When this world makes you crazy

I have my new cell phone. I can’t use it yet, but I have it. I tried to get an unlock code, and the guy couldn’t find one. He referred me to someone else, so I tried them .. and they couldn’t find my code either. Sigh. The world is out to get me, it seems. One of the guys told me to try to call Cingular directly to get that code. So, I guess that’s my next shot. If I can’t do that — then it’s back to eBay, this time for me to sell the phone. I hope I don’t have to though, because I do like it.

Apparently, in this lifetime, I’m supposed to learn how to be a bitch. At least, that’s the way it feels, when life keeps trying to teach me the same lesson over and over again. I just can’t seem to learn it though. I’m too nice. I know this, yet it’s not going to change. Almost every time I do nice things for people, or am just nice in general, it always comes back to bite me in the ass. Twice this week at work alone, this has happened to me. Go out of my way to be nice, make things easier for people … and I end up getting screwed over. This is a repeated pattern over my whole life – I can’t even begin to count how many times people have burned me, taken advantage of my niceness, and then treated me like shit once they’ve gotten what they want. But, instead of learning to be bitchier, I just get more sad and jaded; yet I’m still way too nice for my own good. And I know this paragraph doesn’t really flow well or make sense — I can tell that as I’m writing it — but I don’t really care right now.

I bought myself a new domain name on Tuesday, for a grand total of 14 domains. Two of those technically belong to other people, but they’re still registered in my name. 😉 But, yes. I own a new domain – puzzleiam.com – and I absolutely love it. I adore the domain so much, I’m actually tempted to move to it away from here. Don’t get me wrong, I love having my own name as my domain – but I like that one more, maybe? Ha. We’ll see if I move or not.

Speaking of blogs, I added Snap Preview to this one. If you hover over any external link, you’ll get a little pop-up with a preview of the site. I think that’s just too cool. haha. If it’s too freaky, you can just click the little “options” button in the top corner of the pop-up, and set it so they don’t come up anymore. Hee. I already find myself hovering over links on other sites, and getting sad when there’s no pop-up preview.

I started upgrading the wordpress installations on my domain this morning, beginning with my lyric blog. Yeah. That didn’t go too well. Trying to update the databases after the update was installed gave me a fatal error, and now it doesn’t work. Luckily all the data is still there in my mySql databases, so nothing is “really” lost, but I submitted a ticket to tech support to see how to get this fixed. I’m a bit nervous to update this blog now, so I’m waiting until things get sorted out with the lyric blog first.

I actually knocked off one of the items on my 43things list (and one of my New Year’s Resolutions) over last weekend. I applied for my passport! One of the post offices in town sent out a flyer, stating they were having a Passport Fair. I stopped procrastinating, and went out to apply. It took me about 2 hours to get through all the lines, but I did it! My passport should be arriving in 6-8 weeks.

Go on and say it's a phase I'm going through

I’ve been debating making New Year’s resolutions. I have a difficult time keeping them, but I still want to make them. I’m maybe stealing one or two from Emily, but then I like to steal her ideas because she has good ones. So, my attempt at resolutions for the year:

  1. Update this blog on a more regular basis. Aiming for at least once a week.
  2. Get back on the diet. Halfway dieting doesn’t cut it.
  3. Finally join a gym. Water aerobics = a must.
  4. Go through my expenses and see which are actually necessary. Get rid of those that aren’t. Saving money=good.
  5. Get my passport. This is the one resolution I KNOW I will complete, since I need it to visit Emily again.

Obviously – I’m already not doing so good at #1. Technically, I wrote most of this last week, but just forgot to finish it and post it. Which is half my problem a lot of the time.

I also came up with a to-do list, things that aren’t resolution worthy, but I need to get done. Number one on that list, redesign this blog, as well as my myspace and my other websites. Hmm. Maybe “improve my php skill” should be on the resolution list?

