Forums Archive Index > General Chat > I'm back......great vacation.
Date: 17 Dec 2006 2:09 pm
Hello all,
I just got back after spending 8 days in sunny Florida.......just awesome.
I cannot wait to retire. Got back last night, an hour later my son's car found a deer....(bummer).
Down there my cellphone went wacky.......no cellphone, no computer, no e-mail...no OPE forum........
Glad to see all is well with everyone still.
Visited Tampa, Ft. Myers and Leesburg.
Strange thing...the Home Depots down there don't even have any snowblowers......! :? :? :D
Frank D.
Date: 17 Dec 2006 2:13 pm
Glad you had a good time!!
Would you retire to FL?
Is your son ok?
Date: 17 Dec 2006 2:47 pm
faithfulFrank wrote:
Down there my cellphone went wacky.......no cellphone, no computer, no e-mail...no OPE forum........Frank D.
Thats GOOD! You're on vacation! :D
Glad you had an excellent time! Sorry to hear about the deer incident...
Marty
Date: 17 Dec 2006 3:04 pm
Welcome back Frank!
As Marty said, who needs all that on vacation! We get enough in real life. :wink:
Let us know about your son. Is the deer dead? Did he keep it? Good chow!
Date: 17 Dec 2006 4:53 pm
Gotta go to work, so i'll post more later.
Son is ok..car is not, but it was our worst car..small loss.
He found the deer today....took my pick up, brought it home, showed the deer what it did to his car......
Too much damage to keep any of it, got rid of it....(the deer). i'll try to put a temp headlight on the car, and start looking for a cheap replacement.
My thoughts are now on retirement.......can't wait.
Retirement places will be an interesting subject.......see ya tomorrow, off to work....! Thanks for your caring interest. We are all indeed friends.
Frank D.
Date: 17 Dec 2006 5:53 pm
Sounds great Frank! My kind of vacation, no phone, no computer..... 8)
Date: 17 Dec 2006 7:26 pm
faithfulFrank wrote:
Gotta go to work, so i'll post more later.
Son is ok..
My thoughts are now on retirement.......can't wait.
Retirement places will be an interesting subject.......see ya tomorrow, off to work....! Thanks for your caring interest. We are all indeed friends.
Frank D.
Glad it was only the car.
Hitting a deer here in PA is one of my greatest fears. Too many of them in my area.
A new thread on retirement places would be a great idea!
Regards,
Bill
Date: 19 Dec 2006 2:50 am
Welcome back, what cell phone/service do you have. I'm guessing you used it as a modem. Getting things back in order after a vacation can be a chore.
Date: 19 Dec 2006 7:58 am
AJ,
Around here, Verizon is king.......probably 90% have verizon.
I never used it as a modem.......it ws strange though. In Tampa, Ft. Myers etc it worked fine. In Leesburg it had no service. I went to the verison service center and managed to get one bar. They still cound not update it to know the local towers. They did a software update, etc.
They ended up saying that it was a bad phone, (I do not believe it), and they FedEx'd me a new one, which was waiting for me when I got home. I did not thinbk there was anything much wrong with the phone, but I was not going to turn down a free new phone.
As soon as I got closer to I-75, the "bad" phone had 6 bars and worked fine. It also worked fine again in Tampa, and Atlanta airports, and worked fine when I got home. I just switched to the "new" phone, but kept the "bad" phone as a back up, and returned an older scratched up phone to them, since I had to return something to them.
Since Verizon has free calling to other Verizon phones, everyone here has Verizon.
Frank D.
Date: 19 Dec 2006 8:52 am
Frank, don't ya just love it.
I would agree with you, I think your phone is fine.
It's your provider that's "broke".
From what I read about it and how I understood it....
The carries in the U.S. use "locked phones".
Which means they force you to use their network and their partnering aggreements. And the phone won't work on other networks.
Even though your looking at a cell tower, and others are gabbing away , you have no service.. cause your provider has no "network" coverage in that area with who ever owns that tower, and the programming in the phone knows it, so it shows you zero bars.
The locked phone programming also effects functions on the phones that are just plain old turned off so you have to actually use a different service from them to do something... could be things like blue tooth networking to transfer your photo's from your phone to your PC. They turn that off so you have to buy a dataplan, use bytes, to "upload" your photos from the phone to their servers.
Cingular is one of the very few, if not the only one around that doesn't mess with the functions on the phone, but do lock it up for their "network" like everyone else does.
Date: 19 Dec 2006 2:22 pm
Yeah,
I do not know too much about these phones, and what new stuff they do. Howardsforums seems to be THE place for all that stuff.
I used to have cingular......but around here it was dropping too many calls.....I miss one call from the firehouse and I lose hundreds of bucks in overtime. Had to switch to verizon.
It will be interesting to see what exactly the new Apple phone, scheduled to come out 1st quarter 2007, will be. I'm happy with my current cellphone though. It's an older LG v6000.
Just finished rigging up a "new" headlight on my son's car. It is not pretty, but it works.
Frank D.
Date: 19 Dec 2006 3:00 pm
So long as the cop can't give ya a ticket...
My daughters "station" car, after the first few weeks of her new school year and using the LIRR, got it's first broken tail lens.. out comes the red lens tape.
Her car is "pre-dented" in every corner, but all legal. No tears from all the tap and runs that happen in the LIRR parking lots.
At one job I had my own AT&T and a work supplied a Verizon Mot StarTac.
So for 2-3 years I ran around with my Nokia AT&T and Verizon StarTac.
Around here AT&T had the best coverage (less dead spots), Verizon had some better plans (1st minute free on incoming calls and stuff like that-man have plans changed) but lots of dead spots and voicemails I didn't get for days.
At my parents house, with my Verizon phone in that area, a mile from the sound, I use to get roaming charges, the only cell tower was in Bridgeport CT. AT&T had local towers that covered that area and other fringe areas.
It's all so regional I guess.
With my old AT&T plan / network, I got killed with roaming charges even though the phone said "HOME" , for home network = no roaming.
One bill was $800, after a week on the road through down south.
I had it out with AT&T, and they relented and admitted the "HOME" doesn't always work... WELL DUH I only made the calls cause I thought there wouldn't be roaming charges. They let me Up the plan to cover the minutes that had US wide long distance and the bill went down to $120.
I guess where Verizon didn't let you make the call, AT&T would, but apparently at a pricey charge!! This was only a few years ago, but it was the old dual analog/pcs digital service. Not the same full digital service they have now.
I had very few issues on the island with AT&T phone/cell service, and then cingular bought them out. The transition was tough, but after a few months and getting all the accounts and new technology they brought with them all integrated, it was for the best.
I get much better coverage out of state than I did with the original AT&T.
I haven't had any surprise roaming issues with Cingular either.