Vodafone picture problems

When I moved here I switched to Vodafone because the Virgin coverage is nonexistent.

It took weeks to get photo-messaging working from my phone -- apparently there was something set up wrongly on my account -- and in the end I had to take it into a Vodafone shop to get the settings changed.

Since then, I have had three lapses in service: I try to send a photo-message to Flickr, and get 'Network Unavailable'. It's not lack of signal, and it's not (as the nice man at Vodafone has just tried to convince me) something about the area -- on at least one occasion ladymoonray, sitting next to me, has successfully sent a photo-message on her Vodafone mobile.

This time it came back while I was explaining to customer services that it didn't work and that I found this unacceptable.

They said it was a GPRS problem and that it would generally go away if I did a hard reset (switch off phone, remove battery and sim, wait 5 mins, replace battery but not sim, switch on phone, wait, switch off phone, replace sim, replace battery, switch on).

Is this a reasonable thing to have to do every few days? (More reasonable, true, than previous advice, which was to access their WAP service every day to check it was OK.) Or are they messing me about? If the latter, what course of action would you recommend?

on Google Blogsearch

All of this compiled from various panics, Q&A and tech talk elsewhere. I don't like the idea of my content being searchable without my specific say-so, either.

0. Blogsearch is still in beta, does not work as final version will work, and only contains data from May-August this year May 2005 onwards.

1. Via a friend with good contacts. "Google knows about the problem with indexing blogs that are marked as "noindex" and they're really sorry. They were leftover from the original test phase and not removed when it went into beta."

2. It's unclear (to me, anyway) whether the blogsearch thing is indexing the actual journal or the 'hypothetical' RSS feed that exists, by default, for every LiveJournal journal or community. (EDIT: Google implies the latter: "The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom)." Please note that this does not mean they are lying when they say they don't index LJs with the 'noindex' option ticked. Different source, different destination.)

2a. If the former, they are ignoring the "Block Robots/Spiders from indexing your journal" option on the user info page. (This is what stops your LJ from appearing in standard Google search results, unless of course you don't have it ticked.)

2b. If the latter, you can change your syndication options via the console.
- To set for your own journal, set synlevel level, where level is title | summary | full
- To set for a community, set for communityName synlevel level, where communityName is the name of a community for which you are a maintainer, and level is as above.
gacked from here, where there is a lot of useful info.

3. People are now talking about locked posts being indexed. Haven't seen this and can't replicate. Any examples? Are these posts that have always been locked, or might they have been scraped while unlocked?

IBM Thinkpad help

This is probably a useless post but I'm completely stuck.

My 'J' key has come off and I can't get it back on. There are four pins on the back that need to slot into four metal loops on the base, and I can't get it to go. Is there a trick to this? Does anyone know how to do it?

EDIT: ALL HAIL ME
(much fiddling, and working out the right order to wiggle the pegs in: it is still wonky, so will have to spellcheck anything with a J in it.)

The Booth Museum

A drawerful of Mammals
Originally uploaded by tamaranth.

The Booth Museum, in Hove, is a natural history museum of the old school. It's full of stuffed birds -- collected over nearly a century, from 1837 to 1934, and arranged in 'typical' habitats -- as well as skeletons (the whale skeleton smelt rather unpleasant) and a collection of moths and butterflies from around the world. (See here for a sample of moths). There's also a wheel of colour-coded specimens: you rotate it to see each one under a 'microscope' (magnifying camera) and work out what the specimens of the same colour have in common. Once you've worked it out, you open the appropriate drawer to view ... more specimens. The mammal drawer (shown here) was especially poignant: stuffed weasel, stuffed stoat, little bones.

There's also the 'world's most famous toad': a toad found in a hollow flint in 1898. Current theory is that the toad crawled in whilst very small, fed on the occasional insect, and grew until it couldn't get out. It died, was mummified and now travels around the world.

I was most interested in the display on Flint. From the presentation, I'd guess this was put together in the 1960s. It contained various common flint fossils, and an account of some of the superstition and weird science around them: flint 'hands' (actually sponge-fossils) as evidence of antediluvian humans, sea urchin fossils ('thunderstones') as good-luck charms -- many are found in Neolithic tombs -- to ward off lightning strikes. There was a thriving gun-flint industry in Sussex well into the 20th century. And now I know that the word for a wall with flint pebbles arranged in a grid pattern is 'flint-coursed'.

One hopeful fossil hunter (Henry Willett, writing in 1871) expressed the wish that "If the inspection of this collection should help one young man to find his pleasure, or to spend his spare time in this direction, rather than to waste it in billiards or idleness, then it will not have been formed or presented in vain." Collection as a moral virtue: never mind the education.