We cleared out the apartment and left Manchester on Friday and spent an awesome weekend in London. We are now finally on the Eurostar to Belgium, after being pushed around by 5 million people at the check-in. Cunts!
November, 2005
21
Nov 05
I Leave On Friday
- Take cat to Manchester Airport tomorrow morning at 7am to send to the pet shipping company in London
- Get stuff that is being shipped to New Zealand packed by Wednesday
- Send letter to sister
- Do an international bank transfer for extra money for my sister
- Send off sold eBay item
- Sort through clothes and figure out what I’m not taking
- Quickly get the saleable stuff on eBay for short auctions, possibly beg a friend to ship them out for me, could pay in Belgian chocolate or maybe real money although chocolate is an excellent currency
- Ensure power, phone, and internet get cut off
- Pack!
- Do inventory with inventory guy on Friday
- Make sure landlord doesn’t rip us off
- Say goodbye to friends, bring tissues
- Get suitcases, walk to Manchester Piccadilly, get on train, never look back
to look after cat for 3 months
12
Nov 05
Love Saves The Day Closes, Will Reopen
One thing that Manchester is sorely lacking in is a good café scene. Although the UK is a hop and a skip from the European mainland, specifically France and Italy, there isn’t really anywhere where you can get a decent latte.
The closest to good is Starbucks, and that is pretty damn sad. There are few cafés in town, notably the Olive deli on Sackville but it’s more of a deli than a sit-down café and the shaven head lesbian at the counter is always rude and never looks you in the eye or smiles. There is Oklahoma on High St which has an awesome kitchy gifts section and a pretty good independent DVD rental section. Some of the food is okay, but the coffee is complete shite with the exception of their hot chocolates. There is bluu in the old Fish Market which actually has good lattes, most of the time. And then there is Loves Saves The Day.
Loves Saves The Day is supposedly some sort of “Manchester institution”, which is probably only because it’s been open for 6 years. I can’t for the life of me think of any other reason why anyone would actually think it is an institution, because it fucking sucks.
They opened a store a few months ago on Oldham. I thought, “Ohh! A café close to my work!” I’ve been there quite a few times and I have to say, it’s crap. Love Saves The Day is one of those places that is fashionably expensive. As much as I would like to pay extortionate prices for food that is vaguely healthy – oh, actually, I don’t. Every time I went into the store, there were about 20 staff looking busy, but doing nothing, especially not serving customers or making coffee. They could never figure out what till to serve you at – if they decided to serve you at all. Because the store was so close to The Big Issue offices, there were always smelly homeless guys sitting on the terrace drinking “water” from paper cups. Yet, inside you can pay £12 for two coffees and two sandwiches. And the coffee was always horrid – bitter, burnt tasting, watery. Delish.
So, last month they closed up shop because apparently it turned out that their accountant was embezzling money or dodging the tax book or something like that. And sadly, they will be opening again next week. I look foward to not going there some more, because the only way they will ever become a true Manchester institution is if they stop sucking so much.
10
Nov 05
Newsflash: London Is Full Of Cokeheads
LONDON (AFP) – So much cocaine is being used in London that traces of the white powdered narcotic can be detected in the River Thames, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper said.
Citing scientific research which it had commissioned, it said an estimated two kilogrammes of cocaine, or 80,000 lines, spill into the river every day after it has passed through users’ bodies and sewage treatment plants.
I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised by this. London is the most druggie town I’ve ever been to. Everyone I know in London is a waster and loves coke and/or E, which is so cheap it’s ridiculous. Kate Moss lives in London!
9
Nov 05
It’s Official: I’m Going Home
In September 2001, I lugged an overly large and overly purple suitcase and one extremely heavy box to Wellington airport. I said goodbye to my parents, my nana, my sister, my 3-week-old neice, and my best friend. My best friend, Phillipa, gave me a notebook she’d covered in magazine cutouts of her idol, Michael Jackson, and told me not to read it until I got on the plane. As the plane pulled out, I saw them all standing by the window waving, even though I wasn’t sure if they could even see me. I saw my sister and best friend start crying, and hug each other. I looked at the notebook in my hands and proceeded to bawl my eyes for the majority of the flight to Auckland. I’m such a pussy.
