Are you sure its not my birthday yet?
Most of you know of my gadget reliance. I have been using a PDA for about5 years and have frequently complained about the amount of space it occupies in my pockets. This was almost remedied by the PDA I bought off of Tom because it was thin enough that it wouldn't be a hindrance to movement in my pocket if I left the protective nylon case at home. Unfortunately, the thing occupied the whole pocket meaning my phone and keys had to go in the other pants pocket (which may explain why my phone is so scratched up).
Speaking of my phone I am pretty sure it is dying. It will randomly drop calls even with 4 bars, I get very spotty service sitting in my cube (as in 3 bars one second, no bars the next, drops a call while it is ringing, or won't even get the call but will get the voicemail notification). Generally it is becoming a pain in the ass.
I am currently on the second battery cover for my PDA, and the battery itself is getting a dangerous bulge, and just like my last PDA I have managed to wear out the "down" button and am getting dangerously close to wearing out the "right" button. I think I may have gotten my moneys worth out of this one.
On the subject of phones and PDAs you all probably know by now they my wife recently upgraded her 4 year old Samsung i500 to a Treo 755p ... for free. Its amazing what good timing, full phone replacement plans, and a too much cuteness for you own good will get you these days. This of course has caused me no small amount of gadget envy since over half of my friends are now operating PDA phones, and the one person out of all of them who has been reliant on a PDA for the longest still fills his pockets with 2 devices.
You may wonder why a post titled "Are you sure its not my birthday yet?" talks so much about the sad state of my gadget empire. Well, those of you who are very astute will probably figure it out.
On Tuesday my battery cover popped loose again (ok, I was replacing the tape that holds it on) and the little piece of paper I had wedged into the battery cover switch came out. This little switch tells the PDA that the cover is open or off and switches it over to the backup battery so that you don't lose all your data. In my attempt to re-seat the little piece of paper I managed to trick the PDA into going back to main battery mode without a main battery attached. This means the device lost total power and reset to the factory default. In other words I lost everything on the device.
(sarcasm =>) Lucky for me this has happened before.
This is actually an almost bi-monthly occurance. As such i set my PDA up to do a weekly backup to it's memory card. I restored from my backup, which recovered every file except the ones I had added on Monday (lots of first day of school stuff) and the executables. I have since determined that those are only included in manual backups, not the automatic ones.
Not a huge loss here, I would just have to wait until I got home to reinstall some of the extra applications I use, but none of them are vital. I can get through my day without my ebook reader or my xvid video player. Oh, and all those notes from school? I am sure I can remember what room my second class was moved to, or what my teacher's completely cryptic web address was.
After cleaning up this little mess I decide I shouldn't quite get back to work (since I am at work) and instead reply to one of my wife's emails adding to it the woes of my morning.
The day goes by quickly because I am pretty swamped at work. I take my lunch at 12:30 at my desk (so I can keep working) when I get a call on my work phone. Its my wife. She says my phone sucks. I say "I know, I told you I don't get reception in my cube". She says "Well why don't you come out to the parking lot so we can fix that."
At this point I my mind kicks into high gear, but I fail to come to the conclusion that I am sure all of you faithful readers have. It takes me a good 5 seconds to realize what is going on and this is mostly because we [my wife and I] have been discussing it for the last few weeks.
When we were at the sprint store getting her new phone I finally had the chance to play with the Sprint Mogul. I decided that the world had finally produced a PDA/phone that met all of my desires. Full screen touchpad, compact size, Windows Mobile (NOT smartphone), and as a bonus the device has twice the memory of my current PDA and a slide out full QWERTY keyboard. Oh the joy. The thing was small, light, and retained all the functionality I have grown accustomed to. Unfortunately it was pretty expensive. I couldn't justify spending half this semesters book fees on the device when my current PDA and phone still work.
Luckily for me my beautiful, smart, charismatic, beautiful, loving, beautiful wife does not share the same reservations.
Kristina took a long lunch, went the Sprint store, bought me the Mogul, activated it, then drove to my work to surprise me with it. I guess that explains why she didn't try to call me on my cell phone.
Happy early birthday to me.
Thank you Kristina, you know me entirely too well.
3
thoughts
Labels:
bliss,
computer hardware,
phones,
pockets,
wife
