I picked out my new phone last night and it’s supposed to arrive sometime next week.  I took advantage of AT&T’s 3-day free Pantech Matrix offer.  I’m getting the red one.  It’s a pretty cool phone, although I’ve never had a Pantech.  I like the slide out keyboard, even though I rarely text on my phone.  I text on my iPod for free.  But it’ll still be useful.  I’m the world’s slowest texter, so for those few times I text with my phone, it’ll be nice not to have to take five minutes to send a five word text.

Apparently, At&T’s free upgrades aren’t really free.  The phone was free, but they’re charging us a $15 ‘upgrade fee’.  They always sneak a fee in somehow.

After a few weeks of not having much to blog about, I all of a sudden have quite a few things to blog about.  I’m just going to put them in one entry to make my life easier.

I woke up today to the lovely sound of my phone making a crackling noise that sounded somewhat like my alarm clock tone.  I hit snooze to see if it would do it again and it did.  Then I messed around with the ring tones and now my phone seems incapable of making any sort of ringing noise, choosing only to vibrate when someone calls me.  This really wouldn’t be the end of the world if it chose to happen while I was home and not while I was at school.  I’m long since due to a free upgrade and just kept this phone due to its excellent battery life.  However, since I’m not home I can’t get a new phone right away.  The phone’s in my dad’s name and I can’t just go into the AT&T store and get a new one without him.  So, he’s going to email me a list of phones that I can get for free and I’ll choose one.

I’m also sick, which doesn’t help matters.  Just a cough/sore throat, no fever, so that’s a plus.

The one good thing that happened today is that I discovered that I do not have to take anymore French classes in order to graduate!  Turns out only incoming freshmen needed to take two semesters worth of foreign language, not transfer students, so I’m in the clear after taking that one class over the summer.

Then I had to get my story critiqued in fiction workshop today.  The actual critique wasn’t bad.  My class seemed to like my story and had constructive things to say about it.  But then I got my grade.  C+.  Mostly due to mechanics!  It’s a fiction class, not a mechanics class!  He liked my story, just not the mechanics.  I don’t think mechanics should lower your grade that much.  I’m so pissed off about it.  It’s going to kill my overall grade which will then kill my overall GPA.

I’m so ready for this week to be over.  I wish mid semester break was this weekend instead of next.  I need a break.

My cell phone is constantly being made fun of by my friends and family alike, due to its age.  I have had it for over three years now and I have not used my free upgrade.  Why?  Two reasons.  Number one being that there are pictures on it that I have no possible way of extracting from it due to my lack of picture messaging capabilities and bluetooth.  Number two being the battery life.

Over three years later, this phone still lasts two weeks on a charge.  It’s always on, too.  I have yet to have another piece of electronics that has that good of a battery life.  My iBook’s battery life died after two years.  Actually, I’ve had that phone longer than the iBook.  No one I know has a cell phone with a battery that lasts that long.  My sister’s phone comes close, but it’s only a year old.

However, there is one place where my phone cannot keep a charge and that is Hawley, PA, where we went on vacation.  Every year it’s the same thing.  My phone dies after a day.  ONE DAY!  Not even a day!  It barely lasted 24 hours this year.  I actually remembered my charger this time and I had to charge it every night.   No one else in my family had that issue there.

I don’t get it.  I really don’t.  I don’t use it much there since I only get one bar of service if I’m lucky, but I use it as an alarm and a watch.  Now that I’m back home, my phone is back to its usual long battery life.  Weird.

Well, it’s not really new since it’s been around since Leopard came out, but it’s new to me.  I hate iPhoto on Leopard.  Yes, it has some cool features like face recognition and stuff, but it’s not cool enough to make me like it.  I was not expecting it to be that different from Tiger’s iPhoto.  So I ‘upgraded’ my iPhoto library when I got my MacBook so the pictures would be compatible with the new iPhoto.

Big mistake.  Huge mistake.  Wish I hadn’t done it.  The photos are no longer in nice little folders that I can organize with a file manager.  Nope, the only thing I can do with the photos is open them on iPhoto or Preview.  I can’t even get them on the Gimp.  I was going to make a new blog banner yesterday and then realized that I can’t open my photos in the Gimp.  Well, I can open them but they are really small.  Less than 200×200 pixels.  They’re no longer full size.  I am not impressed.

I have no idea if I can put Tiger’s iPhoto on Leopard, but I don’t think I’m even going to bother.  The only thing I used iPhoto for was to transfer pictures and videos from my camera to my computer.  I use the Gimp for retouching, resizing, and anything like that.

Since I ‘upgraded’ all my pictures, I now have to get them from my iBook again and put them on my MacBook again without ‘upgrading’ them.  That’ll be kind of a pain since it takes forever to put pictures on a flash drive with my iBook.  I’m just glad I decided to let my sisters use it instead of selling it.  Otherwise two and a half years of my pictures would be lost.

My brother of course finds this whole thing rather funny since he doesn’t really like Macs.  He keeps telling me how this wouldn’t have happened on Linux.  Maybe it wouldn’t have, but at least my headphone jack works on my computer.  He’s had his laptop for six months and his headphone jack still doesn’t work with his Linux.

My sister has a Garage Band addiction and often asked me if she could use my laptop to play around with it.  Since I now have a new MacBook, she asked if she could use my old iBook.  I let her.

As she was using it, the screen inevitably turned white.  It did this a few times and I told her to try lifting it up and tapping the bottom and moving the screen around.  She did and tapping the bottom fixed it.  Every single time it went white, tapping the bottom made it go back to normal.  I told my brother and he knew what was wrong with it.  A chip is out of place and he knows how to fix it.  Granted, the way to ‘fix’ it is to open it up, light a match near the logic board, and melt something.   Personally, I think setting one’s laptop on fire is a surefire (haha, I made a pun) way to break one’s laptop even more, but he says it should work.

