Weekend!
I still have one of those clamshell phones. I still use it for real-time voice chat and not really for much else than that. I have young’un co-workers who, impossibly, were born after Ghostbusters came out who mock me for saying things like “I’m either here, in the lab, at home, or with Maribou. I don’t need a smartphone.”
Well, one of the young’uns recently got the Samsung 6 something or other (a smartphone about the size of a toilet seat). He gave me his old Samsung 4 something or other.
All that to say: I need a carrier and I have heard nothing but horror stories about everybody. AT&T is the devil, Verizon is worse, and T-Mobile is even worse than that. Or maybe I’ve mixed up the exact order there.
Anyways, this weekend, I will be going out to get myself a sim card so I can do stuff like “use my new phone to make phone calls”.
Who do you use? What smartphone advice do you have? Please keep in mind that I’ve never had one before and the only thing I’ve done with it so far is download Plants vs. Zombies 2 using the WiFi. (But I haven’t played it yet.) If you’ve got a smartphone rant and you have been holding it back because everyone you know has heard it, know this: I haven’t heard it and I would like to.
I’m hoping to get a crash course in the stuff that all y’all learned years ago.
So… what are you doing this weekend?
(Photo is “Footrace finish line, 1925” from the Seattle Municipal Archives, used under a creative commons license)
The phone isn’t tethered to a particular carrier?
You might want to consider going with one of the subcarriers. Which one would depend on which carrier your phone is tethered to, but if you’re not going to go hog-wild, and Maribou isn’t going to get one, you’ll save money that way.
Among the big carriers, I still consider T-Mobile to be the least evil, but they’ve been stepping up their game.Report
Well, if you are only ever in one of three places the first thing to do is make sure the carrier you want works in those three places. You’d be surprised that in any given office building AT&T might work, but T-Mobile won’t or the other way round.
I travel cross up and down the east coast and sometimes cross country… so Verizon’s coverage is key. They are evil in that their service is expensive, but has never let me down… so I guess that’s not as evil as I’d like to think.Report
For a while I had a work phone that worked everywhere I went except at my desk – there was a giant steel server room chiller (the server room itself having been decommissioned, but the A/C thing was left behind being too heavy / complicated to remove) across the wall from my office chair, and directly between it and the nearest cell tower. If I stood up and walked one step to the right of my desk, I got reception again.Report
Yes, the phone isn’t tethered, I don’t think. It does have the AT&T Death Star on the back of the phone, but I was told that I could get a sim card from anywhere.Report
Need to clean some sheets!
The mother-in-law is arriving next week, so I need to get some cleaning done. As always, but this time with a deadline.
When MIL comes to town, I will finally be able to get a haircut. It’s odd being in my mid-thirties and having such shaggy hair.
The weather has been pretty awesome here.Report
I haven’t hair-farmed like this since college. I look awful.Report
Yunguns are not conducive to going and getting a hair cut.Report
you obviously haven’t been keeping up with your blanket training.
Good man.Report
Sometimes I think, “I miss having a little kid around all the time.” Then I read y’all’s comments, and that goes away.Report
For a while there I could slap some product on it and it looked big and crazy in a sort of David Lynch-y way. Which was cool.
Now it just looks big and crazy in a “I have an enormous undifferentiated mass of poofy hair on my head” way. Which is NOT as cool.Report
“I have an enormous undifferentiated mass of poofy hair on my head” way. Which is NOT as cool.”
Hmmm, for someone who is my age, I would say you have the better of the opitions…Report
Yeah, I was sitting here trying to think of a non-catty way to say “you forgot the #humblebrag”.Report
Gentlemen, as we get older, we learn to disregard the nonessential; a continuous process of paring down to only that which is needed, until the day when finally, nothing is.
You are missing naught (except, I suppose, on very sunny days).Report
I got a little bit of bad news on the health front today and have been placed on ketosis induction. I am NOT happy about this, not even a little little bit. WTF am I going to do with all this beer I can no longer drink?Report
Ohh… i dont’ know what that is, but i hope it gets better and isn’t serious.Report
Basically it’s the Atkins diet.Report
So lots of steak and eggs and cheese then?Report
Well, sort of. I’m also on a sodium restriction. So, not so much cheese. It’s a good thing I know as much as I do about cooking meats because that will let me get some flavor into them without using salt.
