On a non-emo note, today’s major accomplishment comes with much embarrassment.
When I purchased my Samsung SCH-R261 Chrono phone from Cricket (yes, it’s a dumb-phone — quiet, you), I learned that I could use Bluetooth to retrieve a backup of the Personal Information Management file from the phone (*.pim, a holdover from Palm Pilot and Outlook Express), but for some nefarious reason I could not send the same file back to my phone, which meant that I couldn’t create my own .pim file and update my phone’s contacts without having to hand-enter every damned contact into my phone. With middle fingers raised, I bought Cricket’s “MyBackup” service for $5/mo just so I could push contacts to my phone, an operation I do once every two months or so.
In March, Cricket canceled the MyBackup service, probably because of low adoption, likely because they ended their service agreement with the supplier of the service, or most likely because it conflicted with another service their smartphones provided automatically. This left me without a single option to download, organize, modify, and push contacts to my phone.
Today, i went to the main Cricket store here in Austin to get them to unlock my damned phone just so I could push a *.pim file to it. After minutes of digging around in the support tools, the customer service agent could not find a fix. I tiredly shrugged and left.
Earlier tonight, I learned that I could send and receive vCard files between the phone and my Bluetooth-enabled Windows 7 laptop, and that the contacts pushed to my phone went into the appropriate spot in its Contacts book. Shamefully, this allows me to export selected contacts from my Thunderbird address book to *.vcf vCard files and upload them via Bluetooth to my phone. I feel like a fuckin’ chump.
vCard: making smart but ignorant people feel stupid since 1996.