Okay. I've lived without a cell phone for years now. I keep getting asked for my number (especially at school) and I keep saying "cell phone? NOPE!" Well, the time has come for me to seriously consider getting one. I'll need one definitely before school starts, and preferrably as soon as possible, especially with my current escalating involvement with the Mysterium Committee. As such, I've broken down two plans that I would use:

iPhone Nation Family Plan:

• Fee for family plan: $69.98 per month.
  • Nation 550 Family Plan, starting with 2 lines: $59.99 per month.
  • Additional 3rd line: $9.99 per month.
• Fee for iPhone data plan: $60.00 per month.
  • First iPhone data plan: $30.00 per month.
  • Second iPhone data plan: $30.00 per month.
• Unlimited nights (9pm to 6am) and weekends (Friday 9pm to Monday 6am).

Grand total per month: $129.98 (Taxes apply.)

Splitting family plan fee with three people: $23.32 per phone per month.

Each iPhone user pays individual data plan. Added to family plan fee: $53.32 per iPhone per month.

iPhone Individual Plan:

• Fee for Nation 450 Individual Plan: $39.99 per month.
• Fee for iPhone data plan: $30.00 per month.
• 5000 minutes nights (9pm to 6am) and weekends (Friday 9pm to Monday 6am).

Grand total per montht: $69.99 (Taxes apply.)

So that, folks, is the breakdown. Basically, I save $16.66 a month by sharing monthly minutes with three other people. I don't know how feasable that will actually be. Personally, I can see myself using a lot of minutes over a month just with emergency school-related calls. Team projects and such. I was asked many times last semester for my cell number, and I imagine if I gave one out, I'd be dinged with multiple 5 minute calls that would eat up the family pool of minutes. So would it be worth it for me to pay extra for a guaranteed 450 minutes every month (plus insanely high, though not unlimited, minutes for nights and weekends) or do you think I could fit within the family share?

Another concern is that once I'm locked into a contract, I couldn't move from, say, family plan to individual plan with my iPhone. Capella, however, was able to switch from individual to family, and since going from family to individual means more money in AT&T's pocket, I would assume it's okay to do that. I don't want to be stuck in family or individual for 2 years. (Although I don't see myself moving a considerable distance away from my family while I'm in school, which will last at least 2 more years.)

Yet another concern is about getting a texting plan. Should I? I won't text. At all. I'll use the 3G data plan I'm paying out the wazoo for to use IMs or something instead. The iPhone 3GS supports background applications, right? AIM in the background is all I'm asking for and texting I would never use. Then again, the question was never if I would use texting but if other people insisted on sending them to me anyway. Then I'd still have to pay for all their little crappy messages. Is there a way to block texts? Is this even that much of an issue? How many people have trouble with people sending them unwarranted texts?

Then, of course, there's the coup de grace: Which iPhone do I get? I've waited all year to get a cell phone because I knew Apple was coming out with a new one and I wanted it. Above all, I wanted a bigger, better still camera that also functioned as a video camera. Wish granted! Clearly, I want a 3GS, but which size? To be perfectly honest, I'm thinking about getting the 32GB version. I can see myself extensively taking photographs and videos and perhaps recording lectures and definitely putting music on the thing, not to mention downloading all those awesome Tower Defense games from the App Store. My only issue lies with the fact that there is no iPhone disk mode like the iPods have, otherwise it would double as a portable hard drive like I use my iPod for all the time. Then I would totally justify the cost of the 32GB version.

We shall see... Anyone have any advice?

UPDATE 1: Then there's also the Unity family plan which costs 10 more dollars per month, offers 700 monthly minutes, plus doesn't cost said monthly minutes when calling both AT&T cell phones AND land lines! For $10 more total ($3.33 per person that will be using this plan), I think I would pick that. Calling home for free would be nice.

Five things I learned this year during my July 4th vacation:

Thing 1 is learning that Bolt is my new favorite movie, taking the solid place of Wall-E, which tenuously took the place of The Black Hole. I found myself wanting to watch it this weekend and, not being able to, I was a very sad puppy. I figured there was no use denying the fact that I've seen Bolt more times in 3 months than I have my old favorite movies over the course of my entire life. I was so distraught, as a matter of fact, that I completely forgot my personal tradition of watching Independence Day... Well, okay, that's not the reason, but still. Pretty close. (You know, I should make a list of my favorite movies.)

The reason I couldn't play Bolt is Thing 2. I learned that my old laptop can't play HD movies. Whether it's because the video file for an hour-and-a-half movie in 1080p weighs in at 7GB and there was a hard drive bandwidth issue or because 1080p at 30 frames per second is too much for the video card bandwidth to handle, the end result was the same on 3 different video players and 2 sets of codecs: A split second of clear video immediately followed by either insane garble or lots and lots of audio/video skipping. The laptop is a 2.0GHz Pentium M with 2GB RAM and a 256MB nVidia GeForce 6800 Go. My Dell Mini 9 played the thing better than that laptop. (Although we're talking maybe two seconds of legible footage compared to merely one second.)

Thing 3 was learning that even a certain board-controlled privately-owned lake can get caught up in such a power struggle that they can't install tornado sirens without ruining everything. It is sad, though comforting, to know that it's not just a certain community based around a certain adventure game that can't seem to get along from one group to another, but the whole of humanity itself! In the immortal words of the last poor sap who was utterly destroyed because of the words themselves: "Can't we all just get along?"

Thing 4 was learning that I haven't blogged in such a very, very long time. Why? No idea. Not a whole lot to say and not a whole lot to say that I want to tell the whole wide world. I figured I would make Capella happy and post a list of things I learned over the weekend! Which leads me to Thing 5 that I learned:

It is entirely possible to get sunburn by driving for 3 hours in a convertable with the top down on a cloudless day. I'm not saying I did, but I certainly came close. I think it was the combined effort of yesterday's standing outside all day and today's 3 hour drive home in bright, bright sunlight. Either way, convertables are fun, and I didn't even lose my World of Warcraft hat in the wind tunnel of a car!