Forum    Search    FAQ

Board index » Sluggy Related Forums » Reactions




Post new topic  Reply to topic  [ 16 posts ] 
 
Author Message
 Post Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2018 11:08 pm 
Admin of Slight Inconvenience
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:07 pm
Posts: 6057
Location: Someplace other than where I am.
Pete is powerless once again, so he is taking a week off to recharge. It will not be until the 12th at the earliest before his batteries are at 100% once again. Also since I don't feel like pushing this epilogue back, I'm leaving it here. You can use this thread to talk about anything or nothing at all if you want until the next strip is up. Except for SPEC, that's still off limits.

The Phone Story is done (for now), but I can add just a little bit more to wrap it up.

Epilogue:
Spoiler: show
Met the human recently and saw that he had gotten his replacement phone. Things were back to how they were supposed to be and the old phone was also back in in its proper place in a drawer. Though of course, things were not as simple as they should of been to get to this point.

The phone that was burned in the fire was very new. The human had not had the phone even two months before that happened. I would consider --as would many-- that would be considered a "new" phone. The insurance on it through Provider Z, like a car dealer, would not agree. They would not give him a new phone phone but a refurbished one instead. Also the warranty was reduced to only a year instead of two. And on top of that, they would not give him the phone until he payed them a particular 159 Earth units of currency as a deducible.

Now he just hopes nothing ever happens with this phone, since his mate said this is the last phone she will ever help him get ever again. Even with her saying that, I noticed he still puts the phone down in weird locations.

Maybe the story is not complete after all...
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

----
Vote for Sluggy Freelance at Top Web Comics. Remember to vote EACH day.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 2:11 am 
Offline
Joined: Fri Mar 03, 2017 7:32 pm
Posts: 1638
Location: under a pile of papers
This story makes me nervous about breaking my new smartphone--which is the first smartphone I've had in my life!

All my previous phones have been dropped, one dropped down a subway staircase in New York, dropped randomly, battery coming out, and still working. I had phone one for 5 years and phone 2 for 5 years. Incidently, phone 1 still works perfectly as an mp3 player--after 10 years.

However, everyone says the screens on smartphones can break without warning. If I hadn't had to get a smartphone for my job, I would have stuck with my old non-smart phone.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 6:29 am 
Offline
Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2011 8:58 am
Posts: 142
All the best to you Pete. I can only relate in my small way when our little outpost lost power for four days due to an ice storm and we only had minimal generator power to keep the sumps and other critical things going. It's stressful as hell especially when the kids start getting PTSD from it and the only "data" connection you've got is through a cell phone.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 6:33 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2014 5:44 am
Posts: 2187
Doh! Poor Pete! That’s what you get for living in Jersery? Lol. Hope you get your power back soon!

(Ps - smartphone screens don’t break for no reason. They’re lying to hide their poor clumsy treatment of their phones. They’re expensive, so treat them as such!)

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2018 12:53 pm 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 12:25 am
Posts: 391
Eh, I can fess up to dropping a thin-screened phone-like device about four feet when an elevator lurched and that’s how the screen cracked. Not a big deal, but that is roughly your margin of error. And it’s still usable 7 years later; it just has a cracked screen in the corner and the battery is not doing so hot. It probably wouldn’t have cracked if the one who paid for it (not me) had wanted to invest in a decent case (which I couldn’t afford for myself). I am grateful to have had it at all. That’s probably a better way of looking at it.

That said, I am a bit smartphone-skeptical. Sure, it’s grand to do phone stuff, take a quick voice note (I carry a notebook but can’t quite transcribe music from my head that well), do a fact check far away from any keyboard, play a game or read something while waiting on something, etc., but I find the experience stifling compared to a laptop or desktop.

((Hang in there, Pete! :kiki: ))

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 1:02 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Fri Jun 06, 2003 12:00 am
Posts: 80
Location: Yuma, Az
Quote:
Pete is powerless once again, so he is taking a week off to recharge.

If there's no power, how can he recharge? Does Pete have a solar cell on top of his head? Draining the car's battery?

Seriously, or as serious as I ever get, I'm glad Pete's getting some rest and recreation. Get good rest, Pete, and come back swingin'!

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 8:07 am 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Fri May 23, 2003 12:00 am
Posts: 6794
AOL: gregnier
Location: Do not taunt Happy Fun Mod.
Twitter: BaronJayne
Dilvish wrote:
Quote:
Pete is powerless once again, so he is taking a week off to recharge.

If there's no power, how can he recharge? Does Pete have a solar cell on top of his head? Draining the car's battery?
His Lite-Brite-Headedness has to replace the LEDs every once in a while as well.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 2:35 pm 
Offline
Joined: Fri Apr 17, 2009 9:39 am
Posts: 655
Zillatain wrote:
Pete is powerless once again, so he is taking a week off to recharge. It will not be until the 12th at the earliest before his batteries are at 100% once again. Also since I don't feel like pushing this epilogue back, I'm leaving it here. You can use this thread to talk about anything or nothing at all if you want until the next strip is up. Except for SPEC, that's still off limits.
.


