New Toy

So this morning a confluence of events - needing new shoes and contemplating making the switch to a different cell provider, necessitated making a trip to the Dulles Town Center. For a while now - pretty much since before my contract with Sprint expired in December - I've been contemplating making the switch? Why? Well, though I'm not really a cell phone maven, and really would probably prefer not even having one - though I do recognize it as something of a necessity, or at least an extreme convenience in modern life - I decided that I should get myself a smart phone.
After all, it was getting to be tiresome carrying a separate PDA and cell phone everywhere I went. The problem, though, was that I didn't like any of the smart phones that Sprint had to offer, particularly on the Nextel side of the network. For a while I was liking the Blackjack, until I found out that it didn't offer WiFi.
Still, that got me to looking at phones offered by Cingular - the new AT&T - and I found one that I liked.
This one, in case you were interested. So after discovering that I'd blasted my way through another pair of shoes the other day, to the extent that I couldn't wait for a pair ordered online to arrive, I decided that I'd go to the Town Center to take advantage of one of the shoe stores and one of the wireless stores.
After buying the shoes I went to a Cingular - now the new AT&T - store and checked out the phone, talked to the cute-ish Asian girl working there, and decided to make the leap. We started the process of porting my number over from Sprint, but for reasons that she couldn't explain, my number wouldn't port. She suggested that I try an actual AT&T store and see if they could help.
It was around lunch time by this point, but I decided that I just wasn’t up for the food court, and that I would just head home, stopping to do my grocery shopping first, and then just eat lunch there.
Then it occurred to me that I was close to HQ and I had my badge with me – I’d brought it along, unnecessarily, in case I needed it to prove my employment in order to get the discount AT&T offers employees of my company – so I could meet Scott for lunch if he was available.
He was, so I headed over to HQ. On the way there, my phone rang.
It was the cute-ish girl from the wireless store letting me know that she’d been able to get past whatever hurdle it was in porting my number.
So after lunch I headed back over to the Town Center and made the switch.
Once I got home I called my mom to test it out, then began the process of moving stuff over from my existing PDA. Much of it was easy to transfer, as all I had to do was sync it with my computer, which transferred my contacts, calendar, and IE favorites.
The rest was just a matter of transferring from the PDA’s SD card to a PC and then to the smart phone’s micro SD card (which I picked up at Best Buy on the way home).
So far I’m liking it. The screen is smaller than that of my old PDA, and it’s lacking some of the applications, but overall the convenience of having one device instead of two trumps everything else.
One odd and irritating thing that I discovered, though, is that Microsoft does not make a version of its e-book reader – named, cleverly enough, Microsoft Reader – that is compatible with the version of Windows Mobile running on smart phones. A-buh? That’s just straight-up retarded, and really damned annoying, considering that one of the primary things I’ve used my old PDA for over the years has been reading e-books.
Luckily I found a reader application made by another company that does work on the phone.
The only other hardship was entering in my Network Key so that I could connect to my home network. The Network Key is a very, very long string of numbers and letters that works best when you can just copy it from the file it’s stored in and paste it into the text box of the configuration settings asking for it.
For some reason pasting was not allowed in the smart phone network configuration, so I had to enter it manually, which was a pain, even with the QWERTY keyboard.
Eventually I got it.
Before going to the Town Center I’d stopped at Wal-Mart to pick up a few things. I was a bit thirsty, so I thought about buying something to drink, but decided against it, because at the time I was planning on having lunch at the food court, and it seemed silly to buy something for that short drive which would end up sitting in the car and getting piss-warm while I was inside.
Of course, then I didn’t have lunch at the Town Center, so by the time I finally got to sit down with my lunch – making a burger took the cook forever for some reason – I felt like I’d been venturing across a desert.
In any case, I ended up spending an unusual amount of time out in the world today, leaving home a bit after 10 and arriving home sometime around 2. That’s a little different from my typical Monday that involves leaving for the grocery store a bit after 11 and being back before 11:30.
In my conversation with Scott over lunch he suggested that I should provide a little more context with my “Why I Love Fables” posts. He may have a point, but I imagine he’s the only person reading the posts who actually cares, and he already understands the context.
For my part, I was thinking that the whole point would be to provide tantalizing little glimpses into the series that would encourage people to seek out the context.
Since I’m sure that it ultimately doesn’t matter, I think I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing.
Anyway, not much else happened today, and even if it had I wouldn’t really feel like writing much more, so I guess I’ll bring this to a close.