Taking T-Mobile Overseas

It's not often I am thrilled by talking to customer service. Yet when I spoke with a guy at T-Mobile, I was, namely because he provided me with a ton of great information. I'm going to be taking my phone with me to Europe. I should be able to use the wi-fi powers of my G2 to get data and make calls. However, my wife spoke with T-Mobile and found out there are many different ways you can get inadvertently charged for cell service, making turning your phone off or putting it in airplane mode about the only way to avoid charges.

My quest was to find out if there was a way I could leave my wi-fi on, but avoid any over the air charges. The rep from T-Mo got me almost all the way there. Here are the steps and advice he gave me for avoiding charges while abroad.

1. Turn off data roaming. You can do this in Android by going to Settings > Wireless & Networks > Mobile Networks and unchecking Data Enabled and Data Roaming. This way your phone won't try to get its data from the T-Mo network.
2. Use wi-fi calling with a caveat. I can call phones in the US for no charge using wi-fi. However, if you try to call a phone in a non-US country, even if it is in the room next you, it will be charged to your account as an international call. Wi-fi calls originate from the US, making US calls domestic and calls to anywhere else, still international.
3. Don't let people call you. If you are abroad and someone calls you, even if you don't pick up and it goes to voice mail, the network had to find your phone and you'll be charged for a minute of international air time. You can stop this by setting up unconditional call forwarding, which means anyone who calls your number will go straight to voice mail without the network trying to find your phone. You can do this on any T-Mobile phone by dialing in a special code. Dialing **21*18056377249# will turn it on. Dialing ##21# will turn it off. Wunderbar!

Now, the one thing I haven't figured out how to avoid is a charge when your phone checks in with a tower. If keep my phone in airplane mode, I should be able to avoid this, but if I want to use wi-fi, I'll have to grit my teeth and take the charge. I might be able to get away if I remove the SIM card, but that's a pain to do and I don't want to carry my SIM card separately for fear of losing or damaging it.

Anyway, I thought I'd share the intel.

EMTs and the Unintended Consequence of Working Early

I really thought I was going to post on Tuesday. Now almost a week has gone by. Yesterday we celebrated Father's Day with Jen's parents. We saw X-Men: First Class, which I quite liked, and then we got pizza and ice cream at Lucky Pie and Sweet Cow. That's a good celebration.

This weekend I also attempted to rake up the cotton coating our yard. If Zeus ever tires of having Sisyphus move that boulder, he can have the poor guy turn to trying to rake cotton out of a lawn. When I was done, I had filled a 30 gallon trash bag with the stuff, and yet my yard looked like I hadn't done anything. Then it rained, and the remaining cotton has mostly dissolved or disappeared. Go figure.

Work has been difficult but enjoyable. I've been parsing rather ill-conceived data sets into matrices in order to display them as tables. Then I have to make them editable, reorderable, and addable and then turn them back into the same format as the aforementioned data sets. My brain has been working overtime. Sometimes it seizes up, but I have made it through the complex grids. I feel smarter.

Too bad that didn't help me on Friday. See, on Friday I went to work early in order to work on the complex grids. I arrived before anyone else, which is unusual. I went to turn off the alarm, but my code wouldn't work. It'd been a long time since I had to deal with the alarm, so I couldn't remember if I had to press a different key at the end of my code. So I started punching in my code and following it with a different key. Finally the alarm went into high gear, the kind that summons police officers and triggers an animal panic in a person. It certainly did in me. My hand started shaking and I started hitting buttons I knew had nothing to do with disarming the alarm. Finally I called my boss, who was in the shower, and he walked me through several attempts at silencing the alarm before we finally got it to work. I apologized and walked upstairs. Then my boss called me back. He told me that police and EMTs had been dispatched, because, in my panic, I had hit the medical emergency button. Oops. He said he told them to not come, but he told me to be prepared for some imminent arrivals. Thankfully the police never showed, but the EMTs did. I apologized profusely and they were thankfully understanding. I considered baking them cookies or something to apologize. It took a while for me to calm down enough to work. So much for getting an early start.

