My replacement iPhone arrived today. I am glad to have the entire situation resolved and without costing me $400 for a new phone. Apple’s customer service was fantastic; I couldn’t have asked for any better service. Apple really isn’t as bad as many people make them out to be

Wow… never have I received such quick service on a damaged / broken electronic product!

Thursday, I called Apple to report my dead iPhone. Friday, I received a loaner unit (also an iPhone) and shipped out my broken phone for repairs in their pre-paid shipping box. Saturday (today), they received the package, diagnosed it and determined that it was indeed dead. I now have the tracking number for my replacement iPhone, which will be here Monday. It doesn’t get much better or faster than that!

Less than 24 hours after calling Apple, a brand new iPhone “loaner” unit arrived at my place.

I must say, I am impressed by how quick this arrived. They even included a paper clip to help remove the SIM card tray. I called FedEx to come pick up the return package, which was already labeled for Priority with Saturday Delivery - nice!

Hopefully I should get my iPhone back (I am assuming a new unit) late next week. For now, I am just happy to have a working phone again.

Also, I was unsure if any of my stored data (text messages, saved notes, etc) was saved on the SIM card, but thankfully, it is. I have some important notes I keep in my phone that I wouldn’t want a stranger to intercept.

I plugged my iPhone in to charge yesterday, and when I went to get in bed later that night, I found the phone was SUPER HOTTT, almost too hot to touch without pain!

The case that the phone was in (silicon case) was all greasy as if it were about to melt. I pulled the iPhone from the charger and tried to turn it on, to which I received a white screen. I then turned the iPhone off. I quickly grabbed my IR thermometer to measure just how hot the iPhone was.

It took longer than anticipated for the battery to cool, as I think the battery in the phone was still holding a strong charge.

And now, my iPhone is completely dead. It won’t turn on, recharge or anything. Just my luck.

I talked with Apple earlier today (had to borrow my roommates phone, blah). They are sending me a “service” iPhone to use in the meantime, which should be here tomorrow, as well as a box to ship my broken phone back to Apple. I was told that it isn’t terribly uncommon to have this happen, especially if you are using a case on your iPhone, which I was. I should have some type of fix / replacement in 3-5 business days.

I was doing some website work yesterday when out of nowhere, I thought of a great idea for a new website name. I headed over to my domain registration site of choice, Dotster.com and logged into my account. When I logged in, I notice something highlighted in red: the expiration date for my tech site, OCIA.net!

The domain name was set to expire in just five days and I was not sent any kind of warning about it; that is pretty scary! Now, whether or not they would have sent me an email in the coming days is unknown, but I certainly didn’t feel too great about the lack of notice and promptly extended my registration for another year. I am terrible when it comes to remembering things like this, so if you are anything like me, be sure to keep a close eye on your domains and know when they are scheduled to expire. I can only imagine the nightmare I would have had to face if someone snatched the domain from me!

As the saying goes, “when it rains, it pours”. That saying certainly holds true for me and my string of bad luck.

Over two weeks ago, the dryer in my apartment stopped working. We contacted the maintenance staff and over the course of the past two weeks, they came out repeatedly, even replacing a “broken” part, only for the issue to remain.

Last Friday, I found the maintenance guy around the complex and had him come look at it again. He checked on things and said he had to go talk to his supervisor. He leaves and I head to my room… then notice the kitchen floor is covered in soap suds from the dishwasher. Lovely… so one of my roommates and I get to cleaning that up. I go check under my bathroom sink to grab some towels… oh wait, everything under the sink is soaked! I turned the faucet on and water was just streaming from the pipe underneath.

All of this in the span of about seven minutes! Needless to say, Friday was not a very good day.

It is now Tuesday. The sink was fixed yesterday and the dishwasher, well not real sure what happened there but it is working fine now. The dryer, not so much. They came and looked at it Monday morning… it broke again, so I went and complained to the manager at the leasing office. They returned again today, and it seems now that you can run it on the delicate cycle… which is great, but it takes two full runs to dry a regular load of clothes.

Blah, I need a vacation…

I have been using Blockbuster’s Total Access program for a few months now. I had always wondered how the DVDs arrived without being damaged, as they are shipped in a simple paper envelope. Well today, I found that one movie I ordered was cracked!

This brings up an interesting question of just how many movies are damaged during shipment on a daily basis. I am sure Blockbuster wouldn’t release this data but I, for one, would be really curious to know the answer. Perhaps a stiffer cardboard shipping container would work better?

Either way, I’m just glad that I won’t be responsible for the damaged movie. Has this ever happened to any of you that use Total Access or Netflix?

Have you ever done something really stupid? I do, all the time…

Apparently I didn’t learn my lesson a few weeks ago when a Coke got too cold in my fridge and exploded. Yesterday after getting back from the football game (horrible loss btw), I put a canned Coke in the freezer to chill it quickly.

Then, I forgot about it… until this morning. Yes, you know the rest.

For this, I deserve a…

So I’m watching a movie yesterday afternoon and all of the sudden I hear a small “explosion”. I wasn’t sure what it was or where it even came from (plus I was pretty into the movie), so I shrugged it off and stuck with the movie.

Afterwards I decided to grab a Coke from the fridge and, well, yeah, I found what caused the explosion…

Just how I wanted to spend my Monday evening… cleaning up a sticky mess!

Turns out, the mini fridge gets really cold on the center shelf, because that is where the vent is that pumps cold air in. The can froze and expanded with pressure until it was just too much for the aluminum top.

Just another chapter for my future book, “Point & Laugh”…

… sucks! Saturday night, we noticed that it was pretty hot in the apartment. We thought maybe the dryer was heating up the place, but that turned out to be wrong.

Apparantly the AC was “overworked” and when this happens, the unit freezes up… literally! The physical unit outside had a solid sheet of ice covering the padded tube going into the apartment. As you can see above, even the unit inside the apartment had ice on it. I wonder if that “overly used” filter had anything to do with it?

The remedy? Simply let the ice melt. This only took a few hours for the unit outside, but the indoor section required us to turn on the heater to help melt the ice. Talk about hot!