New phone

I got my new Nexus 5. It arrived quite quickly despite not being next-day delivery.

On impulse I got shiny-white instead of shiny-black, mostly to distinguish it from almost-identical-looking phones of my nearest and dearest :) It's actually more of a domino, white on the back and black on the front, which I don't think looks as elegant. But it looks fine.

Everything installed fairly easily! I transferred across most of my most-used apps just by installing them and didn't have to do anything else. Using google is problematic, but makes this sort of thing really easy.

I was just in time to recharge some of my remote ingress portals before they decayed, yay :)

Also, I can get text messages again.

Also, agh, apparently the update that failed to install on my old phone maybe saved me from SMS-combined-with-Hangouts :(

Also, yay, all the buttons work, as does the edges of the screen :)

Voting

I voted on the way to work, at Arbury Community Centre on Campkin Road. It was behind a cafe, which was new to me, but was clearly marked and friendly and efficient.

There was no problem with not having a polling card (which legally there shouldn't be, but I was all prepared to argue if necessary), he didn't even ask, just asked my address.

Thank you to everyone who helped out with the election in any way.

I think it could be clearer that the tellers are volunteers for the parties with no official role and you don't _have_ to say anything to them (even though, it's usually good to). They're often the first person you speak to and usually helpful, but might look official when they're not quite. But that's a fairly minor quibble. And having volunteers from most of the major parties who are watching and politely cooperating both sets a good example, and makes it harder for anyone to get away with shenanigans.

I'm also grateful to all the things that go _right_. There are often rumbles of threats of disenfranchisement in various ways (making some polling stations harder to use than others, making it harder for some people to register than others, etc). But we have a system which is better than most countries (I think?) in being fairly reliable -- can we PLEASE keep it that way and screw it up? There are definitely improvements to make, but can we look for things that will make voting more accessible for people who have problems at the moment (problems registering without an address, problems being intimidated by family, problems getting to a polling station, etc), not just randomly throwing away all the good features in favour of some ill-thought-out internet-poll thing...