Denken auf Deutsch

Exercise time is German time for me now. In preparation for our trip, I'm pulling out my old college German textbook and while riding the exercise bike, I'm brushing up on my dative/accusative prepositions, vocabulary, and irregular conjugations. It's encouraging to me how much of my 3 long lost years of German is coming back to me. It's also alarming when I realize more and more how much I don't know. Speaking a foreign language is often frustrating for me. Because I enjoy the nuances and complexities of language when speaking in English, being reduced to a 1st grade level of speaking proficiency is galling to me. So even though I have a native German speaker as a friend, I never use it, especially since she speaks better English than some native speakers. Of course, I realize that's going to be the case with most of the people I encounter in Germany. I'm probably going to study and study and then not use it for anything more than reading signs.

But I am having fun. German is a pretty logical language, and most of the words are compound ones that make for amusing ideas. For instance, ein Schrank is a cabinet. A refrigerator is ein Kuhlschrank (literally a "cool cabinet"). A freezer is ein Tiefkuhlschrank (literally a "deep cool cabinet"). Eine Tasse is a cup. A saucer, then is naturally eine Untertasse ("under cup"). One word for a mat, like a bath mat, is ein Vorleger ("the thing that lays in front"). And an important one: Nachtisch ("after table") is dessert. I am driving Jen a little crazy by trying to say everything in German, or translating what I just said. "Because the door was open, I thought that you had gone downstairs" becomes "Weil der Tür geoffnet war, habe ich gedacht dass du hinunter gegangen wärst" or something like that.

Outside of German, things have been busy. The cotton from our trees is coming down like snow, except snow melts and this crap sticks around and gums up my lawn mower and gets tracked in the house until we either have a downpour or a mighty wind. So mowing this weekend was tough and ineffectual. There were many other chores, and I made some awesome chicken sandwiches and a decent ice cream pie for some friends that came over. We were so exhausted. We did little on Sunday other than church and a walk along Boulder creek.

Oh, I did get sucked into Angry Birds, now that it is free and runs in my browser. Then I got Jen sucked into it. Our productivity will take a hit for a while. I'm also getting drawn into the Tim Keller sermons even more. Today he was talking about the Fall and made a really good point about how the root sin, the root temptation in Genesis was to break our trust that God is good. The serpent was saying, "If you follow God, you're going to miss out. You're not going to get the good stuff." He didn't try to argue that God didn't exist, or that God didn't really say what He said. It was that God was keeping the good stuff for himself, wasn't looking out for us, and wouldn't give us what we needed if we followed Him. Wow. That's some good insight. I see that assumption buried deep in a lot of my sins, especially those of omission. I don't step out in faith because of a root lack of trust that God is good and will take care of me or at least make it all work out for good. I'm looking forward to the rest of the CDs. I'm woefully ignorant of any current events, but this is the situation during NPR pledge drives. Well, with those lemons I'm making lemonade ... Oder soll ich 'Limonade' sagen?

Thank You God for My Hearing

Let's see. I'm finally playing Portal 2. I got in an hour and really enjoyed it. Very funny game. Maybe sometime this week I'll get another hour? Anyway, the cottonwoods are starting their assault on our our yard with small dusting of cottons; mere portents of the drifts to come. I'm starting to practice my German again. Oh, and I almost got T-boned by a speeding fire engine.

So, there's a hill I usually race up on my commute so I can make it through the light at the top. On Tuesday, the crosswalk was flashing a Don't Walk sign, so I sped up to make it through the light. Just before I got to the intersection, I heard a thunderous blat of a horn and I wisely put on the brakes. I stopped outside the intersection in time to see a fire truck with all the lights going blast through the red light. Had I tried to make my intersection, that engine would have been picking me out of their grill.

For this reason, I have not and will not use headphones in my car. This is pertinent this week since the local NPR station is doing their pledge drive and I brought my Playbook along to listen to podcasts during my commute. Unfortunately, it is a bit too quiet to listen effectively on the freeway. I spent part of my commute holding it near my ear like a loud cell phone. But no headphones for me. My hearing is a bit too important to survival. Fortunately, Jen's parents came to the rescue and lent me their CDs of Timothy Keller sermons. I listened to two today, and although they aren't as jam-packed with awesomeness as his books, they are quite good. They also are the perfect length. The sermon on the drive home today ended as I was pulling into the garage.

Throw Back

There is something seriously wrong with me. I have a free evening and a copy of Portal 2, and I still haven't even taken the shrink wrap off it. What the heck?! Instead I am writing this blog and posting pictures. The pictures are of Laura's birthday celebration. We joined up at Steuben's to grab dinner before journeying over to the Fillmore for roller derby. You can see the photographic evidence in my gallery.

