Hippo, Birdie, Two Ewes...

To mnemex!

Schedule for this week

Just a reminder for anyone hoping to connect with anyone from the Starport crew this week: The mdlbear, flower_cat, and chaoswolf are going down to ConChord on Thursday; super_star_girl will be starting school on Wednesday and will be staying with jilara for the weekend. We'll all be back together Sunday night.

On the schedule for today are updating the cellular phone plan (Cingular's family plans are better than our old one with AT&T, and the Wolfling needs a new phone anyway), and looking into a new washing machine (they seem to be on sale this weekend, and our current one is 15 years old or so and starting to leak). And I have to get some more sheet music and oggs onto the website.

!@#$%^*()

[rant] Family phone service from Cingular: $75/month Three new GSM phones: $214 Dealing with Cingular's and Nokia's websites: priceless (and worth even less than that)

Can I use the website to figure out what the unknown symbols on my phone display mean? No. Can I use it to determine why the website and the manual disagree on what cable to order to connect the phone to my PC? No. Can I figure out how to block inexperienced users from using expensive services? Of course not.

And Nokia expects me to use flash -- there are lots of pieces of their website that simply aren't accessible without it. IDIOTS!!! [/rant]

Phone rant

So, in order to move our service from our old AT&T plan (which isn't offered anymore because they were bought by Cingular) to a new, same-price-but-much-better (no roaming, unlimited in-plan calls, unlimited night and weekend) Cingular plan, we had to abandon our old TDMA phones and get shiny new GSM phones. OK, that's an improvement, except that there seem to be lots of data services that all cost $0.01/KB. Well, let's hope it's hard to get to them by accident.

The flower_cat and I both got nice little Nokia 3120's. Smaller, lighter, and better battery life than the old ones. Pretty color display. A mysterious letter G in the upper-left-hand corner; no sign of it in the manual. Roughly the same loathsome UI as the previous Nokia phones, except that there are three times as many menu items so it takes that much longer to navigate.

I HATE PHONES! If they weren't so damned indispensible in this miserable world I'd be perfectly happy never to have to deal with one again. And cell phones are worse.

In other news

We also went over to our friendly neighborhood appliance store (Western Appliance near the corner of Bascom and W. San Carlos, if you're San Jose local) and bought a new washing machine. It's a Maytag Neptune front-loader; $700 less an eventual $100 water utility rebate (it uses considerably less water than the old one, and less power, too).

It's also supposed to be much quieter, doesn't get unbalanced when spinning, and of course it doesn't leak.

Foo

In spite of having gotten quite a bit done for the household, today has been a total bust as far as music is concerned. Sorry about that.