Guarding against summer brownouts

Twice during the past week, our electrical power went out. The first time, a large area was affected. The kids were in school practicing for last Saturday’s graduation program and, upon arrival, their first announcement was that power went out in school. You can just imagine their frustration upon discovering that power was out in the house too. School was several kilometers from our house so go figure how large the affected area was. The good thing was that the brownout only lasted for an hour. By Philippine — and Meralco — standards, that was fast restoration indeed.

The shitty thing was that I had a column due that day. It would have been possible to compose a column on the computer (on precious battery power), send it via bluetooth to my cell phone then e-mail it to the newspaper. But. BUT. I hate writing a column without surfing and reading up first. When e-mail and the internet are musts for your work, you have to have a Plan B, and a Plan C even, to guard against the brownouts that plague summers in the Philippines.

Now, most of you know that I had been salivating over a new cell phone for the past several months but couldn’t make up my mind which one I really wanted. First, I wanted an iPhone. Then, I saw the Palm Centro and changed my mind. Then, after having waited too long for the Palm Centro to arrive in the Philippines, I decided I was going to get an iPhone. I was already scouting around for the best prices when Sony Ericsson announced that the Xperia would come out soon. I was drooling over it and forgot about the iPhone. I was willing to wait actually until the brownouts began. Or, maybe, the brownouts were the best reasons to finally make up my mind.

Getting the iPhone is quite a story. It seemed that every store selling the iPhone at SM Megamall’s Cyberzone didn’t offer any warranty. And that scared me. That’s the reason I didn’t want to buy from Greenhills or Ebay. I wanted a seller with a permanent store and an official receipt. With so many fake iPhones being sold, and I hear they look like the real thing although they’re nothing more than talk-and-text phones, it was too risky to sacrifice my peace of mind for a couple of thousand pesos.

So, the stores selling the iPhone said NO WARRANTY. I was about to give up (the kids said I was masungit already) when I entered a store called Mega Exchange. One month service warranty. Of course, it goes without saying that every item sold carries a built-in seller’s warranty (that’s in the freaking law), so, I figured that was good enough. My SMART sim card was inserted into the slot and… shit, no signal. Sam, the tech expert in the house these days, said it sometimes happened. She lent her GLOBE sim card, the signal was low, but there was a signal. Speedy called Sam’s number, the iPhone rang and that was it. We got the iPhone.

Driving home, all I could think about was how the iPhone would work with my SMART sim card, if it would reject it, if there really was a defect and if I would have to return it. When I couldn’t connect to the web and couldn’t get the e-mail to work — I got the message that I was not subscribed to EDGE — I was so sure we bought a lemon and was about to cry. I searched the web for answers, found nothing and got progressively depressed.

Then, I remembered PhilMug. I had an account there but I couldn’t remember my username. I registered for a new account and, within five minutes from the activation of the account, I found the answers I was looking for. In the photo above, that’s a page from this blog as viewed from the iPhone’s Safari.

Me ← happy → me.

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