Having scraped change out of the couch, sold off my possessions on eBay, and been given some extremely well-timed birthday gifts of cash money, I finally broke down and bought an iPhone.

Part of me wanted to wait until I got an actual job, but the Sprint network in my neighborhood was crapping out so badly that my crackberry would drain at least once a day. It was damn near unusable, so off I went to the Apple store at the crack of dawn yesterday to fulfill my iNerd destiny.

The iPhone is predictably awesome. Substantially easier to use, save for needing to get used to the virtual keyboard. Apps (and I’ve downloaded nothing but free ones) are a great enhancement to the included programs. Having the full internet, and having it at a damn fast pace, is a substantial improvement over the primitive Crackberry browser.

Making ringtones in GarageBand is a fun time killer. Trying to figure out exactly what little snippets of a song will be fun rather than annoying, then trying to time the loop exactly right so the rhythm holds up over repeated rings is an entertaining challenge. Current ringtone: The first eight seconds of Cake’s “Opera Singer.”

There are a few things that bug me: The iChat outgoing text message noise can’t be turned off and bugs the shit out of me on the phone (oddly, it doesn’t bother me as part of iChat); I really, really wish there was a 64GB version so I could have my entire music library on it; for some reason it refused to mingle contacts I’d initially synced from my computer with MobileMe and I had to hand-delete several hundred duplicates; and the glossy back is the slipperiest thing I’ve ever touched short of a live fish.

Overall, however, I’m mighty pleased with my decision so far. I love that I now only have to carry one device for phone and music, and I’m very, very happy that I have a phone that gets decent reception at my apartment.

As a sidenote, the most ridiculous aspect of this entire process happened when I called Sprint up to pay off my final bill. Their billing system bills a month in advance, so I wanted to pay off my final bill since I was only about a quarter of the way through the month.

Sprint’s rep, of course, told me that I had to wait until after my billing cycle rolled over on the 12th. Which is all well and good, except my payment is due on the 6th. She swore up and down that I wouldn’t get dinged with a late fee unless I was more than 10 days late, though she didn’t seem too surprised when I expressed some skepticism towards that promise.

So we’ll see what that final bill winds up costing me, but frankly, I was ready to pay just about any price to get the hell away from Sprint’s craptastic service.

Recently, I have:

• Turned 28, to relatively little fanfare. Which is probably appropriate, because it’s not a terribly significant birthday. Drinks at the friendly local “We have a ton of awesome beer” establishment were fun, though.
   
• Found a surprisingly viable backup employment plan if I can’t get on anything for the fall season (which I’ll go into at some point later on if/when it happens). But the good news is that I am relatively confident that I will not be boiling my own shoes for dinner. At least not until after Thanksgiving.
   
• Had my phone deteriorate to the point where it’s going to take a lot of restraint for me to not smash the thing with a ballpeen hammer between now and next Friday when I get the new iPhone. Thankfully I have kept a dedicated phone replacement fund and have decided to say “Screw unemployment!” and just get the damn new one.
   
• Gotten new neighbors after 5 months of the apartment next door being empty because the landlord refused to face reality about the way rents are falling around here. They seem nice, but their cigarette smoke seeps into my apartment on occasion, and they let their cats roam about, which tends to freak Chaplin out in the middle of the night from time to time.
   
• Broke down and finally gotten myself the “Hooray, I lost 80lbs!” reward I’d been planning to get for months: An iPod shuffle/waterproof headset combo which will keep me entertained while swimming long distances. I’m now doing 2 miles with no problem, and I’m considering bumping up to 4km when I can get away with it.
   
• Watched an absolute fuckton of TV. Rewatched entire 4th season of BSG, now working through Netflix discs of Big Bang Theory (more geekily amusing than I recalled it being, since I dropped it after the pilot) and re-watching Band of Brothers, probably going to go through all of Deadwood next.
   
• Received a sternly worded letter from the landlord to the entire building that the toilets are ONLY for disposal of human waste and toilet paper. I’m not sure whether or not I want to hear the story behind that one.
   