I’m allowed one piece of fruit a day and if yesterday was any indication I’m likely to get pretty nasty towards anyone who stands in between me and that one piece of fruit that actually makes me feel not hungry.
As you can tell, I’m still in the “anger” phase of mourning after my loss. I feel like I’m being punished for doing something bad. Which, in a way, I am: I knew I was born with bad genetics for this sort of thing, and I knew I was carrying around more weight than I should, but didn’t pro-actively moderate my diet accordingly. I figured keeping my alcohol consumption moderate, having at least moderate physical exercise most days, and generally using good ingredients would do the trick, but no, that wasn’t enough. So now I get to re-actively moderate it, and the results are more drastic than they would have been had I taken it easy sooner.
And the worst thing about it is: I’m going to die anyway. I’ll just have a slightly longer, significantly less joyful amount of time before I get there. When it’s put that way, it becomes a temptation to ignore the doctor’s advice, so I’m going to stop now before I talk myself into doing something foolish like eating half a bagel.Report
Blood sugar test results?Report
Hypertension. Much like the I-won’t-believe-he’s-actually-overweight @tod-kelly describes below, the prescription is “here’s some pills, now go lose a lot of weight and don’t eat salt ever again.” Which sucksucksucks but it is better than a cardiac event.Report
Work it off, learn to destress, and you might get salt back again.Report
ROADTRIP TO BURTS!!!Report
Google suggest that ketosis induction is phase I of a low-carb (Atkins) diet. My regrets. I offer to help you drown your sorrows by swapping your (good) beer for low-carb alcohols. Like gin. Mixed with sugar-free tonic.
So, G&Ts at your house?
(We are in the same county, at least.)Report
You’re on, counselor. I get 10 net carbs a day for two weeks, so they may as well come in the form of gin.
Good gin, since I’m going to make every one of those grams count.Report
geez i thought you were dying or something.Report
COCONUT CURRY TIME. Meat of your choice. Peapods and peppers and beansprouts and garlic.
With lime juice. And lots and lots of coconut butter and coconut milk.
Over fresh, cold avocado chunks (hot/cold textures, yumm).Report
Last summer when I had to spend two months on a low fat diet, I couldn’t have avocado. It was akin to torture, as I put it on everything: burgers, chicken, eggs of any sort, tacos, other tacos, still other tacos, pork chops, shrimp, tuna, tacos…Report
Leaguefest 2015 at Burt’s house! 😉Report
Speaking of which, ????Report
Right?!Report
I’m all for it. Just lemme go and ask my wife….
Oh.
How’s about Portland?Report
Portland!!!
I’m on it! I know a ton of wineries, breweries, distilleries, restaurants, parks and hiking spots. Oh, we have to talk Tod in to hosting a BBQ at his house and his wife in to making her brownies!!! Care for a second birthday party, Tod?!
There’s a bacon and bourbon festival this weekend at the museum of science and industry, but I’m sure there will be another fun festival any other weekend we plan.Report
I”m on something similar, also from Doctor’s orders — but I don’t think it’s quite as intense as what you’re doing, diet-wise.Report
But you’re not even a little bit overweight. I dare say that you’re a damn good lookin’ man.
Well, there may be other reasons. So hopefully you whine about it less than me.Report
I’m actually quite a bit overweight.
But more than that, the dreaded threat of hypertension has suddenly and rather unexpectedly reared its head. So no I have to be changing up a whole lot of things about my diet, including cutting carbs and sodium way, way down.Report
Doctors are prescribing low-carbohydrate diets now? Didn’t see that coming.
Anyway, don’t forget exercise. Both aerobic and resistance exercise have been shown to be effective treatments for hypertension, independent of their effect on weight loss.
Potassium helps, too, as it acts as a sodium antagonist. Your options are limited on a strict low-carbohydrate diet, though. I guess fish and greens would be your go-to.Report
I was pretty surprised too. “Isn’t that sort of thing hell on the kidneys?” I asks. And the doctor says, “That’s why you’re also going to drink a ton of water and come back to see me in two weeks for more labs and further instructions.”Report
Doing anything under a doctor’s supervision is a good plan.Report
I am thinking about buying a tablet. The laptop is getting long in the tooth, and tablets seem to be getting to the point they might be useful for anything I do from my home on a personal level (I am sure everyone here is like Duh, but I am an unrepentant luddite.) I started physical therapy this week, so that is the big thing with me lately. Mostly just chill.Report
I’m happy with my Tab Pro. Well worth the money for the crisper display and better specs.
