Posts from — June 2009

So this past Friday, I finally fulfilled a wish two years in the making. My own wish yes, but hey, I wanted it. Due to some pretty good luck my contract for my ancient, shattered-screen Samsung flip phone expired just days before the new iPhone 3G S was to come out. Naturally, I had to upgrade.

I had been expecting this–Apple has pretty consistent product release cycles–and had saved up some money from my birthday a few weeks ago. With that, I logged onto AT&T’s website and went through the relatively easy steps required to pre-order an iPhone.

Unfortunately, I had to be out of town on the actual day that I’d get the phone, as I was requested to take place in a roundtable on Gay rights in Arkansas. When I got back home, the package was sitting there, waiting for me. With predictable fervor, I tore into the box and opened its contents with the reference that Apple packaging demands. There were no instructions. I dug around in the box, but all I found were my receipt and a shipping invoice. I plugged it into iTunes, went through those steps, and put some music on the phone.

When I disconnected the phone from my computer, it said no service. This could not be fixed by any number of restarts. A quick google search yielded some news reports of an error in AT&T’s computers do to so many activations. It made sense. I made due with my phone on the wifi, downloaded some apps, and went to bed.

The next morning I had no luck. I tried restarting it quite a few more times. Nothing. I even went to the AT&T store, but they were predictably useless. They told me to wait, had no idea for how long, and said I could try to call customer service. By this time I’m just calling it my iPod touch.

I wake up the next morning to, gasp, a phone that has no service. I do have, however, an email from AT&T. As it turns out, att.com/activate will do the trick. It took maybe five minutes of filling out a simple web form (phone number and zip code) and agreeing to my new contract. My next restart yielded a working phone.

The actual process of getting my phone to work was simple. But the fact that their website didn’t link to the activation page, and I couldn’t find out about it in a google search, in the packaging, or in their store is a pretty good example of pretty bad customer service. You shouldn’t have to wait two days for an email that explains how to make it work. It should come the morning the phone is delivered.

The phone, of course, is wonderful; this entire post was composed using the free wordpress for iPhone app.

Take Your Kids to Dickson was wonderful! It was great seeing so many families come out yesterday. I spent a few hours reading to kids and playing finger puppets with them. All in all, a great day. Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen!

I’m all about the little things. They’re just too easy to do. And here’s one that I insist upon: I always ask what comes with my plate. I used to just ask for everything on the side. Let’s say my burger comes with onions. I’d just discard the onions. The problem with this is that it wastes some onion. I may not want them, but certainly someone else will. It might be a bit of a hassle, but I alway ask the waitress what comes on my plate, and tell her what not to bring me. As is, restaurants produce  a lot of organic waste. This is my way to help cut down on that.

This summer, I’m all about volunteering. Helping out in areas I should be already (Pride Week ’09), areas I always try to help out in (Democratic Candidates), and other random things I can do to help out the city of Fayetteville. A friend told me that it’s awesome that I care that much about Fayetteville to want to make it better, but to me it’s just the no-nonsense obvious choice. I really do love Fayetteville and want to give back to the town as much as I get.

The whole ‘darker side’ of Dickson comment really upset me, and a whole bunch of other people, too. One of them is Heather Kendrick-Gerlaugh, who, unlike me, did something about being mad, and organized the first annual Take Your Kids to Dickson. Last night, because of a tweet she made, I had the opportunity to help her out in the final planning stages, and I sure am glad that I did. I helped paint a few signs for the event, and it was worth it to see into the planning behind the event.

It’s just her, a few of her friends, and her mom doing it. It’s so inspiring to see it happen, too. I love Fayetteville to the extent that it pains me to be in any other town in Arkansas. Most of my volunteering has been orchestrated through twitter, and all of it through social media. People complain that social networking sites divorce us from the real world, but for me, they’ve been a tool that has helped me make lots of new contacts in town, and helped my drive to make Fayetteville a better place.

I’ve got an idea for something big, hopefully, and I’ve met with a few people about it so far. Here’s hoping it works out. And for all of you with kids, make sure to take them to Dickson Street at 3 pm today.

Last week, I blogged about how the City of Fayetteville is warming up to social media in at least some respects. Really I was just happy to see those Facebook and Twitter buttons up there in the corner of the site.

Well, I saw this banner in the union yesterday. I guess someone doesn’t understand the idea behind hyperlinking.

I don't think you can click these buttons.

MGMT. June 9th. The Village. I drove down to Little Rock for this one.

I’ll keep it short and sweet:

• Their sound live is too guitar-driven. Not enough of their trademark synth breaks.
• The Village is the worst venue I’ve ever been too. Hot, horribly managed, dirty, awful light show. Rude staff. Show started two hours late.
• MGMT acted like they were better than their audience. They gave themselves an encore featuring one semi-popular and one new song. They ignored their single, “Kids,” which the crowd was chanting for, in unison. Advice: when you’ve got one album with two singles and fans cheering for one of them, you should play it. 

I can’t wait to get out of Little Rock and back to Fayetteville. I’d leave tomorrow morning were I not seeing friends all day, though that is a good enough reason to stay.

So its no big secret that I’m starting a new radio show over at KXUA. My pitch for the show was something like “interview people on campus and off. Get all sorts of people in on it—students, business owners, etc…. Just showcase Fayetteville.”

That’s a pretty big plan, though. Not to say that I’m daunted. Excited, really. But it’s still a lot a lot of work to go through. I’m sitting on about two hours worth of interviews with the Mayor, Alderman Petty, and Alderwoman Lewis. I’m not quite sure how to edit it together, though. I’ve come up with a rough plan for how it should be organized.

I’m assuming that I’ll get a standard 2-hour KXUA slot. I want to try to fill this with two hour-long shows. They’ll be hard to produce but if I can get 5 or 6 done this summer then I can rotate those out as I make new ones periodically during the semester.

3 sections per episode:

What I’m debating is the order that these things should take. 20 minutes of Section 1, then Sections 2 and 3, then back to Section 1? 15, 10, 10, 10, 15? 40, 10, 10?

Photo by Jon Schleuss

Header on accessfayetteville.org

I was looking at a map of the city parks system tonight when I noticed something praiseworthy about http://accessfayetteville.org. In the upper right-hand corner of the header is a link to the city’s respective pages on Twitter and Facebook.

If you read this post, I detail a bit of the controversy about the city of Fayetteville adopting social media as a technique for information distribution. It’s nice to see those links there, even if the matter is a bit undecided as of yet. If I were planning on visiting Fayetteville, I would definitely check out those links to see what was up in the area.