Latest phone

So, I was out riding the Nomad with WhatsHerFace this weekend and stopped at cingular to upgrade my brick of a phone to something else. I ended up with the CranBerry(Red Blackberry pearl).


At first I wasn't sure that it was for me, or that I would like the qwerty keyboard integrated with the phone pad. After a bit of practicing I now can go pretty fast on the little keys. I also tried many times getting my email set up and web browsers working, applying all the patches but no go. I finally called the old att wireless-cingular-the new ATT support and found out the store sales girl did not add a blackberry plan to my phone, so no browser or email capability.

I had the rep add the functions and now I have full web access and email access. This phone rocks now! The map features rule and the web browsing is fast and easy to use. Big plus on the format of this phone, getting a blackberry that actually fits in my watch pocket is great. Better than carrying the blue berry brick around.

Setup on this phone was easy once I got the correct services added to the phone. I decided to not use our company Blackberry Enterprise services and used the Blackberry Internet Service. I went to the mycingular blackberry website and signed up for an account and added my email accounts. These almost immediately showed up on my Pearl's desktop. One of the cool things is email addresses like gmail.com and netaddress.com are supported by Blackberry so I all I had to do was enter my account info, they configured the server info for me!

One difficult thing was to get the patches and upgrade the phone. This should be done first, and unfortunately the website link I got at the store, was incorrect. I had to hunt down the links on the cingular site, which were not easy to find either. You should find the Blackberry support page that has the latest Desktop software and the patch. Install both and upgrade the phone.

Difficulty: 1 geek mantool, 3 geekless mantools

Synchronicity Toy?

Well since WhatsHerFace beat me to it(and she was out of town) I ran out and picked up my latest toy! Here is a Ad photo of my new 2007 Kawasaki Vulcan 1600 Nomad. Since it was fresh out of the crate at the shop and the weather sucking this weekend, I won't get to pick it up until mid-week.

In true under-achieving type-A fashion, I went to my bank and got a loan done before I went shopping. At the store, I decided to see what kind of deal they could make me, which was about 4 points lower than the bank.

I had been looking at the Nomad for a while since deciding not to get the Triumph Rocket III or a HD of some sort. On the floor, they only had a Vulcan 1500 and 1600.

After much gnashing of teeth, I decided to get the 1500 because of its look and kind of retro styling. However just before doing the paperwork, the sales guy casually mentioned he had an all black Nomad in a crate in the back and asked if i would be interested. Hell yes! It was almost the exact bike I was looking for originally (it was all black and I REALLY wanted the two-tone ebony/titanium version). He obliged to allow me to see it in the crate so we took a walk out to look through ginormous crate farm full of ATV's and bikes of all kinds. We walked the crates and could not find it anywhere. The only 1600 we could find was in red(blech).

The shop manager said that it was definitely out there. On our way back out the third time, I noticed tucked back amongst all the ATV's and dirtbikes that had been assembled, I thought I saw it sitting there. I pointed it out and sure enough it had been assembled except for a few miscellaneous parts that had been mis-shipped. And it was not black, it was the two-tone model I had dreamed about!

Too late for the long story short, but I ended up with the two-tone Nomad for the price of a black one, and a few dollars more off to boot. One of the best buying experiences ever for me! If you are buying in colorado, check out Rocky Mountain Cycle Plaza in Colorado Springs. Ask for Greg, he rocks!

ManTool

Oh and a special thanks to Ballz and V900Girl for waiting what turned out to be most of saturday with me.

UPDATE: Here is the animal at home: