But last week after several months of a persnikity Motorola Razor that would say it was charging, and then not have a charge I decided that a new phone was in order. The old phone was my second Razor. The first one lost it's speaker and I snagged a newer one from my husband who upgraded himself to an iPhone. The battery had conked out but it's really easy to get a replacement battery on Amazon so I breathed several more years of life into the phone with a new battery. All in all I felt that I'd done my green duty to use things up, and a new phone was a minor indulgence.
I'm not going to call a cell phone a necessity, it's an indulgence, so a new not-smart phone can be a minor-indulgence.
One downside of a new phone was that I lost all my ringtones. Although my phone doesn't ring a lot I love knowing from the ring who's calling.
A few months back on one of our not-infrequent trips to Staples, MicroCenter or Best Buy I picked up a $10 program called RingFactory. It advertised that you could make a ringtone from a CD or MP3. At the time I had an anemic hand-me-down PC, a leftover from when my boys were in high school. Some mothers forage through their children's discarded shoes or clothing, I pick through their digital and electronic detrius. That PC, a Compaq to hint at how old it was, had flashed the blue screen of hard-drive death at me a couple of times and this summer I decided not to find out if the third time was going to be the dying breath. So I bought a new machine. The wonders of a spanking new machine are worthy of a whole other post so I won't go into it here. With the new phone and the new PC, plus the RingFactory I set about replacing my families rings. It doesn't work with iTunes music so I was limited to CDs in my collection. So here's what I've done:
| Husband | Carole King - I feel the Earth Move |
| Older Son | The Who - Happy Jack |
| Younger Son | The Supremes - Baby Love |
| Everybody Else | The Who - Who are You? |
Obviously my collection includes "Tapestry" and "Who's Next." It's my opinion that those are two of the greatest albums ever! On the old phone husband had been a few bars from "Love Shack." That always kind of embarassed me when it rang in public places so I decided to be more refined and go with moving the earth.
I've got some others queued up - if I add someone who's British then "London Calling" will be there ring. A chatterbox can be a Dave Matthews song with the chorus "So Much to Say." Older son, whose name is Jack could also have "Smackwater Jack" by Carole King.
Got any good suggestions for people/rings?
