I don’t know why I’m so tempted, I’ve already got a little laptop, my 12″ Dell D400 — I think it’s that it’s so little and not “I’m carrying a laptop today” fragile that you could carry it more like a book. It’s decently kitted out, too, with built-in wifi and wired Ethernet, external VGA, an MMC/SD reader, and a webcam.

I think I’ll probably hold off until they start showing up secondhand when their early adopters get tired of them. (I’m glad I’m now in a city where people use Craigslist.)

Any of you guys pick one of these up yet? (deviant-, I’m looking at you!)

Also, until the Air costs $400, you are not permitted to suggest a MacBook Air instead.

This Ikea storage box has a recessed lid with a hole in it, making it a great charging station. I got the idea from this Instructables post, but didn’t bother with the switch, and used an extension cord instead of a power bar because space is at a premium and those adapters don’t need three-prong plugs. It also has the benefit of needing a smaller exit hole for its plug.

The plastic cuts easily with a utility knife to make the hole through which the power cable exits.

Still to do: Outlet multipliers to charge more things, labels on the cables, LED nightlight so the box glows when it’s plugged in, a USB power adapter so I can charge things that have proprietary USB cables.

I’m also glad to finally have modern ringtones, since the BlackBerry was back in the single-voice MIDI era. I edited up a bunch of mp3s in Audition, and then realized that the phone doesn’t loop mp3 ringtones smoothly — between the mp3 frames and the phone, there’s about half a second between repeats, so now I have to go back and re-edit them all to be about three times as long as they are now, so they don’t have to repeat unless I let the phone ring and ring.

(I can’t believe that people pay for ringtones.)

Virgin Mobile continues to be good-weird. Setting up voicemail, I was prompted to record my name, but “if you want, you can make up a name, so if you’ve always wanted to be Shirley, then now you can be Shirley”. After setting up voicemail, it drops you into your mailbox, which tells you you have “no messages, not a single, lonely message”.

I need to call customer service on Monday to clear up how payment works, since I’m not 100% clear on how the combination of prepayment, a monthly package, my second month free, auto top-up from a credit card, and the credit from the phone purchase all fit together. I’ve got this week off work, though, so I’ll have plenty of time for that and all the other stuff I want to get done, like talking to the bank about RRSP borrowing and a student line of credit for this whole school business.

In other news, we won again curling tonight, and it looks as though we’ll be keeping our rink together for the weekend mixed at Granite next year, which should be a blast. I need to start looking around for year-end sales on brushes and shoes.

When I went to Virgin Mobile‘s website, they had a big promotion on because it was Freedom Day, the first day of wireless number portability in Canada: for one day only, if you moved your number to Virgin Mobile, they would credit your account for the price of the phone you buy. So essentially you get a free phone, and the account has no contract; the only gotcha is that you can’t get the price of the phone back in cash.

That was a hard deal to beat, and I was really quite pleased with the idea of leaving Fido, who I’ve never really been thrilled with. So since I knew I was going to be with them for a while and since I could afford their monthly plan ($20/200, but the $20 is all-inclusive) I went out to HMV (!) on my lunch and bought the best phone they offered, a dark-gray Motorola RAZR V3c.

I called them when I got back to work, sat on hold for about half an hour, and a rep set me up, except for the actual activation. Since they had to wait for Fido to approve the move and release the number, someone was going to call me back later to walk me through activating the phone. (It’s CDMA, so it’s not just a case of activating a SIM.)

I waited and waited, and then around 5:00 pm my old phone deactivated. That seemed like a good sign, but still no phone call. I tried to call them, but got a busy signal! After poking around on howardforums a bit, I learned that their call volume was 15x higher than usual but they’d only planned for 5x, and their call centre had completely lost the ability to make outgoing calls.

This morning I called back and waited on hold for another half-hour and they apologized a lot and then walked me through activation, and I’m now 75% done. There’s a problem affecting a lot of migrated users that’s preventing incoming calls, and I’m one of them. But outgoing calls work and text messages work in both directions, so I’m sure it’s just a case of ironing out bugs in the brand-new number migration process.

(One sign that I’m not in Fido-land anymore: when you hit 0 on their IVR to go straight to a human, the IVR says “Hang on while I find you a real, warm, cuddly human.”)

The phone itself is pretty neat. It’s mostly an improvement over my previous phone, a Sony Ericsson T610, and all of the “mostly” is because Virgin Mobile cripples the phone a bit to try to get you to buy ringtones and stuff from them: OBEX FTP is disabled and there’s no WAP access. Otherwise it has all the features I wanted: flip-phone format, bluetooth for headsets, voice dialing, mp3 ringtones, a great screen, speakerphone, a decent camera, USB, and a good UI. Using it really drives home how annoyed I was with a lot of the features and UI on the T610. And I’ve mostly worked around the lack of OBEX FTP by using Motorola Phone Tools and a USB cable to upload my own ringtones and download photos without having to go over the air. Right now Obey Giant is staring at me from the screen and it plays Spadina Bus when it rings.

Or it would if anyone could call me. Soon. Soon!

One thing that amused me about the whole number portability thing: Telus and Virgin Mobile featured it on the front page of their websites; even more, Telus’s flash Web ads are all about portability lately, and Virgin Mobile, having started the portability ball rolling, has had tons of promotions about it. Rogers, Fido, and Bell, on the other hand, don’t mention it at all. I imagine they must be hemorrhaging subscribers.

• I had spent a good part of yesterday evening tracking down an odd bug in Gaim in which it would try to participate in Jabber multiuser conferences using the nickname of the first other user it sees in the conference. It took me most of the night to figure out what was happening and what was supposed to happen, so I left it at that and figured I’d see about fixing it today. This afternoon, I found where it was picking up the wrong nickname, but couldn’t tell if it was safe to just cut out the offending code, so I went to check CVS to see when the code was introduced — and found that the maintainer had fixed the bits I was trying to fix a couple of hours before. Woops!

• A coworker of mine brought leopard geckos to work today to drop them off at the breeder he bought them from on his lunch — he’d bought them to breed with his, and they didn’t get along. I nearly came home with a pair of leopard geckos.

• I stopped in Future Shop tonight to pick up an S-Video cable for the satellite receiver and a component video cable for the PS2, since it’s taking over as DVD player now, but found they only carried Monster Cable. I won’t buy Monster Cable because they’re slimy and because they’re ridiculously expensive without being better in any useful electron-or-photon-moving way, but I’d forgotten how expensive: I’d have to drop $100 on the component cable and $75 on the S-Video cable, 6′ each. I crossed the street to Best Buy and bought both cables for $35 total. That’s the third or fourth time in a row that Best Buy has blown Future Shop out of the water. I should really just go to Best Buy first, except their parking lot is always busier.

• Going to quickly grab cables on the day the PSP is released is a dumb thing to do.

• The S-Video cable claims that it produces better signal quality than composite because it sends video signal information over “two discreet channels”.

• Just a moment ago on the TV guide, I saw that Pimp My Car was playing on MusiquePlus, the French MuchMusic, with the title translated as Pimp Mon Char. ‘Stie!

In other news, I’ve got gaim running again, so I might actually show up on AIM and MSN and Jabber and stuff now. Also, I have a four-day weekend.