Damn phone

Graeme:
Breakfast was vegemite
toast and hot chocolates. We're getting very sophisticated with our toast now. We use a frypan, oiled lightly with olive oil, then lightly oiled thick slices of bread. Covered with a saucepan lid to keep them warm, they cook in no time, resulting in golden crunchy yet soft bready pillows that melt in your mouth.

It's like someones turned up the gorgeous dial today. Although the first bit of driving today was fairly boring and rough, from Kharkiv and onwards has been stunning. Huge fields of sunflowers, some corn and gigantic trees lining the wide multi-lane roads. Kharkiv felt very european (this coming from someone who has never been to Europe), clean, busseling, cobblestone streets, ye-old trams etc. It feels like town pride is back on the table. Smiles and waves are now commonplace, and seeing people picnicking in the countryside is refreshing and confirms our suspicion that this place is somehow better.

My argument has been that we're seeing things in a more positive light because we're more rested, but Cassie is still adamant that this is not the case. I'm inclined to agree with her on this, some parts of the trip have indeed been lame, but being tired doesn't help when an interpretation of something that could go either way.The pressure of covering distance is becoming less and less as the distances we need to cover are so much lower. It is however good that we got the hard bits done, leaving us ample time to enjoy this end of it. The one thing we keep saying, is thank goodness we did the trip this way round, as opposed to going from the UK to Magadan. The culture shock would be depressing.

Dinner tonight should be marinated beef with packet risotto, washed down with orange Fanta.

Bit of a techie section, so those only interested in our travells, skip this section:
I've been having some trouble with my phone. Even in Russia, mobile data was unreliable. I could get it on some networks, but not others. If I had mobile service with MTS RUS, I could not change the phone to Manual network selection, the search would just time out. If the MTS network was not available (either out of service, or in Mongolia, or Kazahkstan where there was no MTS), it would search fine, use another network and 3G would work fine as well. Weirdly in Kazahkstan, in urban areas, data would not work, but in regional areas, it would work fine. If I do a quick dance before the phone completely starts up, I can sometimes manually change networks and data would work fine, but on MTS, I don't know that it's ever worked properly. I checked with the network before leaving, we were meant to have roaming data in all countries.

I guessed there was some incompatibility between MTS and the phone, like perhaps an odd character in the network name or something, causing the search to fail, but I can't be sure.

Cassie's SIM card doesn't fit my phone, and hers does not have data capibility, so we've not been able to swap them around to test. I have however put the SIM out of her phone, into the laptop and it has full service, 3G and HSPA. So, either way, no clearer if my phone is fail, or the SIM or both.

What's also weird, is at times, trying to trick the network selection, I remove the SIM whilst the phone is on. Normally the phone instantly goes 'No SIM', but recently mine is still displaying the last signal strength regardless of if we have more, less or none. This is also evident when I find I can't send SMS's. I suspect something is crashing the mobile part of the smart phone, everything else seems fine. Restart the phone and it comes good for a while, but still no data.

Today, the phone plugged into the car stereo, which normally charges it, ran it flat to the point it wouldn't turn on. It's not a particularly hot day, but the phone was quite warm... like it overheated and decided not to charge. I've left it charging on a makeshift icepack and it's going fine now... weird.

I've used the 'Reset Network Settings' option to no success and although a full reset may fix the problem, there's too much useful stuff on there to loose and without Internet access, I can't get older or newer firmware for it. We should be arriving in Kiev Thursday, so I might try update it or something?

We've not had comments from Steven or Jon in a while?! I knew Jon was away for a few weeks, but we expected to hear from him by now?

Position: 12-09-04 16:11:10 +0300 +0000
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