August 10, 2006
Phone swap
Alyssa had mentioned that it had been a while before writing the anniversary posting. I guess it seemed that life settled down quite a bit once the Chinni's returned to Indiana. There had been such a flurry of "while they're here we should..." that once it was over, we just took it easy for a short spell.
Phones - One of the things I forgot to mention was that the night before they left, Michelle's phone suddenly died. It powered up, had all the classic phone menus, but would not connect to the cell network. Since Michelle's cell is our 'home number' (the one we moved our land line to years ago), she was understandably wanting it handled ASAP. In diagnosing whether it was her phone, I put my cell phone 'personality' (i.e. the SIM chip) into her phone with similar unresponsiveness. Meanwhile I put her cell phone personality into mine and it worked fine. Since mine is so rarely used, we kept it that way.
The next morning I went into a Marlborough Nextel dealer to get a replacement phone. My main request was that it have built in Bluetooth so I could use a wireless headset for those rare moments I need to talk in the car. Such luxuries never mattered much to me before, but having a stick shift car makes cell phone usage nearly impossible. You pretty much always have both hands busy with your left hand steering and your right hand shifting gears.
Since we liked the sturdy, rugged design of the i530, I went with the i580, one of its successors. Unlike a rant I did last November, this phone does have a camera, an MP3 player, Java, Bluetooth, color screens, calendar, etc. I didn't have much choice. Motorola really didn't offer a basic phone with Bluetooth wireless capabilities. It's like trying to buy a Ford Focus with an integrated navigation system. You need to move up in the product line for a feature like that. Along with the phone, I picked up the Motorola H700 wireless headset shown at right. So far I'm happy with both.
Scripting - Another project that kept me away from posting was a night I spent writing yet another web oriented script. So many of the little widgets around the site (the weather, the birthdays, the DVDs, the webnotes, the gospel, the saint, etc) were just things I did one or two nights when I thought it'd be fun to write a little script to handle them. There are a few others you don't see as well. This one, though, never got written.
Like many cellular customers, we have an allotted amount of minutes we can use per month. If we go over that, the penalties are pretty high: 40 cents per minute. That's worse than international calling rates! Several months ago I reviewed our bills and changed our plan to a lower monthly allotment but added free evening calls after 7pm. Occasionally we get close to using up our minutes, especially with the girls home from school for the summer. I wanted to write a program that would surf to Nextel's website, extract each of our shared minutes, calculate how far we are in the billing cycle, and send a message to our phone with status. In theory, compared to the other scripts I'd written, this would be a piece of cake. In actuality, Nextel has so obscured that info, it would take a large effort to automate it. What takes just a few mouse clicks in a web browser actually involves a lot more than meets the eye. So for now, I'll just bookmark it and browse the site a few times a week... Ah well!
Greenfield - Michelle had a nice day with the kids today. The weather was pleasant and she arranged to go with her new friend, Jill, to Greenfield State Park. You may remember that Jill has a son who also has microtia similar to Timothy (although Timbo is a year older). Michelle, Jill, and the seven children spent 4-5 hours at the lake enjoying the sun, sand, and surf. Okay, no surf.
We're supposed to have a sudden drop in temperatures overnight. I think we're going from record highs last week to seasonally record lows this weekend. We've been lucky that it's been temperate all week. It'll help get our electric bill back down compared to last month.