More of the same (or the lamentations of me)

Well isn't it interesting how when everything is going bad, it can always get even more fun. It can. Totally.
So in the last post i discussed needing to get a T-Mobile SIM card so that i could send text messages from the cell module in the project. Apparently the website wants to make it as hard as possible to do this, because only the most devout of believers can enter into the sacred T-Mobile network.



Pretty much immediatly after my posting i had my friend attempt to order one (he is on the project with me) and come to find out they won't let him. The website allows him to go all the way through the process enter in the creditcard info, then asks him to answer some security questions to confirm his identity. He previously had a T-Mobile account so i guess they are entitled. He answers the questions, and then it blocks him. He has crappy internet, so he tries again on my internet, thinking that maybe the connection died. Same thing. The next time he trys it doesn't even get that far before failing, so he calls them up. After asking for his SSN and other identifying information they said that they can't do anything about it, they are "trying to protect his identity". So i'm like "Well fine, i'll try". lol
I have pretty much the same experiance, except i don't get asked probing personal questions, as i have never had an account with them. Instead it returns an error claiming that i entered my credit card information incorrectly. I highly doubt that this is the case, i was in fact sure i entered it correctly. There was a chance however that my bank didn't like me buying 2 cellphones in one week, so i checked to see if it showed anything on my account information. Low and behold there was a charge for the card and shipping, then a refund, not a blocked charge, they took my money, then gave it back. I tried again just to be sure and sure enough the same thing happened. At this point i was afraid to try again because my bank would probably think it was fraudulent if i continued, so i asked another friend to try. Same thing.
Then i called my mom and asked her to try. Same thing.
I tweeted T-Mobile and they just pointed me at their website to the same SIM card page, and the find a store tool. There are no T-Mobile stores near here, at least not so close i could go there on a week day.

The answer to all this?
ebay

On ebay i was able to find the same card un-activated for less than on the site. No hassle. No work.

our working theory is that they have a black list on this region because there is only one tower near here, but why would that matter... i mean i might be buying it because i plan on moving to a place that does have lots of T-Mobile towers and want a phone for while i am there, or something. Anyway... i think it is BS.


Other than our nice little cell module project i have a plds verilog project i am working on for a class. This week we were supposed to implement a mux'd 7seg display with 3 number fields. I wanted to just be able to check it off at the begining of lab so i could work on other things, so i stayed up last night doing it. I build the code, and loaded it up, and it seemed to be right, the RTL looked fine i mean ya, i wish i could get rid of that mux in front of my FF, but my pld doesn't have any enabled flipflops, so it is kinda impossible.

And i think it is silly that my counter/priority encoder has muxs acting as... ... um... delays...

But generally i looked good. I mean, everything was functionally the same as what i wanted. So when i programmed the PLD you can imagine my surprise when it didn't work. Nothing showed up on my 7Seg. i would have thought that if it was going to be broken it was going to display at least something, but no. I looked it over, poked at various parts of the code, did various things, but nothing was wrong with it that i could see. After about an hour of this i tryed to hard code a value to display, and IT WORKED. so that meant that my switch code was wrong. Well if that is what you thought too, you'd be wrong just like me. I eventually checked the physical state of the switches with a multimeter. They are wired with pullups so when open it reads 5v and when closed it reads 0, well... they never read 0. Turns out the wire wrap wire broke while wrapping ground, so it floated until driven high, then stayed there. I am actually surprised i didn't damage the pld while programming, (i had the switches closed so *theoretically* they wouldn't be driven during programming. rewrapped it, and yay! it displayed crap. i accidently indexed a->g instead of g->a on my 7Seg, and it was very obvious that that is what i did, so one more compile and it worked great.

Moral of the story... ima check my hardware first from now on...  :p
also buy your sim card online, save a headache.