• Have fought the good fight against my body’s natural instinct to stay awake ridiculously late and then get up mid-morning. Generally won, though this week I’ve mostly lost (as evidenced by the timestamp on this post).

I read about a website called YourFonts, which will let you make a free TrueType font out of your own handwriting. I thought, that sounds kind of fun, and maybe I can make something that will actually make my handwriting legible.

Here are the results:

Yep, that worked out well.

Many people assume that because I have a relative facility with technology, it does not randomly decide to hate on me the way it seems to with everyone else. To that, I counter with the events of this evening:

I fought with a writer’s crapware laden-computer for half an hour at the end of the night, ultimately forcing it to abandon its efforts to spit out all kinds of random pop-ups but not without going through several attempts at removal.

Massive problems with my phone (which randomly refuses to switch off roam, draning the battery pretty much immediately when it gets into that mode, thanks, Sprint!) have given way to coming home to no internets tonight.

Drove me crazy trying to figure out what it was, particularly after getting disconnected THRICE from Time Warner Cable’s lovely automated system which decided there were either “technical difficulties” or that my “call could not be completed at this time” at every turn.

However, I seem to have narrowed it down to a DNS issue – For the nerds in the house, I was pulling an IP address just fine but I couldn’t connect to squat, so I put in the OpenDNS.org DNS servers and it’s been smooth sailing from there.

Anyway, I have managed to fix (I think) two out of the three issues, but just because I usually have a half-wit idea on how to fix it doesn’t mean this shit doesn’t break on me.

Today marks the end of my Sprint contract, and the beginning of a technological battle royale. Let’s meet the contestants!

IN THE RED CORNER….

The Blackberry 8703e, better known as the Crackberry. A practically indestructible phone on a shittastic network. A phone that I’ve dropped on concrete or asphalt so many times I’ve lost count.

But it’s started to act up. It’s starting to refuse to come off roaming. It’s starting to send calls straight to voicemail. I don’t know how much of it is Sprint’s asstacular network and how much is the Crackberry itself.

And it’s also starting to get old. It strains and buckles under the weight of simply trying to load Facebook’s mobile site. It freezes up when I’m trying to switch between applications.

It’s only a matter of time.

IN THE BLUE CORNER…

The iPod 5g. Replacement for the first iPod I ever got, a purchase that changed my life because I could carry all my music around without throwing out my back.

This one had enough space (80gb) to let me get some Podcasts going, and I’ve gotten addicted to the point that I’m now a month behind in 2 of my main ones (BBC Global News and This American Life).

It seems to be rolling along just fine. It seems to be handling its daily trips around the universe in my pocket just fine. But the last one seemed to be doing that until one day the line-out just up and died on me.

Will the hard drive hold out? Will the line-out survive? Will I accidentally drop it in a giant puddle of water? Only time will tell.

And finally, we have….

THE REFEREE

…my complete lack of fiscal restraint when it comes to purchasing shiny electronic things.

Particularly after spending an hour playing with my friend Dan’s iPhone this past weekend, I want one. Like, NOW.

My utter hatred of AT&T stopped me from switching when it first came out, but I’ve gotten to the point with Sprint that I’m pretty much ready to tell them to fuck themselves, and at least have some NEW asshattery to deal with.

Part of what’s keeping me from buying one is the extent to which I am fiscally screwed after the last year: $2k to join the union, $4500 on COBRA, PLUS a delightful four months of unemployment have left me damn near tapped out.

But once I’m done with COBRA as of the first of the year, and once they inevitably release the 32GB iPhone that would let me take my main playlist (which by itself is 12GB), my Podcasts, and some videos with me…I don’t know how long I’m going to last.

The battle begins today, and ends when one of the three above breaks. Place your bets on when I’ll crack in the comments.

From the department of It’s About Fucking Time: TiVo and Netflix sign a deal to allow Netflix Watch Now streaming to Series 3 TiVos.

If only I had time to watch half the shit I’m TiVoing right now, let alone the Netflix discs rotting by my TV. At least this will be a good way to kill time the next time I’m out of work.

