To clarify, I did not receive a haircut from the bushfire. And thankfully I've not really been affected, although you can feel the smoke in the air. There have been quite a few other mishaps this week, though.
Yesterday I did get a haircut (or all of them cut, if you want to make a dad joke) from a local place by my house. It'd been a while since my last one and after traveling for three straight weeks I decided it was time to clean up a bit. There's a shopping centre not too far from where I live, so I wandered over and made an appointment for lunch time yesterday.
Haircutting places here not only give you magazines to read (and don't expect you to speak to anyone during the cut), they also give you free tea or coffee! Such a novelty. He also asked if I wanted my hair blown dry - I said no, but then he did it anyway and just didn't charge me. I think I'll be going back.
Last night Katrina and I went to the Sydney night market, which is supposed to be reminiscent of Asian night noodle markets. Except it's held in a big park downtown instead of crowded streets. There's a lot of Asian influence here, though, so the food was really good. We got there on the later side - the crowds were still pretty big when we first showed up around 7, but calmed down by about 8. We at ea lot of good things, including pho, seafood noodles, and dumplings of many varieties. I also had my first taste of Malaysian food - I tried something that looked like fried smashed bread/crepe with curry. I'm not sure what it was called but I was a big fan of the bread (less so of the curry but I'm sure you can get it with a lot of other curries).
Today has been a comedy of errors: when throwing my laundry from the outback in my washing machine, I also threw in a package of trail mix, because everyone puts trail mix in with laundry, don't they?! As I scooped it out by hand, this was the one time I was happy that my mix didn't include chocolate.
Then I received an email from my intranet that I needed to change my password. I did. Then I couldn't remember what I changed it to, so I was locked out of our email client. This set off a series of phone calls to our help desk in DC, where it was already 9:30 pm. After it ringing for a long time, I left a voicemail with my phone number.... in Australia. And not very much hope.
After I was preparing to leave and just go to the beach, I got a call back from a private number. I couldn't hear anything for a long time, but eventually I heard a faint voice saying "Michelle?" IS!
I hung up on him after it became clear the conversation wasn't going anywhere, and called him back from skype on my phone. By this time, because I had closed my laptop, I wasn't just locked out of my email. I had locked myself out of my entire machine. I wasn't connected to the internet, and he had no way to remote in to my computer and fix it (he could, however, reset my email so it wouldn't say that I had tried to enter a bad password too many times).
Just as he was about to "escalate" me, I pressed something I hadn't tried before and was able to reset my machine password. Then he helped to reset my passwords, log me back into my email, and fix my phone settings.
In the middle of our conversation, my boss called - her credit card had been compromised, so the bank canceled it. All in all it was a good team day for us. I thanked Anthony the IS guy for his help after we thought all was fixed, and went to make some late lunch.
When I came back to my computer and phone after grilled cheese (comfort food is the same everywhere, I think), I saw that my phone had an alert - my work email had a bad password. This was strange given that we'd confirmed everything was fixed. I tried to enter the mail client on my laptop and also got a bad password alert.
I called Anthony back and he picked up on the first ring. We did some more trouble shooting and he discovered that remote password resets take an hour to kick in, otherwise you get the reprompts like I did and you get kicked out again. What this means is you have to sit at your computer for an hour so it doesn't go to sleep, but you can't use any of the things that attempt to contact the server. Which brings me to this blog post.
Thank you, Anthony, and if my computer locks me out again I may just throw it out the window. Wish me luck!
Yesterday I did get a haircut (or all of them cut, if you want to make a dad joke) from a local place by my house. It'd been a while since my last one and after traveling for three straight weeks I decided it was time to clean up a bit. There's a shopping centre not too far from where I live, so I wandered over and made an appointment for lunch time yesterday.
Haircutting places here not only give you magazines to read (and don't expect you to speak to anyone during the cut), they also give you free tea or coffee! Such a novelty. He also asked if I wanted my hair blown dry - I said no, but then he did it anyway and just didn't charge me. I think I'll be going back.
Last night Katrina and I went to the Sydney night market, which is supposed to be reminiscent of Asian night noodle markets. Except it's held in a big park downtown instead of crowded streets. There's a lot of Asian influence here, though, so the food was really good. We got there on the later side - the crowds were still pretty big when we first showed up around 7, but calmed down by about 8. We at ea lot of good things, including pho, seafood noodles, and dumplings of many varieties. I also had my first taste of Malaysian food - I tried something that looked like fried smashed bread/crepe with curry. I'm not sure what it was called but I was a big fan of the bread (less so of the curry but I'm sure you can get it with a lot of other curries).
Today has been a comedy of errors: when throwing my laundry from the outback in my washing machine, I also threw in a package of trail mix, because everyone puts trail mix in with laundry, don't they?! As I scooped it out by hand, this was the one time I was happy that my mix didn't include chocolate.
Then I received an email from my intranet that I needed to change my password. I did. Then I couldn't remember what I changed it to, so I was locked out of our email client. This set off a series of phone calls to our help desk in DC, where it was already 9:30 pm. After it ringing for a long time, I left a voicemail with my phone number.... in Australia. And not very much hope.
After I was preparing to leave and just go to the beach, I got a call back from a private number. I couldn't hear anything for a long time, but eventually I heard a faint voice saying "Michelle?" IS!
I hung up on him after it became clear the conversation wasn't going anywhere, and called him back from skype on my phone. By this time, because I had closed my laptop, I wasn't just locked out of my email. I had locked myself out of my entire machine. I wasn't connected to the internet, and he had no way to remote in to my computer and fix it (he could, however, reset my email so it wouldn't say that I had tried to enter a bad password too many times).
Just as he was about to "escalate" me, I pressed something I hadn't tried before and was able to reset my machine password. Then he helped to reset my passwords, log me back into my email, and fix my phone settings.
In the middle of our conversation, my boss called - her credit card had been compromised, so the bank canceled it. All in all it was a good team day for us. I thanked Anthony the IS guy for his help after we thought all was fixed, and went to make some late lunch.
When I came back to my computer and phone after grilled cheese (comfort food is the same everywhere, I think), I saw that my phone had an alert - my work email had a bad password. This was strange given that we'd confirmed everything was fixed. I tried to enter the mail client on my laptop and also got a bad password alert.
I called Anthony back and he picked up on the first ring. We did some more trouble shooting and he discovered that remote password resets take an hour to kick in, otherwise you get the reprompts like I did and you get kicked out again. What this means is you have to sit at your computer for an hour so it doesn't go to sleep, but you can't use any of the things that attempt to contact the server. Which brings me to this blog post.
Thank you, Anthony, and if my computer locks me out again I may just throw it out the window. Wish me luck!
All I can say is Oy Vey! :-)
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