Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I have spent too much time and energy dealing with a warranty replacement for my iPhone.

The phone started misbehaving on Sunday evening or Monday morning, rebooting itself incredibly frequently. I thought it was doing better Monday night, but Tuesday morning it showed symptoms again, so I took it to the T-Mobile store where I'd gotten it last fall.

After eliminating a couple of known issues (low battery charge and cold), and confirming that there was no water damage, they gave me the choice of going to the Apple store to see if they could do anything, or paying $20 for a warranty replacement, plus an optional twenty more for overnight shipping. Tuesday was a raw day, windy and rainy, and taking the train downtown and back, with a fair chance of winding up back in Harvard Square at T-Mobile, only wetter, didn't seem like a good use of my time.

I got my new, or as it turns out refurbished, phone after lunch today. If this ever happens again, I will make the store transfer my data over to the new phone, even though I have it backed up. (They offered, but it seemed to make sense to just come home.) If I'd done that, they would have had to install the OS upgrades, rather than me doing it, via an iTunes upgrade I hadn't bothered with, and worries about whether the backups I needed were there. (Before the upgrades, the only backup iTunes would show me for the phone was the basically null one it had done twenty minutes earlier.)

So, back to normal, for whatever "normal" means these days (which is a comment both about the larger world and about the fact that I have a $500 pocket computer and communicator that comes with a one-year warranty), but I'd rather have spent that time on paid work, or been playing with the cats.

The good news is, the dentist says I only need the one crown replaced. So, I have had lidocaine, had a mold made for the new crown, and have the temporary back on. The tentative schedule is I get the permanent crown a week from Monday. In the meantime, the painkiller has worn off and the swelling hasn't entirely; I've had a naproxen and may take another before bed. Dinner soon, and apple pie for dessert: the lidocaine has worn off, so that side of my mouth is no longer numb or swollen.

It turns out one advantage of reading books on the Palm is that it fits in a jeans pocket, making it much easier to read while waiting for the tooth-molding stuff to set, because I didn't have to worry about where to leave my book while the dentist was doing the stuff before that. (The stuff doesn't taste as horrible as I remember, but that doesn't mean I like it, and peeling it off my upper lip afterwards was annoying.)

We're going to be buying a new hard drive for this PC, because the current one is past its statistical mean time between failures.

250 gigabytes for $75.

That makes me feel old, in a way that all the "hit songs from $year" or "do you remember X event/Y object?" memes don't.

My mother called a few hours ago, to let me know that her broadband is down, and therefore she won't be on IM until they fix it. She wanted to be sure I know she's available to talk.

(We've had the IM working between us for less than two weeks.)

I've been happily using an AIM ID and now the pre-Alpha LJ chat facility via their Jabber client. I'm using the GAIM client.

It now transpires my mother has a Yahoo chat account, which my brother set up to use for her. I'm generally not thrilled with the whole Yahoo interface/ID et cetera. Does anyone here have good, or bad, experiences with it?

In particular, do you know offhand whether I can add it to my GAIM client, rather than using a separate client?

(I'm not going to ask Mom to add an AIM ID; if this looks unappealing, we'll stick to email and the telephone.)

Addendum: I dug out my Yahoo ID, downloaded Yahoo Messenger, used it long enough to add my mother's userid there, and made contact through GAIM. Mom said Hello, expressed surprise that it had worked, and went to bed (time zone differences).

A FAQ should not be a 5.3-megabyte file that I have to download and open in Acrobat.

Of course, if they'd used plain text, they wouldn't have been able to throw full-page photos of various government officials at me, nor insist on a blue background for the material.

I am tempted to write and ask them how this complies with their requirement to provide services to the blind and visually handicapped; were I a resident of the state in question, or if I had a vision impairment not corrected by my bifocals, I probably would.

Better, it turns out that there are actual FAQs elsewhere on the site. So my issue is less one of accessibility than of bad site design and worse labeling.

In between working at home doing online research--google is everything I dreamed of when I was ten, and then some--I exchanged IMs with r_ness, who began with "Hello from Lufthansa flight 404, at 36,000 feet!" and may be spending the night on my couch. In keeping with this, the research results are sent off to the client(s) by email, and I called cattitude on his mobile phone to tell him I'd offered Leon the couch.

The whistling tea-kettle and gas stove are lower-tech (pilot lights, not electronic ignition, on the latter--which does mean that I can cook during blackouts), because this isn't the Plokta Cabal, and the point of the tech is to get things done.