Hey Samsung! Get a real website and get some real customer service, will ya?

Sigh. In my continuing search for my next cell phone (and I'm willing to be patient), I was hoping to get some info on a particular Samsung phone. So, I headed over to samsung.com, navigated to the phone page, and tried to download the user guide. No such luck, just kept getting an error. I wanted to see the exact layout of the phone (see my requirements here) and so far, only user guides have been able to give me that answer.

My dissatisfaction from the Samsung website stems from:
- navigation in drop-down menus does not contain all phones
- user guide was not available for the phone I was interested in
- was difficult to find an e-mail link to report the problem
- when I finally found some sort of e-mail form, the "submit" button was off the page and the window did not allow for scrolling(!)

Frustrated, I actually picked up the phone and dialed their 1-800 number to try to report these issues. There was no phone menu option to speak about web issues, so I went to "phone sales". A young 20-something dude picked up, and I swear, he might as well have added "you idiot" to the end of each sentence he muttered.

Ah yes. With each brush with sh!tty customer service reps, I do learn a lot, and can try to apply it to my own practice. So I guess I should thank them for these free lessons.

Last but not least, the Engrish is another reason why it's hard to take Samsung's website seriously:

In this set:

• Hangin' with Thi and cute schnauzer friends
• Hangin' with Tiana when she came to town
• The Aquarium Downtown and the fishies living there
• Snippets from my junior high school friend's wedding up in Canada
• Hangin' out with friends and fam in Canada
  
• the usual random stuff I just *have* to take pictures of.
• BONUS: some Photoshop fun with pics of Chef Hugh's pool party. I saw Superman, dude!
  

My mom has a cell phone just for emergencies. She doesn't use it much, so she has trouble remembering how to do stuff with it. Today, she asked me yet again how to check her voicemail. Later in the day, I thought I'd check up on her:

Me: Mom, I just wanna make sure that you remember how to check your voicemail.
Mom: Oh okay, when you see the little glasses sign on the screen, you push and hold down the one key, where there's another little glasses sign.
Me [brief pause where I'm figuring out what she's talking about]: ... Oh ... uh ... right! OK, very good!

Some of you may know that I am currently temporarily "the boss of" a cute little ball of fur named Happy (again, also starring in my Really Important News parts one and two). Well, I've been trying to play the good dogsitter and taking Happy out to do stuff other than just taking him on his pee and poo walks. These extra outings get him really excited and extra happy, which makes for cute pictures. :) So last weekend, I crashed Hugh's place with Happy to watch the UT vs. OSU football game there (man, the Longhorns were disappointing!). Then, I called Hugh and Carrie up to go for a walk at Arthur Storey Park, and tired little Happy out there.

Well, today's adventure was to get the kid a bath. (I call him a kid, but he's really kind of an old man - he's 8 years old, which is 56 in human years.) That boy done stank up my car, gettin' all sweaty and excited and droolin' all over the place. So I headed over the nearest PetsMart to git'im a bath.

I'd never done this before so I called ahead of time to inquire. Turns out you need an appointment, AND it takes THREE HOURS! Wow. Well, I was in for a little surprise when I went to pick him up about 6 hours later (other than him smelling so lovely from his raspberry oatmeal shampoo ... I kid you not) - I guess he'd held his little bladder the whole time in his kennel there, so when we exited the grooming area, the old man couldn't hold it any longer, lifted his leg on a select bin, and promptly proceeded to TAKE A LEAK RIGHT THERE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORE. Passersby commiserated: "My dog did the exact same thing," and "Dogs will be dogs". Luckily, Happy is a little dog with a little bladder, which means cleanup was not too terribly bad. Notice the guilty look on his face. Hahaha. Pets sure have it better than humans sometimes ... I mean dang, if *I'd* peed in the middle of a store, I'd have gotten my arse whooped to next Tuesday by one or both of my parental units! And a few employees would probably jump in too!

[ on to pictures of cuteness, food, and pee! ]

note: The pics link won't work as of 2:10a - smugmug has decided to do some maintenance. They won't be up 'n runnin' until 4am. Yargh! Imma goin' to bed. Will put the link on in da mornin'. G'nite!

