The Occasional Blog of Jonah Weiland

With the Monday holiday I’ve had some time to play with the new phone (LG VX6000) a bit more and have some new opinions on it.

First off, as of this afternoon my phone number still hadn’t transferred. I called Verizon Wireless customer support, who were terribly helpful and quick to respond. The tech I got tried a couple of things to no avail and then called a higher-up tech guy. The hold time was over five minutes at that point, so he asked if he could call me back so I didn’t have to wait. No problem. Five minutes later I received a text message on my phone saying it had been activated and moments after that a tech called me to confirm that all was working right. I informed him it was and asked if he’d tell me what the problem was, because according to Verizon it should have taken less than 24 hours. He admitted it was a Verizon mistake, not AT&T or anything else. When the scheduled time came for someone to make the change, it wasn’t done until a couple of hours after and then it was done wrong. Oh well. He very easily could have lied and blamed it on someone or something else, but he fessed up. I appreciate that.

It seems a high capacity battery is a must for this phone. If you use the camera at all it eats up battery life a bunch. It’s not impossible to deal with, but a second battery with more capacity is a good idea. It means a heavier and slightly bigger phone when used, but that doesn’t bother me too much. If it’s a day when I know I’ll be using the camera a lot, I’ll simply use the high capacity battery.

A data cable is a must. I need to do a bit of research on which one to buy, if there’s actually a difference in them. If you want to do custom ring tones or want to retrieve graphics off your phone without sending them to yourself via e-mail, thus using up your monthly allowance of picture transmissions, you need a data cable. And it’s not an entirely easy thing to do, from what I’ve been reading. First you need to get the cable and the proper drivers for the cable. Once hooked up to your phone, you have to run a program on your PC that isn’t exactly officially sanctioned by Verizon from what I understand. Then, even using the program, you have to jump through a few hoops to make things happen. Now, I haven’t done this yet, but when I do I’ll report on how easy or difficult it is. Clearly, Verizon would prefer you pay for their content available through the “Get It Now” feature in the phone. I’m sorry, paying $1.99 for ringtones doesn’t intrigue me.

In activating my phone today I discovered the various diagnostic options available to me. There’s a few interesting bits in there, but nothing terribly useful for my needs.

Overall I’m still very pleased with this phone. The only drawback has to be battery life, but that can be rectified.

Well, I did it today. I switched to Verizon Wireless from AT&T Wireless and I’ll be dumping my home line shortly.

Today I went over to the AT&T Wireless store to see if they offer deals to users who are thinking of switching to a new company. After waiting half an hour to get help, a very un-enthusiastic sales person came over and started answering my questions. I asked about rate plans, satisfaction guarantees, roaming charges, etc. I asked about bonuses they could throw in. There were none to be had. I was on AT&T’s TDMA network (old network) with an older Nokia phone and they’d be happy to upgrade me to a crap GSM (new network) phone for free, or semi-crap phones for a little money, or nice phone for a lot of money. No deals to be had, either. No free extras. Nada. They I started looking at their plans with nationwide coverage (no roaming, free long distance) and compared to Verizon’s nationwide plans, AT&T’s plan wasn’t as good. They guy was really dismissive and disinterested, so I said fuck it, let’s go over to Verizon and see what they can do for me.

Once again there was a bit of a wait, but not too bad. Once I got a sales person he was very helpful. I told him I had been looking at the LG VX6000 phone and asked if it was my best bet. He said it was his favorite and ask every employee in the store and most of them will use that same phone. There were more expensive phones available, but he said the deal Verizon was offering on this phone right now was the best. I compared it to a couple of other phones and agreed. I had him add in a car charger and headset and then we talked calling plans. For nationwide coverage with no roaming the plans at Verizon are better than AT&T’s. If you’re staying local, AT&T is cheaper, but just by a little. Basically, if you go to Verizon you should expect to pay a little bit more per month, but all indications are that the service (both cell and customer) are leagues better than their competition.

