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I hate warts. I hadn’t had a single wart on my body until a few months ago, when I found something weird on my left hand. It was quite uncomfortable, and I found it

Wishing it away for a month didn’t seem to stem its flow. So I did the only thing a man could do in his situation, ask my G.P. to freeze the bugger off!
The freezing process itself was a little painful, what is most annoying however is that over the course of a week the wound on my hand had blown up into a big blood blister type thing, and hadn’t changed.
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It was quite hard, and if you look closely you can see the remainder of the wart ‘head’ in the center of my blood filled thing.

Being the inquisitive guy I am, I decided that I would put to use my trusty Sypderco knife and open up the wound to see what’s happening inside.
Surprisingly there was quite a lot of blood in there, and once I had drained most of it I started to make a bigger hole to peek inside. Surely I thought after 7 days I’d have some funky fresh new skin!

It looked pretty bleak in there, and what’s worse it looked like the wart had somehow survived! There was definately a distinctly white piece of something in my hand inside there. So I ripped off most of the outer dead skin and cleaned up the old congealed blood.

Here’s a photo the day after I opened up to have a look inside.
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Looks pretty good so far, here’s hoping the wart is gone forever!!!

So, I’m not the safest person in the world. Sure I have a fair sense of self preservation, which seem to wander off when I become curious or bored.

And so something silly like this happens:

At an OCAU BBQ meetup I decided ‘hey what the hell is that yellow pipe sticking out of the beach next to the storm water drain for?’ and proceeded to inspect where my footing slipped and I fell into the murky depths of the sea.

I rised a little bit embarrsed and wet, however my trusty Nokia 6600 was not as fortunate. Salt water and mobile phones (and about any other electrical device) do not mix. I was quick to remove the battery as soon as I hit the water but it was too late, the phone was no more.

So I have now upgraded to the Nokia N70, which is quite a good phone. I’ll write up a little review of what I think about it soon; to be honest I would have prefered not to have destroyed my 6600 and waited a little bit longer for something a bit more fresh as functionality wise the N70 is very similar to the 6600.

The coolest thing my phone has is a loud ring speaker, which allows me to play the coolest ring tone I have made yet!

My Spyderco knife that Dan gave me also suffered some minor rust damage which prevented the safety locking mechanism from functioning. Luckily a night basted in WD-40 cleaned out the junk and freed it up good as new.

Heard this of Dr Karl, this awesome little site that shows how to talk directly to operators/people rather then talking to machines. Perhaps one day IVR’s will be smarter then the average person; but not today.

It’s called gethuman and it’s a nice online database that contains tips, tricks and hacks. Unforunately it seems it is US centric and doesn’t have much in terms of international support.

Still, it’s a good idea - and here’s some basic tips for on how to talk to a person.

Once you have a phone number, here are some tips to try to get through the computer to get to a live human:

- Interrupt. Press 0 (or 0# or #0 or 0* or *0) repeatedly, sometimes quickly. Unfortunately the same keystroke does not always work for each company. Many IVRs will connect to a human after a few “invalid entries”, although some IVRs will hangup.

- Talk. Say “get human” (or LANSMASH! :P) or raise your voice. The IVR might connect you to a human after one of these key or unknown phrases.

- Just hold, pretending you have only an old rotary phone.

- Connect to account collections or sales or account cancellation; they always seem to answer quickly. First ask them for their name and rep number (so they know you are writing it down, and thus so they are more likely to help you.) Then ask them to transfer you to the department you need. Sometimes they will put you ahead of the queue, although sometimes they will send you to the end (and thus in those cases this tip is useless).