Rollover Minutes...Or Not

Did I mention a few times how much I love my iPhone and hate the service (ATT) I am forced to use with it?

Okay but wait...check out the pic with this post. That's my new monitor that has a dock for the iPod. The iPhone doesn't work right with it, but it seems to recharge in the dock. Perhaps I'll eventually find some update or something that allows it to work properly, meanwhile it looks cool there except for the message that it doesn't work properly and do I want to turn on Airplane Mode. Also, when did the pedestal of my monitor get so dusty? It's totally awesome...it has four USB ports, a little speaker and a couple different memory card slots. Soooo convenient.

Yeah, so the monitor and having the computer mostly all set up finally makes me happy. AT&T...not so much. Yesterday, my bf was out of town and I sent him a couple text messages and I didn't hear from him all day. Usually he sends a bunch of texts and calls at least once, usually twice. I just thought that maybe he was too busy or something because of business or maybe he got out of town and realized how happy he was to be away from me and just decided to never talk to me again. Well? I don't know...it could happen...I mean, not even one text message? I went to bed all sad and stuff.

This morning I woke up at 6am, which trust me, is very early for me. I think I woke up because my cat Rodney threw up all over the catfood bowl AND the water dish and so both cats were rather hungry/thirsty and restless/jumping all over me, but anyway...I sat up in bed and went "did AT&T bill me this month??? What is the date today?" I checked online and sure enough I owed them money. I have the pay-as-you-go or prepaid minutes plan because when I signed up I was having a bit of a hassle with it and it was looking like I was going to have to go to some ATT/Cingular wireless store in person to get it taken care of when I found I could do the pay-as-you-go with no trouble. It costs about the same, I guess a little more, than the regular plan and you aren't locked into a two year contract. Actually, I would suppose the bit extra you pay would probably add up to about $200 over two years and so it's just about exactly the same as paying $200 to get out of a contract, but whatever...it was what I ended up with at the time.

So, I needed to pay money for this new month of service, but they didn't call me, didn't text me, and didn't even send me an email to let me know. And I was sending text messages and they LOOKED like they were actually going somewhere. If I hadn't checked, who knows how many days could have gone by where I didn't have any service while meanwhile I grew more and more depressed thinking nobody wanted to talk to me? I thought I was set up for automatic renewal every month, but um...I guess it wasn't working? Meantime, I lost what amounts to about 400 rollover minutes. This is the second month in a row I have lost my rollover minutes. I have to wonder if they do it on purpose or something...like, if you have at least X number of minutes left, then don't notify you of needing to pay because *mwahaha* then you'll lose them.

Oh well, it's mostly just irritating...it's likely the rollover minutes would have just gone to waste, otherwise I wouldn't have had so many to roll over. I just wanted to say again that AT&T sucks.

iPod Touch

I'm probably the last to know, but I just found out about the iPod Touch, a hybrid of the iPod and an iPhone. My first thought was I WANT ONE, since after using my iPhone I find the screen on my video iPod to be totally puny.

Then, I realized this thing is only 16GB. That's twice the storage space of the iPhone, but 1/10th that of the latest iPods. When you have an iPod that holds basically your entire audio library including dozens of audio books and a bunch of movies, who wants to move backwards and get something so much smaller? Plus it seems like they COULD HAVE made it hold more if they'd really wanted to. Thanks but I think I'll wait for 60GB or more. If I didn't have an iPhone already, I might feel differently.

My third thought was, "this would make soooo much better of an Ultimate Prize for the IMVU Street Team than an iPhone". I mean, c'mon...you don't need to pay a $100 a month cell phone bill to use it, and it's available/usable WORLDWIDE. Somebody should go rethinking what "Ultimate" really is. Of course if they're going to do that, I'd still like to cast my vote for the Wii being the ultimate prize.

I am not like my mother!

