Sunday, December 05, 2010

How to Use Up a Perfectly Good Weekend

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, coming home from the airport Friday I decided to stop by the AT&T Store in the People's Republic of Boulder and upgrade m creaking iPhone 3 (not 3s) to the iPhone 4.I had to do it at the store instead of on the Internet because AT&T, in the interest of "security," has a strange Catch-22...the upgraded phone has to be mailed to a street address. Up here at the Secret Hidden Bunker, there are no Pony Express stops...you want mail, you get a P.O. Box in some town. So I have a P.O. box. AT&T adamantly won't mail a phone to a P.O. box, since only terrorists use the nefarious things.

No big, I said, UPS, Fed Ex or use some other comman carrier to send me the phone.I said I had accounts with Fed Ex and UPS, so I'd just give them the billing number and away we'd go. Well, said the AT&T rep, you must be crazy, since only terrorists use comman carriers instead of the USPS, so despite the fact that I've been a customer for a decade, and AT&T has never had any trouble sending me my bill, no phone.

So I went to the store. Sigh...the nice guy and I talked about my need for the 32 gig phone, the big one, because of how I use it. If you've gone through this recently, you know it's a long haul. But I eventually went home with the newly activated phone. When I hooked it up to sync, I realized it was the little 16-gig phone. Back to the store Saturday, a long rounbd of explanations and, eventually, a new phone. The phone was acting right, but the store clerk, a different one from yesterday, assured me the phone just needed charging.

It did indeed charge a little, then crashed stone cold dead before it could sync with my Mac. So today it's back down the mountain for the next round of Fun With AT&T. Granted, I should have hiked over to the Apple Store, where they never seem to make these kinds of mistake. Unfortunately, I wanted to shift my old phone over to my Sweetie, which mandated the trip to AT&T.

This is so boring.

I did manage to hang some new drywall in the gun room, part of an upgrade I've planned for the winter. When I get back from PRoB, I'll finish that up. Looking forward to THE WALKING DEAD tonight...since the Sweetie's not home I can watch it on a Real Television rather than the iPad (admittedly a great screen, however small)/

14 comments:

  1. Now maybe you can convince the powers that be at Downrange TV to:

    1. Ditch the battery & performance killing Adobe Flash that they've junked up the website with, and,

    2. Make the Downrange TV show episodes available on iTunes, so I can ditch my $12/month sports package on DirecTV. No reason you guys should have to split that money with all the other channels/shows that I don't watch.

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  2. Kevin2:43 PM

    I love flash. I adore web sites that you can't bookmark and have to allow random applications to execute on your pc in order to see them. and how would all the maleware writers make a living if you got rid of flash? And I really like having a 50% of my battery life and 50% of my CPU cycles sucked down the flash black hole. Plus the wonderful advanate of having every site I visit stuff a pile of data and code on my PC that I can't get rid of or see. Not to mention that I really see an urgent need for every web site I to be able to create a peer-to-peer network for it's use on my PC. Flash is great. Please use more.

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  3. Anonymous3:33 PM

    Move to iTunes !Yeah me love giving money Apple. They're sooo cool !

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  4. Anonymous3:45 PM

    Oh second point. I love to watch video on iPhone 3" screen or the terrific iPad 9" screen. Makes me feel like I was back in 1948. Great technology. Apples the best !

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  5. Since I've already written on your blog about trying to get a new Iphone 4 with a driver's license that expired three days earlier no sense in reworking that. However, believing that Apple is "Kewel" is akin to believing TSA and their new security procedures make life better. I guarantee you that any problem you had with AT&T about a physical address would have been twice as bad at the Apple store. A friend from the old Soviet Union used to say that anything in Russia that was good was an excuse to burden you with much more that was bad. Apple explained. After it turned out that Apples vaunted security was a joke and that Ipads were prehacked, an acquaintance commented that Macintossers are marketing dreams. Make a commercial with a guy in Dockers who was "the coolest guy in the room" saying to a fat, ill-dressed, nose picking Moron, "Wow, you mean you've never been hacked?"

    I got a new phone but I also managed to get a worse plan at greater cost and the reception is much worse. And then there's the mystery problems; apps work and dont' work. Next up, Android.

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  6. Iphone users explained.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

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  7. I've been using Macs since, well, The Mac, and I while I do lurves me my iPhone 4, AT+T is the worst cell provider in the lower 57 states. The sooner Apple leaves them in the dirt, the better.

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  8. Anonymous12:19 AM

    supposedly, this January I think it is Verizon who will also be offering the iPhone. I say that competition is usually good for the consumer.

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  9. Check to see if you have a UPS Store or simular business in you local town. You can rent a PO box from them instead of the USPS for a little more and it will have a real street address. You can even put that address on you drivers license. It will make the secret hidden bunker even more hidden.

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  10. shawn6:16 AM

    yeah! zombies on the big screen.

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  11. Anonymous8:40 PM

    Hmmmmmmm. No surprise that tonight's cable news showed that AT&T has the worst customer ratings of all of the wireless carriers, per their latest survey. Based on the experience that I had with them when I switched-over to them earlier this year, I'd have to agree. At least my phone actually works for regular cell phone functions. They botched everything else. My phone log, tracing the entire transaction, including what it took to get nearly everything sorted out, is pages long, on legal-sized paper! Note that I said "nearly everything".
    Life Member

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  12. Lawrence12:38 PM

    My problem is, I live way out in the boondocks, and the only cell service that works out here IS AT&T.

    So I have no choice.

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