Weblog

Well, come this Friday, I will have a total of four cell phones in my possession. That's right, four. Then three of them go on eBay.

The story began nearly two years ago, with the upgrade of my old TDMA AT&T Wireless phone to their new GSM service. With the upgrade came the LG G4020. However, my parents decided in the past few months that they wanted to upgrade to a family plan, and I was tasked with finding the best deal. The problem: my AT&T contract of two years didn't expire until this September. So, the plan was to go with Cingular (the company that had since bought out AT&T Wireless). This would mean a new SIM card for me, as we would all need Cingular SIMs. Since mine would be an upgrade, though, I wouldn't get any good deals. I had been eyeing a Sony Ericsson k750i, the top-rated phone in the world, for a month or so, so I decided to pick that up. It is quite a nice little phone: 2MP camera, MP3 player, removable memory, and lots more. It is SIM-free, so I can use it on any GSM plan. I also upgraded my plan to Cingular, and with that got the LG C1500. The plan was to then get a three-line family plan, and later add mine onto it. This would allow us to get the deals they only give to new customers on three of the phones.

However, in my research, I discovered that T-Mobile offers the same number of minutes on a family plan as Cingular for $10 less. And to make things more interesting, my new contract with Cingular said that I had 30 days to cancel. So, I decided to see if Cingular bothered to keep my old AT&T contract on file. They didn't! So, I went out to the Cingular store today to cancel my service. When I got there, the guy at the counter asked me if I had purchased my phone there. When I told him I hadn't, he said I would have to call 611 and cancel it that way instead. So apparently Cingular stores don't help all Cingular customers. Anyway, I did manage to cancel the line, and I also ordered a four-line family plan from T-Mobile. And apparently Cingular doesn't want the phone back. So, when I receive the new phones on Friday, I will have the fourth and final phone. All of them but my Sony Ericsson will be put up on eBay.

But of course, that could not be the end of the story. After canceling my Cingular service today, I later turned on my Sony Ericsson to get a phone number off of it. When I did so, I got an SMS from Cingular, welcoming me to their service. So, lucky me, I got to call 611 again. Hopefully two cancellations is all that they need.

So I decided a little over two weeks ago that I was going to build a new server. Although my desktop isn't exactly decrepit, I finally decided that it was time to take the web site, along with the various other server tasks it was handling, and put them onto a dedicated machine. Of course, like any good CS major, I had to build my own machine. I started with a barebones Shuttle PC, which was on clearance because it is an AMD Socket A architecture. My original intent was to build a new desktop and server, and use some of the parts from my old desktop in the server. However, it turns out that all of the stuff I was going to use either a) won't work, or b) since the desktop is a dual CPU machine, its parts are worth more on Ebay than their single CPU counterparts cost to buy new.

So, not only did I decide to just buy new components, but since I already had the case sitting around, I just went ahead and bought the rest of the parts. So much for waiting until after the school year like I planned! So for anyone salivating to know the details, the (very tiny) box has an Athlon 2400+ and a gig of PC2700 RAM. Boring, I know. However, it also has dual Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA hard drives running on RAID 1 - that's 250 gigs of mirrored, fault-tolerant storage. The box has no optical disk or floppy drive, though. This made for an interesting Windows installation yesterday, which required both Windows Server 2003 on a CD, and the RAID drivers on a floppy. I raided (pun not intended) my desktop for the optical drive, and Matthew Brand was kind enough to lend me his floppy drive. I am very happy that Windows Vista/Longhorn Server promises to make this less painful by dropping the floppy drive. In the mean time, I hope I don't have to reinstall Windows on it again.

So, this site is now running entirely off of the new server. This should mean absolutely nothing to anyone reading this, but it at least makes me happy.