I’m a gadget-freak. Those of you who know me know that already. If it’s small, silver and full of LEDs, I’ll want one. Given this, it’s hardly surprising I like to have a decent mobile phone. My current model, purchased September 2002, is a Sony Ericsson T68i. It’s annoying. There are many features, but they’re not that well thought out. The T9 dictionary doesn’t include words with apostrophes, for example, and said symbol is fifth down the punctuation list. That gets boring really fast. If you synchronize with Outlook it’ll grab the company name if there is one, but it won’t display it properly in the address book. It gets full after 50 text messages. I can finish typing a text message and the phone takes another 5 seconds to catch up. it’s quite happy to send blank messages. Stuff like that.

I’m arguably being somewhat picky, as the phone has many good points. It’s rock stable; the bluetooth connectivity works fine; it’s small and light; the alarm succeeds in waking me up of a morning. It niggles, though. The lure of a proper operating system is strong. For this reason I today ordered a Nokia 6600. Except I didn’t, because I couldn’t.

O2 have for the last 18 months had a quite unbeatable tariff on their website. £25/month line rental gives you 100 free minutes (anytime/anynetwork) and 500, yes that’s 500, text messages per month (or 125 MMS). That’s quite shocking. I send a stupid number of text messages per month, but 500 should just about cover it No other network can even touch this offer. This annoys me, because I’ve seen people try to deal with O2 before. Their customer support, in my opinion, sucks. Kate spent three weeks trying to get the unlock code for her mobile. Google abounds with horror stories. However, in the end money talks louder than principle (in this particular circumstance, anyway), and given that my monthly bill would be at least double with any other tariff, I went with O2, hoping nothing would go wrong.

It did.

I selected the phone and tariff, entered my bank details and credit card number, then put the order through, creating an account in the process. It thought for 30 seconds, then told me there had been an error in the system. Damn. At this point, coincidentally, my POP3 server fell over. Half an hour later it was resurrected, but no confirmation email had appeared. The help section on the O2 website requires you to enter your O2 mobile number, or you can’t access it. I phoned their customer support line, which diverted me to another number, which just beeped in an i’m-not-working way. My account showed no sign of me having ordered anything, so I tried putting it through again, only to get a ‘you may only order one phone at a time’ message. Eventually I called their sales line, where a very helpful (really) man told me that they’d been having problems. I gave him all my details and he created another account. I didn’t realise until half way through that their telephone sales system consists of the website. And that’s all. So 15mins later he gets the exact same error I did. Apparently my order will sit there until the system gets fixed. So that’s at least two phones on their way to me, then. He said I should phone each morning to see what’s happening.

Aaaaanyway. I watched The Wedding Planner last night. I didn’t enjoy it that much, but while watching I consumed perhaps half a two-litre bottle of Orange Tango. Big mistake. Really big. My parents had to stop me having orange squash when I was a kid, as the orange colouring made me go hyper (sound familiar?). Orange Tango, in large enough quantities, seems to do the same thing. I got 2hrs sleep, and that’s optimistic. Apple Tango is fine, thankfully, as that’s my favourite :-). Fanta makes me ill, Orange Tango makes me nuts…as Ben pointed out, I wonder what Orangina would do.

In an attempt to get something useful done today (and to upset my bank balance even more) I signed up to dvdsontap. I’m on their £15 2 DVDs at a time plan, as then I always have something to watch. There’s a 14 day trial period, so I’ll do a proper write-up once that’s over. My ‘rental queue’ has over 70 DVDs in it atm

There’s a hell of a lot of moaning in the above paragraphs! I apologise. I sound like an old person. It’s not like it used to be…I blame young people. To make up for this, I’d like to point you in the direction of this roundup of the Christmas number-one contenders. ‘Mad World’ by Gary Jules is the aforementioned Donnie Darko song. ‘The Closest Thing to Crazy’ by Katie Melua is also lovely, so my hopes are on one of these to win. There are short clips of all the songs, so give them a listen and let me know what you think.

Finally, Ed posted something today which amused me greatly.