Not sure I would consider it for a laptop replacement, though.Report
I have a couple of years old Nexus 7 (no cellular, have to find a wifi hotspot). Great e-book reader, fine for maps, okay as a browser if you don’t want to do much data input. Speech recognition for browser searching is okay. I’m not good enough to do spoken input for e-mail. Skype is very nice on it. For me, definitely not a laptop replacement.Report
You can get keyboards for tablets. Keyboard cover sorts of things. So there is that.Report
That would kinda be the plan.Report
I tried a dwarf rigid Bluetooth keyboard of about the same dimensions as the tablet — better than the keyboard on the screen, but still spaced too close for me to use comfortably. I’ve been thinking about trying one of these rollup keyboards.Report
I tried a bluetooth keyboard on a tablet recently, and after having to touchscreen the text box and switch to typing a few cycles, I just ended up using the screen keys.Report
I think there is name for keyboards attached to computer/monitors. Quite a versatile item in my experience.Report
R. went without a laptop for 3+ years with two tablets (iPad and Transformer), and only recently purchased a new laptop for work. And she did so begrudgingly.
Personally, I hate tablets, so I have no clue how she lived that way. I guess it’s entirely a matter of preference and purpose.
We’re about to buy a desktop, because my son needs it for some of the stuff he’s doing for school. Any time I have to spend money like that (and we’re not even looking at expensive desktops), I start freaking out and drag the process out, so it may be 5 or 6 years ’til I pull the trigger. Of course, I’ve put it off so long already that my son now talks of nothing else, so my fear of spending money may be outweighed by my annoyance at constantly having to talk about it.Report
Lain isn’t going to get a desktop for college. She’s going to get a bunch of parts sitting on the table and a toolkit.Report
We actually talked about building one together, but let’s face it, I am not that guy. We had a long talk about the hermeneutics of suspicion today. That’s gonna have to be my contribution. The building computers thing he’s gonna have to do with his uncle or my neighbor who seems to have turned his entire home into a complex of computers.Report
Almost every time I build a computer, there’s one hard-to-diagnose problem. In theory it’s easy, but there’s always that one thing.Report
The futility and madness builds character.Report
Ordinary Times
The futility and madness builds characterReport
Computers are pretty much plug and play. It’s not like building a roof or something.Report
I recently upgraded my second gen Android to a galaxy 5 mini. It was only one of a few that had a similar size footprint and removable battery. That’s important, because, frankly, I’m on the NSA list….
Pro tip…if you’re dating a dual citizen from Iran, don’t let her email you. 🙂
But I really find the huge sizes very annoying. I have a good deal with verizon and i’ve read that they are aggressively pricing their data plans, so you should shop around.Report
His on Earth do you find out you’re on such a list? I can’t imagine they go around telling people.Report
Back a few years when the NSA was telling us what they were legally authorized to do, vs what they actually were doing, they said that they could snoop on emails from foreign nationals to americans.
So I know that that email got copied into the “system” 🙂
Recently I submitted my visa application to go to China. A few days later, I was contacted by a woman on a dating site and we had dinner. She was VERY eager to meet. She disclosed that she was a CIA counter intel employee. I wonder the following: 1) if that was true, 2) if she might have been a foreign agent, 3) If I was being investigated or 4) probed for any classified/business info.
Note, my China visa requires that I disclose who I work for and the address…It was curious 🙂 And even if it’s none of the above, I’m sure as hell telling the story for the rest of time as though it was…..Report
And this is why wise information brokers don’t use e-mail.Report
welcome to the club
@chris it’s a FOIA black holeReport
@damon
I used to date a Palestinian academic. Pretty sure I am on one now too.Report
Given all the crap I used to post under my own name, either I’m on the list or the NSA is like everyone else and can’t navigate the Usenet archives either.Report
I can’t believe it’s only Thursday! I’ve had a heck of a week.
