mortonfox: (create a fursona)
Phone booth without a phone

I noticed that the phone was getting flaky two weeks ago. Keys on its keypad didn't always register although in all other respects, it still worked fine. I was still 4 months away from being able to get a $150 discount on a new phone from Sprint, so I checked on eBay for a replacement. Interestingly, there is now a burgeoning market for Razr V3m phones on eBay -- 50 to 100 secondhand units on sale at any time. Trouble was I kept getting outbid. After losing half a dozen auctions, I changed my strategy. Instead of looking at auctions that are closing soon, I looked at the other end of the list, i.e. auctions with the most time remaining. I saw one with a low "Buy it now" price and snagged it.

I got the package yesterday afternoon. Yes, the replacement phone looks exactly the same as the one I already had. Even came with a similar number of scratches. :) First thing I did was to try to copy the contact list from the old phone to the new one. (It's not really newer because it's second-hand but it's new to me.) I already had Motorola Phone Tools on my notebook computer configured for the old phone, so I thought it would be a snap. For some reason, the software made me go through the onerous device driver installation and phone setup steps again even though the new phone is the exact same model. It didn't automatically recognize this new phone either. And finally, the software said that the contact list restore failed even though it worked.

The next step was surprisingly easy. I followed instructions at the Sprint website to activate and program the new phone. Sprint took a while to provision web services, so I left it alone until this morning before updating the phone software and installing Opera Mini. I used Opera Link to get my bookmarks back, and it was easy and almost instantaneous. I'm glad Opera Software provided that feature.

Here's something that is still a problem: The 2.x version of Google Maps Mobile doesn't work on this phone. Google has also apparently removed all the 1.x versions of GMM. Came across this discussion thread but it didn't help because those links to older jar files don't work any more. So, until the next phone upgrade, I'll try Mobile GMaps.
mortonfox: (jaws)
Maguire Park

I'm not sure I understand the appeal of take-and-bake pizza places. I thought the whole idea of going to a pizza place was for them to make the pizza. With a take-and-bake place, all you're getting is a raw pizza that you still have to heat up in your own oven after you bring it home. Worse yet, this Wise Bread blogger had to wait 80 minutes at the store for his take-and-bake pizza! After reading that blog post though, I remembered that the local A&P supermarket has its own version of take-and-bake pizza. So this evening, I went and got one. It was $3, a store special. Of course, the downside of getting takeout from the supermarket is I got distracted by their other weekly specials and just had to stock up on soup and yogurt too. But it still didn't take 80 minutes! Anyway, this is what it looks like after baking. There's enough for a meal and a half.

Did more of my tax return. I think I only have two 1099 forms remaining. Of the two, one will be from Ameritrade, who is delaying my Form 1099 because their records "indicate [my] account holds a position(s) with a high likelihood of a dividend reclassification." Heh, okay. Even then, I think they'll end up sending one or more 1099 corrections anyway. Last year, the last 1099 correction I got from them was in mid-March. As a long-time holder of income and royalty trusts, I've come to expect things like that. However, it won't do me any good to file my taxes early anyway. After the most recent batch of forms, my tax refund meter stood at -$5,327. So I might as well use the grace period to earn a bit of interest on the tax set-aside.

Installed Motorola Phone Tools on my notebook computer. I wish I'd taken notes when I installed it on the desktop computer last year because this is a tricky process. The MPT CD didn't come with drivers recent enough to recognize my phone so I needed to install the latest handset drivers. Even then, MPT didn't recognize my phone. After a bit of experimenting, I figured out how to add my phone manually as a "RAZR V3c". It's actually a "V3m" but the driver definition for that model is still not there and the "V3c" seems to be close enough as far as command strings go.

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Morton Fox

May 2020

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