Woodland Park Zoo

The sign at the zoo was quite welcoming!  I don’t go to the zoo very often, but it’s always nice to see penguins, leopards, cheetahs, and other exotic animals. I wanted to throw meat into the pen, but I’d get kicked out.

This peacock was quite photogenic. The moment people came, he spread out his feathers for all to see.

This elephant is coming right for us! If this was South Park, the elephant would have been blown up by a bazooka or something.

This little guy was scraping the meat off of the bone.

Here is a godless killing machine staring us down.

Too bad I didn’t have my usual camera, and I had to use my phone camera for everything.

Feierabend

One of the few things that is guaranteed to pique my interest is a nice German pub.  The food I like to get is always the pork hock.  Super stereotypical, yet super delicious. The place had decorations that looks really stereotypically German, but the food and the beer were all very authentic.

This place also had 1-liter beers! The taste instantly reminded me of the time I spent in Germany and if I could hold my liquor better, I would have drank way more of these, purely for its taste.

I want more of that beer now. It was a good taste of a beer from my once home away from home.

Crabpot

The next day was another day for food. After a brief walk through Pike Market, we went to Crabpot for some seafood. I had heard many good things about this restaurant, namely how customers get a wooden mallet to smash open crab shells. We ordered the Crabpot seafeast and so when the food came, they took the bucket of food and poured it on the table for us to go at it. They also gave us a mallet and a bib (it gets really messy).

I liked the food, but my only complaint is that there wasn’t enough of it! After the meal, we chilled for a bit longer at our friend’s flat before going back to Vancouver. It was a nice weekend getaway. Honestly I feel that I should do more of these – it somewhat satisifes my constant urge to travel. Luckily, I’ll be going to Japan soon so that’ll be fun!

More photos here

Back in May, one of our intern “Stammtisches” took place at a beer garden up in the mountains in Stuttgart called Karlshöhe.  At the top, I could see pretty much the entire Stuttgart city center. 

While we were up there though, it rained really hard very briefly.  Once the rain went away, a rainbow appeared.  But moments later, we saw a second rainbow!  Apparently, the second, lighter coloured rainbow, is a result of a double reflection from sunlight in raindrops.

The second one is kind of hard to see, but it’s between the left edge of the picture and the brighter rainbow.  When we saw this, someone inevitably shouted, “DOUBLE RAINBOW!! WHAT DOES IT MEAN??!”  For people who aren’t quite familiar with that, see this YouTube video.  Either way, it was pretty cool to be able to see that.  Too bad, I didn’t bring my usual camera day and had to take the photo with my phone camera.

After almost four years of using my Inspiron 1520, its age finally caught up with it and its light literally went out.  The backlight refuses to turn on now.  I came back from Berlin last Monday and found my computer in this state.  I left it off during that time too.  During this time, I had trouble doing any blogging and uploading any photos.

Google told me that the problem lay with either a loose connection, the inverter or the lamp.  I tried to check this out myself and open the computer case, but the screws refused to budge.  People online somehow got theirs open, but I couldn’t.

Unfortunately, my warranty expired so I’d have to pay to get this computer fixed.  I looked at my options on the Dell site and the North American Dell Support refused to help me and kept referring me to the European side even though I bought my computer in Canada (I really don’t know what these guys at the call centers are doing).  After about three calls to the support line, I finally found someone helpful and she told me that I had to change my laptop registration such that it showed a European location before I could get it fixed.  An alternative option would have been to send the computer back to Canada to get it fixed.

What I did instead was just buy a new laptop.  My laptop is already super old and already can’t really keep up with my tasks anyway, so I suppose it’s time for an upgrade.  What surprised me was that laptops in Germany (from their Best Buy/Future Shop equivalents anyway) cost so much more than in North America.  In fact, it was cheaper for me to buy my computer in Canada and get my parents to ship it to me rather than buying it locally.  I’m sure there are cheaper places, but I don’t exactly know how to look through all these German websites.  Another added advantage in buying from Canada is that I’d have a computer with the US Keyboard layout rather than the German one.  And in the future when my laptop needs repairs, it’ll be easy.

In the meantime, I’m using a 17 inch LCD screen that I borrowed from a friend.  This will suffice until my new computer arrives.  No more shining a lamp at my computer screen and squinting my eyes to see the screen anymore.  I also don’t need to be using my phone to go on the internet at home either.