By the time I return to New Zealand next year, I would have been living overseas for 4-and-a-half years. I lived in Austin, Texas for a year; Houston, Texas for almost two years; Manchester, England for just over a year; and soon Antwerp, Belgium for three months. By mid-February, I will be back in Wellington, back where I started.
The last almost-five years have been sometimes crazy, but most of the time fun. I really don’t think that life is going to be crazy and fun back in Wellington. I expect it to be dull and boring. I’m not really that looking forward to being back. I was sad to leave but now I’m vaguely dreading going back.
Since I left New Zealand, I have thoroughly enjoyed never bumping into weird ex-boyfriends and annoying twats I went to school with. I’ve loved being the token foreigner with the “weird” accent that forces Americans to do really bad Steve Erwin impressions. I’ve had fun being somewhat “exotic” when I was dating when I lived in Houston, although I’m probably a bit white and my accent isn’t ESOL enough to actually be exotic, but guys love it anyway. I’ve loved living in places where nobody really knows me and certainly no one has any expectations of who I am or what I’m like. I could be whoever the hell I wanted to be, and it always helps having a weird accent when you want to go to the drive-thru in your pajamas or if you say something completely bizarre by accident. No one questions stupid foreigners for being stupid – they’re just so foreign! But mostly, I just don’t want to bump into people I don’t like again. I’m really bad at pretending I like people I don’t.
I know New Zealand is this beautiful country that people who don’t live there rave on about a lot. I also rave about it at times, but only when I’m having a whinge about wherever I’m living now because I’m really excellent at determining the worst attributes about any place or any thing. But although New Zealand has the most beautiful landscapes, clean air, and open spaces there are quite a few things that suck that make me not sure about moving back.
First of all, it is far away from anything interesting. Australia is the closest country, but only on one side – it takes almost 6-and-a-half hours to be to Perth from Auckland. Australia isn’t interesting anyway! It’s 12 hours to Los Angeles. It’s 11 hours to Japan. It really is in the bloody middle of nowhere. This is both good and bad, I guess. Fingers crossed I won’t have to wear a surgical mask any time soon, but I probably will – god damn bird flu.
Secondly, there is no internet. Well, there is, but it is slow and expensive and owned by Telescum who like to fuck things up, just because they can. I guess this lack of decent broadband will force me to actually go outside and do stuff, but I will also probably have to go back to reading the paper for movies times, getting directions from a paper map, and getting my TV schedule from Woman’s Day which will be hidden amongst stupid articles about the lamest of New Zealand celebrities.
Then there are other things like New Zealand’s bizarre and recent obsession with crystal meth (”P” for the morons in New Zealand – it’s fucking crystal meth you twats, stop trying to make it sound like something that’s going to make you want to make love to a toilet brush), mental and violent teenage gangs who will probably beat me for my shitty 2nd gen iPod that I can’t afford to replace, the price of electronics and travel, and the lack of good stores like IKEA, H&M, and Apple Stores (yeah, yeah, I’m a fangirl). Also, where am I going to get breakfast tacos and lackmans? I’m going to have to make them myself, good lord!
I’m sure in due time I will get used to buying my furniture from stores that sell “comfortable sofas” and not buying fun electronic stuff purely because I can’t afford to be spending $100 on a PS2 game. But I will never get used to bumping into annoying people from school. Maybe I’ll just dye my hair, fake an accent, and pretend I don’t see them.
6
Nov 05
Where Do Homeless People Poo?
I’ll tell you where. Down the side street beside the Travelodge in Ancoats. Every time I walk down there I always see a big ol’ people log. They smell too. Especially after it’s rained for a few days and the poo has started to disintegrate and then it gets warm and sunny. Mmm, the smell of hobo intestines.
There aren’t any free public toilets in Manchester, not that I know of anyway. You have to pay to use the toilets at the train station and they have these weird huge brown cubicles (a fitting colour) dotted around the city centre but not on the main streets, mostly around The Big Issue offices. They usually cost about 20p. 20p! That’s 51.322 New Zealand cents! When you don’t have a home and you don’t have a job, I guess you have no choice but to run down to Spear Street and release your turtle into the wild. Which I will find.
