a full backup of my phone and most of it was already synced to Google, it’s still annoying as fuck to have to re-download and restore everything. The devil is in the details – how your app screens were setup to the point where muscle memory could open a particular app – which isn’t 100% back to normal.
I have all my music, but all my playlists got borked.
I have all my photos, but the timestamps didn’t restore properly so now they’re all mishmashed.
I have to get a new activation code for my online banking, because Switzerland.
The most annoying thing – one of my go-to stress-reliever/time-waster games got removed from the Google play store!! Happily, Katy still had it on her phone, so with a bit of ingenuity and USB debugging, I was able to extract it from her phone and sideload it on mine. Note to self in case of future need, the magic mantra is this:
Determine the package name of the app, e.g. “com.example.someapp”.
adb shell pm list packages
Get the full path name of the APK file for the desired package.
adb shell pm path com.example.someapp
The output will look something like
package:/data/app/com.example.someapp-2.apk
or
package:/data/app/com.example.someapp-nfFSVxn_CTafgra3Fr_rXQ==/base.apk
Using the full path name from the previous step, pull the APK file from the Android device to the development box.
adb pull /data/app/com.example.someapp-2.apk path/to/desired/destination
It’s showtime!
The pig has passed
The pig is no more. We’ve taken the hard decision to put her to sleep. Between the anemia and the potential nasal tumour, things were not going to improve, and she was starting to sneeze huge clots of congealed blood, while having a persistent nose bleed. She passed quietly, while her human was whispering nothings of encouragement in her ear.
Splatter
The pig’s nose and fur look like a Jackson Pollock painting. Unfortunately, that’s blood, and it doesn’t seem to want to get better.
2022 can fuck itself right off too.
So following on from 2021, 2022 was rather shit. While there were moments of fun, it seems that most if not all of them were overshadowed by drama, illness, accidents and general fuckery. At times, I thought I was losing my career, my family and my mental health. I can only thank my wifey, my friends, my colleagues and my Not-my-dogs for keeping afloat when it felt I was sinking. I wish I could believe that 2023 will be better, but my general cynicism just hopes it won’t be more of the same, if not worse.
Early Christmas gift
I have a gap between my back two molars that’s been getting wider over the last few years. I had a checkup last year when we were in Leicester and it was fine, but I should start using a sensitive toothpaste to avoid hot/cold pain.
Over the course of this year, the gap has been getting wider and food has been getting stuck in there. Flossing and brushing seemed OK, but last week something changed and pain flared up like a mofo. I thought, or hoped, it was just a really stubborn bit of something stuck on the gumline. No joy. Its been getting worse, with really fun pain spikes. A visit to the dentist revealed a massive fuck-off cavity on my back molar, and a smaller one on the molar next to it. The dentist is amazed that it went this bad this quickly apparently.
So my options are now a 3k chf root canal, that’s not guaranteed to save the tooth, or having it pulled (for only 400chf). I also need to get the 2nd cavity sorted as well, but that one can wait a bit.
On boxing day, I’m getting the tooth pulled, then having the stitches removed after new years, then the cavity fixed late January. Joy.
Merry f’n Christmas.
Well that was expectedly annoying
Roger Waters is coming to Zurich next year for a one-day stop in Switzerland as part of his farewell tour. Through my mobile phone provider, I had access to a ticket pre-sale. Or so I thought. The sale opened at 10am yesterday. I was on the website, I had tickets selected. And then the ticketcorner website completely bogged down under scalper bot load, and I couldn’t complete my purchase. When I refreshed the browser, all the top-tier tickets were already sold out. When I tried to get another set of tickets, those disappeared before my eyes. Within 5 minutes, all the tickets were sold out. And now those tickets, that were 200chf, are available on ticket resale websites for more than three times face value.
I’m going to try my luck again when the main sale starts later this week, but I’m not holding my breath.
Airport hell
Today has been a complete and utter nightmare. I was supposed to be halfway across the Atlantic right now. Instead, I’m on hold with Air Canada, sitting outside Brussels airport, chain-smoking and having a nervous breakdown.
I had a 8:15 flight out of Geneva to Brussels, then a 10:30 flight to Montreal. I got up at 4am, got my last bits ready, and then headed to the airport on the 5am train. Bags of time. Get to the airport, fight with the baggage check-in self-service kiosk (win!) then go past security super quickly. So far, so good. My flight to Brussels was uneventful, but that’s when all hell broke loose.
