The Phone Balance Challenge: Day 4

My alarm on my phone woke me up this morning. I turned it off and noticed that I had a text message waiting. It was a message from 3 informing me that I need to top up as my phone balance was low. A good sign for the achievement of my challenge.

As of 7:45am this morning I had loss of $232.44 from yesterday! This was much better than expected. The secret of my success…last night I connected my phone to my laptop, and used the phones 3G connection to power the Internet traffic on my computer. Genius. Last night the 3 network participated in some grid computing and also some “reciprocal” grid computing (aka Torrent sharing).

But I got too carried away. It all happened while I was sleeping too. I had connected my phone to my computer, setup the grid software and let the phone provide me with some bandwidth (I was getting like 5k/sec though so whether I did anything useful is debatable), set up a few Torrents, and went to lie down. Before I did so though I checked my balance, and my previous surfing though my phone had used around $40. Not bad. $100 is a good figure. I’ll get up to $100 and then turn it off.

But as the $100 mark was being reached, I was sleeping.

The only reason that my laptop didn't carry on using the phone as an Internet connection was that the power on my laptop ran out. I now only have $20 to last me these few days. $20 should be loads though. I mean, based on Day 1 when I actually made a profit, 3 days should be easy.

Comments

A new experience

It felt like I did a lot of travelling today. I'm in Moscow now. In total it was about 8.5 hours. But I had gone forward by 3 hours, and spent a few hours waiting for a delayed plane after being searched like a terrorist, and all the contents of my backpack unpacked and gone through with a fine tooth comb, and comments about sandals that I had in my backpack as being "too heavy". I have no idea what that meant, and at the time I probably didn't help the searching by Lisbon airport security by replying a sarcastic "uhhh,....yeah". I had a pencil case with me, and the guy doing the searching took every single pen and pencil out, and examined them all! I'm really not sure what he was looking for, as I could have used them as instruments of pain infliction but he allowed me to keep them all. I evetually boarded my flight to Maldova which was hugely delayed for no specific reason, so I got to Maldova and had to get on a bus from the plane, go to the transit a...

An unusual shopping experience

A few days ago I was in a shopping centre near to Syndey Aquarium. I walked into a clothes shop there and started to look at the sunglasses they had on sale. A female member of sales staff walked past me, smiled and said the obligatory "hi, how are you. Want to try any sunnies on?". Standard reply of "oh,...no,...no thanks, I'm just looking thanks". Nothing unusual. I looked at the sunglasses a bit longer then slowly started to wander round the shop looking at other things. About 5 minutes had elapsed since I had entered the shop and spoken to the girl. I was now looking through their extensive collection of board shorts. Admiring the price, fabric, etc. This girl walked over and started folding clothes or doing something with clothes and hangers. I didn't pay any attention. Suddenly she exclaimed in an overfriendly way "what are you up to tonight?". I almost jumped with surprise, looked up at her, looked around to see if the question was directed ...

The social experiment

I saw this scene on Friday night in Sydney. I was standing at an intersection, a really busy intersection near China Town, waiting to meet some friends,...but they were late. So I had lots of time to stand around and wait for a break in the stream of pedestrians to take this picture. It still came out a little blurry, but I can describe it. On the left, a table of water bottles with a metal tin and a sign saying that the water bottles are $1, and then another sign saying it is unattended and that you should be honest and pay if you take a bottle. On the right of the picture is a guy kneeling on the pavement, possibly homeless, with a sign asking for money. Almost immediately this struck me as some sort of strange social experiment. Embrace your inner philanthropist by giving money to a homeless guy, buy yourself water for $1 and give no money to the homeless guy, steal a bottle of water, steal a bottle of water and give it to the homeless guy, or even buy a bottle for $1 and ...

You'll find me about 11,000 miles away.

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