I’m on call this weekend for my first job and I’m physically working at my second job. Saturday night is girls night (cards against humanity and whiskey!). Sunday I have theater tickets!!!Report
Your girls nights sounds much better than most guys nights.Report
Well, yeah, I’m there. Hello! 😉Report
I have a Kindle for reading (which I would not even consider replacing with a non-E-ink device), an Android for mobile internet (and occasionally making calls), and a 15-inch MacBook pro for computer stuff and Netflix. I can’t imagine what I’d do with a tablet.Report
They’re great for reading digital comic bo… nevermind.Report
I’m having something of an odd weekend.
Tomorrow I might be going to an improv show if tickets have been procured for me as promised, but I haven’t heard from the guy in a week so I don’t know. If not, I’ll have to find some kind of a plan B.
Saturday I am going through a second round of being recorded *and* a second round of being filmed. The filming is for a documentary where I doubt I will survive the cutting room floor. The recording is for a multi media art show in September, where they’ll be doing visual mixed media and film around audio of personal stories that are edited to sound more like poetry. Or something like that. I think. Anyway, they’re using my voice and stories. Kind of curious to see what it ends up looking like.
Sunday I’m going to find some way to treat myself.Report
I didn’t know where else to put this, but…I just got to chat with Lawrence Lessig, you guys! I’m nerding out SO HARD right now.Report
@zac OH MY GOD I AM SO EXCITED FOR YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!
Seriously dude. That is wicked.Report
I’d suggest setting up TextSecure as your default texting app – it’s the best bet at NSA-proof encrypted text messages for exchanges with other TextSecure users, and if you set TS up with a local storage passphrase and the phone with a screen lock code (highly recommended), your whole text message database has a good chance of being local police force-proof.
Also, for a while I was using one of the many motion-sensor-using alarm clocks you can get. The idea is that instead of the alarm going off at an absolutely fixed time, it goes off up to twenty minutes or half an hour before, but at a point in your sleep cycle when you’re sleeping lightly. You put the phone on your mattress, and it uses the motion sensor to detect when you’re already tossing and turning a bit. I found that it eliminated the feeling I sometimes get of being kicked out of a deep and important slumber by the alarm. I stopped using it though mainly because it drew down the battery on my phone something intense, and as the phone aged the battery lasted less and less well.
Now I want to try putting one of those on my new phone – I’d forgotten all about that…Report
Saturday is the Pride parade, which is always a lot of fun. This year Mr. T and some other friends are going to be in a float – the only live band in the whole parade. They were rehearsing last night, and sounded pretty great. They’re playing the Care Bears theme song! And a disco version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow!
Also later there’s a picnic thing with the school where Kiddo’s starging kindergarten in Autumn.
Sunday volunteer at the bike shop like usual. The other shop the organization runs has come to the outraged attention of some MRAs for having a women, trans* & gender non-binary folks day a few times a month, and now our wonderful shop coordinator has to deal with a human rights complaint and a whole bunch of awful harassing phone calls. This Sunday will be a WTGNB day at the other shop – it probably won’t affect us much, but hopefully there won’t be too much impact on them (I’m half hoping we get a few misdirected rant-y calls, so I can tell off some jerks).Report
I will be crashing hard after one of the most exhausting non-start-of-school weeks I’ve ever had. There’s a point in covering-for-people-who-are-definitely-more-in-need-of-the-time-off-than-you where it stops being ANY fun at all, and I reached that point on Wednesday. But here I am at work today, 7:30am-6pm.
Fun times.
So I’m hoping to do as little as possible this weekend while looking at how much I need to get done this weekend. Ah, paradox.Report
Sending thoughts of a nice recliner, a good book, and the alcoholic beverage of your choice your way.Report
Germane to the phone: if you want cheap service, get the same provider Maribou has so that you can share minutes and data.
If you travel enough and you want better coverage, get one of whichever of the two Big Three Maribou doesn’t have so that wherever you are you have a better chance that one of the two of you has coverage.
Verizon’s family plan was better than AT&T’s, last time I looked. T-mobile doesn’t have good coverage some of the places we go so that’s out for me, but my coworker Dave has had it for years and he hates it less than I hate both AT&T and Verizon, so that’s notable.Report
@jaybird I went through my archives, and several months ago when my mother-in-law got a smartphone, I found that the best deal was Straight Talk. Straight Talk uses AT&T’s network, and if your phone is branded AT&T, it’ll almost certainly work.
H2O looks pretty decent as well. Also AT&T.Report
Will, Patrick, thank you both.
I will take your advice to heart and hammer this out with Maribou when I get back.Report