Les Bonnes Choses

A few days ago, I mused about what I might want for my birthday. Don't get me wrong, if one of you crazy people delivered a yacht or a jet pack to my door, I would most certainly be delighted. And wonder whether you're involved with the Miami drug trade where yachts are plentiful, or come from the future where jet packs are plentiful. However, f'reals, I have been trying to figure out whether I want the pleasure of owning a cell phone again. In London, I seldom used my phone, and so never came anywhere close to using up the 200 minutes per month that Rogers charged me for (after a month of particularly gratuitous usage, I managed to use 50 minutes).

Then my jerk* of a brother-in-law goes and brings his iPhone with him on our car ride from London to Chicago. He's all texting Heather hither and yon, finding our position on a map because my GPS had been stolen, and looking up CITAG. If you're shipwrecked on an island, you want a guy who knows how to catch fish and build a fire using only a pair of shoelaces and a swatch of canvas. If you're lost in the arctic, you still want the firebuilding, but are going to need some rabbit-trapping skills. For pretty much any other situation, you want an iPhone.

Aside: if Apple uses that line, or any derivative thereof, I will sue them into the stone age -- as in, before 3G wireless carriers existed.

Anyways, after JPM stepped in with some words of wisdom, I realized that, if I don't mind only being able to phone from WiFi hotspots, Skype on an iPod Touch at $.021/min is pretty inexpensive; probably even less than the pay-as-you-go plans I've seen. The downside: I just recently bought myself a very satisfactory mp3 player (which would become obsolete), and iPods are the sorts of things that get stolen or get you mugged.

*Note that I don't actually think that my brother in law is a jerk. I rather like him, and have even been accused of having a man-crush on him -- I don't, but will admit that he is somewhat dreamy in a rugged, well-educated kind of way.