A fitting alibi, creepy hopes of youngins not partying too much, & the worst BlackBerry app evah…

~Friday~  I drove up to the Avent Ferry Food Lion Park & Ride this morning to catch either the Wolfline #9 Greek Village bus or the #1 Avent Ferry bus. The #9 was waiting, and boarding it I listened to drama unfolding over the two-way radios broadcasting on all of the Wolfline buses.

A crash had just happened just down the street—at the intersection of Crest and Avent Ferry—and had evidently turned into a hit and run, with the guilty party taking off as the police approached.

A guy across from me was speaking a little too loudly on his phone, in what sounded like a conversation to his employer regarding his imminent lateness to work this morning. Evidently the connection wasn’t good, because he kept repeating things, more loudly each time.

At the next stop, a girl took a seat next to me wearing a sweater that was presumably making its fall debut—if the distinct smell of moth balls was any indicator.

Also boarding at this juncture was a student who had seen part of the hit and run drama, and after he explained it, that guy that had been talking to his boss on the phone asked, “When did all that happen?”

“Just now,” the guy said. “Just now, over at Crest.”

“That’s why I’m late to work this morning,” he said as if trying on an alibi that he thought fit perfectly, and about as pleased with himself as anyone could be about how smart he was to think of it.

A guy I’ve seen occasionally and who is older, is not a student, and has no sense of the Wolfline bus social norms was aboard this morning. It’s relatively quiet on those buses, especially early in the morning, as a lot of the students are half asleep while riding to class.

So, today he was conspicuous in a couple of ways: 1) In short, one-line comments to students sitting around him—particularly to women, and 2) In his attempt to have a conversation with the driver, which is another thing that rarely, if ever, happens on the Wolfline buses.

Well into the route, the bus got full to the point that students were standing all the way up the aisle, and as if he were the driver or worked for the Wolfline in some capacity, he said loudly to the bus-at-large, “Can you move back a little youngins? We’re packed in like sardines up front.” It should be noted that he was sitting down, and the fact that people were packed up front affected him in no way at all.

And then, just to add to the Why??? factor he added, “I hope y’all didn’t party too much last night.”


My work day was consumed with technical editing, the likes of which I haven’t seen since I did that full time at IBM in my final year there. I edited three things for UNC CAUSE 2010:

  1. The conference manager’s opening remarks
  2. The text for the abbreviated schedule that’ll be part of the attendees’ badges
  3. The 68-page conference program

It’s absolutely astounding how much time I spent last night trying to do one little thing on my phone. In conclusion, I’d just like to say that the BlackBerry App World application absolutely sucks.

A good two-and-a-half hours of my night was spent attempting to purchase Electronic Arts’ BlackBerry edition of Scrabble so that I can make moves from my phone in the Scrabble games I play on Facebook.

I’d tried this a few days ago, and I’d gotten a message saying there was a problem with the credit card information I’d entered into the App World app. Five times, I entered the information, saved it, tried to use it, got the message that says there was a problem with it, re-checked it, and found the information not saved—even though every time I saved it, I got: “Information Saved OK.”

So tonight, it went like this:

  1. Tried to delete the credit card account it says it has saved, which correctly contains my name and address, but won’t save the credit card number, its expiration date, or its three-digit security code, thus leading to the message that “there’s an error in the credit card information.”
  2. Read that there’s no way to delete a credit card account once it’s in there, and that I should delete the app, and download and install it again. (This sequence takes 10-15 minutes, by the time the download and the rebooting of the phone completes.)
  3. Connected my BlackBerry phone to my laptop and downloaded a new version of the app using the BlackBerry desktop application.
  4. Opened the newly installed version of the app, only to find my credit card account still in it! And still not able to store the rest of the card information in it.
  5. Googled to see if there was something you have to do when you delete the app to also delete any stored information associated it, but didn’t find anything.
  6. Deleted the app again to try downloading it from the Web on my phone instead of via a wired connection to my laptop and the desktop application.
  7. Opened the Opera browser on my phone to navigate to the website from which to download the app. Once there, I clicked on “Download,” and it said, “This app can only be downloaded using the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. Arrrrrgh!
  8. I opened the “standard” BlackBerry browser, and tried it from there, and the download completed. Then waited for the reboot of my phone.
  9. Once again, when I started the newly installed app, that credit card account with incomplete, and uneditable, data was still in there.
  10. The only other option in the app is to pay via Paypal instead of a credit card, which I’d been avoiding, because although I have a Paypal account, I haven’t used it in probably five years, and I didn’t want to start now.
  11. Since it seemed like my only option, I clicked on that, and when I put in my Paypal information, using the userid and password I had on record, it said, “Paypal account not found.”
  12. Tried to switch back to using the credit card option instead of the Paypal option, but couldn’t do it.
  13. Repeated the entire sequence—another 15 minutes down the drain—of deleting the app, downloading it again, and reinstalling it to get back to the credit card option. All to no avail.
  14. Spent 20 minutes dealing with Paypal to confirm my userid, reset my password, update the information to charge to my credit card instead of the Coastal Federal Credit Union where I used to do my primary banking when I last used Paypal.
  15. Continued with the Paypal option on the phone, and successfully purchased the Electronic Arts Scrabble game, installed it, and brought it up.

It would appear that the BlackBerry version of this Scrabble app—unlike the iPhone version—does not connect to online games, which is the whole reason I was purchasing it.

There are three ways to play: “Versus Computer,” “Pass’n Play,” and “Solo.” “Versus the Computer” plays a game against the app. Selecting “Pass’n Play,” it says “Player 2 has randomly been selected to go first. Press trackball to begin,” and “Player 2” seems like it’s just “the computer,” not unlike the “Versus Computer” option. The solo version is like a solitaire version of Scrabble.

I’d like to think that I’m totally missing something here, and perhaps it’s that I need to somehow now connect this app to Facebook, but if that’s the case, it’s certainly not obvious. And if so, it’s something for another day. Needless to say this was a frustrating Friday night spent.

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