My flight landed at 9:35, and my flight to Canada was starting to board at 930. I could still have made it, but there was a complete and utter border checkpoint shambles in between. Even with shameless queue jumping, I didn’t make it in time for my gate. The flight closed only a few minutes before I managed to make it to the gate. The staff at the airport were like, don’t worry, they know there are late people, they’ll wait. They didn’t. I missed my flight. But I could still see it just outside the window, still connected to the ramp. So close, yet do far.
Enter circles of airport/airline hell.
First rung of airport hell was getting my suitcase back. That took about an hour – which given the number of lost bags that were piling up, is probably a small miracle nonetheless.
Second level of airport hell: customer service counters. Now comes the part of trying to rebook a connecting flight. See, the 1st leg of the flight was operated by Brussel Airways. The 2nd leg was Air Canada. After waiting in 2 different queues, I get a lady-just-about-to-close-her-window service agent. She looks at my boarding passes and smiles because she’s still going to be able to go on break soon. You see, sir, Brussels airways says that even though the flight was late by a couple of minutes, I still had more than 50 minutes to make my connection, that’s their contractual obligation, and they’re not responsible for airport delays, so I need to deal with Air Canada.
Air Canada, joyously, doesn’t have a service desk at the airport.
I need to call them.
Enter third level of airline hell: phone support.
At the time or writing this post, I’ve been on hold for over two hours. (2h20, to be exact). It was a solid hour and a quarter before I actually spoke to a human being. The rest has been trying to figure what my options are. Which seem to be very few. It would seem that AAAAAALLLLLL flights out of Brussel going even remotely to Canada are booked solid until the 4th – Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Quebec. So now I’m trying to get myself back to Switzerland, lick my wounds and deal with the fallout. It’s still not clear just how much out of pocket I’m going to be on this.
Update at 3h mark: Possible moderate success – since I’ve already started the trip, the flight is not cancellable nor refundable but I can keep the remaining legs as “credits”, usable up to July next year. I’m hoping to be able to use the BRU-YUL portion of this aborted trip to pay for a flight back to GVA, and then I’d still have the YUL-GVA portion as credit I can use until July of 2023.
The lady on the phone has been super helpful, and I repeatedly told her so.
Update several hours later, once I’ve finally been able to pee, sit, eat and drink something. From reading up on the interwebs, it seems that Brussels is a known shitshow for passport control. This is a picture from a few years ago, but history repeats as it was the exact same spot I was in.
And this is a news blurb from a few weeks ago:
Passengers traveling through Brussels Airport, Belgium towards a non-Schengen destination were forced to enter a lengthy queue at passport control. “While Federal Police carried out the necessary but time-consuming passport controls, a technical problem also affected the airport’s e-gates, a system that mechanically reads out the passports. Passengers for non-Schengen destinations are advised to come well ahead, i.e. 3 hours in advance,” the airport tweeted.
Between 50,000 and 70,000 passengers are expected to depart from Brussels Airport daily during the summer months. 66 destinations are non-Schengen. People were complaining about kilometer-long queues and 4h delays…
Now I just have 3 hours to kill before I fly to Zurich, then Geneva.
The universe hates us
The day before I was supposed to leave for Canada. I have my boarding passes, covid certificates and all other sundry paperwork. The suitcases are ready.
In recent years, birthdays have always been… difficult so Katy wants to have a good day with me before I leave to celebrate a pre-birthday, in case my real birthday follows the trend.. We go to Lausanne for dinner and a movie, but the heat and humidity are oppressive and it’s getting to us. We decide to go home instead of seeing the movie. Katy just wants to go to bed.
At the station in Morges, we want to take a taxi to go home. While going to the taxi, Katy falls off the curb and hears a crack. She thought she sprained her ankle, but the pain doesn’t go away and she can’t really walk on it. After 4 hours in the ER (so 1h30 am), it’s a fracture and she needs crutches and a giant boot. One year to the day from the date of the operation on her finger.
It’s confirmed, we’re hexed and the universe hates us.
On the plus side, it was much easier than expected to get in touch with Air Canada and rebook my flight. Hopefully she’ll be more mobile by next Sunday. We should know more on Thursday.