Hardware

How’s this for kicks?

It looks like the iPhone just went through a price drop (ALREADY), and Jobs is being kind in reimbursing HALF of the overpay price (The old price was $200 higher, remember) in the form of a gift certificate.

I’m still in the “WHY would I buy a six hundred dollar phone?” camp here, even though the phone is now only four hundred dollars, but I’m finding this whole thing to be truly funny.

I’m just waiting for the free suppository add-on to come with the iPhone (as well as the phone being usable on a carrier that isn’t AT&T) before I consider buying it, but I’d still be leery of buying it. It’d provide me with no features worth my time.

I finally caved in.

Since I wanted something else to play on my DS, and I came to the realization that we only live once, I decided to buy the R4 card for the Nintendo DS.

I simply wanted a card that had better compatibility than this Datel Games ‘n Music card I got at Wal-Mart a few weeks ago. Some of the homebrew stuff just does not run on the GnM all that well (DSLinux, for example), and I think it’s because of an artificially imposed bottleneck on the card itself.

So hopefully, I’ll be having some kind of fun with this thing next week.

It’s Monday. I feel supremely lazy, with only one thing to do (which is laundry, two loads) today.

I’d like Chipotle for lunch.
I’m being lazy, and not going to get it.

It’s just one of those days, with the weather see-sawing between sorta-clear, and sorta-rainy.
It’s nice to be lazy and get away with it, sometimes.

Oh, and gushi ? I did mention I would post my laptop specs for you, so:
Dell Latitude CPx H500GT, running on Intel® Pentium III at 500 MHz, ATI RAGE Mobility-M1 AGP2X at 1024 x 768 px, 256 MB RAM, 30 GB HD.
Internet access can be done in three ways: Samsung A900m as modem on USB, Xircom Ethernet card + Dialup Modem on Cardbus, and Realtek 802.11g card on Cardbus.

She’s not intended to go fast but she is intended to at least go.

So, when I got paid, I tapped a little into my savings, and burnt off my entertainment budget for the month in a single shot:

I now have an old Dell Latitude CPx laptop at my disposal.

I can finally blog a little more, from more locations, without having to constantly abandon my computer because time’s up. All I’m limited by is where I can connect from at the moment via Ethernet (or by my phone).

This only cost me $200, and can seriously be reused over and over until I manage to break or lose this laptop.

Result: Getting connected often enough to actually download stuff for my personal entertainment, so that I can play offline = Saving money in the long run.

I am seriously happy.

[tags]laptop, internet, tethering, dell[/tags]

So, here I am, at the Public Library, wishing I had a cheap old laptop of my own and one of those wireless cards for it to use.

I’d like to be able to spend time talking with my friends online, but yeah, it’s annoying to do it from my phone (not to mention very difficult, thanks to T9), and also is impossible to multi-task on the phone. I’m used to talking to several people in one go, and on different services.
Some friends use AOL IM. Others use ICQ. Still others use Yahoo! Messenger or MSN, or Google Talk, or…
Then there are my friends on IRC.

I really just want to find a very cheap laptop, so I can actually have something to do on Sundays.

That has to come later, though. :-/

No time like the present to throw out an off-hand reference to Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, while talking about my phone.

As some of you may have noticed in a previous post, my phone was stolen while I was in a homeless shelter. I had a normal habit of placing my phone next to me in the bed while I’m charging it up, basically sleeping with it on the charger.
After about two months, someone decided it’d be fun to steal my old Samsung A640.

At first, when I went into a Sprint location (on Kennedy Blvd. and Himes Ave.), they not only didn’t want to work with me, but they also breached account privacy by not going through a proper validation step for the account. That is, they didn’t ask me to provide identification, AND they didn’t ask me for the account password to prove that I am who I say I am.
They simply turned off the phone, and didn’t bother working with me. They could have said, “Since you didn’t have the full insurance,” (another gripe for later), “the only way we can offer a discount on the price of the phone is by renewing your contract for two years.” That alone would’ve pacified me. No, the girl was rather rude in her portraying that I would have to pay full price on the phone, and there wasn’t really any other option.

I was seething mad after that in the first store, and didn’t trust that they had even done anything, so I went to another Sprint location in WestShore Plaza. I met a rather nice guy in there, and he was much more on top of things. He actually took an effort in validating who I was before confirming that the phone had been deactivated, and I hope that the higher muckity-mucks at Sprint know to reward him for that, since I ended up calling Sprint several days later.

I called Sprint on Monday morning to just close my account.
Since the cost of replacing the phone would be more than the cost of terminating the account early, I called in, and made my complaint about that one Sprint store, gave kudos to the other, and then asked for the cancellation department.

I get a rather nice gal on the other end in Cancellation (probably labeled ‘Saves’ internally, since she did her best on this call to keep me), and I explain to her just why I was cancelling my Sprint account (the privacy issue*, the fact that at this point the cost of early termination is lower than the cost of replacing my phone with a decent one from Sprint, and a bit about how the insurance plans were portrayed to me when I bought the phone, which all pulled things together in how I wanted to just cancel and get it over with).

She asked me to hold on, so she could relay the issue to a supervisor.
She and the supervisor basically apologized for the problem, and asked if I’d be willing to stay on with Sprint if I could get a discount on a replacement phone, since I also told them that I was considering coming in the next week anyway to try getting an upgrade to a better phone (read: they saw dollar signs there).

I listened to their terms and conditions on it, which they boiled down to actually (zOMG) make sense in a short period of time, while offering full information.

I was interested, so I accepted.

Sprint is mailing out the replacement phone, and all I need to do is go make a payment for it.
I won’t disclose the amount of the payment here, but I’ll say this much:

• It beats paying full price for this phone!
• It beats paying Sprint the cancellation fee, and then buying a prepaid phone or buying a MetroPCS phone (which I was reconsidering).

The week’s beginning to look a little better, especially with the phone replacement I’m getting:
I’ll be receiving a Samsung A900m to replace my old Samsung A640. (You can compare them side by side at phonescoop.com by following this sentence.)

I just need to bide my time now.

I think I should go see the doctor in the morning about the headaches I have at work, and see if he can recommend the replacement of my monitor, a CRT, with a flat screen display.

I can see this one refreshing like mad, and it makes my eyes want to bleed with the level of pain I’m subjected to at the moment. It’s pretty darned annoying, too.

Good thing I can type with my eyes closed, though. I’m pretty much blogging blind at the moment, in order to give my eyes some relief between calls.

I should also ask about the carpal tunnel and an ergo keyboard note, but right now, the headaches are more major.