Thanks Meredith!

Lately I’ve become all too aware of how frustrated I’ve become with having a cell phone.  It’s nothing personal against anyone I know and I don’t want any of you to have second thoughts about calling me anytime you want.  I’m just getting disenchanted with always being able to be reached out and touched, constantly connected to the whole wired world.

I always consider just getting rid of my phone when I start having problems with it.  I bought a slightly nicer phone than usual last time.  It’s a flip phone with a full color screen.  It plays MP3s and videos.  It does internet, takes pictures and can use a memory card.  The best part was that in places like my apartment where there’s no cell service, it can use the wireless internet signal instead.  That was the major selling point.

It’s given me about a year of decent service.  Most of the time I cause physical damage to a phone long before the circuits are ready to die.  This time it’s going from the inside out.  The hinge and the buttons are like new.  Even most of the paint is still intact.  I can’t say why it’s messing up.  It’s been in the humidity and the dust and the heat and the cold, everywhere I’ve been.  I think that plays a major role in the malfunction of the electronics I own.

A couple weeks ago it stopped wanting to switch from cell service to wifi when I came inside.  I called T-Mobile about the problem and they told me to call them from a different phone.  If I had a phone that worked, why would I have been calling them?  Fast forward to a couple days ago.  It started blinking and the menus and text entry is working slower than usual.  Not good.

I weighed my options and decided against getting a new phone through the insurance plan I was carrying.  Coverage with T-Mobile has never been quite what I needed.  Customer service has always been friendly but never particularly helpful.  The phone only held up half as long as it should have.  That’s enough.  I’m out.

Most everybody I know has gone to Verizon.  The prices are significantly more than the other carriers, but I think I’ve finally proven to myself that when it comes to a cell phone, you get what you pay for.  I was able to get a decent discount through work as well.  Verizon phones seem to have coverage everywhere short of maybe a faraday cage.

What I’m really sold on though is the fact that you can get a phone built to military specifications.  It’s actually certified to be in the dust and sun, dropped, shaken, rained on and submerged in water.  If that doesn’t sound like something I need, I don’t know what does.  The phone is called the Boulder.  You can check it out at casiogzone.com/boulder Mine should be here Tuesday.  If you can’t get in touch with me before then, you know why.  After then, we shouldn’t have any problems.

There were lots of vendors with tents giving away cool free stuff.

Unfortunately, the tents were near the stages but the beer was next to the bathrooms on the other side of the venue. By the time you got a beer and walked to a stage, it was either time to go take a piss or time to go get another beer. So I saw like 3 bands perform. All day. At a music festival.

Since we did a lot of walking, we saw lots of interesting things and lots of strange-looking people.

The beer was cheap and the servers were happy, which are both lies. A music festival in the middle of a Tuesday doesn’t really fit into the schedule of the average working adult, so at least the lines were short.

I learned that even though there was a massive age difference between me and my friends and most of the other people at the show, we still shared a lot of the same ideals.

If you had a beer once you got close to the tents and the stages, you had to go in time out. I bet we stood there for a couple hours throughout the day.

This Hare Krishna guy wanted to trade a book for a donation. I told him I wanted a free copy of the book that, if I enjoyed, I would make a donation. It didn’t work that way and he took the book away from me. You know how some movie trailers show all the good parts and the rest of the film is just garbage? That’s how his sell on the book was. I ended up finding the copy of the stupid book. So I went back and got a picture with him and told him I got the copy from “the other guy”, which somehow made sense at the time. I did actually skim through the book. I think it’s the only book I’ve ever actually thrown away. The whole thing reads like a book report on the ideas of all the great philosophers. The problem I had with it was that the Hare Krishna try to play off the words of people like Socrates as their own. Was that too heavy for this story of a fun and illustrated day of inebriation and music? Sorry…

Apparently I rescued Katy Perry from a nice day.

And yeah, there were some bands there or something.

This ramp was about four times as long as it was tall, which made it safe for the kids and boring to watch.

One of the few bands I saw any of was this awesome punk trio called Tat. Sort of a Distillers/Bouncing Souls sound. Good stuff if you like punk. Check them out at http://www.myspace.com/tat “Pessimist” is my favorite track on their MySpizzle.

Somewhere around the second beer, me and Ray ran into Jon, Aaron, Woody and girlie. (Sorry, I’m bad with names.)

Who doesn’t like giant bear people?

Woody and Jon entered a trivia contest held by a New Jersey douche bag.

I couldn’t help but think this was the modern iteration of Punky Brewster.

Woody played guitar and drums while Jon yelled a lot.

Towards the end of the afternoon, we all felt like this.

Jon got some jailbait to help him put on a temporary tattoo.

I bumped into Elvis.

Ray met the fat kid from Superbad.

Ray liked the dude with a keytar covering Bob Marley songs.

Somehow the camera captured how everything was looking to us by the time it got dark.

On the way out the CDs were $5 but the hugs were free.

Source.