Ramblings – Page 5 – Puzzle I Am

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:

Update this blog on a more regular basis. Aiming for at least once a week.
Get back on the diet. Halfway dieting doesn’t cut it.
Finally join a gym. Water aerobics = a must.
Go through my expenses and see which are actually necessary. Get rid of those that aren’t. Saving money=good.
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!

Pop my skull, ready to lose control

I was planning on finishing the post I was writing about Canada today. Yeah. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I am having one of those “blurry” days, where I can’t stay mentally focused on anything. My work is suffering, since I can’t finish the tasks, I keep wandering off elsewhere. Ugh. Even writing this entry will likely take a few hours, and I don’t even need as much focus for ramblings that I’d need for recounting events of a trip. I’m starting to be tempted to break up that post into segments, and just post what’s already finished and then post more parts as I finish them.

And now, thanks to a new medicine I’m supposed to be trying out, I feel incredibly sick. I have a hunch that will be the first and last time I take that pill. Thankfully the doctor gave me samples to try out, and I hadn’t paid for a whole month’s worth of the medication! It didn’t help any that when I went to the restroom, someone decided to douse herself in an entire bottle of perfume. I had to walk out through that stench, and some of it clung to me and is making my nausea worse. I have a hunch that when I finally get to go home, I’ll be napping until it’s time for LOST.

Speaking of medicines, I have one thing to say. Wal-Mart may be a big evil? But oh my god I love that their $4 generic prescription program came to Texas. Instead of having to pay $75 for 3 prescriptions on my insurance plan, they only cost me $19.90. ($15 for one not covered on their plan, $2.80 for another, and $2.10 for the third.) My wallet has been a little thin lately, thanks in part to doctor co-pays, so being able to save over 70% on prescriptions is a god-send.

I finally got the diagnostic tools set up and run on my PC. Seven failing sectors. Right now, since it’s failing at a very slow rate, I’m going to try to make it last as long as I can. That will give me time to make sure all my data is completely backed up (that’s being worked on daily, in order from most important down to least important). It also gives me the ability to get the new hard drive with money I’ll receive from Christmas. That way, it’s a little easier on my pocketbook, especially since I definitely want to get a larger hard drive than I have now. Hah. Or, if I decide, it gives me the ability to get a new PC instead of just a new hard drive. I am researching to see what’s out there now that I might want.

Not only is my computer going absolutely nuts … so is my cell phone. Two weeks ago, the display was completely backwards and almost colorless; and it had the message “Check SIM” on the screen. Turning it off and on corrected the problem for a little while. Last week I discovered that some of my games were no longer working properly (which sucks when in a waiting room with nothing to do), and the phone wasn’t responding correctly to the buttons pressed. I headed down to the T-Mobile store over the weekend to ask about it. I figured I just needed a new SIM card, especially because of that message and since my card was 5+ years old. The clerk believed I needed a new phone, so we replaced both. She was able to give me the new SIM card right then, as well as transfer all my numbers over for me. YAY!

The new phone is being shipped to me and should be here any day. Considering I’m still having some of the same issues, I think she was right and it’s the phone. It’s sad really. This phone isn’t even a year old yet, and it’s already being replaced. I had my previous phone for over 4 years, and it was still working perfectly when I decided to upgrade. In fact, I kind of preferred that phone to the ones they have out now. But, the new phones have more features than my old one did — like decent games — so it was time to upgrade. At least I still have that phone and can switch back to it if this one craps out completely before the replacement arrives.

More traveling is on my horizon. This Friday, I’m headed to Los Angeles for the weekend. It’s been almost 6 months since I’ve got to play on the west coast, so I’m ready to get back out there again. I wish I could have a little extra company on this trip in the form of my best friend, like I did last year, but at least I got to go to visit her just a few weeks ago.

I think it’s also time for a blog redesign. I’m getting fed up of the current theme I have. It’s nice, I’m just tired of it.

Predictable errors and no identity

My computer is failing. Little by little it has been going bad; a long slow painful death. At first it was little things. Nothing too obvious that it was the hard drive. I started having problems viewing files. If a webpage has an embedded file, I can’t watch it. But if I go directly to the source, I can. That started in one browser, then another, then another; each collapsing over time. More recently, I lost the ability to use the center mouse button. It’s still set up in the system to work — it just refuses to. From time to time, my ability to right click will disappear. Normal tasks that used to operate at a reasonable speed has started slowing down and freezing up my PC. I had defragged, virus checked, removed ad/spyware, and nothing was helping. It’s been incredibly frustrating because I knew something was wrong, just didn’t know what.

The day I left for Canada (Oct 6), the cable internet went out after I left. At first, mom somehow expected me to be able to fix it from 1100+ miles away. My brother showed up, and he helped her call the cable company and deal with them to find out what was going on. (Later we discovered it was actually the electric company’s fault. They were having issues and sending intentional power surges down the line to diagnose their problem. Those surges kept messing up the modem since I had forgotten to put it back on it’s surge protector when I rehooked up the PC a in September. Oops. Thankfully the rest of the PC was shut down AND protected. Evil power company.) While mom was on the phone with the cable company, they dialed into my pc. The tech asked mom “You know there’s something wrong with your PC, right?” To which my mom told him I did know. He told her that we could call Sony and they would help us with it. If *I* had been home, I would have asked him WHAT was wrong with it, since I knew it was messed up, but had no idea HOW. But, at least him saying that verified to me that there was indeed something wrong, and I wasn’t just hallucinating things.

When I got back home, I was told to run a drive scan. I did and sure enough my main hard drive has bad sectors. I’m installing Seagate’s desktop drive scan (but this process is taking multiple days because of the hard drive issues) to do a better scan and see what’s wrong with it. It’s starting to get a little worse, freezing up more. So, while I’m still running pretty well, I’m also burning CDs of important things so I don’t lose them. I’ve also uploaded a bunch of stuff onto my websites for storage purposes. I am trying to sign up for the free trial of the Spare Backup service, so that I can protect as much of my data as possible. Unfortunately, I’m having problems with that as well. Grrr.