For Easter weekend, the interns and I went to Greece. Instead of only going to the famous tourist areas like Athens, we also went to a city called Volos to check out the beaches they had there.

Getting to Greece

Typically, we leave early in the morning for trips, but this time we left during the night in order to make our morning flight to Volos, Greece at Frankfurt-Hahn Airport. Originally, we all thought the airport was in Frankfurt, but apparently, it was a 2 hour bus ride. Apparently, Ryanair likes to use airports named after big cities, but the airport itself isn’t located in that city.

We started our journey by taking the U-Bahn to the Stuttgart main train station to catch the a train to Frankfurt am Main. From there we would take a bus to Frankfurt-Hahn Airport. We arrived in Frankfurt at about 3 AM and during this time, we ran around the streets looking for our bus. Because of all these transfers, we barely had time to sleep. I think I only slept for about 4 hours intermittently. It was a good thing that not a lot of people took the train at night because this let us lie down on two seats and put our legs on the seats in front to sleep better.

After 2 train transfers, and a bus transfer, we boarded the plane. By now it was already morning. We were all still really tired. All we did was sleep. I’m surprised I still managed to fall asleep really well even with little kids and babies crying around me. I didn’t really get a chance to look out the window very much though. Although for the brief moments that I was awake, I managed to see the Swiss/Austrian Alps (I don’t know what our flight path was).

I left the house at around 11:30 PM, and arrived in Volos 10 hours later. If only we knew about the Frankfurt-Hahn thing, we would have tried to fly out of Stuttgart International Airport.

Volos

We checked out the town for a bit and stayed there for a night. This place isn’t very known among tourists going to Greece, so there weren’t a lot of tourists anywhere. We pretty much went to this place to check out the beaches.

We rented a car here so we could drive from Volos to Athens the next day. When we first got into the car we realized it was almost out of gas. We thought that it was normal to get the car with a full tank and return it with a full tank. While driving around Volos, we saw how the Greek drove. I’ve got to say that the drivers in Volos are some of the worst I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why, but nobody cares about driving on their own lane (lanes aren’t even painted most of the time). Nobody yields for pedestrians unless there’s a light. And while we were driving, people rode mopeds without wearing helmets and all they did was squeeze through spaces that cars couldn’t and cut off the cars. On the highway, they even drove on the shoulder.

After looking at the beaches, we drove up to the top of the mountain overlooking Volos, a site for archaeological excavation. It was supposed to be the ruins of a city from 5th century BC, but we didn’t really see any ruins except for some stones buried solidly in the grass. But what we did see was the most spectacular view.

In the evening, we tried Greek hard liquor called Tsipouro. The ones we got had 42% alcohol by volume. The taste of it was repulsive. I’ve drank hard liquor with a similar percentage of alcohol before, but those didn’t taste bad. The food they served with it was quite good though. I particularly enjoyed eating the octopus. Later on, we ate some more Greek seafood. We got to try other foods like ray-fish, squid, and cuttlefish. I’m craving some of that right about now.

On the Road to Athens

We all knew of the high oil prices nowadays so we thought it might have been more economical to take public transit from Volos to Athens. We asked about a car rental and after doing the math, we found that the two options were about the same, so we opted to rent a car. We drove the Opel Corsa for about 330 km from Volos to Athens. Little did we know, we had to pay tolls on the highway. The Greek also like to put up these mini-churches on the side of the road. On the highway, we could see these and they represent the people who died there.

For a while, we didn’t really know where we were going once we got into Athens. Once we arrived, we tried to find a suitable parking place for the car that was near a metro station. We decided not to drive around Athens since it would be very hard to find a parking spot. The car simply got us around Volos and to Athens. We stopped the car and asked people for directions multiple times. Out in the suburbs, not many people spoke English so communication was quite difficult. Although, on one occasion, one of the locals spoke Hindi, which one of us happen to know.

The first place we tried to park at turned out to be partially blocking a driveway so we had to move. While parking the car though, I opened the door slightly to look outside to check the spacing of the car to help the driver. At this moment, my phone slipped out of the car seat and onto the street. Luckily I realized my phone was missing as the car started driving away. I quickly got out and ran after some people on the street who picked up my phone. Luckily they were just walking away thinking about whether to keep it or not. I literally ran out of the car and called out to them saying, “Thats mine!” despite the fact that they might only know Greek and not English. If I had been even a minute slower, my phone would have been lost. Good thing the people who found it were nice enough to give it back. I was prepared to run after them.

After a huge sigh of relief, we found a new parking spot. We left the car near an apartment about 20 minutes by train from our hostel for two nights. Every now and then we’d think of the car and hoped that it was still there. Even if the lady who lived at the apartment said we could park there, we still weren’t sure if it would get towed or ticketed.

The Acropolis

Once we checked into the hostel, we walked up to the Acropolis, the location of the most famous landmark in Athens. Unfortunately, due to a restoration project, there was a huge metal crane in front of the Parthenon. I don’t know why, but landmarks I visit always seem to be under maintenance whenever I go there. But the good thing was that going up to the Acropolis was free because of Easter.

At the top of the Acropolis, there were a lot of remains of ancient Greek architecture. Among these was the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, The Erechtheum, and the Parthenon.

I don’t really know a lot about Greek history, but it seemed like these places attracted a lot of tourists simply because they’re famous. I doubt a lot of people have an in depth knowledge about the Greek culture. I’m sure a lot of people just looked at these ruins and thought they were just some old stones.

Greek Architecture around the City

Apart from the Acropolis, I also saw many other ancient Greek buildings. A lot of the Greek architecture was very similar because of their use of the columns, but it was still very interesting to look at.

It seemed like because it was Easter, a lot of the attractions that otherwise would have cost money were free. We would have had to pay to go see the Temple of Zeus.

Around the City

One of the things that was very peculiar about Athens is the amount of stray dogs on the street. I thought it might just be owners letting their dogs run around freely without a leash, but these dogs had no leash.

While we were walking around, a lady was walking her dog on a leash when the leash caught onto my friend’s leg. My friend, seeing this dog, decided to pet it. Unfortunately, that dog’s attitude isn’t same as what he’s used to in America. The dog tried to take a bite at his hand. Luckily, he moved his hand away fast enough before he got bit. The dog’s mouth was so close that its slobber got on his hands. The lady didn’t even apologize for it. It made us think that the Greeks weren’t very nice people.

Everywhere we went in the city, we saw tourists. In fact, there were so many tourists that I sometimes heard more people speak English than Greek. And as tourists, they were everywhere in the city center. There were tourists from all sorts of countries, but when it comes to interacting with the locals, it was either English or Greek.

Like in Paris, people tried to sell me things on the street. Instead of selling mini Eiffel Towers, they sold this toy tomato. When you throw it on the ground, it’ll splatter, but slowly go back to it’s original form. It looked so cool, but it seemed like something that would only be cool for about 5 minutes if I had one. A lot of people also tried to sell fake brand name sunglasses and purses. I’d laugh really hard if they tried to sell fake LV bags on the street in front of the LV store.

Apart from the old Greek buildings, we also hiked up to the top of a hill to check out the view from the top. There was also a church there.

I don’t really know why we went up to the top the hill in all the trips we take. It’s something that we always do. Try to get as high up as we can just to look at the bottom.

Christian Culture

Prior to visiting, I never knew the people in Greece were so Christian. Seeing that it was Easter weekend, I saw a bit of their Easter traditions.

At night, people held candles and all walked to a church. I don’t know what they did when they got there, but the walk attracted large tourist crowds wondering what they were up to.

Food in Athens

Since Athens is one big tourist trap, one can expect to see lots of restaurants selling overpriced food for tourists. But regardless of that, we got to try some really delicious, but probably stereotypical, Greek food. One of the things that confused me though is why they called their salad “Greek Salad” when just “salad” would have sufficed. Maybe that’s their way of getting tourists to try it.

People around the city were all grilling lambs for Easter, but unfortunately, I never got the chance to try some. I’m not missing it though, because I was never a fan of lamb meat anyway.

National Archaeology Museum

On our second day in Athens, we visited the National Archaeology Museum to look at the history of Greece. Luckily for us, we didn’t have to pay to get in because of Easter.

Unfortunately, a lot of the exhibits weren’t open so we didn’t spend a long time here.

More Beaches

Because we didn’t get enough of the beaches in Volos, we decided to visit a beach in Athens too. What surprised me here is the girl that decided to go sunbathing with her top off even though it wasn’t a nude beach.

At one point, we all sat down by the beach enjoying some beer. That the one of last opportunities for relaxation in Greece before we had go to leave the next day.

