Technology: 12, Dave: 0

[Phone]
My brand new phone that I had purchased only a year ago, with the ridiculously slow operating system, died on me yesterday. The very day I was hoping to show up early to salsa class and get Red Shirt girl's phone number. I didn't really mourn its passing, mostly because when I pressed MENU,* to lock or unlock it, it took forever for it to actually lock/unlock. In fact, everything about that phone was slow. Navigating through the menus was like wading through a pool of molasses with sacks of hard drives full of poorly-written code attached to your legs.

Something had been rattling around inside the phone for about a day--must have banged into something important.

I stopped by AT&T for a new phone. I wanted to pay full price and avoid a contract, because I hate making commitments to companies I hate, but apparently the cost of a phone is greater than the cost of breaking a contract. Thanks a lot, Cali. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the sales guy thought I was either a douchebag or a huge nerd when I told him the operating system on my previous phone sucked.

I finally walked out with a mostly working phone and began my initial period of mixed fascination and hate. Its kind of like your first few dates with a significant other, except instead of a girl it is a cell phone, and instead of euphoria its acute disgust. My new new phone has basically the same crappy operating system as my old new phone, the main difference is that it has been endowed with an unnecessarily large memory and an unnecessarily fast processor.

This is not how I wanted the story of my old new phone to end. I would have preferred that every human being on this planet be told what a crappy operating system my old phone had, and then found a perfectly coded, open source, and beautiful Nokia-and-AT&T-compatible operating system on the internet that does not have twenty layers of abstraction for code monkeys that can't manage memory, and programmed by people who don't think it should be called GNU/linux. Even if that single person was me.

I guess if I want to live a normal life, I can't spend time fighting these battles. If only I had an evil and completely asexual twin that got along with people who expect the entire world to change for them.

The next problem with my new phone...well we're gonna have to skip a few. Especially which button they chose for backspace...those bastards. Anyway the next problem I'll choose to mention is the part where I tried to delete a contact, and then wasn't able to make any new contacts, and then all of my contacts disappeared. My reluctance to trust my contacts to the memory of this new phone was involved, however I just lost a lot of numbers because they were only stored in the memory of the now deceased phone, so I think such reluctance is justified.

In the time since I've received a number of problematic texts from numbers that I should have recognized. For example, "I think we should just be friends blah blah blah" is not, in fact, a text that you can respond to with "hey who is this?"

I got my contacts back by reseating the SIM card. I suppose that means they will all disappear again the next time I drop my phone.

[Board Games, part 1]
I haven't played Settlers in a while. However I have managed to keep up with all of the girls that attended, so I suppose its no great loss. Also, I was getting pretty damn good, and no matter how hard I try, when it comes to Settlers (and Descent3) I can't pull back and go easy on someone. Doesn't matter if a friend is a total beginner, they get the same cutthroat treatment from me. Hopefully if I stop playing for a while I won't win almost every game.

Speaking of those girls, it has taken a long time to find some to come salsa with me, but despite that setback I may end up with way more than two. This has the potential to be awesome. If I can manage to show up at the same club, roughly weekly, with ten girls, everybody will know me AND adding that many girls to a single dance floor could actually swing the normally male-dominated gender ratio back into balance. I could restore balance to the dance floor. How awesome is that?

Possible Salsa Harem Candidates:
-Firefly girl
-Pilot girl
-that sarah girl I barely know (doubtful)
-Actor girl
-that girl from craiglist
-that girl I never want to hook up with again
-Red Shirt girl
-possibly someone from or associated with my dance class

Thats eight. If I can pull this off I am the king. If any of them read my blog regularly, I am finished.

[Board Games, part 2]
The host of a board game club I attended once roughly a year ago, who I retroactively decided was creepy, emailed me to inform me that their policy required their members to attend twice a year, and he was forced to let me go. I never asked to be a member, was not aware that I was a member, and had replied to one of Mr Creepypants' emails to confirm my disinterest in making another appearance there any time soon. While I did enjoy playing half a game of Starfarers of Catan before I had to catch a bus back to Seattle, the gender ratio was worse than a gay bar and driving all the way back there to play some board games while sober is possibly the last item on my list of possible things to do on a saturday night. At this point if I did want to go play some board games with them, I would shoot him an email and then show up. That's about exactly what I would do if I were still a member. I hope this means the picture he took of me will be removed from their website.

Sill, I feel a slight sting being kicked out of a club I didn't want to join. That would be like, way back in high school, having the chorus teacher come by the band hall while I'm practicing my trumpet to let me know I couldn't be in chorus. People who play the trumpet, by the way, are typically competent singers because they have good pitch. That actually goes for most instrumentalists.

I do want to play Starfarers of Catan again. If you like spending 8 hours to play a board game, please contact me and we'll set something up. Maybe they'll set up a table for us in Vegas.

[Work]
This week it is my turn to deal with all of the crap that no one wants to deal with. That means being at work and "on call" with my pager and everything during the daytime, from 9:30 to 5:30. This leaves an hour between when I can and want to go leave and 6:30 when, thanks to rush hour, construction, and about a million busses, I can actually make it home. You can expect more posts like this one. I used to feel bad; there are a lot of posts that don't make it. In fact this is post #90 according to google, but you would see a different sum. I don't plan on feeling bad anymore. If you get tired of hearing me complain about modern technology and the lack of girls in Seattle, thats your fault for continuing to read this. Hmm...I do still have to make sure I don't say to much when I drink and write. So I suppose the filter isn't coming all the way off. Thats what she said.