Matt Simerson – Page 49 – Adventures on the Journey

Cell Phone Conundrum

I need a cell phone and service, and getting the right deal has proven suprisingly difficult. Maybe you can help?

My reprieve from being married to a cell phone is nearing it’s end and I have a choice to make. Because of my personality, I have already done some research to determine what’s available that will suite my needs the best. I have found exactly what I want, I just can’t get it. My ideal service plan is as follows:

AT&T Shared GSM National, two lines with 900 shared anytime minutes (from anywhere, to anywhere), two bluetooth equipped phones (Nokia 6820, Motorola T616), unlimited nights and weekends, nights begin at 7pm, unlimited mobile to mobile, $0 setup, and $80 per month.

For my needs, this is absolutely perfect. We already have unlimited free long distance with our IP phone so it’s highly unlikely that we’d ever exceed the 900 minute plan and AT&T has fantastic coverage all over the country. The only problem with this plan is that I can’t buy it. AT&T doesn’t offer “local” coverage in Northern Michigan and willl not sell a service plan for use here.

I have exactly the same problem with T-mobile. They too offer a very similar package but once again, do not offer service here. I’ve checked with the regional cell phone providers in the area (Cellular One, Alltel) and neither offer a calling plan that I want to be limited by for a year. Cingular doesn’t offer service here, so the only option I see is Sprint.

I dislike Sprint for several reasons. The coverage up here is very spotty, I don’t like the phones they offer, their data service is expensive, and I’d have to pay a fair amount more to activate service and buy the phone. With AT&T and T-Mobile, I can get a cheap data plan, free phone & activation, and a good service plan.

Ideas for a solution anyone? Ideally I could get an AT&T plan but as far as I know, I cannot do so without crossing ethical boundaries.

Compact Flash – Finally!

My single biggest annoyance with my Nikon D70 camera has been swapping flash cards. I shoot in JPEG Fine so I can fit about 75 photos on a 256MB flash card. I have two of these and am quite adept at swapping them as soon as I’ve filled up the first. Having two 256MB flash cards just isn’t enough. When I shoot panoramas, I burn through 10-20 shots each. Shooting just a few of those will leave me in want of space.

On our Alaska trip I toted along my PowerBook to offload the photos as I filled the flash cards. I also took it to have a full darkroom at my disposal but there are occasions like our Isle Royale trip where it’s impractical to take the PowerBook, or even an iPod with Griffin’s media reader.

Until recently, the options for solving this problem have been: a) pay through the nose for a big (1GB +) flash card, buy an iPod mini or Nomad 4GB mp3 player for $250 and rip the 4GB flash card out of it, or just wait for the prices to become reasonable. Now that fast 1GB cards can be had for under $100, there’s no reason not to upgrade. Pick a fast card from Rob Gilbraith’s site and then use PriceGrabber to find it cheap.

I picked up a SanDisk Ultra II 1.0GB for $89 shipped to my door. That’s a far better deal than buying more 256MB flash cards locally for $60 each.

An itty bitty possum

After arriving home from our trip to Isle Royale I noticed that some items that had been stored on the shelves in my garage were on the floor. This is quite atypical and left me wondering. I placed everything back onto the shelves and resumed normal life, making sure to close the garage service door.

Last night after returning from Persnickety I noticed that once again, several items had been knocked off the shelves. This was quite odd indeed. I placed the items back on the shelves, pulled the car in, and then paused to look around. Lo and behold, I spotted this up in the rafters:

He was fairly docile and seemingly unthreatened by me because he didn’t put on his catatonic act. I took a couple pictures and he didn’t enjoy the camera flash much. I then picked him up and carried him into the house to show Jen. We made him a plate of salad and left him on the back deck, with the garage door closed. If he’s a wise possum, I won’t catch him in my garage again.

Isle Royale Article & Photos

I have finished composing our trip log for Isle Royale. I have also completed processing all the photos and have published an Isle Royale photo album.

Isle Royale

Tomorrow evening (Thursday) Jen and I pull out of Cadillac bound for the end of the earth. Some twelve hours later we’ll pull into Copper Harbor, Michigan at the Northern most tip of the Keeweenaw Peninsula. There we park the litte Jetta and board ourselves and backpacks onto a ferry and sail off into the frigid waters of Lake Superior.

Four and a half hours later we’ll arrive in Rock Harbor on Isle Royale. From there we’ll depart on foot for parts unknown. We expect to hear the howls of wolves at night and maybe even see a moose or two. We’ll return to civilization on Monday and be home sometime late on Tuesday.

My site gets a fresh look

I have new become much more familiar with CSS, and boy is it nice. The new design is more attractive, easier to read, and contains far less code to accomplish the same purpose. On average, each page now contains 30% less code.

