I can’t believe it has been another month already! Where does the time go?
I will get to the phones in a minute, but first, I want to share with you all a very interesting thing that happened to me on Saturday. Sandy and I joined up with some fellow photographers to shoot a local car show. I had my usual ton of gear and I took the first image and thought nothing of it.
So, when I went to take the next image a few minutes later, my “Auto focus” on my camera was not working.
I thought to myself, HMMM, what’s up with that? See, I have not taken any pictures since early March, and I was going nuts trying to figure out why it was not working. I struggled for a couple of hours, and finally gave up, and put the gear back in the car, and hung around while Sandy and one her friends went shopping at the Street fair booth’s.
On Sunday, I resolved that I was going to get to the bottom of the crisis, and figure it out or I would send my camera off to Bernie, my repair guy in Kansas, who has repaired my gear for the last 20 years or so.
Well, it turned out that it my own silly mistake after all. When I had my FX or Full Frame camera, a Nikon D700, I had set a button on the back of the camera to only allow auto focus when pressed. A lot of folks will set up this way so that you can “Grab” focus on the subject’s eye, and then recompose without having an adverse focus shift. So, that was my work flow habit carrying over to my present camera.
I simply forgot that I had set that, and of course the auto focus would not budge until the back button was pressed. Makes sense, I had asked it to that, right? Well, now I feel like a complete idiot….
Whatever.
So about the phones? Yeah here is the deal. We have had AT&T as a mobile provider for as long as we have been here in Tennessee. When we moved out here back in 1999, with a job change, my new employer paid for my cell phone. Basically we have stuck with them ever since. Why? I don’t know, we just did.
Well, I had been apologizing to everyone that asked, that we were unable to do text messaging. To us, that was not such a big deal, but I could see it becoming a very useful process. In addition, our little Samsung phones could not handle contacts very well. ( See, I have over 1200! ) And several times I needed a number from Sandy’s phone, and she may have needed one from mine. Not too pretty…
Now, on my PC at home, I maintain a huge contact file in my MS Office, but I can’t use the phone numbers.
So, it was beginning to be a big mess. Also, the little Samsung’s had no web abilities, so we could not surf, or anything. Just call someone after we looked up their number somewhere else. Pretty lame right?
I had been hearing about Straight Talk from Walmart, but did not think it would work for us, because, I did not think we could use iPhone’s on that plan. Well it turns out that you can.
After a prolonged plea on FaceBook for someone to sell us their old iPhones, and a wonderful cell phone shop in Murfreesboro, we now have iPhones on Straight Talk with unlimited everything for about what we were paying AT&T.
Pretty Sweet. And we can now use the “Cloud” for a common contact source. And just last weekend, Sandy is using InstaGram to upload her cute images of our adventures with our grandson, Jace. Of course our remote families enjoy this, and it is after all quite fun and easy.
If you have a contract with a carrier, you may have to wait until you can update or renew, but, I would encourage you to give Straight Talk a try when you can. Fast, friendly and makes life a whole lot sweeter!
Next time, I will fill you all in another fun project, Boxee Box! Catch ya later!!!
Subscribe to my Blog with RSS Feed