Next month my bf and I are taking a ten day trip. We haven't quite finalized plans for it, but the most important part logistically is that my semi-retired mother is coming out here to cat-sit for me while we are gone.

So, last night I was talking to my bf about buying my mom her ticket. I can't just...you know...buy her a ticket, because it has to be on the right airline so she can get her frequent flier miles and I have to buy it during the right time period so she can get double ff miles, or so she has informed me, and she wants to make sure that the miles will get credited to HER and not, say, to ME.

I jokingly sent my mom an email asking if she'd like me to have her routed through Memphis so she can get even MORE miles, and she emailed me back quite seriously that yes, that would be good if the times were convenient. So, I was laughing about it to my bf. Like, imagine if I'd been planning to buy her ticket using FF miles? She probably wouldn't come catsit, because then she wouldn't get any miles. Like, maybe she's coming out here for ten days just for her Northwest Worldperks. Heck, if it were me, *I* would pay MORE money to get a more convenient nonstop flight and screw the miles.

So then, since I like to rant about things, I start ranting about AT&T (you're suddenly quite jealous of my bf being stuck in the car with me for several hours, aren't you?) and about how people on the west coast get kind of screwed with free "evening" minutes because they don't start until 9pm, but you can't call anyone on the east coast using your free minutes because for them it's midnight. Meanwhile, people on the east coast can call people on the west coast at 9pm and people on the west coast are getting that call at 6pm, and it's like, soooo unfair. Then, after ranting for a while about how much AT&T sucks and how unfair it all is, I suggest that maybe HE should get AT&T, because then he'd be "in my network" and all our calls to each other would be free.

I realize this is a somewhat ridiculous suggestion, since he makes phonecalls all day long and probably 95% (or more) of his calls are to people on some other network or maybe on a landline phone or someone in another country, and all I ever have to say about AT&T is that they suck, but still...my phone always makes a point of telling me exactly how much time/money I used up and have left at the end of each call and it drives me crazy and never is ANYONE I EVER talk to in the same network I am.

It was about this time he went from just sort of smirking to OPENLY LAUGHING AT ME. "Yeah, your mom and her frequent flier miles", he says, "at least I know where you get it from."

What???? I am NOT like my mother! Argh.



p.s. to my mom: Sorry Mom, I don't know how to get the owl hoot ringtone on your phone. No idea.

iPhone is 95% awesome

Wow, I love my iPhone. My bf bought me one as an early birthday present what...three weeks ago? It feels like I've had it forever now. No phone has every feature I want, but of all the phones currently out there, the iPhone comes closest and I imagine it will be a while before anything beats it (in fact, the most likely gadget to beat it is a new version of the iPhone.)

I hated switching to AT&T. It's expensive and I don't like the plans they have available. However, I must say that the sexiness of the phone makes up for it. it reminds me of when I first got my Sidekick and people on the train would be straining to get a look at it. I can't use it anywhere without people giving it covetous glances and commenting on it...and I use it all the time, it's so great at looking up google maps - my MDA could look up maps but the screen was so small it was almost impossible to make out the street names. The iPhone has, hands down, the most beautiful screen out there and it even shows the traffic patterns so you know what streets to avoid.

It's great for surfing Yelp (very important!)

And I swear, if your network connection is good, YouTube videos (like the one of prisoners in Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center dancing to "Thriller")

will look much better on an iPhone than on most desktop and laptop monitors. Not sure if it's the quality of the iPhone screen or the different compression used to ready these for your smart phone.

What is up with that Thriller video anyway? I think it's well on the way to becoming the most famous thing out of the Philippines since Versace's murderer or maybe since Imelda Marcos became synonymous with an excess in shoes. But does it cast positive or negative light on the country? I don't really know if popular opinion runs more along the lines of "what a bunch of fruitcakes" or "wow, what a cool prison reform system!"

Anyway, my two current favorite things are 1. my iPhone and 2. that Thriller video
I think my obsession with my iPhone will last longer, though, because you can't accessorize a video.