It’s kind of ironic that I figured out what was wrong with my laptop after getting a new MacBook.  Not that I’m complaining about the new MacBook.  It’s quite awesome.

I even made a graph about my laptop saga and put it on the Graph Jam Website.

My new MacBook and iPod Touch, that is.  They were supposed to arrive Friday, which was less than 48 hours after I ordered them.  Apple has incredibly fast delivery service.  I chose the free 5 day shipping.  When I got home from my French class, there was a note from FedEx on the door telling me that they had tried to deliver them, but no one was there to sign for them.  If it weren’t for that French class, I could have had them on Friday!

I spent half of Saturday waiting around for the FedEx guy.  That shows how dorky I am.  I was so excited when he showed up.  I opened it right away.  Then I had to figure out how to transfer my files, which in theory was supposed to be easy due to Apple’s migration assistant.

I had a few failed attempts, including one that I left running during work and then the connection broke while I was there and I had to start over after I got home.  It actually took much less time after I got home because I used a shorter Ethernet cable and turned off my AirPort, which helped.  It took about an hour.

Pics are obviously necessary of the new MacBook, but I lost one of my rechargeable batteries at LeakyCon and I have yet to buy any new ones.  Nor do we have any double AA batteries in our house.  So, pictures will come as soon as I can locate some batteries.

Due to the migration assistant, I haven’t noticed much difference between my new one and my old one, except for the lack of a blinking screen.  My programs are nearly the same and it’s like being on my old computer, which I like.  The major difference is that I now have a WebCam, which is great because I can talk to my college and LeakyCon friends while being able to see them and they can see me.  WebCams are so awesome when most of your friends live far away.

I am still debating about which iPod to sell.  I haven’t opened the Touch yet.  I wanted to get the rebate all squared away first, which I just finished doing.  However, there are pros and cons to each iPod.  I know MJae is going to say ‘Keep them both’, but I need money.  I’ll probably post a pro and con list on here at some point.

I ordered my new MacBook and free iPod Touch last night.  Yesterday was the first day of Apple’s Buy a Mac, Get a free iPod deal. I’m glad I waited because not only do I get the free iTouch, Apple upgraded their MacBooks to come with a 160GB hard drive instead of a 120GB one and a 2.13 Ghz processor instead of a 2.1 Ghz one.  All for no additional cost.  Apparently good things come to those who wait. Now I have to wait until next week to get it, because I chose the free shipping which takes the longest to arrive.

I am retiring my iBook.  In a few weeks, once Apple brings back their ‘Buy a Mac, get a free iPod’ deal, I’ll be getting a brand new MacBook.

I took my iBook to the Apple Store and they told me it would cost at least $200 to fix it.  $200 to open it up and replace cables to see if that’ll help.  If that doesn’t help, then it’ll cost even more.  So, I’m giving my iBook to my mom, who has been wanting a laptop since my dad got one of those EeePCs.  She doesn’t mind the blinking screen.  Then I’ll sell my iPod Nano since I’ll get a free iTouch.

Back at the beginning of the semester, my Honors professor had us email each other a list of ideas we had for our respective thesis papers for next year. We did so and at the beginning of the next class, he asked if we read everyone’s ideas.
The class erupted in a frenzy of complains that some people sent their ideas in .docx file formats that can only be opened by Microsoft Office 2007.  Me, being the computer savvy person that I am, sent my file in a .rtf format.

The professor quickly shushed us and told us that inability to open the files wasn’t a good excuse.  He claimed that Microsoft has a converter on their website that makes .docx files viewable.  I could go on a rant about Microsoft and their pointless file formats, but that’s another post.  He also suggested that we send our files in .rtf formats.

Throughout the semester, people continued sending their papers in .docx formats and I continued to not read them.  I don’t really want to download Microsoft’s viewer thing.  It wasn’t like the professor actually checked to make sure we read people’s papers.

A few weeks ago another paper was due and I realized this a few minutes before I had to leave for class.  In my haste, I didn’t turn my paper into a .rtf format and sent it as an .odt format.

Today I got an email from my professor telling me that he could not open my paper.  How ironic.  He who tells us inability to open files is not an excuse is telling me he can’t open mine and wants a different format.  I suppose that excuse only works if you receive files in formats that are not Microsoft ones.  Just another example of how my school is pro-Microsoft.

I resent the paper as a PDF.  He was able to open it.

I had one of the biggest scares of my college career this morning.  I opened up my laptop and the screen was white.  No blinking, just white.  I didn’t really think anything of it since it happens everyday or so.  But when I closed it and opened it back up again, it was still white.
I closed it again and decided to give it a little while and see if it would fix itself.  So I studied and then tried again an hour later.  Still nothing.  It was still white.  I started to freak out a bit since I have two papers on it that are due this week and next week.  I hadn’t backed them up on my flash drive either.
Since I know it’s just the screen, I had to find a monitor to hook it up to so I could get my papers onto my flash drive.  I went to the library and their monitors wouldn’t hook up to my laptop.  I think it’s because they’re LCD screens or something.  Then I tried hooking it up to my friend’s laptop, but I didn’t have the right cord.

Then by some stroke of luck the screen went back to normal.  That was the longest it had ever been white.  I have definitely realized how much I rely on my laptop.  I backed up my papers and now I’m backing them up as I write them.  I just need my laptop to work for two more weeks.  Then I can get it fixed.