Going Home

In order to avoid traffic at the tolls, we woke up so early that we had to miss the free breakfast at 7 at the hostel. We all got up at 5 in the morning and by 6:30, we were on the road back to the airport in Volos. Despite getting a full night’s sleep, I somehow still slept for 3/4 of the car ride back.

On the drive home, we could see smoke coming from some of the houses. At first we thought someone’s house was burning down, but later we figured that it might have been people grilling lamb for Easter.

Later, we realized that we left way too early. We aimed to arrive at 11 am, but we arrived at around 9 am for a flight that departed at 2:15 pm. The airport in Volos was also in the middle of nowhere. We spent the next two hours doing next to nothing. During this time, I finally finished reading that book I started a while back.

When we returned the rental car, the amount of gas in the tank was in the red zone. We wondered if the car still had enough gas to go to the nearest gas station. It didn’t seem likely that there was a gas station anywhere near the airport. It was in the middle of nowhere.

We tried accounting for all the things that could make us late like looking for the right way to go, traffic jams, etc., and none of those things happened. For the whole trip one of my friends kept making fun of my other friend for making us all wake up early. In fact, he was so worried about being late that he thought we should skip coffee in addition breakfast. Skipping breakfast and not eating for 5 hours wasn’t very fun.

On the plane, I was bored out of my mind. My phone and iPod had all run out of battery and I was forced to sit there staring out the window. Even doing that was hard because I didn’t get a window seat. Because of my boredom, I took some random pictures.

We arrived at Frankfurt-Hahn Airport at around 4 in the afternoon, and from there we took the bus back. We all spent so much money in Athens that we all had just enough to get home. We didn’t think we’d make the 4 o clock bus in our original planning, so we arrived at the Frankfurt Hbf a lot earlier than expected. Getting to places early seemed like the trend of the day. We got there at about 6 in the evening, and had to wait until 9 PM for our train. By now I had been on the road for almost 12 hours. We ended up browsing through a bookstore and walking around town until our train arrived. After 17 hours, I finally got home.

More photos here

I gotta say, I was pretty spoiled before.  Not in the way of material things, but more the fact that my parents did all the cooking, laundry and pretty much all the other house cleaning chores.  I don’t think I ever had to set foot in a grocery store either.  All the food my mom bought and cooked, I ate.  She even took the time to make the food that I liked to eat.  That all changed when I came to Germany.  Well, it’s been a time of firsts.

Cooking

To state this bluntly, I can’t cook.  I came here without knowing one of the most critical things to keep myself alive.  In order to avert the crisis of me starving to death, I had to learn this crucial skill.  I already know how to cook like eggs, bacon, and pasta (but not the sauce, unfortunately), but it’s not like I really know how to cook.  I can’t eat that stuff everyday either.  I remember during my first few weeks here, I researched online for different recipes.  I sucked so much at cooking that I didn’t even understand what I was reading.  Marinate? Sautee? What?  Instead of following recipes, I took a different approach.  I started with the easy stuff.  Potatoes.  I was so bad that I even cut myself the first time I tried cooking potatoes.  I think I’ve gone a long way since then.  Now I know how to marinate my meat (thanks to my mom for teaching me that over VOIP), and how to make sauces like curry.  It doesn’t sound like much, but I probably quadrupled, if not tripled my cooking knowledge.  I want to learn some more like how to steam my own fish and cook rice with a stove (too bad I don’t have a rice cooker).  I am by no means a decent chef at all, but it’s a start.

Grocery Shopping

I wasn’t so clueless in this regard, but it didn’t help when I couldn’t read any of the food labels in the supermarket.  Luckily I installed an English-Deutsch dictionary app on my phone before I left Vancouver.  The app saved me so many times already.  It was kind of like, “What the hell does this mean?”, type type type, and then “oh, so that’s what it is”.  I think I ended up eating nothing by sandwiches for almost a whole week.  I mean, I can buy eggs, sausages, bacon and all that, but I had no idea what canola oil was called.  The dictionary didn’t help here, unfortunately, since they used a different word altogether.  Eventually, I figured out everything, and now I’m buying all the food I can eat and more.