This also poses a question because there is never toilet paper, or any other type of paper, near these poops. Unless there are poopy bits of toilet paper flying around the city (somewhat likely), I think it is more likely that there are homeless people walking the streets with dags and skidmarks.
This reminds me of a question I heard a few days ago – how do blind people know when they’ve finished wiping?
4
Nov 05
Rhys Darby Is Funny
Last night P, my friend Mischa and I met up with a guy I know from New Zealand, his sister, his sister’s boyfriend. We went to The Comedy Store to see some standup.
We caught Rhys Darby – apparently some famous comedian from New Zealand, but I’ve never heard of him before. Regardless, he was fucking hilarious. He does the best robot noises and war sound effects ever. I think our group contained the only Kiwis there (all 5 of us, fairly surprising to have 5 Kiwis who don’t live together hanging out in Manchester) and after a few drinks we definitely seemed to be laughing the hardest to the jokes about Rainbow’s End – New Zealand’s “Premier” Theme Park (it is really quite crap – it has the world’s most badly kept mini-golf course and the world’s shortest rollercoaster, hosted by Coca-Cola). I laughed so hard I got to the point where you can’t really laugh anymore so when you hear something funny you kind of mumble and groan because otherwise you’ll pee your pants. I’m sure the booze didn’t help that.
He was well worth the £7, so if you get a chance to see him I would recommend it. He is playing at The Comedy Store in Manchester again tonight, and in London on the 3rd of December.
2
Nov 05
System Keychain Error Message
After installing some random Mac OS X update, I started getting a weird dialogue box when I rebooted my machine. I don’t know when it started because I may not reboot my iBook for a month or more at a time. The message says thus:
“Mac OS X wants to use keychain system”
The password was not my login password, and nothing else I could think of. When this dialogue box was open, it would stop my airport card from connecting to my default network. As soon as I clicked cancel my wireless would connect. It wasn’t a major problem, just an annoyance.
I found a solution on Mac Fix It Forums which fixed the problem.
Tiger stores your Airport (WLAN) WEP keys (and apparently some other info) to /Library/Keychains/System.keychain, which is also available through Keychain Access. However, apparently that keychain has a system generated random password by default. If you try to access the actual passwords in the System keychain through Keychain Access, it will ask for the random password that, of course, is impossible to enter.
Now, if you want to set a keychain password for the System keychain, the only way seems to be through the command line. I happened to had only one stored password in the System keychain, so I was able to skip exporting the keys (on command line) and then importing them; I don’t even know if that is possible if you don’t know the keychain password.
So, what you can do, and what I did, is to create a new System keychain with a password that you *do* know. These are the instructions to do so. Please note that when you follow these instructions, any passwords in your System keychain, if any, will be lost.
- Start terminal and give the following 2 commands (make sure they are on one line in terminal)
- sudo mv /Library/Keychains/System.keychain /Library/Keychains/ System.keychain.backup
- sudo systemkeychain -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain -C “password”
(where “password” is the new keychain password that you want to give to the System keychain)- Reboot the system
To test that you have managed to do that right, do something to create a new entry to the System keychain (e.g. join a WAP-protected WLAN), launch Keychain Access, select System keychain, double click the entry in the System keychain to open the info window, and select “Show password”. You will be asked for the System keychain password, and if you managed to set it right, you can now grant access to show the password in the entry.
This worked for me. When I rebooted, I got a dialogue box asking for me to grant keychain access to airport. Thanks wrl!
1
Nov 05
Saving Images From Safari
In Safari 2.0 they changed the save-as funtionality so can specify a folder that all of your download get saved to (like your desktop or a downloads folder). When you right-click on, say, an image, you can see the option to Save Images to “Downloads”.
Now, all this time I thought you couldn’t choose a folder at will, like you can in Firefox or on a Windows machine. But Apple just hid it so people like me would waste time trawling through their downloads folder once a month and saving everything in a big timeconsuming go.
All you need to do is press and hold Option when you have the right-click menu up. This brings up the option to Save Image As…
All this time and I didn’t know. Argh!