Cafe Tacuba on ACL tonight (in the NYC area)

Check out WLIW, Ch 21, tonight (midnight, Saturday night (actually
Sunday morning, 12/29)) for Austin City Limits. Cafe Tacuba is on.
(It's a repeat.) This is one of the best concerts I've seen on tv. At
one point the lead singer teeters on the edge of the stage, falls off
the stage, a girl in the audience immediately starts dancing with him
and pulls him back up onto the stage. They dance some more. During
the B part of the music, she bends him over her knee and kisses him,
one of the funniest live concert moments I've ever seen. A great
show. Great sound. Turn it up! (I hope you have your tv set up to
play through your stereo. It will sound great, as all ACL shows do.)

Blues Traveller is on first.

I now have a cell phone

I got my first cell phone a few days ago. I signed up for the AAA
plan with Consumer Cellular which charges $10/month and .25 cents a
minute. I don't use the phone much so it seemed like a good deal.

I got the phone a few days ago, having only ordered it on Friday of
last week so it came fast. It was alot smaller than I was expecting.
It is a Nokia 1600. It doesn't have a camera. I'm not paying for text
service but for some reason it says I have some text messages sent
and received (That has since been resolved. I erased the message
counter but the customer service lady, a nice girl, didn't know why
it had happened.) I have called them three times and I think I
bewildered two customer service agents who answered. One woman had no
idea what I was talking about when I asked her about the musical note
icon that appears when the screen dims. Both were patient and helpful
though the other guy I talked to seemed to be frustrated that I
wasn't up to speed on how this cell phone worked. (I have plenty of
computer experience so can get what I need out of geeks but I have
very little knowledge about how to use a cell phone.)

I have made a few calls. The first was to my sister who uses a
portable phone through an internet connection. It broke up a couple
of times but I don't know if it was due to her portable phone, the
internet connection or my phone.

I have noticed I get both two bars and four bars for reception while
sitting in the same chair. I looked up the cell phone reception on
MobileMedia's cell phone coverage page
(http://www.cellreception.com/coverage/) and some people have
commented that my area does get poor reception sometimes.

I am not impressed with the voice quality. (It's also hard to hear
sometimes. And totally inconvenient to adjust the volume while in a
call. That's BAD design.) I am not sure I want to put up with these
limitations. I also don't like having the keypad on the phone. Often
enough you have to hit keys while listening to a menu. Using a phone
that has the keypad on the base unit is much easier. I haven't found
any Bluetooth desk phones that I, in theory, could use with this
phone (if it had Bluetooth, which it doesn't.) That would be a good
accessory. Inventors, listen up.

I do see how people can be absorbed by the buttons on their phones.
You do spend a lot of time looking at them. These are really small. Too small. They are backlit too but the lighting isn't uniform. Bad design.

More later.