It's Spring Break But Not For Me

work

This week the students (well, most of them) are off to parts warmer. The problem is that warmer weather came here to Ball State while they were gone.

While they were gone, I pulled the old Gateway E2600 boxes used as print job release stations, replacing them with Dell Optiplexes. When that was done, I replaced the public printer in our Architecture Library with a much faster HP LaserJet P4515x, and added another P4515, too. Before the week is out, I will update the new circulating MacBooks.

sister's laptop

I have found that Windows 7 works fine. It is not the pain in the butt that Vista was. And by Vista I mean 32-bit Vista, because I avoid the pain by using 64-bit Vista. Having a 64-bit dual-core processor (Intel Core Duo) helps a lot, too.

I say this because my sister the editor has burned through another laptop. Given her line of work (editing books by the ton) laptops tend to have short lives. Between myself and the rest of the family, we talked her into a Lenovo IdeaPad with specs comparable to my own home box. The laptop came today, and she was busy breaking it in.

For those of you ignorant of computer history, Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought out IBM's PC division in 2005. The Ideapad is the consumer version of the old IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad.

With Windows 7 running on it (with the Windows 95 desktop she is used to), my sister should have no problem with her editing work, after she transfers her stuff from old laptop to new.

new cellphone

My first cellphone is a Motorola V195S, your basic flip phone with external screen showing time of day and battery life. It has served me well for the past several years, for as long as I have had my pay-as-you-go plan. I like the phone mainly because I can use it almost anywhere, at home or at work, even in places that force others to go into windowed rooms or even outside.

T-Mobile does not make the Motorola V195S available anymore, either because of its high-energy output, which freaks out the cellphones cause cancer crowd, or because the V195S is so simple that few people want to buy it, so it is not making T-Mobile any money.

As for myself, I never thought I would ever need or use a cellphone as much as I have. Even when I do not consume all of my minutes (I have more than a day's worth), I still have used the phone so much that the case has gotten grungy from all the handling. And, as I said, it is simple: It does not have a camera, and it does not have Web access.

So I decided to buy a replacement: A Samsung t139. It has the same basic shape as the V195S, but it is slightly longer, a lot thinner, and a lot lighter. It is a darker color (gun-metal grey on black). And it has a four-megapixel camera.

I bought the t139 directly off the T-Mobile site. I did not expect the phone to get here as fast as it did. But, two days after I ordered, I picked the phone up from the local UPS depot with more than an hour to spare. (With a quiet week at home after my library friends meeting, I had time to drive from Muncie straight to the depot.)

After inserting my SIM card, the phone worked as intended. I tried out the camera; the pictures were impressed, and I found that pictures could be sent somewhere online (I will investigate this later). I also found that I have to reenter my phone book entries, but at least I can create my own categories (unlike the V195S, which had only three fixed ones).