For Christmas both Michelle and I received Samsung A900 phones, and you are aware that it has a reasonable camera if you spend any time looking at this site at all, because I have posted a picture from it almost once daily since I got it.

There is, however, a problem with the Sprint picture mail service and this phone. And it is acknowledged by Sprint if you call it’s a known issue. The issue is that basically you tell the message to send, and it doesn’t it sits in a pending box on your phone. Their work around is to retry and if that doesn’t work, then delete it from pending and resend.

Their workaround is clearly garbage, because it takes me forever to type a subject and sometimes a message on the picture, so I am not deleting and retyping the message. They also promise a phone update that will fix the problem. And no the most recent update doesn’t fix it.

I have found a work around that works almost every time. After telling your picture to send, wait until the fancy EVDO indicator fades back to idle mode. Then launch the browser, wait until the page loads up, hit “end” and then immediately go back to your pending mailbox and “re-send.” This seems to work nearly every time.

I also tried calling Sprint back to tell them this work around, but I didn’t get a very good tech on the other end and they didn’t understand what I was talking about. Here’s hoping they release a fix soon… I guess in the mean time I should call again and complain and try and get service credit.

Gives me energy so I can work so I can make money so I can buy food…

I have had a pretty good experience seeling with Amazon. But I never really paid attention to the selling fee structure, because I was happy to just make a few bucks on most of my books. But on friday I got the notice that another of my books sold. I charged $2.50, I got paid for standard shipping. But the Amazon fee came out to be $2.60.

Well, shit, I ain’t about giving my books away and paying for the privilege. I would rather burn it than pay Amazon 10 cents for the privilege of shipping it to someone else. I looked into it, and yes of course I am in the wrong. I mean they have it all laid out. They take 99 cents and then some %age of the sale, and then some closing cost. Which is purposely confusing so that you will sign up to pay them a monthly fee to sell with some advanced account, so you can waive some of those fees.

Fine I get it they want to make money. But damn, I only have maybe a grand total of 20 books I want to sell in a year, and that is on the high end. So clearly half.com is the answer for me. (they just charge a %age of the sale)

But just a reminder to myself, don’t list for under $3 with amazon. And probably don’t list with Amazon any more.

I hope that promise includes milkshakes