T-Mobile’s loss and a new website

I’m sure you all are quite tired of hearing about by cell service adventure, so this will be the last post–not just because I don’t want to bore you anymore, but also because it’s pretty much the end of the story.  When we last spoke, I was hoping to get my G1 data service problem addressed, and my decision to switch from AT&T to T-Mobile was basically contingent upon the outcome of that. That problem ended up being fixed by a persistent live chat representative, who finally cleared all of the pending services off the account and re-applied them. Everything started working after that, and we were both very happy.

However, when I called T-Mobile the next afternoon to port over the numbers, I ran into something unexpected.  My number is in the 714 area code (Orange County), and Courtney’s is 540 (Roanoke). It is apparently impossible to port numbers from two different markets onto the same family plan. I have no idea why, but my guess is that the reason is more legal than technical, since cell data is just like any other data and can be routed to or from anywhere. Anyway, they told me I could only port the numbers if I split the family account into two individual accounts. But to do that, it would bump up the cost by another $10.  On top of that, I found out that the particular arrangement of plan and data options wouldn’t work with my G1, and I had to switch to a different plan for another $40/mo. The final difference in cost ended up being about $3. For the loss of rollover and mobile-to-mobile, not worth it.

On top of that, I found another way to get a discount through AT&T. If you work for a large company (or go to a large school, including Virginia Western or Cal Poly Pomona), you can often get a discount even on existing accounts without a contract extension. Go to this website and enter your email address in the box on the right to check for an instant 15% discount (sometimes more, sometimes less). Note, this isn’t a pyramid scheme. It’s an AT&T site, no spam. It’s worth a shot if you have AT&T and don’t have any discounts.

So, the bottom line is that I’m sticking with AT&T, and I’m even saving $10/mo doing it.

The other thing is that I’ve switched my blog from Drupal to WordPress. Many (most? all?) of you probably didn’t realize that the notes that get posted on Facebook are being pulled via an RSS feed on my website. You may not even know what the actual website looks like–or, rather, looked like. I’ve changed the layout to something I like better, and the Facebook posts will link to the website now (as this one does) instead of the Facebook Notes application, which frankly is very boring. Hopefully this will be…well…cooler. We’ll see.

Next post: reminiscing about my first college semester! Or, an observation on the healthcare debacle. I haven’t decided yet.