My short temper has always been one of my trademark qualities. I'm not proud of it, and have been working on it for the last 14 years, so it's still a work in progress.

Well, today it nearly snapped. I could feel the anger bubbling up within me like a volcano on the verge of eruption. Why? Here's the phone conversation (reminiscent of other marketing calls I got in the past) where I nearly bit someone's head off:

Some of you know that I performed some minor surgery on my trusty laptop before, upgrading the CD burner to an internal DVD burner. Everything went smoothly, thank goodness. But today is a huge milestone -

The left touchpad button is gimpy now. I have to hit it EXACTLY in the middle or to the left. Hitting it to its right just makes it go in, but something sounds broken, and it doesn't actually select anything. :(

Will have to see if there is a viable minor surgery solution ...

YOU CAN'T DIE ON ME NOW!!! NOT AFTER ALL WE'VE BEEN THROUGH!!! I WON'T LEAVE YOU BEHIND!!!! NOOOOOO!!!!

</end overly dramatic response to situation>

I use Digital Image Mover (DIM) to copy pics from my flash cards to my computer. I have it set to copy the files over while automatically renaming them to be YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS_ihatepink_filename, according to the internal photo info on when it was taken. Well, today it gave me the weirdest error message:

Copying from h:\DCIM\234CANON\IMG_3412.JPG to C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\1969\12-1969\31Dec1969\1969-12-31_18-00-00_ihatepink_IMG_3412.JPG
ERROR->h:\DCIM\234CANON\IMG_3412.JPG (The system cannot find the path specified)

So basically, something went wiggy and told my computer that the pic on the card was taken on December 31st, 1969, at 6pm.

Must be some Y2K remnant thingy. ;)

as the truth rang upon my ears
my tears fell freely
suddenly at my weakest
yet also at my strongest

my wings are damaged
but with courage i can fly.

...

Thank you for letting the truth ring.

---

Happy birthday, bro. Sorry, no crazy group drunk dialing like last year. :) I got a msg on my cell phone tonight: "Hey girl, I guess I'll have to catch you at another time since it's Saturday night and you're probably doing your wild thing." Hahahaha. Such a rep. Unfounded, I say! :)

Oh yeah, an online chat conversation with my bro we had the other night:

	1:55:19 AM						have you met my friend who looks like lucy liu? http://ihatepink.com/content/binary/2006/08/31/vcbouncer.jpg
	1:56:14 AM						the one on the left?
	1:56:26 AM						duh! the one on the right is ME, you doofus!
	1:56:40 AM						didn't recognize ya, actually
	1:56:44 AM						HAHAHAHAHAHAH
	1:56:50 AM						never seen ya with makeup on
	1:56:58 AM						i'll let her know.. she did my hair and makeup that night, and i borrowed her clothes to go clubbing
	1:57:10 AM						i wear makeup only for clubbing and weddings

Good one, Howard. :)

I didn't take as many photos as I usually do, but I did find my favorites of the night, featuring not the bride nor groom, but the groom's adorable nephew.Note: No children were harmed in the taking of these photos. No, we did not feed him beer!

I guess I shouldn't be surprised how crazy things got, since this weekend was all about the wedding of our favorite party-throwers, Carol and Alan.

QUIZ: Two of the following statements are false. Which are they?

1. One of the girls who came to the bachelorette party got so drunk she eventually had to go the hospital and get an IV drip.
2. A 4-month-old shihtzu puppy attended the bachelorette party and peed on my carpet.
3. The big red 15-passenger van we rented for the bachelorette party garnered 2 instances of sleazy guys rolling down their windows and indecently propositioning us at red lights.
4. I was a designated driver for the bachelorette party.
5. There were unclaimed articles of clothing left behind at my apartment from the bachelorette party.
6. What with the open bar at the wedding, Alan got totally wasted.
7. We got kicked out of 3 different places in the hotel after the wedding because we were being so loud.
8. I got carded at the open bar.
9. The bride couldn't find her undergarments after the wedding, so I lent her mine.
10. I got over 1000 pictures documenting the whole weekend's events.

Click through to see the answers and some pictures!