I’ve been playing with the phone a bit since I got home. One of the keys was making sure the phone had good reception at my house, which it does, so on Tuesday I’ll call SBC and have them switch off my home phone number. I also took a photo with the phone. Take a look. Pretty nice quality. I didn’t put the photo through Photoshop for optimization or resizing. This is exactly what it took.

So far I’m pretty pleased with the new phone, but let’s give it a few days before I pass final judgment.

Oh, and if any of you are thinking of switching to Verizon, drop me a line so I can get the referral credit!!!

So, I’m seriously considering turning off my home line and going cellular only. When people try to get in touch with me they’ll call me at home, leave a quick message like “Hey, I have something neato-fucking-bitchen to tell you, but you’re not home … I’m gonna try your cell.” What’s the point of having two numbers, then?

I currently own four phone numbers. One person, four phone lines. There’s my home line, business line, fax line and cellular number. Ridiculous.

My current cell provider is AT&T Wireless, who I’m not entirely happy with. Their service is spotty (all of them are), at home the service is pretty poor, they REALLY let me down when I was in Chicago last year (absolutely no service the entire time I was there) and they’ve made mistakes on their billing at least three times in the last two years that I’ve caught. So, I’m considering moving over to Verizon Wireless, who has the best customer satisfaction and service ratings. Problem with Verizon is they’re also one of the more expensive cell service companies, right behind NexTel. But I think the phrase “you get what you pay for” applies with cell service.

I don’t think I’ll miss not having a home line since, well, I’ll already have two other land lines coming into my home office.

Has anyone else made the jump to cell only? Any regrets? Any recommendations?

I just found out about this movie a couple of days ago. “Bukowski: Born Into This” is a new documentary about one of my absolute favorite writers. I was introduced to him by two people at the same time, albeit totally separately, about four of five years ago and I’ve read a lot of his stuff since then. All his prose novels and a number of his collections of poetry. I’ve not run into any other writer who writes with as much pain and honest as Hank. It opens next week here in Los Angeles.

It’s true. My TiVo thinks I’m a horny black dude.

So I’ve got my TiVo set-up to record stuff it thinks I might like. Over the last 18 months I’ve ended up seeing a number of television shows or movies I might never have watched otherwise. BBC’s “Coupling” was one of those shows.

Lately, my TiVo’s been recording some weird ass shit. There’s been an overwhelming amount of BET television being recorded lately. That’s Black Entertainment Television for the abbreviation impaired.

Also, my TiVo’s been recording a lot of soft core porn. Serious. Every Saturday morning when I wake up and check my TiVo it’s recorded all kinds of Skinemax product from the previous night. You know, the ones where you get to see the boobies but none of the other goods. That’s right. Crap porn!

The only explanation for this is the following programs which are a part of my season pass list, “Chappelle’s Show” and HBO’s “Real Sex.” Otherwise it makes absolutely no sense.

OR, maybe I am a horny black dude! Interesting

Story

“We are not talking retarded people here, but a couple who were brought up in a religious environment who were simply unaware, after eight years of marriage, of the physical requirements necessary to procreate.”

Went to the Dodger’s game last night. Had a lot of fun and witnessed something I’ve never seen before. I saw a guy get 18 pitches after he fouled 11 of them. The crowd was first annoyed, then as the number of foul balls he hit increased, the crowd got back on his side. The only way to save this at bat in front of the fans was to hit a home run. Alex Cora did exactly that and the place went mad. Read about it here. That’s when baseball gets fun.

On a side-note, man, Dodger’s Stadium is a real pit these days. They seriously need to do some upgrades, especially to their displays and ad systems. Just looks like 80s schlock. On the other hand, Angels Staidum, which I also visited recently for a game, is a beautiful stadium. It underwent a couple of renovations lately and it shows. Makes Dodgers Stadium look like Compton.