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I am excited waiting for the new iPhone 4 to be available tomorrow! I keep telling myself NOT to jump and make an impulsive purchase, but being the “gadget guy” I am, I love my toys. I know Apple has had a lot of bad press about the antenna problems with this phone, but not everyone is having the problem (with my luck I will). I guess I keep telling myself wait… you’ll get stung again, as you usually do by jumping too fast. Apple says the “bumper”, which is a rubber case for the phone, will fix the issue, but some people says it takes away from the look of the phone. I ALWAYS have a rubber case on mine. I can’t hang on to anything slippery so it helps, and gives it some protection if I drop the phone. I did find that my old Blackberry would bounce pretty good and keep ticking.

I have been watching the Apple web site to see if they are allowing pre-orders, but they aren’t. So tonight, I’ll have to sit up till midnight to place my order online. Hopefully they won’t do the update from California in the Pacific time zone. I’d have to get up at 4am!! Yikes. I want to buy the unit online rather than from a dealer. Why? iPhone 4’s will be unlocked in Canada, unlike other countries. This means, I can travel to the USA, go into an AT&T store, purchase s SIM card and a pay-as-you-go plan and save myself a lot of money over the roaming charges we incur. However, you pay dearly for this option. Is it worth it? I’m not sure. Canadian providers offer an expensive US package of something like 100 minutes of long distance for $40 that you can add on when you travel. I did this one with BELL when we went to Florida. BELL uses Sprint down there and almost all my calls got dropped because of Sprint’s crappy service. So it wasn’t worth it. But if I purchase the phone from a dealer like BELL, the phone will be locked to BELL and I’d have to pay them to unlock it if I wanted to use it with AT&T when in the states.

I’m due for an upgrade and I think I can get $250 off the price of a new phone IF I take a three year contract with BELL. My contract expires in January. But I’m not sure I want to lock myself in for that long a period or not.

Decisions! Knowing me… I’ll end up going to the dealer and buying it in the morning. It will be locked to BELL, but if I purchase it outright I don’t change my contract. There are a lot of new cell providers starting up that the competition to lower prices will hopefully convince the big guys to lower their prives. I’m still pissed they charge for text messages which cost them nothing. I’ll keep you posted on how it all turns out and what issues I run into with the new phone.

Jason turned 37 on June 25th. Our web site was down for a few days, so I couldn’t post anything. Today I want to make up for it.

The ladies from Jason’s office took him to Montanas for lunch where they made him wear the “Moose hat” and sang Happy Birthday to him. He laughed his arse off. Apparently one of the group took a video of the whole thing. I’m trying to get a copy of it.

Mom and I took him to Racines for supper. We had a wonderful meal and Thomas, the Chef, brought out his dessert with a candle in it. They are very thoughtful and great friends at the restaurant. That, and because its the best one in the city is why it is our favorite.

So Happy Belated Birthday honey. You’re not getting older, you’re getting crankier! Haha

Easter weekend is over. No green eggs and ham for us! We had our weigh in Tuesday. The results? I lost 4 pounds and Jason 1. That makes the total weight loss since January 18th – Larry 25.8 pounds and Jason 20 pounds. Neill, our consultant, was pleased that we came through Easter weekend without gaining. We did great.

It’s a long, slow battle, but we aren’t in a big hurry to lose the weight. The longer it takes us to do it, the longer we will have changed our eating habits and it becomes easier. Even eating out in restaurants, we look carefully at the menu and choose things that are good for us. Jason did have a few french fries that came with a restaurant meal over Easter weekend and he hated the taste of them. Funny how your taste buds change. Before he would eat them AND add gravy!

I am now off one of the two meds I was taking for me diabetes, so just one to go. My sugars have been almost too low so I had to come off one pill. Taking a short walk around the block will help keep my sugars low as well. The weather has been amazing so it’s good walking weather. We broke out the shorts last weekend. That’s the earliest I can remember pulling them on. It’s usually the end of May. Hopefully it will be a nice warm long summer.

