On Saturday I was eligible for my “New Every Two” discount from Verizon Wireless, so yesterday I went to the Verizon store and upgraded to the new LG Chocolate. It’s a sleek, black phone that looks way more like an iPod than a phone, obviously because they’re trying to encourage people to listen to music on their phones. It slides open to reveal a keypad when you want to use it as a phone, and the rest of the time it’s really small and thin.

Verizon didn’t have the cable yet to transfer my phone book from my old phone, but with a USB cable and BitPim (set for the VX8300, which is pretty much compatible), I was able to transfer my phone book as well as all my photos. BitPim also let me create a custom ringtone out of an MP3 of “Such Great Heights,” so that was pretty awesome.

Verizon uses Windows Media Player 10 to sync music to the phone. It only comes with a tiny 60MB of memory, just enough for about an hour of music, so I put the Postal Service’s Give Up on there, and I might get a microSD card later to store more music.

A friend of ours who used to work for a florist volunteered to do our wedding flowers, which was incredibly nice of her, and it’s going to save us a lot of money. She usually gets the roses from Costco (which is a good idea for anyone who needs a lot of inexpensive but high-quality flowers), but we want a specific variety of rose that Costco doesn’t carry. The bridesmaids’ dresses are dark red, and Costco only carries one shade of red, and Costco’s shade would clash horribly with the dresses. So Ashleigh and I went to Chelsea Flower Market one day with a swatch of fabric, and we decided that we wanted Black Magic roses.

I’ve been put in charge of finding wholesale Black Magic roses for the wedding. The best way to get roses is direct from the farm, it seems, because then they’re fresher (they last at least two weeks) yet cheaper. I’m pretty sure I’m going with Margareta Export Flowers (flowersandfreshness.com), because they have the best deal I’ve seen on Ecuadorian roses. NuSabana has a good deal too, but they’re Colombian, and Colombian roses tend to be smaller than Ecuadorian roses. Also worth a mention, if anyone out there is shopping for bulk flowers, is 2G Roses (FreshRoses.com), which is a grower in California. In the end it’s possible I’ll order from them instead, even though they’re more expensive, just because I won’t have to worry about the weather in Miami (where South American roses enter the U.S.) or about customs. Oh, and there’s also RoseSource.com; they sell Ecuadorian roses, and they have great customer service, but they’re a little more expensive.

If we didn’t care about the exact color, I’d consider Sam’s Club instead. They have the absolute lowest price for roses online, and they’re farm-fresh from Ecuador to your door, unlike Costco’s roses which are shipped to Costco first.

Wedding planning is going well. Ashleigh has taken on the role of “bride,” which makes sense, and I’ve taken on the role of “wedding planner,” because I’m actually really good at organizing things (a trait I got from my mother, so thank you, Mom). We’ve done most of the work we need to do already, and we’ve still got a little over three months till our wedding. I read some advice that said it’s better to get done whatever you can get done ahead of time, even if it seems like something that can wait, because you don’t want additional stress right before the wedding. So although we could have waited to get table name holders, we got them last week. And although I could have waited to get a cake knife and server, I ordered one yesterday. The less we have to worry about in the days leading up to the wedding, the better.

I understand that your pricing structure may be complicated, and that everything’s somewhat negotiable. But if you refuse to put prices or price ranges on your web site–or even worse, if you refuse to put prices in your “information” packets–then I don’t really want to do business with you. Clearly you think you’re too expensive, because if you were a good value, you’d want to advertise that. And anyway, you’re just wasting a whole lot of my time and your time, because then I have to call you, and you have to dedicate time to coming up with a price quote for me, and you have to keep following up and inquiring with me, even though your location is far too expensive in the first place. If you’d just tell me up front how much it’s likely to cost, I could avoid wasting everyone’s time. Do you really think that by making me talk to you, you’re going to convince me to spend twice my budget? Not a chance. Instead, you’re going to get a shitload of people calling you to find out what you could have easily posted on your web site. And the people who could afford it will, and the people who can’t won’t. You’re not going to convert anyone, you’re just going to piss people off.

Ashleigh and I got engaged this morning!

Holy crap! The new Apple Store (the cube) at 59th and 5th is going to be open twenty-four hours a day! That’s excellent news because it means there’s finally something to do in midtown after 11pm besides eating and drinking. It’ll also be helpful for the next time that Ash’s Junior Mints melt all over her iPod.

Oh, and for the first twenty-four hours (beginning tomorrow at 6pm), they’re giving away a MacBook an hour.

I spent the weekend in NorCal, and I took some pictures in San Francisco.

In the song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” from Avenue Q, Princeton argues that we all make judgments based on race: “Not big judgments like who to hire; just little judgments like thinking that Mexican busboys should learn to speak goddamn English!”

Earlier today, our President expressed his thoughts about a new Spanish-language version of our National Anthem:

“I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English.”

Last time I checked, the United States does not have an official national language, much like it doesn’t have an official national religion. It’s too bad those goddamn equal rights are always getting in the way of our President’s ability to govern.

Earlier today Apple Computer Inc. announced that, with a small software download, the new Intel-based Macs can run Windows XP. I immediately went to the apple.com home page to check it out, because I imagined it was going to look like this.

I haven’t been writing much, but I’ve been taking a lot of pictures. Visit flickr to see them.