I had a few problems with the old site design, the most troublesome being code maintenance. Editing pages wasn’t terribly hard, but since I was using tables extensively for the layout, it wasn’t exactly simple either. I would often find mis-typed tags since the majority of the code maintenance is via a text editor (vi).
Continue reading “My site gets a fresh look”

Labor Day

Rather than taking a vacation, we lived up to the name of the holiday weekend. On Saturday we helped Mike & Deb load a bunch of furniture into their truck and a trailer to haul back home to Marshall. That took all day.

Sunday afternoon I tore out my old garage door opener and installed a new Genie opener. The trusty old Craftsman had finally given up the ghost. The new opener works quite well, despite the abused condition of the door. I also cleaned up the garage while I was out there.

Monday was a car care day. Jen vacuumed all the carpet and cleaned the other surfaces with Armor All while I washed, scrubbed, and finally waxed the exterior and treated the windows with Rain-X. The Jetta is looking mighty fine right now. So fine, I had to post a picture of it on the Jetta page.

After finishing up the Jetta, I cruised over to Home Depot and purchased a few boards that I needed to trim out the windows and closet door frames in our new master bedroom. The new master bedroom is nearly completed. We’ve moved all our furniture in already. The only things left to do is paint the closet and install doors.

A warm western update

After arriving last week, the first order of business was a fishing trip in Ilwaco, WA, at the mouth of the Columbia river. As Ricardo and I drove down we encountered schizophrenic weather. We’d have torrential rains for a short while, and then it would be clear and sunny 5 minutes later. The weather continued switching personalities during our entire drive there.

Due to the inclement weather and resulting 11-14 foot waves, we weren’t able to go into the ocean fishing and had to instead fish in the mouth of the river. We caught three decent silver salmon but we were both disappointed by not being able to fish in the ocean. We could see the breakers crashing just out past the mouth where we were fishing but they were too much for any of the chartered fishing craft to deal with.

We also fished from Ricardo’s boat in Mukilteo for two days, catching two minnows (about 10″) and one decent (9 lbs) silver. On Sunday, I visited with Ryan Merrick and we went out sailing on his father’s boat. It’s been a long time since I’ve just sat around and waited for the wind to blow. It’s quite tranquil and eventually the wind did pick up, affording us a fine bit of sailing.

I continue to be amazed how fleeting time can be. I had aspirations of visiting Rich (brother-in-law) and Mitzi & Bill (mother and step-father in-law) but I can’t imagine where that could fit into the next two days. Being mobility challenged does not help. The clerk that took my drivers license when selling me my fishing license didn’t give it back. I failed to notice until we got back to Mukilteo. It’s being mailed to me but in the mean time, I have to impose on others to get around.

As usual, it’s sunny and warm in Seattle.

Travel status

It’s been 3 years since I’ve flown out of Traverse City. Today, that aged memory was refreshed, and I once more remember, in vivid detail, why I so often choose to fly out of Grand Rapids instead. It’s really nothing against T.C., but rather because most flights out of T.C. connect in Chicago. Chicago often has weather delays, and once they get behind, it only gets worse.

Upon arrival at Cherry Capital airport, I learned my flight was delayed 15 minutes. I checked in, pulled out the book (The Pelopennesian Wars) I had brought along for just such an occasion and started reading. We got word that O’Hare was completely halted until further notice. The delay grew from 15 minutes to an hour, then two, and we finally left for Chicago at 4:30.

I had since re-booked on a later flight out of ORD which was scheduled for a 4:50 boarding and 5:10 departure. I arrived in ORD at 4:45, checked the gate status for my flight (gate C23, on-time), and then hauled tail across two concourses to get to my plane which would be fully boarded by the time I arrived at the gate.

Upon arrival, I learned my flight was delayed 1 hour 25 minutes. Sigh. So, I decided to call ahead and inform Ricardo & Paulette of my new flight info. I pulled out my trusty calling card and tried to place a call. I was greeted by a, “Sorry, you do not have enough minutes left….” message. This was not a problem I had only to call the 800 number on the back and recharge it.

I called and learned a new and useful fact, calling cards expire. Mine in particular (AT&T @ $0.035/min) expires after two years. I can still use the remaining minutes, but I can no longer recharge the card. This is terribly unfortunate, as I had long since memorized the card number.

My next logical step was to use coins in a payphone, so I traded a $10 bill for some change and tried placing my call when I learned something else new. Some payphones are “local only”. That means that if you happen to be standing in front of one of these phones with quarters in hand, you cannot use this phone to place a long distance call. How irritating. I finally resorted to calling an operator who shared that revelation to me.

Since I had already tried several phones, I asked the operator how I should proceed. His helpful response was, “try a different phone”. I asked how to identify a local versus long distance capable phone. He replied that I would need to read the instructions on the phone and see if it had long distance instructions. I replied that the phone I was currently using did in fact have long distance dialing instructions. After this I didn’t bother pushing the matter, as it wasn’t likely to be fruitful.

After trying a few more phones with similar results, I finally resorted to asking a kind person to allow me place a call with his cell phone.