coolass.net

37signals makes this great multi-user web-based chat program called campfire. My friends at P’unk Ave. use it pretty extensively to discuss work and also to waste time amusing themselves with pictures and videos. We’ve discussed that it would be cool to have a web page consisting of nothing but the amusing pictures and videos posted every day, if only to act as a visual chronicle of what was interesting at the time.

The result of those discussions was my learning a little ruby and campfire2tumblr, a neat little script that uses the tinder gem to listen to the room, and post any images or youtube videos to a tumblr blog.

The tumblr blog for P’unk Ave’s images and video is workingnotworking.net

“Guess who’s getting a new iPhone today?” is the first thing I said after surfacing. I had just jumped into the hour-glass shaped pool at The Avalon Beverly Hills… with my phone in my pocket. Sean and Christian groaned as I lay the dripping phone in the sun. At that moment I wasn’t going to let this ruin my morning, but it would end up ruining my afternoon.

After getting a bit sunburned, we headed out to pick up a new phone and find some lunch. The nearest Apple store was in Century City, just down Olympic. The apple store had a cordoned off area on the right side of the store where you had to wait to be “pre-qualified” to buy a phone. This involved talking with an employee with a hand-held, who would check to see if you were eligible to purchase a phone, I didn’t think I would have much trouble. It turns out that because I had a corporate discount on my plan I had to purchase a phone in an AT&T store, and Apple wouldn’t be able to sell me one right there. We left and found the nearest AT&T just down the block where we found out that they don’t keep iPhones in stock. You have to order one, and wait 7-10 days until it gets delivered, this wouldn’t do, as I needed my phone for work in less than 24 hours. We finally came to the conclusion that if they removed the corporate discount from my phone, I could go back to the Apple store, purchase a phone, and have the discount re-applied after activation.

Back at the Apple store later that day.

“We can’t sell you a phone because you’re out of market”

“What does that mean?”

“Here in California, AT&T has a different system than the East Coast.”

“What can we do about this?”

“Nothing”

Borrowing Sean’s phone, I called back the AT&T store we were just at and explained the situation. The final answer was to buy a phone with a new California contract, take it home and activate it, and Monday morning call AT&T and have them disconnect the California number. So that’s what happened; after two trips back and forth between Apple and AT&T, and more than a dozen calls to customer service, I have replaced my original phone with the new 3G version. Everyone involved was very helpful, employees of both companies bent over backwards to help me navigate a stupid, backwards inter-corporation tangle of rules, and networks meant to maximize profits and obfuscate something that should be simple.