Thanks to curvedmetal I am now coveting a smartphone other than a Blackberry. When I got my Sidekick 3, I had no phone at all because I’d just cracked the screen on my Sidekick 2. So I ran out and upgraded to a SK3 immediately and it was $300. But if I’d taken the time to do the research, I probably would have gotten a different smartphone. Originally I was thinking it would be the Blackberry, but none of them have all the features I want. It turns out that the T-Mobile Wing has just about everything I want except a built-in GPS. I could keep my same voice plan, and the data plan would either be the same price or $10 more per month. (I’m not sure what the difference is between just “Hotspot” and “T-Mobile Total Internet,” though neither comes with unlimited text messaging like I have now - that’s an additional $15/month.) I probably won’t make the change or anything, because I don’t know how much I could get for my SK3, but if anybody wants to buy me a T-Mobile Wing, I won’t say no! I’m just tired of the inflexibility of the Sidekick, feh.

More stuff went down at GenCon today, of course, but I want to get to sleep sometime this century so I’m trying not to think about it now.

My sister-in-law got a laptop for her birthday. Her parents had asked if there was anything she needed for school, and she said “a laptop.” So her dad gave her his, which is less than a year old and way better than mine! This is actually the second laptop they’ve given her, the first one being from when she studied in England for a semester. I bought that one from her a while back - she needed money, and I needed a laptop. Mine has something like a 40GB hard drive…this one has 100GB. Mine has 512MB of RAM…this one has 1GB. This one is lighter, smaller, and has more nifty widgets than mine. She’s not even an internet addict like me! She doesn’t need all the space and RAM, she’s not playing games or anything. She will probably put some music on it but mostly she’s using it for school - typing in Word, doing a bit of online research. And yet even though I know this is way more computer than she needs, I’m not going to try to come up with ways to convince her to trade with me. It would be too much hassle to transfer all my stuff, and anyway - her dad gave it to her, not me. But still…I totally have new computer envy right now. Please pass the methadone latest issue of Computer Shopper.

• My custom earphone kit came today; I had a problem with it and it didn’t come out quite the way I expected. They don’t take returns, but I e-mailed and let them know what happened and they’re going to replace it! I’ll reserve my review for then.
• I finally heard back from the farm about my Cat’s Meow piece. Turns out they are interested after all! I think all three of mine already have homes, but when I get them I will send pictures and they can order more of their own if they like.
• Yesterday I signed up for this tour of the Grand Canyon for next month when we’re in Las Vegas. It was about $220 for two people. I realized I never got a confirmation e-mail, so I went back to the site…and it now says $190 for two people. I signed up last night! I eventually did get the confirmation e-mail and it has the $220 price, so I am going to call them tomorrow and ask about it. There are plenty of other tour operators, if they won’t give me the lower price I might ask for a refund - then again, there’s a $25 cancellation fee, and that’s the difference anyway. We’ll see what happens when I call.

Thanks to crayonbeam’s mention of custom earphones, I now have what I hope will be the perfect earphones for listening to my iPod. At first I ended up at Ultimate Ears, but their cheapest custom model is $550. Next I came across PodFitKit. After reading the instructions and FAQ, and watching the video, I promptly ordered a pair in off-white. The PodFitKit is a silicone putty type material that you fit around your existing earbuds, and into your ear. You let it harden for 10 minutes, and then you can remove your brand new custom earphones. And it’s only $15! I was quite delighted to find this product and I hope it gets here soon.

Well, I guess my ears are just shaped weird, or something. They are at least two different sizes, I can tell that much. I went to the drugstore at lunch and bought the Philips SHS3201 earhook earphones for $10, and the right one sits pretty comfortably on my ear but the left one feels like it is a little too low. Neither of them falls out even when I shake my head hard, but I am still wondering if I should have just gotten the lightweight folding $7 over-the-head headphones instead. I got the earhook kind because I wanted something low-profile, but apparently my ears are just more bizarre than the rest of humanity’s, and perfect headphones simply don’t exist for me.

To my great disappointment, the Logitech wireless headphones I ordered don’t fit. They work fine - the Bluetooth is great - but they are too big and heavy for me. They don’t seem to sit properly behind my head, and they’re squashing one ear and hurting it. So I think I am going to have to sell them, or something. They were $32 on Amazon plus $11 shipping, and I want to get as much back as I can. I’m really unhappy about this because I am enjoying the freedom of no wires, and there aren’t many good alternatives. The next generation is called Free Pulse but they are very expensive, and I have no idea how they’d feel on my ears either. There aren’t many affordable alternatives; I was considering the Creative CB2530 which looks much more comfortable, but Cnet really didn’t like them so I’m not sure what to do. I may just have to use wired earphones for the foreseeable future, unfortunately.

If you have a jar full of coins, I highly recommend Coinstar’s new coins to certificates program. If you ask the machine to turn your coins into cash, they charge a service fee of 8.9% of the total amount counted. If you have it turned into an eCertificate for Amazon.com, iTunes, Starbucks, Borders, Pier One Imports, or a few other places, the coin counting fee is waived completely. I just brought my giant jar of coins in, and here’s what I had:

Dollars	1
Half-Dollars	0
Quarters	239
Dimes	172
Nickels	164
Pennies	1036
Total	$96.51

Not bad, eh? So I now have an Amazon.com gift certificate for $96.51. A tip for those of you who bring in your coins, though - before you hit the “I’m Done” button, check the reject bin at knee level. After I had already completed my entire transaction, I discovered the reject bin held 25 quarters, 10 nickels, four dimes, and 20 pennies, for a total of $7.10 that didn’t get counted. It’s worth trying any rejects again just to see if they’ll go through, so don’t forget to do that before pressing the final button.