Oh boy, and NJ is supposed to get slammed by major snowfall tomorrow too. No wind though, but it will hamper efforts to restore power.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 7:29 pm 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Fri May 03, 2013 9:56 am
Posts: 506
Location: East of the West, west of the East, north of the South, south of the North Pole.
One lesson to learn from the phone story is to keep the phone and the subscription separate. Buy a phone without a subscription attached, and sign up for a subscription that isn't bundled with a phone and can be terminated with a reasonable notice period. Then you can switch service providers without replacing your phone, it's easier to try another provider and go back if their coverage is unsatisfactory, and you can buy a Christmas gift without disrupting service for the old phone.


Phones should be able to take an occasional impact in my opinion. A device that is carried around and handled all the time will get dropped now and then, and should be designed accordingly. My phone has fallen on various hard surfaces multiple times, and the only damage is a tiny dent in the plastic cover that doesn't affect its function at all. Its screen surface isn't glass but some kind of clear plastic. Maybe that makes it more durable. On the other hand there are some small scratches on the screen, not from falls but from sharp metal objects in my pocket.

This isn't a capacitive touchscreen that reacts to proximity, but a type that's called resistive and reacts to force. Thus I can slide my finger gently across the screen and get tactile feedback without disturbing anything, and press a little harder when I want to activate something. There's no need for special touchscreen gloves, and any old stick can be used as a stylus.

The biggest problem with this phone is that Nokia abandoned Maemo and jumped into bed with Microsoft. The phone gets no updates so it's accumulating known security holes, which is very bad, but there isn't anything acceptable on the market to replace it with.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2018 9:08 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Sat Jun 28, 2003 12:00 am
Posts: 42
Location: DFW, TX, USA
Rombobjörn wrote:
The biggest problem with this phone is that Nokia abandoned Maemo and jumped into bed with Microsoft. The phone gets no updates so it's accumulating known security holes, which is very bad, but there isn't anything acceptable on the market to replace it with.


Oh wow. Your phone is old. Nokia has long jumped back out of the bed with Microsoft, is now being made in China by a company called HIV, AMD, something or other, and you can buy new Nokia-branded phones again, running Android and receiving updates, presumably.

Also, damn Pete... just relax and take as much time off as you want, and don't stress about the strip.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:57 am 
Admin of Slight Inconvenience
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:07 pm
Posts: 6057
Location: Someplace other than where I am.
We haven't heard anything from Pete, so his batteries are still being charged or he's back at 100% and doesn't want to tell us.

Longest I've been without power has only been three days. The refrigerator got cleaned out. Cooked hamburgers and a frozen pizza on the grill. Couldn't save much else, other than the ice cream.
Rombobjörn wrote:
One lesson to learn from the phone story is to keep the phone and the subscription separate. Buy a phone without a subscription attached, and sign up for a subscription that isn't bundled with a phone and can be terminated with a reasonable notice period. Then you can switch service providers without replacing your phone, it's easier to try another provider and go back if their coverage is unsatisfactory, and you can buy a Christmas gift without disrupting service for the old phone.
Usually how they do it now, is that you can get the phone at a reduced monthly cost that usually has to be paid off in a certain amount of time. So instead of paying 800 for the phone at one time, you only pay maybe 20 per month for 2 years. Of course this is based upon you never losing the phone. As for the Christmas gift debacle, the problem came about since she wasn't clear enough in what she intended.
randomlanguage wrote:
This story makes me nervous about breaking my new smartphone--which is the first smartphone I've had in my life!

However, everyone says the screens on smartphones can break without warning. If I hadn't had to get a smartphone for my job, I would have stuck with my old non-smart phone.
That's the same reason the human in the story has a smartphone. He went to a different job that required him to do more than just talk to people with his phone. That phone that he could not get rid of, is his first smartphone. So he's had that thing for maybe five or six years. Can't quite remember when he started there... Wasn't too long after after his first mate died after the surgery went bad, I think... Or I'm misremembering my timeline...

Anyway, interestingly I have only had a smartphone for about three years now. I had a (dumb) phone many, many years before that and I wanted to get one years before, but the cost from the provider I had at the time was around a 100 per month and it was prohibitive to have data added to the bill. It was an extra 30 per phone and another 10 for texting. So I would just take my small tablet with me and check things wherever I had to go somewhere and hope there was free WiFi around.

Now I'm with a different provider (but it uses the same network--which I have to say is the best around here--I had before) and had to pay for the phones outright since it it is a "prepay" service. When I switched over, it was something like 80 each for two phones and the service was/is around 60 per month and that includes unlimited call/text and 12GB of combined data. Had those phones for about two years, but they started having a problem with storage space since it only had 4GB total for everything. Kept running into issues when updating apps. Had to go through and clear everything out that I could find and hope it was enough.

