The LaValley’s Blog

So on Friday… my trusty super duper PDA phone that I’ve had for about 18 months… decided it had had enough and died. Well actually, the screen had decided it had enough and decided the best way to demonstrate that was to crack in half.

Have a looksy: Samsung Bites the Dust

The good news is that I don’t need a phone for my job as no one is ever trying to reach me and thus I’ll never to reach anyone… *holds finger to ear* Wait a minute… I’m being told that a phone is a requirement of my job… and that I’m secondary on call in the coming week. Why am I always the last to get the memo. Or in this case, why was my phone the last to get the memo.

So I went over to the local verizon store and had a chat with the technical team. They said since the phone was over a year old, that it would cost me $53 dollars and that I’d have to wait until the new phone gets shipped to me from… I guess the moon cuz it would take 3-4 weeks. I basically just looked at the guy and asked “OR?” To my disbelief he asked…. “Or what?” So I basically go into a long diatribe about how it’s required that I have a means to contact any user at the hospital if I get paged and that I needed a cell phone. He said, well, that there wasn’t much he could do… then looked at our account (note to tech staff in sales… do this first) and noticed that my wife’s phone qualified for an upgrade and that I could get my phone to be replaced by using the upgrade to knock off the price of one of the phones they had on the floor.

Perfect, let’s go over there (1 hour later as the 3 people in front of me had all 3 sales staff telling them every possible detail about every phone in the store and then deciding, that the first phone they looked at was the best because “they really just wanted a simple phone to make phone calls.”) What, It was a small store and I overheard their conversation. So when it got to be my turn, the sales person had no chance. I knew exactly what phone I wanted, and that it would be better for him if he made the time with me short as humanly possible. I don’t know if this made him happy or if he was just in shock that I didn’t ask him to repeat his seminar on cell phones that he had just gone over like every other customer before me in the previous 5 hours of his shift. Needless to say 30 minutes later and a few dollars poorer…. I walked out with this:

This is not the actual phone.... but seriously... they all look the same.

All I can say is that I’m very happy. I’ve not got it completely broken in but in the past 24 hours I’ve been able to:
a) Get my Geisinger Mail synced through their BB server (which ironically made the mobile admin’s day that I didn’t have to bug him with 10k questions)
b) Get a Sirius radio app to stream to my phone
c) Use google maps
d) Install my facebook application
and finally
e) Be able to watch youtube videos… (seriously this is one thing that REALLY irked me about my last phone)

Just think what the next 24 hours will bring.

Ok… seriously that was alot of words to say … My phone broke… and I got a new one.

This past week my in-laws were in town. They were treated to seeing our first look at the fawns that have come to the neighborhood. Angie was quick with the camera and captured 2 awsome nature videos. Nothing like seeing nature right out your back doorstep.

Enjoy!

Angie also took some still shots!
Take a look:
Photobucket – Angie’s Deer Photos

My sister graduated from SouthLakes just recently. I have two pretty decent video clips. One of her walking the stage and one of the balloon drop. Both are worth a watch. She’s headed to LSU on a full academic scholarship. Impressive to say the least. Well without further ado…. The videos.

The Walk

The Balloon Drop

Ok , So I posted this on my facebook page. I’m getting tired of facebook ads, and have my own blog site anyways…. I’m gonna start posting the important stuff in my life here and use the facebook to monitor everyone else that still uses it.

I went to my sisters WYHO concert a few weeks back and took my HD camera with me. The result is her kick ass solo. Great job sis!

So this spring my daily activities have been….

1) Go to work,
2) Come home, check email on the PC… delete spam.
3) Play Xbox 360 and Play Halo 3.
4) Rinse / Repeat.

Mainly because, I had access to the TV and I like to play Halo 3. However, Angie completed her degree recently and I now found continuing the routine meant… wife being bored. So I have given up the TV (except 2 nights outta the week and exceptions) in an effort to make sure she can watch some of the stuff she likes too. (Yeah.. this is reality TV most of the time).

So I can’t really go back to my old gaming habit, Eve-Online because I swore never to play it again once I stopped. Well it’s been a year and I’ve not even thought about it, which is a good thing but I still need something to play to unwind after the day is done.

There are several options on the horizon, but for now I picked up a game called X3: Terran Conflict. And it’s pretty good. It’s space based and completely single player. No more creepy 13 year old kids and no more subscription fees.

It’s actually a 2 year old game, but it came out with a new 2.0 version box which is the one I picked up.  It’s pretty fun and worth checking out.  I do warn anyone looking at getting the game that the manual is absolute rubbish. It doesn’t explain anything in any detail. The video tutorials from the website… also rubbish. They are about as equally useless. It’s got a very high learning curve, but once you do the universe is ridiculously huge and worth every penny spent on it. I could play this well into this fall and just be finished with most of the content by then. Halo 3: ODST and Modern Warfare 2 will be out on the Xbox and I can continue to garner the TV when Angela should be doing grading. *hehe*

Game Link: http://www.egosoft.com/games/x3tc/info_en.php