I'm not sure when roller derby started making its comeback. I remember being rather confused by it during the 80's. I was a kid, but I could still sense the theatrics involved, and I couldn't quite fathom what the heck was going on. Now with a little more experience under my belt, I found I actually was enjoying it quite a bit. There were no theatrics; no staged dives or choreographed spills. These girls were taking it seriously and the falls were real and painful. It was actually quite fun, even standing in the smelly heat for the whole 2 plus hours.

The home team was the 5280 Fight Club and the visitors were The Oly Rollers from Olympia. They were supposedly the best two teams in the league, but the Fight Club got their lunch eaten by the opposing team, which was too bad. Still, it seemed like everyone had fun. About the only disturbing thing was the half time bout by the Roller Punks. The Roller Punks are 12-17 year-old girls doing roller derby, which I think is actually kind of awesome. However, the young girls with their cheeks hanging out the backside of their spankies were a bit disturbing. I'm having flash forwards to being a dad and thinking "You're not leaving the house dressed like that."

The rest of the weekend was spent doing yardwork, having lunch with our friends Glenn and Jenny, and playing Lego Pirates of the Carribean on XBox. We also had the exciting arrival of patio furniture. Jen's parents got themselves some new furniture, so we inherited theirs. We have greatly expanded our ability to host people on our deck now and don't have to rely on the mismatched mish mash of plastic and vinyl we've been sporting thus far. Sounds like time for a deck party.

What Was

The week has been packed, so here's a quick recap:

Memorial Day weekend was mainly yard work and barbecues. I made a great corn salad and some other stuff. We started doing some planning for our Europe trip. We got the new Lego game: Pirates of the Carribean. It's fun. The weekend was good.

This week we had a guy from one of our clients fly out and work on site. It's stopped me from programming, but the planning and brainstorming we have done will save me tons of time and heartburn in the future. I am all for this sort of thing. Also, we drank beers in the sun at picnic tables at the office and had good lunches. That is good.

Earlier in the week I had celebratory drinks with the rest of the team that worked on a massive and frustrating project for another client. We drank big beers at Gov's Park and toasted never having to touch that code again.

Also this week at work, they filmed an episode of the show Eats Street in our parking lot. It runs on the Cooking Channel. There's a really good chance you will have the opportunity to get to see me eat a freezing cold ice cream sandwich on television. My boss John has a bit more info on his blog here.

I bought Portal 2 today, which was on sale for $40 (awesome!!!) at Best Buy. I can't believe I'm writing this blog post rather than playing it. What the heck?!

The Playbook on the Road

So, I gave the Playbook its road test while I was in Mexico. In general, it did quite well. Right at the airport, it showed an advantage over a laptop: I didn't have to take it out of my backpack to go through security. Score!

During flight time, I did give it a go watching TED talks and other podcasts. I was using my Android ear buds, and unfortunately they were not powerful enough to overcome the background noise of the airplane and make speech intelligible, even with the Playbook and the app at full blast. I also had brought along a pair of Blackberry ear buds I had gotten for free at 360|Flex. These proved to be powerful enough to make the speech intelligible, but were exceptionally annoying because they kept popping out of my ears, despite the three different sizes of ear buds I tried. So, I was able to listen, but not contentedly. I'm sure the Android headset would have been adequate for music, but not for speech.

Once I was relaxing on the veranda, the Playbook was great. I listened to and viewed more podcasts without any problem and in good comfort. Even the partial sun didn't mar the screen's brightness.

I also used the Playbook as a tool for running a trivia night in Mexico, and it worked quite well for that. I was viewing a Word doc, so nothing too complex. I had planned to be playing music and running a timer simultaneously, but that proved to be overkill ... for the trivia, not the Playbook. When I tested that trio of functionality before the trip, it worked great with the exception of the timer not rotating to portrait mode and that making switching apps wonky.

I also played games on the Playbook, namely BubbleMech Lite from Coldwired Games. It was a great experience. Not that the game is hardware intensive, but as a general experience, it was good. The game is good too. I'm waiting for the full version of this to come out.

So, overall, I was pleased. I still turned to books for the majority of my flight time entertainment, but I certainly intend to take the Playbook on future trips. High portability and a good battery life are also good aspects. Now if only they could get freaking TweetDeck on there...