I now have a new phone. Since I'm not dependent on it yet, I figured this would be a good time to make major changes. I decided to install cyanogenmod following this terse guide. The process went well, except for a few unclear steps:

• To put the update zip on the sdcard, you need to make the phone show up as an external hard drive. This meant finding the "usb connected" notification and telling it to present as a disk to my mac.
• To reboot into CWM I needed to run "adb reboot recovery" on my mac. This depends on the android development sdk, which I had already installed.
• Once in CWM, the volume buttons moved me around but the power button didn't select. I needed to press 'volume up' several times before it said "back button enabled" and enabled it.
• The first time I installed cyanogenmod (CM7) I got a reboot loop. The second time I got stuck on the splash screen. The third time it booted properly.