Still just buried in work as we try to get our footing, but a few quick:

THINGS I LIKE

- This American Life’s podcast this week, aptly titled “Another Frightening Show About The Economy.” You can download it for free from that page for the rest of the week, and it’s a much, much clearer explanation of what in the hell is going on with the economy than I’ve heard from any other place thus far. Really fascinating stuff.

- Google’s Gmail Goggles. If you’re going to send a late-night email from Gmail, you can now enable a new feature that will ask you to answer a series of relatively basic math questions in a short period of time to prove that you’re not too a) drunk or b) tired to be emailing someone.

- USAA Checking. Sweet god, Deposit @ Home is awesome. You scan a check with a normal scanner, you upload it, and then you’re done. You can walk over to an ATM 20 minutes later and withdraw the cash, which is REALLY convenient when that check is your petty cash advance from work. And USAA reimburses you for the ATM fees since they’re an internet-only bank.

THINGS I DO NOT LIKE

- The nights I just can’t seem to get out of the office. We had pages drop right as we wrapped tonight, and when I should normally be getting out of the office by half an hour after wrap, I wasn’t done until almost 2 hours after wrap.

- The fact that every muscle in my body is seriously pissed at me right now. I ordered a footrest for the office which should help prevent me from hunching over my computer, but between being the Hunchback of Notre Lot and working out like a crazy person, my body is hating on me right now.

- Waking up in the middle of a REM cycle, which I did this morning, and which made me drowsy, cranky, and off the ball all morning.

THINGS I’M UNDECIDED ABOUT

- I mentioned this to a few people, but for some reason two different guys in my office asked me if I was ex-military this week. Apparently I have a military precision about me, according to them. Frankly, I think it’s just because I know the alpha-bravo-charlie alphabet and use it to be clearer on the phone. That, and I keep making my PA’s drop and give me 20.

- I’m pretty clearly not going to make my goal of getting my weight loss total to 80 pounds by Halloween. At least not unless I get some sort of serious gastrointestinal illness like the one striking half of USC. However, I’ve already lost 70 and will hopefully be in the 73-75 range by the end of the month. I’m debating whether I should be happy about this, since it’s so close to my goal and weight loss slows as you lose more weight anyway, or frustrated with the slowing pace. I think for the sake of my sanity, I’ll go with the former.

MSNBC’s Cosmic Log breaks down the bailout in terms of the Apollo program: Even accounting for inflation since the program ended in the early 70′s, this bailout could pay for seven Apollo programs.

Seven Apollo programs. Not just sending one set of guys to the moon, but the ENTIRE program. SEVEN TIMES. And that’s before you take the extra $110 billion they tacked on to get the damn thing passed.

That is a lot of goddamn money.

NASA found snow on Mars.

At least one of my PA’s is about as much of a space nerd as I am and gave an excited, “DUDE!” when he read this, causing me to make him send me the link.

I know fuck-all about the continued collapse of the American financial system and quite possibly society in general, but dude, a robot on Mars found snow! How fucking awesome is that?

When I was swimming while I was in Idaho, I thought maybe the pool might be a little longer than the pool at my gym, since it was taking me a solid six minutes longer to finish 100 lengths than it had been at my gym.

The folks at the pool in Idaho swore up and down that their pool was 25 meters. The folks at my gym swore up and down when I asked them this afternoon that their pool is also 25 meters, even though it felt noticeably shorter than the one in Idaho.

So, there are three possibilities:

1. The pool in Idaho is actually longer than 25 meters, meaning the pool at my gym is 25 meters.
2. The pool at my gym is actually only 25 yards long, meaning the Idaho pool was 25 meters. This also means I haven’t been going nearly as far as I’ve been thinking I have.
3. The fact that the Idaho pool was outside and at moderately high altitude and the pool at my gym is inside at sea level is playing with my speed and perception, and the pools are actually the same length.

Frankly, I think option 2 is the most likely, given that at my pace the 6 extra minutes it was taking me to finish in Idaho is about how long it takes me to swim the 214 meter difference between 2500 yards and 2500 meters.

How much of a tool would it make me if I showed up at the gym tomorrow with a measuring tape so that I can find out if I’ve actually been swimming 2500 meters or 2500 yards?