Aaron Around The World >> Europe >> United Kingdom >> London, England
Jump to page: << 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 >>
Monday, 21 July 2008 - Must be Monday
Wednesday, 23 July 2008 - West End culture!
Thursday, 24 July 2008 - Dude, where's my bike?! Check this out! David Cameron is the pompous leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, and he is incredibly distraught right now after his bike was stolen yesterday! Apparently he 'locked' it to a metre-high bollard, and so the thief just lifted it up over the bollard and was off with it while Cameron was in the supermarket hahaha!
Friday, 25 July 2008 - I love flying
This is the gaping hole on a Qantas plane en route to Melbourne from London (via Hong Kong). It had just left Hong Kong an hour earlier when passengers heard a huge bang, which was followed immediately by cabin depressurization, and a rapid descent from 30,000-ish feet to 10,000 (standard emergency procedure during depressurization). The plane touched down safely in Manila not long thereafter.
Full story here.
Saturday, 26 July 2008 - Big colourful London!
Sunday, 27 July 2008 - Phone fun! I just had the weirdest experience with a phone in my life! Some of you will probably find this boring and uninteresting, but I was fascinated - sorry ;)
Every couple days over the last week or so, the phone here in the new flat has been randomly ringing once and then stopping. The first time it happened was just after midnight, waking me up in the process. Half an hour later it did it again (waking me up again), and then a third bloody time about five minutes later. There's a phone number you can dial to get the caller id of your last missed call, so I got out of bed to give that a try and the phone number it gave me back was my own cell phone number. That stumped for a second me until I remembered I had called myself to test the phones were working shortly after I moved in here three weeks ago. But what had me stumped now was why the phone was randomly ringing (at all hours of the night) if no one was calling me! Fast forward to tonight and Katie tried to call me, but upon answering the phone all I got was a bunch of loud buzzing and static. I hung up, she tried again, but it was the same result so I thumped the phone with my fist and voila - static gone! So we started chatting, but ten seconds later we could both hear another voice on the line. It was an automated woman's voice saying “The number you have dialled has not been recognised” over and over again - what the hell?! First of all, I hadn't dialled any number (Katie called me, I didn't call her), and secondly how was this chick even on the line?! Then I had a hunch. When I thumped the phone I had likely pressed a few numbers, and ten seconds later this chick started up, so I wondered if somehow there was a second phone hooked into my line, and when I bashed the phone I was inadvertently dialling a number on the second line which then timed-out when I didn't push any more (and hence “The number you have dialled has not been recognised”). This was weirding me out, and a phone call with Katie obviously wasn't going to happen while this bitch was banging on in the background. I hung up from Katie and then turned the (portable) phone back on, but instead of a dial tone that chick was still going strong with “The number you have dialled has not been recognised”! I hung up and picked up again a few more times but she wasn't going away! I left it a minute (I figured she'd run out of puff eventually hehe), tried again, and this time I got a dial tone. I called my cell phone to see what number would come up on the caller id - my number or some other number, and sure enough some other random number came up - a second line! I let the call go through to my cell phone's voicemail to see what could be heard on the other end, and while ‘recording' a voicemail for myself I could still hear a faint dial tone in the background. I pushed a few more random numbers, waited, and then got my new friend back again with the “The number you have dialled has not been recognised”. I hung up and listened to the voicemail on my cell phone, and I could hear everything - the second dial tone, the chick, everything. So I could essentially use both phone lines in tandem to dial two different numbers and have the recipients hear each other (i.e. unintentional 3-way calling) - bloody good if not for the fact the phone had become a bit unusable with the static and dual dial tones etc. I figured the second phone line must belong to someone else, and somehow their line and my line had become physically connected, probably within the telephone exchange box (I've seen inside those things, wire spaghetti!). I wondered what would happen if I was to call the second number from my cell phone. If this other random number did indeed belong to somebody, what were their callers hearing when they dialled that number? I dialled the number from my cell phone and bugger me, my home phone rang once and then stopped - exactly what had been randomly happening over the last week! So that explains how my phone was ringing at all hours with nobody actually calling me! After my home phone had rung once and stopped, I could hear a dial tone in my cell phone?! I wondered if this dial tone was for my actual home phone line? I dialled a number on my cell phone (one I happen to know that answers with an automated IVR service) while in theory still connected to my home phone line, and sure enough I heard ringing and then the automated IVR service! I picked up my home phone while doing this from my cell phone and I could hear everything my cell phone was hearing, so I had basically used my cell phone to dial a number from my home phone line - weirder and weirder! That meant that people had been trying to call this other number (making my home phone ring once and then stop), but instead of whoever answering the phone, they would instead have heard a dial tone - the dial tone for my phone line! Unbeknown to them, they could then dial any number they wanted and get free calls which I'd be charged for hehe (actaully, I hope that hasn't happened come to think of it?!) With that thought in mind I figured I best get it sorted asap, and fortunately the company in charge of Britain's telephone infrastructure (BT, or British Telecom) have a 24/7 fault reporting line, but how was I going to call them with all this shit going on (it wouldn't be cheap to call from my cell phone)?! I thought I'd give it a whirl anyway. I was answered by another automated IVR thingee, and given the usual "Push 1 for this, push 2 for that, yada yada". However, I could clearly hear two distinct voices giving me options; both phone lines had called BT, and BT had answered both lines hahaha! I chose the option to talk to somebody now, and got two different versions of the same hold music from the two phone lines hehe. Then some guy answered, and in the process of welcoming me to BT and giving me his name etc. he cut himself short when he realised he could hear his own hold music, and when I started talking over it that confused him some more hahaha! A couple seconds later a second guy answered the second phone line while the first guy was trying to talk to me over the fucking hold music, and that just confused the shit out of them both! I explained to both of them what had been going on, and because they were able to hear both me and each other at the same time, they both understood what had probably happened from a BT perspective. This made life a lot easier for me because while I was enjoying two different hold musics I really wasn't sure how I was going to articulate all of this, especially if I got some Arab who can hardly speaky the English. But no such worries, and one of them called me back on my cell phone while running a check on my home phone line, and according to their check - as I suspected - it appears to be two phone lines physically touching in the exchange. The checks also revealed that the voltage coming through my phone line is abnormally high, and may account for the weird static I'd been hearing (and could probably bugger my phone come to think of it). Be that as it may, why the phone has only just started to become unusable from tonight I have no idea, as I had been using it without problem during last week while it was doing its random ring-once-and-stop thing, so the other phone line has been interfering for a while now but only tonight has everything really crapped out good and proper. Weird weird weird, but either way bloody funny stuff. I'm sure I could pull some good pranks with that; call two different people on two different phone numbers and then stay quiet and see what happens when they both answer and hear each other, hmmm ;)
Thursday, 31 July 2008 - MacGyver!
Page Comments
