i think my my mind is going... i can't keep my train of...i don't have a train...

i probably came here to post something...

yeah, so the title field in the blog entry thing... somehow has the same name as the search field at mua. so when i clicked on the title field to type in a title, all my past searches came up in the drop-down that firefox so politely offers. yes, i want my blog titled "glycolic acid."

i came here a few days ago to say something about the election, but blogger was down (hmm... apparently the election is a large blogging milestone...), so, yeah... none of that. i'm sure everything that needs to be said has been said somewhere already, so i'll just leave the subject with one of the best by-products of the election... the mass-assumption apology pictures:

i love old people. the funny ones, anyway.
oops! - probably my favorite picture on the site
they come in pairs, too - with a sense of humor
looks can be deceiving - awesome
and they pout - i'm not even sure if she's trying to be funny...
and, of course, i also love...
the dorks - at least these showed their faces...
hello world - updated, and with a twist
mac user? - i'm not even sure what to think of this one...
some funny people hide their faces too...
athiest? - maybe, but more respect (from me) if they believe in "God"
font whores (ie: me), when browsing in jpeg form, become handwriting whores
graffiti - asian chicks often have grafitti handwriting that i love... but not me...
another - hmm... also asian... (so why not meeeee?) love the "california" part
a little late for halloween, but...
scary! - okay, maybe not *that* scary... but something about this guy leaning over the camera (and therefore, me) gets to my stomach...
ones i have to apologize for/to (also kinda scary...)
it's not the dress - sorry... not that i'm trying to be mean, but it's just not.
no goddamn excuse - ? for the choker that makes your neck look two inches wider?
and must people resort to...
child abuse? - okay, maybe just exploiting a cute face, but...
crying - usually isn't a sign of a happy child
better to look at... chickies!
recording chick - is this chick supposed to be famous...?
this one probably isn't - but she looks like she's in a public service announcement
travis county seems to have some of the hottest chicks
black & white - one of the first on the site
another - i wonder if they know each other... "don't blow us up"
but what about florida
maybe - well, maybe...
on her back - is this real?
and this chick is...
very goddamn sorry - don't know where she's from, but i just like her... maybe 'cause her eyes remind me of my wifey =D

working on an animal portion of this. while i don't support animals and children as political statements (they don't understand what you're doing to them!), i saw one that was just too damn funny to leave out. and now i can't find it...


yeah, so my phone's been having issues lately... first, it wasn't ringing all the time when my parents called (but not anybody else, as far as i can tell...), so i'd end up getting phone mail from my parents without a missed call while my phone was sitting in full service. lovely.

middle of last week, it started randomly losing signal. and i don't mean drop to no bars like it used to... i mean "no signal." poking at it a bit helped sometimes, and i've never been in a situation where i couldn't get the signal back, so i wasn't *too* worried. it worsened at the end of last week to where it was bouncing around between no signal and a signal with no bars (a condition under which my phone can actually place and receive calls), but it turned out that matt's phone was doing the same thing at the time, so i'm going to blame that on a transient network problem.

now, my feelings toward my phone rise and fall like the tides... thought it had bad reception, just to find that it can hold an extremely stable call with nearly no reception (stable being no breaks in sound... calls still get dropped sometimes, but that's usually when i call with one or no reception bars). it's a really quiet phone, but the sound quality is better than most cells i've heard or tried, and it's not a problem when i use my headset (a motorola-specific one with the answer/hangup/redial/dialout button =D). of course, the low volume on ringers would be more forgivable if the phone's vibrate function worked enough to alert you when it's not in your pocket (holster or purse).

and then there's the crashing. the damn thing froze the first week i had it. i looked over at it about ten minutes after putting it down, and the outside lcd was still lit. and it still had the time from when i set it down. opening, closing, and butting mashing had no affect, so i pulled out the battery. hasn't done it since, but it does have a bunch of strange bugs. and it's slow.

when the hinge cracked, i was torn between being mad about the design flaw and being sad that my phone-phone was breaking. i'm still not sure what to think, but i have yet to hear of one doing any more than cracking... <knocks on wood>

but i'm willing to put up with this stuff because i'm not willing to trade my problems for others' problems. i have an ouside lcd, for one, and it's monochrome. and i don't mean like a gameboy, or the old samsungs. it's "on" is as dark as my watch lcd (there's no visible space between the pixels, but i doubt that's even a problem with phones now), but the background is silver instead of greenish, making it even more readable. most other phones can't be read in the sun, which leaves you with only your ringtones when you receive a call in the sun. the inside lcd is still color, which gives it the same problems as the others when it comes to making calls, though. and for a color lcd, it sucks (4k color depth... what is that about?), but i don't even need color, so that's not a problem.

and it's tri-mode, which, unfortunately, is rare. i just know that, if i get an all-digital phone, i'm going to get stuck somewhere with only analog signal, unable to make my emergency phone call. i like the interface design (except for the backwards hangup/call buttons, which has me dysfunctional on other phones now), and i love the voice button.

but tonight, i checked my phone (a habit i've gotten into after discovering my phone sitting in no service a few times last week), and the battery was down to one bar. not an uncommon occurence, considering my phone's battery life is about a day and a half on standby and an hour and a half talktime, but i had just unplugged it a few hours prior (less than half a day), and i hadn't talked on it at all. it had been in service every time i checked it, and the battery wasn't warm (which it tends to get when it's looking for a signal). it's a lithium ion battery, and i conditioned it properly when i got the phone... so if this is how the battery behaves... i don't know what to think. i'll update the issue when something else happens, or when i get my ass to the verizon service center.


and... blogger has been fucking with its entry interface again. it no longer reads my double spaces (poopy), and it does generally strange things. like, it's supposed to be wysiwyg (i think), but i typed "<cell phone stuff>," and it translated it to a "<cell>" tag. i thought it might be a fluke, so i typed it again, and it did it again... so i deleted it all, and used "&lt;" insead of "<" well, for some reason, instead of deleting the <cell> tags, it hid them from me... which i only found because i went into the html editor to check a link (did i mention that you have no way of editing a link once you create it?).

i think i liked it better in the old days when i used html tags instead of those stupid little buttons. i'd use them now, but they only seem to work half the time (and only when i don't want them to).

of course, it's a free service, and it's still easier than doing everything by hand, so... just ranting, no complaints...

***

*UPDATE: i've discovered that the lack of cell phone ringage has nothing to do with the fact that nobody wants to talk to me (okay, so maybe it still does... but there are other reasons!). calls to my cell have gone straight to voicemail. i don't mean that half-assed "i'm trying to ring the phone, so i'll just ring in your ear three times before i kick you to voicemail" crap that my parents were experiencing... i mean, seriously, you dial the number, you get voicemail.

i checked this while my phone was showing three bars signal, and same thing... then i tried to make a call out from my phone, and it got stuck on connecting... no calls out, either, huh? tried rebooting the phone to see if it would behave, and then damn thing wouldn't turn off. it acted like it did: it turned off the internal display... and it got stuck. i only found out when i couldn't turn the damn thing back on... then i found that the outside display still said "verizon wireless," which is what it always says when you're turning it off... but, most of the time, it goes away.

of course, pulling out the battery makes it good as new. as always.

when matt goes to the service center to address his issues with his keypad (his 6 only works if you press it really hard, and the 9's slightly on the fritz too), i'm going with him... problem is, as above, i don't think i want a new phone... i just want the issues to be fixed with my phone (battery that lasts at least a day with average usage and, most importantly, os stability!)

anybody know if they have a firmware update for my phone?