It took about a week, but my iPod finally stopped being haunted. I still haven’t figured out where those songs came from. I even sat there and scrolled through every single song on the iPod (all 767 at the time) and the songs it was playing were no where to be found. Christmas just wasn’t ready to let me be yet, I guess. The iPod is starting to break, though: the headphone jack no longer works. I can still play it, though – since the dock I charge it in at work has a headphone jack, and the car plugs into the other end. It really needs to be replaced, but since they aren’t making the mini anymore — I guess I have to upgrade to a bigger iPod. Which, that isn’t an issue really. I need a bigger one. This little 4GB just doesn’t cut it anymore. I just can’t afford a new one, and I can’t find my receipt for this one (I have the extended warranty/replacement plan on it). Guess I’ll just have to save up and wait until it’s completely dead before getting a new one.

My phone is also acting up, and this makes me very unhappy. Well, technically T-Mobile’s customer “support” makes me very unhappy. Back in November, I blogged (5th paragraph) about the problems I was having with my RAZR. They replaced it and the sim card so the replacement is only about 2 months old now. It was barely a month old when I began having similar problems to the one that had just been replaced. Nothing as severe, but the display has messed up repeatedly, amongst a few other problems.

One of the other issues: my old RAZR had been set up so that I could access “t-zones” and download ring tones from the web, etc. After getting the new phone, I had made a few tones via Phone Sherpa, and tried to send them to my phone, but my phone wouldn’t connect and download them. The people at Phone Sherpa were nice and knew what the issue was (the WAP profile isn’t set on my phone like it should be) and pointed me to a certain help area on T-Mobile’s site to get it fixed. When I saw all the steps, I remembered having done it with my first RAZR, so I figured it would be easy. Wrong. I go through the steps, and can’t go past a certain point. The directions tell me to access a menu that isn’t available on my phone. I’ve been going back and forth with T-Mobile’s customer “support” for the past 15 days now, and have gotten absolutely no where. I do have many copies of the same form letter though! The last tech to attempt to help me informed me that the web sessions menu (the one I am missing) is not available at all on the RAZR, and that my phone should already be set up to work. Um, if it was set up to work, I wouldn’t be having the problems. Not to mention the fact that it’s T-Mobile’s OWN site that tells me I need to access that menu, on a RAZR. The guy also referred me to the RAZR user manual — and in that manual it shows that the menu IS available on the phone. They supposedly referred me to a Senior Rep on the 7th, but I am still waiting to hear back. I’ve even emailed twice since then asking why I haven’t heard from them yet.

I really need to replace the phone for all the display and other technical problems, but I’ve been hesitant to do so. I know T-Mobile will just send me out another RAZR, and I don’t want one. I don’t like the phone anymore, and I have no faith that a 3rd one would have any less issues than the first two. I was considering calling their support people to see if they would replace it with a different model at no charge, and without a contract extension, since it’s not working right. I went into one of the T-Mobile stores to see the phones they offer right now, and none of them really grabbed me as “must have” or even “maybe this would work”. I looked at a bunch of different phones, and one I liked is one that a friend has and loves. The only problem – it’s a Cingular phone, not T-Mobile.

I searched eBay and kept my eye on several auctions. I ended up winning one on Tuesday night, and won the phone for a fairly cheap price. Now I’m the owner of a Cingular 3125 Smartphone. The phone should be here over the weekend, then I just have to get an unlock code to unlock it so I can use it on T-Mobile, and hopefully I’ll be good to go. Keep your fingers crossed!

…wtf?

My iPod is apparently possessed by the Ghost of Christmas Past, or something.

Whenever I purchased or burned new holiday songs, I made sure the genre was listed as “holiday” to make them all easier to find to take off the iPod/out of iTunes. When I added them to the iPod, I had a seperate playlist for just the holiday songs that it synced from, so I didn’t have to search through my main playlist. Last night, I edited that playlist and removed all of the Christmas-related songs from it. I synced up the iPod, and it clearly shows there’s only 767 songs on it now, about 230 songs LESS than there was one day ago. So, according to the number of songs, it synced up properly, and removed all the Christmas songs.

And yet, this morning? It keeps starting to play songs that are no longer on the iPod. Songs I removed. I’m more than a little freaked out, because I went through and deleted everything with a Christmas mention (I left one or two winter/snow non-Christmas songs, as well as New Years songs) out of the playlist, so I know they’re gone. Like I said, the iPod shows that it deleted 230 songs. I have no clue where these are coming from. I guess the iPod doesn’t want Christmas to be over with yet?