Laundry

My flat doesn’t have a washing machine, and I wasn’t about to pay to go to the Laundromat.  I didn’t even know where it was either.  I knew that my mom occasionally washed some clothes by hand and so I consulted her on how to do it.  Her instructions sounded simple enough, but I needed to go out to buy laundry detergent.  Problem: I didn’t know what that was called in German.  I looked it up on my phone and found out.  I thought it’d be pretty straight forward after knowing what laundry detergent was called, but I was so wrong.  I went to the laundry section in the store and saw about fifteen different brands/kinds of detergent.  I had no idea which was which.  I stared at the wall of items for about twenty minutes while looking up various words on my phone before I knew which one to get.

Planning Trips

Since I’m here, I must take the time to travel around Germany and its nearby countries.  Before doing that however, I had to look up the places I wanted to go.  How do I get there?  How much will it cost?  Where will I stay?  Only two methods really exist for transportation: train or plane.  To book a ticket for travelling, I had to use the Deutsche Bahn website and that site confused the hell out of me for the first little while.  But now I know.  Booking flights should have been quite simple, except for the fact that the discount airlines don’t fly out of the major airports.  Now I had to think about how to get myself to one of these airports.  Seeing that I’m not made of money, I try to optimize costs everywhere.  50 euro a night for a hostel?  No way, time to look for something cheaper.  30 euro?  That’s a good deal.  Despite all this planning, I’ve gone to so many places already, and I still have not exhausted my list of places to go.

Drinking

Stereotypes say that Germans like to drink, and it’s totally true.  Although, it’s not really my first time drinking, it is my first time making a habit of it.  Every Thursday is my drinking day.  Sometimes Saturdays too.  I’m never looking to get hammered, but I find that drinking beer and socializing is just super relaxing.  Typically, I try a new beer every week, but a lot of times I just order my favorite beer, Hefeweizen.

Living in Another Country

This is the first time I’ve ever left home for longer than a week.  I used to live on residence at the university, but I went home every weekend.  I could go home every weekend and enjoy my mom’s wonderful cooking.  I have no such luxury here.  I often find myself craving the things I’ve temporarily given up in order to be here.  Besides missing family and friends while over here, I started appreciating the little things.  It’s just things like sleeping in my own bed, sitting in my own computer chair, and eating Chinese food.

Dealing with A Landlord

I always thought a landlord was just someone you pay so you can live in their house, but I learned to realize that it’s not only that.  A landlord is analogous to a dictator (but obviously not as bad).  They pretty much have total control over how I like to live in their space.  If they’ve got a problem with something I’m doing, they’ll tell me and I have to change my habits for them.  Just like the time where I showered too long.  Luckily, my landlords are pretty nice people, but I could have been really unlucky and gotten some mean ones.  Maybe the mean ones might even try to kick out their tenants if they didn’t like the way their lifestyle.

Day 61

People describe Stuttgart as the cradle of the automobile because of the invention of the automobile in this city. Many people also consider the city as the origin of the automotive industry. Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, and Maybach all produce their cars here in Stuttgart. Even automotive parts giant Robert Bosch Gmbh set up their headquarters in the region. Mercedes-Benz and Porsche both opened a museum in Stuttgart to show off all the cars they designed over the years. In January, I went to the Mercedes-Benz Museum, and yesterday, I visited the Porsche Museum.

The Porsche Museum differs from the Mercedes-Benz Museum in the way that Porsche displayed their sports cars and racing cars more than their other cars. The Porsche Museum is also smaller than the Benz Museum and contains less cars. I thought the cars that the Benz Museum displayed seemed much more interesting, but that has to do with my interest their pre 1950’s cars more than the new Porsche sports cars. One thing I thought was very cool about the Porsche Museum was that they had a car that everyone could sit in. I can’t think of any other time where I’d be able to sit in a Porsche! As usual, I take lots of pictures whenever I go places, but unfortunately, I left my SD card at home, so I had to take all the pictures with my phone camera.

My photo album for the Porsche Museum

Up until now, I’ve never opened an MMS successfully. My Internet settings on the phone were never set
probably plus I never bothered to do it. I also didn’t know the billing rates for opening them either.
But now, an opportunity arose for me to require MMS. The Deutsche Bahn has three options for distributing tickets purchased online. The first one is by printing them out, but I don’t have a printer. The second method is having them mailed to me, but that costs 3.50 euro. The third and best option, is to have them sent as MMS. Knowing that my phone, the P1i, has this ability, I looked for how to do it. After going through lots of Googling and reading through translated German sites, I finally figured it out.

