Things are looking up

Yesterday was a pretty red letter day.

Verizon told me that my phone would ship out on Monday morning with two day shipping. However, when I called them to get the tracking number, they told me it hadn’t been sent yet, but promised to send it Tuesday. I was a bit worried – they were shipping it to my Chicago hotel, and I would be flying out of Chicago on Thursday evening, so that left little room for delays! Imagine my surprise when I got home from the hotel on tonight to find the package waiting for me. I immediately ripped the package open to marvel at how beautiful and thin and small the phone is. Honestly, it feels like an iPhone with a textured back.

There is a long debate still raging about whether you need to fully charge a phone battery before using it for the first time, and subsequently run it all the way down to zero before reconnecting it to the charger – some say that this helps to condition your battery so it will last longer. I was SO impatient to start setting up and playing with my new toy, but I miraculously managed to hold off until morning. And when I did… oh, the joy! It does everything my old phone did, but is smaller, lighter, and faster. Hallelujah! I’m not thrilled that I had to shell out $300, but maybe that thief did me a favor by allowing me to upgrade without guilt 🙂

In other news, my firm has an internal blog on which everyone in the practice is supposed to write opinions/insights of industry news and stuff. The Enterprise practice (which includes airlines and is therefore all the people I want to impress) is running a four month contest to try to get people to post more about Enterprise-related topics. Each month, they’ll select one winner who will get a $25 gift card and have their post published externally; at the end of the four month period, the top three entries will receive even better prizes. 1st place gets an iPad, 2nd place gets a Kindle, and 3rd place gets $100 gift card. So in July, I wrote a post about airline price fixing during the World Cup… and today it got announced in the company newsletter that it won best article of the month! I’m pretty thrilled about that.

In the other other news, the exterminator is coming tomorrow, so I’m hoping that when I get home on Monday, it will be to a bug-free apartment. We shall see…