Don't have that problem with the phone I'm using now. Of course I paid 480 for that one, so I would hope so. Just checked and I see that I have 5 gigs of pic and videos on the thing and... Heh! I haven't cleared the cache out in a while. It's up to 3.8GB. Cleared the cache out at least. Storage is less than half full now.

Looking back over what I wrote, I'm not sure where I was going with this. I'll just say, that after only having a smart phone for three years, it's hard to imagine not always being to just look up any inane thing that pops into my head at any time. Also you're going to scoff at me over this, but, oh my gods, texting is so much more convenient than calling. I knew it would be handy, but it's much more handy than expected.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2018 8:20 pm 
Offline
Joined: Fri Apr 17, 2009 9:39 am
Posts: 655
Pete's power is back on.. so hopefully he will be revitalized some Monday.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2018 5:55 am 
Offline
Joined: Fri Mar 03, 2017 7:32 pm
Posts: 1638
Location: under a pile of papers
Zillatain wrote:
Looking back over what I wrote, I'm not sure where I was going with this. I'll just say, that after only having a smart phone for three years, it's hard to imagine not always being to just look up any inane thing that pops into my head at any time. Also you're going to scoff at me over this, but, oh my gods, texting is so much more convenient than calling. I knew it would be handy, but it's much more handy than expected.

So far, I've had my smartphone for a week. I'm in China, and get free international texting, but not calling, $10 per/G of data. Basically, I've been using my smartphone basically as a mini-tablet. I connect to wifi in the hotel room or at the office, and when I'm not in either of those places, it's just a camera/translator/kindle, so the only place I've used data is the airport.

Still handy though!

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2018 3:13 pm 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Fri May 03, 2013 9:56 am
Posts: 506
Location: East of the West, west of the East, north of the South, south of the North Pole.
Kar98 wrote:
Oh wow. Your phone is old.

This is an old phone. :-Þ Image

Kar98 wrote:
Nokia has long jumped back out of the bed with Microsoft, is now being made in China by a company called HIV, AMD, something or other, and you can buy new Nokia-branded phones again, running Android and receiving updates, presumably.

I may not have followed all the turns, but as I've understood it Microsoft gobbled up Nokia's phone manufacturing department while Nokia changed its focus to equipment for telephony operators, and now Nokia just leases their trademark to other phone manufacturers. Not that it matters much. Maemo remains abandoned either way. There might possibly be something based on Mer that I could install, if I could find the time to research the topic.

Zillatain wrote:
Usually how they do it now, is that you can get the phone at a reduced monthly cost that usually has to be paid off in a certain amount of time.

When I order things over the Internet – be it clothes, books or electronics – there is almost always an offer to pay in installments. I never do because it's always cheapest and easiest to pay the whole price at once, but it's an option if you need a thing badly and don't have enough savings to pay for it at once.

What I'm recommending against is the bundle deals where the phone is tied to a single provider and you pay installments for the phone as a part of the subscription fee. Buy a phone from an electronics retailer (paying in installments if you really must), and sign up for a subscription with a telephony service provider, but avoid subscriptions that tie you up for a year or two. Then you'll have better flexibility if either the phone or the subscription turns out to be unsatisfactory. Is it not possible to do this where you live?

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 8:12 pm 
Admin of Slight Inconvenience
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:07 pm
Posts: 6057
Location: Someplace other than where I am.
Rombobjörn wrote:
When I order things over the Internet – be it clothes, books or electronics – there is almost always an offer to pay in installments. I never do because it's always cheapest and easiest to pay the whole price at once, but it's an option if you need a thing badly and don't have enough savings to pay for it at once.

What I'm recommending against is the bundle deals where the phone is tied to a single provider and you pay installments for the phone as a part of the subscription fee. Buy a phone from an electronics retailer (paying in installments if you really must), and sign up for a subscription with a telephony service provider, but avoid subscriptions that tie you up for a year or two. Then you'll have better flexibility if either the phone or the subscription turns out to be unsatisfactory. Is it not possible to do this where you live?
You must go to very different sites or many more online than I do. I rarely see any that have an option to pay in installments or if I do, there are things you are required to do/have before they will give you the option.

Yeah you can buy a phone from somewhere else and usually active on a different provider Also I think you do have the option to buy the phone out right from the provider if you want. You'll pay more for it though, unlike if it's subsidized with a subscription usually. I mean if you have the money and don't mind paying more money for it to have more freedom, go right ahead.

Top 
   
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
 
Post new topic  Reply to topic  [ 16 posts ] 

Board index » Sluggy Related Forums » Reactions


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest

 
 

 
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to: