Sometimes, my apartment has the weirdest benefits. I blame living in a small town. I was treated to a rather unplanned–at least, I didn’t plan it–fireworks show for the May two-four weekend. Or, as we call it up here, the Victoria day weekend. It didn’t last entirely too long, but it was vaguely entertaining. Kinda makes me wonder what unplanned goodness I’ll be privy to for Canada day. Or if I’ll still be here to see it.

In randomly unrelated and still amusing news, I’ve gone all 24th century on my cell. My text message, instead of one of the default Nokia sounds the thing ships with, is now one of the com badge sound effects from Star Trek: Voyager. Because, well, I had it on the computer and didn’t have any other use for it. I was moderately amused. Still kind of am, a little. Or rather, I was–now I’m just lazy.

Sorry, no earth-shattering content here. Perhaps I should have saved my PAC-MAN rant for today? Oh well. I’d of still posted this anyway.

For a little over a week, I’ve been at my parents’ place keeping an eye on things while they go do the skipping the country thing. A couple days ago, I temporarily expanded my house sitting operation to include my aunt’s place, while they took care of something about 1.5 hours away–someone still had to be there when repair people showed up. I knew I’d be bored to tears sitting there, since they don’t have a computer I can use, or a wireless network I can attach a computer I can use to, assuming I brought one. Fortunately or otherwise, the place still had cell coverage. So, packing as little as possible, plus the phone I finally got my hands on back in November after its logistical issues, I went and spent the morning doing not a whole lot.

I did manage to get a bit of job searching done, not that I found anything worthy of applying for. And thanks to the fact they charge me way too much for a data plan I absolutely have to have with this phone, I was still able to go through a lot of the things I had to go through. When getting around to posting a couple of the things that got posted on here yesterday, though, I discovered the brokenness.

I don’t use any third party applications for maintaining the blog. Mostly because, especially the past month or so, I never know from where I’m going to be writing. It could be from my place, from this machine, over at Jessica’s place in the event I end up there, or wherever. And I very rarely, meaning all of twice, actually wrote and posted something from my phone so installing an application on there didn’t cross my mind. It probably should have.

Trying to log into the site via the Rogers Wireless cellular network proved to be next to impossible. Of course, it being me and my phone being something of a questionable internet usage tool, I suspected it might have been a thing to be tweaked a little in order to get it to work. So I spent the better part of 45 minutes doing that. And googling for things to try that I hadn’t already thought of. After banging my head against that for a bit, I eventually just said screw it and went back to my email. I’d beat the hell out of it when I got back home and didn’t need it in top working condition.

When I did get back to my parents’ place and their sort of half stuck together, but working, wireless network–hey, I can only do so much with a wireless modem from Bell–I figured I’d try to log in via the wifi connection. And, wouldn’t you know, first try it let me in. I tried from the cell network again, and of course it laughed at me.

What’s interesting about it, though, is it doesn’t throw any kind of error at me. Or rather, it doesn’t throw anything at me–it just returns me to the login screen as though I hadn’t given it any information. The logs don’t show my attempts either, which makes me wonder exactly what funky and messed up thing Rogers is doing to me between phone and blog. Of course, googling further for other people having that issue with websites that aren’t this one didn’t answer my question either. Although, I did find several more examples of severe Rogers and Rogers Wireless related brokenness–their website, which I think has only gotten worse, for one. Not a good thing to be reading about when trying to fix an existing problem, Rogers. You might want to look in to that.

I did manage to learn two very valuable pieces of information, though, when doing this. Pieces of information that may have been helpful 2 days ago.

• The phone isn’t quite as questionable an internet usage tool as I originally thought. The network, however, makes up for that improvement in questionability status.
• And, the most important lesson to take away from this bit of unexpected geekery. From now on, posts while mobile will be emailed. Starting whenever I get around to configuring such things.

I’ve been known to keep a very random, very scattered, and very eclectic collection of music around, both on my local machine and/or various attached hard drives, as well as within my Jango playlist. I like to think my selection of ringtones reflects that. I go from the commonly played to the rarely played usually in a quick breath. A rarely played Matchbox 20 song, “How Far We’ve Come”, has been my primary ringtone since pretty much the first week I got this phone. I think I might have heard it played by someone other than me a grand total of… once in that time. This morning, in the span of about an hour and a half, I got to hear it coming out of my phone 4 or 5 times. Granted they were all either not intended for me or telemarketters, but still. This morning, my ringtone has become an overplayed song. In honour of that transition, have a video of the said song. I’d embed it here, but he or she who is behind the original upload of that video has decided to complicate matters to the point where that’s not happening. So, you get to click instead. And while you do that, I’ll go contemplate changing it.

One of the things I’ve been working at trying to accomplish before the move (more on that later), and haven’t actually managed to accomplish yet, is the replacement of my old Nokia phone–specificly, the 6682. I tried once before, but the folks over at Rogers’s sales department seem to have a bit of a hearing problem. Or perhaps just a comprehension problem.

I ordered the Nokia E71, but about 5 days after the order was placed the phone I actually received wasn’t it. No big deal, I’ll just return it. Except not quite. I fired it back at UPS the same day I received it, and 2 days later, they knocked on my door with the exact same phone–and no return sticker thinggy. Brilliant. I spent pretty much the next week trying to twist their arm into getting me another one before I packed everything up and scrammed back to the Pembroke area. Suffice it to say, and not really all that surprising to me, it ended up actually rather not happening. Go figure.

Then, the move happened. I packed up my old apartment in Ottawa, came 1.5 hours southwest-ish to Petawawa, and unpacked most of it in the span of a day or two. Actually, a lot of stuff’s still in boxes–but, hey, the majority’s actually useable again. I can live with that. Once I had things up and running here, it was back on the phone to Rogers to try and sort this mess out. I still had the phone, in its original UPS packaging, sitting on the end of my desk–well, once said desk finally got put back together–for the first weekend of my living in the new place. Rogers still wanted to email me a shipping sticker thing to print off and use. Which would have been perfect, except I still had absolutely no way to get access to said email. They tend not to remember you told them that 5 times already.

I eventually gave up on that, as my return window was very quickly closing and I was flirting with a headache. I also finally ended up getting net access that Sunday night, but by then I wasn’t about to reenter that same dance. So instead, I called UPS up myself. And, as luck or something like it should have it, this time I got someone with more than half a clue. I scheduled them to come and pick up the thing. I got the address to one of their receiving yards from Rogers that morning, and when shipping dood showed up, it got handed to him. Along with a request to forget about billing me, and stick Rogers with the price tag–something he seemed a little too eager to do, but I wasn’t about to argue. Meant I could cheap out and well, cheap is good, no?

The phone never did come back to me, and the fact they’re not charging me for it on this month’s bill would seem to indicate they did receive it, and didn’t screw up the processing of it. Either that or someone just committed a rather significant oopsy. Either way, as long as the price for that phone doesn’t end up on a future bill, I’m not about to call them up and say otherwise. So now, with that phone being on its way or already back to Rogers and out of my hair, I can focus on getting the one I was actually after.

Which, last week, is exactly what I ended up doing. Only this time, rather than them simply sticking the wrong phone on my bill, the one I was after for whatever reason wasn’t showing up as one I was eligible to actually purchase. Perfect. So far you’re 3 for 3, Rogers. So I give them what for over the phone, and the rep basicly decides at that point to take responsibility for the whole damn thing. Which, when dealing with me, has been known to be a mistake. She tells me she’s going to keep checking, and call me if and when it actually gets sorted out. And, since everything should have been reset when I returned the phone and I knew I was eligible for it before I tried to buy it the first time, clearly it was a problem internal to them.

I wasn’t holding my breath–remember, I used to sit on the other end of similar conversations. I know most folks who say that do it with the complete intent of blowing you off knowing the chances of them getting you again are pretty well slim to none. Particularly when you’re running an operation with multiple call centers in multiple locations dealing with multiple thousand customers nationally. This morning, though, I did get that call. Whatever went and broke on their end wound up getting fixed. Finally. So, after much nashing of teeth and a whole lot of wanting to curse out the next rep to pick up the phone, I managed, somehow, to at least get the order processed. Now, hopefully they send me the correct phone on this attempt. And, hopefully they do it before Google Voice goes global. Otherwise I see a bitchfest in their, and my, near future.