Now, I use Vodafone in Germany, but this method may work on other providers even. I am also using GPRS, and not 3G (I don’t have a dataplan unfortunately). The way to do it is to register an account on Vodafone.de using your phone number. Obviously, if you use a different provider, you’d go to their website to make the account. I clicked through their services and found an option called the “HandyKonfigurator”. What it does is it sends me the proper settings required for my phone. I clicked through the dropdown boxes, found my phone and pressed continue. Vodafone then sent me a file that would inject the settings into my phone. They also sent me a PIN that I had to enter before my phone settings were changed. I did as I was asked, and now I can receive MMS messages!

Vodafone Internet Account Settings

• Address: event.vodafone.de
• No user name and password required
• IP Config and DNS Addresses are set to automatic
• Proxy Server: 139.7.29.17 at port 80

Vodafone MMS Account Settings

• Service Center Address: http://139.7.24.1/servlets/mms

Before actually doing any sightseeing, our landlady had discovered a mistake to our residence permit that we completed the day before at the Rathaus (town hall) in Gerlingen, so our trip to go back there to get it fixed. The next thing we had to do was apply for something called an “Aufenthaltstitel” at the Landratsamt (literally translates to District Office) in Ludwigsburg. Trying to get to where we wanted would be impossible if we didn’t have a map to guide us. On the way there we came across some interesting sights.

A Church in Ludwigsburg

Looks like Government Offices of Some Sort

Inside the Landratsamt, we knew exactly which room we needed to go and who we needed to see. When we got there, we ran into a slight problem: the person we needed to see didn’t speak English. Neither of us spoke German. We ended up using a pay phone to call our supervisor to see what we could do. Luckily, he managed to help us complete our paperwork there by talking to the people at the office over the phone.

While they were looking at our passports, my supervisor and the person working at the office had a long conversation about the visa that we acquired in Canada. Although, I can’t speak German, I was able to catch some words in their conversation and looked it up in the German translator on my phone. I caught two words. One word meant “peculiar” and the other word meant “circumstance”. Juxtaposing these words did not make our situation look good. If we failed to complete the paperwork at the Landratsamt, we could not legally start our internship until we get the proper papers. Luckily, everything went well. That was a relief.

Since it was only noon when we finished in Ludwigsburg, we decided to go to the city center of Stuttgart. Unfortunately, our lack of familiarity with the city’s metro led to us taking the wrong train. It took us further away from our destination. After looking a bunch of transit maps, we took the correct train to Stuttgart after a 25 minute wait.

Typical Train Station in the Stuttgart Region

Upon arriving at the city center, we were greeted by sights of very distinct architecture. Many of these buildings had been around for hundreds of years.

The Outside of the Train Station

The Königsbau, Now a Mall, Was the Former Home to the Stuttgart Stock Exchange

das Neue Schloss (The New Castle), Home to Many Kings of Württemberg

The castle here is slightly different than before since Allied bombing during World War II destroyed just about the entire castle.

We pretty much wandered around town to see as many of the cool attractions as we could. Part II to come soon!

One problem I’m still having though is that whenever I try to connect to my own wifi network, I have to connect to it a few times before it works.  If I connect to my neighbour’s, it works right away, so I’m thinking that it’s a router issue.

Another thing is that Coreplayer’s Youtube function likes to stop working for some reason.  Could it have been a setting I changed which messed up Coreplayer?  I don’t know.  It worked fine before and nobody online seems to have had any problems.

Because of that, I’m now using the phone’s in built media player for Youtube videos, but for some reason trying to watch a second video will freeze my phone.  No idea why.

In addition to that problem, I’ve also encountered a multitude of other issues with this phone.  Many of which I thought I’d fixed with the firmware update.  Anyhow this is the list of issues:

• screen going black
• unable to make incoming or outgoing calls
• text messages received, but i do not receive any notification for (they just appear as a new message but there’s no popup saying “New Message Received”
• probably more that I don’t remember right now

I recall that since the firmware update, I’ve installed a few programs and changed some settings.  I have a feeling that this has to do with the settings that I changed.  I’ve had the software installed on my phone for quite a while and it has given me no problems.  The most recent app I’ve installed would be the Gmail app, but there’s no telling whether or not its the culprit.  I also changed the backlight settings, and added a few Internet accounts.   When I was in California, I changed the mobile networks from Fido to AT&T.  I changed it back a week ago when I got back and there was no problems.  I doubt the volume controls have anything to do with this.

I might end up doing a firmware reset.