Today I say goodbye to my old friend Richard Robinson, the Director of Information Morning at CBC here in Fredericton. This is his last day on the job. He leaves after 32 years at the station. All those years getting up at 3am and in to work, no matter what the weather. Some winter nights if an impending storm might cause him problems with his morning commute, he’d sleep at the station overnight. THAT’S dedication!

Richard started as a news reporter, seen but not heard. A few years ago he became an on-air personality a few years back when they assigned him to read the morning weather as part of the show he directed. Recently, he has been even more visible as Information Morning morphed into “NB First“, a television version of the show. His unique way of describing how cold a winter morning was by the number of pair of “Stanfield” underwear you should wear was typically Richard. He was down home and folksy. But he was always a newshound and could smell a story. Over the many years covering politics, he became friends with many political figures and civil servants and had a contact list that nobody will ever match. If we needed the Premier for the show, Richard could probably get him booked for the next day.

I first met Richard in 1970 when I went to work for CFNB Radio, a private 50,000 watt AM station in Fredericton. He was Assistant News Director. I can still see him hovering over his old typewriter tapping out news stories. I’m not sure when he left to join the CBC, but that was our first meeting. CFNB was in the throws of a union squabble. The employees wanted to join NABET and management, needless to say, didn’t want a union. There was a lot of tension until the vote came in the early summer that didn’t have enough support for a union.

I next ran into Richard when I went to work at the CBC in April 1991. He had aged somewhat, but was still a “character”! He is an avid outdoorsman and loves antiques. He built a beautiful house out in the country and became a country gentleman.

Today, Richard put his Stanfields away for the last time when the show ended. I’m not sure what his plans are, but he is still young (sort of) and has lots of time to enjoy this summer in the garden and tend his flock of animals.

Goodbye and good luck my friend!

Jason says I can never make a decision and always keep changing my mind. He’s right! I tried the iPhone for a couple of months when it first came out and loved the phone, but hated the fact that BELL couldn’t keep me connected to their “new and improved” network. I sold the iPhone, but have missed it. I love my Blackberry, but hate the small screen which doesn’t rotate when you turn the phone. I bought the new Curve 2 shortly after it came out. I fought right off the bat that it wouldn’t work with my TomTom unit as a hands free. That was a pisser. Then I found that several of my favorite apps wouldn’t work on it either. But it WAS a Blackberry and I never got disconnected from the network.

Last night, I decided I’d better plug it into my iMac and backup everything. I can’t remember if I had done that since I purchased this Curve or not. Immediately I got a message that there were lots of software updates available. Always wanting to keep up to date, I said “go for it” and took them. During the install, the phone crashed and I got a 507 error. I waited, pulled the battery and reinserted it, and it started to boot up, but came right back to the 507 error. A call to BELL said it was an easy fix. I was asked if I had the desktop manager installed and I said yes, that was what got me into this mess. But I was on an iMac. “Do you have a PC in the house you could use?” NO!!! I do not. BELL told me I’d need one to run the software to get my Curve up and running again. So… here I sit with a 507 error on a phone that won’t boot up and I’m not buying another PC to fix it. This morning I’m taking it back to the dealer and letting them put it back with THEIR PC.

BUT… (here comes the part about changing my mind), since BELL and Blackberry make a token effort to support Mac owners with a desktop manager which doesn’t work well with my Curve and won’t according to the BELL CSR, I’ve decided to give another iPhone a shot. I’ve been told by BELL that the issue with some iPhones not staying or reconnecting to their network has been resolved. But of course they have lied through their teeth to me before! So an hour from now, when the dealer opens, I’m off to buy another iPhone.

The sad part is that all my contacts and appointments were in the Curve and I have lost them. Some I have in my iCal on the Mac from before I updated to the Curve2, but some are lost. Anybody wanna buy a Curve2?