New old phone

I'm no longer a slave to Verizon Wireless. Two years ago, my college friend/housemate and I got in a "family plan". A couple of months after that, we added her boyfriend to the plan. He turned out to be a jerk and - to make a long story short and to respect other people's privacy - they broke up. Moral of the story: don't get in a family plan with someone you're dating. Or to quote the Bible, He who puts up security for another will surely suffer, but whoever refuses to strike hands in pledge is safe.

She dropped out of the phone contract later in order to sever all links with her ex - even paying the $175 early-termination fee - so I was stuck with being the account holder. It was ridiculous because the ex and I had 700 minutes/month between us. I generally used less than 200 and he didn't use an awful lot more.

What also sucked was that I got used to SMS-ing a lot in Malaysia. Hotlink Prepaid messages are 15 SEN. Verizon messages are 15 CENTS - yes, one of the skills you have to learn as an international student is to not convert currency otherwise you go crazy, but it's still damn ex.

I'm on Einstein Wireless now. It's a small Wisconsin-based GSM provider. I wanted to be on a GSM network so I could use my "new" phone, which is a Sony Ericsson T610 which I bought secondhand in Low Yat Plaza last year. Ironically it was already several years old at the time, but still far more advanced than the primitive Nokia that came with my Verizon plan...

At the moment I'm just trying out Einstein's prepaid cards. The nice thing about having an unlocked phone and using prepaid with no contract is that if you don't like your provider, you can switch easily.
Silly Americans =)
Farking Verizon >(

No idea why, but I can't receive incoming text messages even though I bought the Feature Card (for data), although I can send them all right. So, until Einstein customer support gets this sorted out, if you're a friend who knows my phone number you can SMS me from the internet here.

Eensy Weensy Dinosaur!

I first read about Pleo in this Wired Magazine story.
At the time I thought ok, it's a dinosaur-shaped Furby. Sounds kinda cool, and possibly more fun than the Roboraptor. They combined "dinosaur" and "cute" by making it a baby dino. A bit innovative but not that big a deal.

However, ThinkGeek.com has it on preorder status now, and if you go to the product page, there's a little video of the baby dino. For me, I think the sounds it makes are the part that makes me want to pick it up and pet it. (There's also a video in the online version of the Wired article (ok, so saying "online version" was a bit redundant, obviously it's not in the hardcopy.))

Basically if you liked watching Littlefoot in The Land Before Time when you were a kid, you'll like Pleo. I wonder if it was a deliberate decision to make it look like that character, or unconscious.

And then I thought what would be really fun if someone gave me $350 to spend on a non-utilitarian toy: watching my cat play with it =D