Dave Thorp's Blog

On top of all the PC problems detailed below my number ported from orange to O2 on Friday.

Whilst the port itself wasn’t too bad (completed by 10am) the aftermath was horrific. Prior to porting I had been using a temporary O2 sim and topped up qualifying for free texts as well as adding some bolt ons. All vanished!

It took 4 phone calls and a number of e-mails to resolve the issues which are thankfully now sorted (though I have approx 150 texts less than I should)

You may have noticed the site has been down since Thursday night. You may of course also not have noticed. Either way you are about to find out why!

Thursday I decide to try opensuse 10.3 briefly as until recently I was using opensuse 10.2. Unfortunately, it’s boot loader didn’t set the windows bit up right so I couldn’t boot into Vista. After managing to restore Vista’s bootloader I hit into a new problem. Vista realised it wasn’t 100% legitimate and locked me out (it was of course 95% legit just incase any police or microsoft employees are reading this site…. and in the case of microsoft employees I’ll make you a deal…. stop spamming my site and I’ll ensure all my software is genuine).

Anyway back on topic I spent most of Friday trying to get some form of OS on without losing data. Unfortunately XP (which I do legitimatly own BTW) wouldn’t let me connect to the net without my network card driver, opensuse would struggle with all my mp3 and video files that are on an NTFS volume and after swapping OS a large number of times I finally manage to download the network card driver and install windows XP which is where we are now.

Needless to say the next time I mess with my operating systems wont be for a while (least until the PS3 offers divx support or a linux media server will transcode for the PS3)

Next week my mobile number (which I had had for 2 years making it the 2nd longest time I’ve kept the same mobile number) ports to O2 making it have travelled full circle over all 5 major UK networks and back to the network that it started on.

I’m porting back to O2 mainly because of their new data bolt on which gives 200Mb of data for £7.50 a month.

The number started on O2 in October 2005 when I changed numbers to stop my ex gf at the time from contacting me and tormenting me (long story). I was one of the first to purchase an i-mode handset on o2 (imode being a service which I thought was pretty good with the free e-mail o2 were offering) however it never really took off.

I ported to 3 in spring 2006 to their we pay tariff

When vodafone started doing free weekends back in summer 2006 my number went with me over to vodafone.

Spring this year my number went to t-mobile to take advantage of their web n walk as well as the unlimited evening and weekend texts offer they unfortunately have stopped doing now.

Summer this year I moved to orange to get unlimited evening data and 600 texts for a £20 top up with calls at 15ppm

And now my number moves back to o2 with 200Mb data at £7.50 and 500 texts for topping up £15 or more a month

Anyone wondering why I take my number with me. Simple it’s because it’s 077 077 07 xxx