[General] Productive Night
mood: 
tired
music: R.E.M. - Man On The Moon
Also took my phone by the T-Mobile store, and the guy there managed to hack it back into working order. Probably should get another phone eventually, but nice not to have to do so.
After that, did a quick dinner with my dad and then we headed to Victory Music at Third Place Books, which we hadn't done for a while. Need to do that more often; it's a lot of fun. Got a little bit of writing done, and also met up with
bluerain and orv; it was great to meet them in person finally, and the performance of "Still Nina" seemed to go over well.Came home, trying to get ready for bed. Am tiring out earlier than usual today, possibly from doing about 8 million errands, and having been out driving yesterday. But it's a good tired, the tired of 'hey, I cleared a huge chunk of my TODO list both at work and outside, and got to do something fun too.' :)
We used to have T-Mobile, but we switched to Sprint because they have better coverage in this state.
I started out as a happy little AirTouch customer many, many years ago. AirTouch was one of the companies that did some kind of Frankenstein-like rebuilding into a single monolithic company and became part of Verizon. Since I'd had the number for something like 2 or 3 years at that point, I was stuck.
Verizon spent years whacking me with ungodly service charges every time I crossed the Canadian border. (And this is something I can do multiple times in a month.) In addition, CDMA service in Canada is, shall we say, pathetic; I kept having to fall back to analog service instead of digital. But I stuck with Verizon because I'd had the number for something like seven years by that point, and it had become my main contact number.
As soon as it became possible to switch and keep your phone numbers, I went to switch.
I decided I wanted GSM/GPRS -- it's the standard that the rest of the world (including Canada) uses, which means going to other countries, I can get service more easily. That meant either T-Mobile or Cingular. T-Mobile has more Canadian cooperation -- I swap over to Rogers seamlessly when I cross the border, and can still get my voicemail and SMS messages properly (something I could not do with Verizon). Plus, they had cooler phones than Cingular. ;)
At any rate, I've been reasonably happy with the coverage, though I admit my signal is noticably worse when I'm down Auburn way, or Gig Harbor (for the Ren Faire last month), or Parkland. And I did lose signal when driving through the Canadian Rockies, but I challenge /anyone/ to get signal in the middle of nowhere while crossing Rogers Pass. ;)