First, I never heard from Wil Wheaton, which makes me kind of sad. Everyone was so encouraging that I wrote to him with hope, but so far no joy - oh well. What I really wanted to write about, though, is stickers.

• First: political bumper stickers. I participated in my friend Ryan’s Political Bumpers project around the time of the 2004 presidential election, so I got very interested in political-sticker-spotting. What I’ve been noticing recently, though, is that people still have those stickers on their cars. I’ve always thought political stickers, like tattoo’s of your current squeeze’s name, are a bad idea because they will grow out of date. But it seems that around here, at least, political stickers have turned into declarations of the car owner’s ideology. I have found that I now equate “Bush/Cheney” stickers with “I’m the NRA - And I Vote” stickers, Jesus fish, and so forth. Likewise, any “Kerry/Edwards” stickers are equivalent to Darwin fish and other left-wing ideas. The Bush/Cheney stickers have the added air of “nyah nyah” while the Kerry/Edwards stickers have an added air of…disappointment, I guess, or maybe “you suck!”
• Second: cell phone stickers, or “skins.” When I had a clunky old Nokia 3390, I had removable faceplates. I ditched the original gold one early on and used Hello Kitty faceplates for the rest of the phone’s life. But now that I have a Sidekick, I no longer get removable faceplates, so my device is very bland and gray. It’s possible to buy colored rubber “bumpers” to replace some of the buttons of the Sidekick II, and it’s possible to spend hundreds of dollars to have tiny crystals put all over your phone, but I wasn’t really interested in either one. Instead I designed a skin at My Tego. The back is going to have a picture of A all over it, and the front is going to have abstract rainbow stuff. (I also tried out Starry Night, The Scream, and Hello Kitty fronts, but I decided to go with the abstract one. It’s going to be slightly tricky to get the skin on properly, but I’m looking forward to having a fancier phone!

Holy crap! My new phone is here! ALREADY!

My Sidekick has been slowly falling apart for a couple of months. It did great for a long time, no nicks or scratches or broken parts even though I dropped it a few times. Finally, a couple of months ago, the scroll wheel quit scrolling. Then a tiny scratch appeared on the screen. A couple of weeks ago, the scroll wheel stopped clicking, too. This was a pain, but I could still use all functions, so that was okay. Finally, two days ago, the Back button fell off; it had been loose from earlier drops, and I was fiddling with it (like a loose tooth) and it came off. I was able to scotch-tape it back on so the button still functioned, but I knew the end was coming.

I needed a replacement - there was no chance I would go back to my wimpy Nokia 3390. (I keep it as an emergency phone.) I asked around online and checked out eBay, and called T-Mobile to ask how much it would cost to upgrade. They said that with a two-year contract I could have it for $140, because I’ve been with them for three and a half years. I was leery at first because I’ve been out of contract for a long time, but then I realized: I’m not going anywhere anyway. I like my Sidekick, I’ve been happy with T-Mobile for a long time, and I have no desire to switch. I talked it over with A and she said $140 seemed reasonable for the upgrade.

So yesterday morning on my way to work I called Customer Care and said I wanted the offer they had given me yesterday, which had been noted in my account. I went through the contract agreement process, decided to hold off on insurance, and chose free seven-day shipping rather than paying $15 for three-day shipping.

It’s here. Already. I have heard people say how long it took them to get their Sidekick, how warranty exchanges took forever…not for me. It’s here! I have a Sidekick II! It has a built-in camera with twice the resolution of the Sidekick I’s plug-in camera! It will have a working scroll wheel! All I have to do is swap my SIM card and activate! Once I get the firmware update, I will have Javascript and I can choose my own wallpaper! The letters won’t rub off the keys! Eeeeeeee!

My geocaching can now go paperless! I haven’t used a PDA in a while - I gave my Palm m130 to A - but I realized I wanted one for geocaching. A pointed out that we still had some old ones…and sure enough, we had two Handspring Visors and a Palm III. Of the three old PDAs, only one of the Visors worked, and at first I thought it couldn’t sync but then it managed to. Of course the sync tried to load everything I’d had on my m130, which had more RAM and a more recent OS, so I had to clear everything off the Visor again and then just load Cachemate. When I discovered the shareware version only holds 10 records I promptly paid the $8 to register - if it had been $15 or $20 I probably wouldn’t have. I have also paid $3 for a month of premium service on Geocaching.com; I didn’t want to pay $30 for the year because I might not be doing this six months from now. But now that I’m set to go paperless I am looking forward to doing more caching in the area.

I’ve been reading Crime Library again lately. I’m not sure why I like that site. It’s good for research, sure, but I just pick feature stories at random and read them. Some of them get pretty gruesome, and I guess it’s just barely better than Rotten.com - it’s definitely pretty sensationalized.