It’s amazing how much easier it is to drag yourself to work in the morning when you are dreading a 30 mile commute and 8 hours of work you are totally disinterested in. The first week and change of work have been great, and while all “honeymoon period” disclaimers apply, the new environment seems much more conducive to happiness and productivity than my previous situation. Things weren’t horrible at Goodrich, but they weren’t great either, and that commute started each day on a pretty down note.
I walked to and from work the last three days of this week… I drove on Monday and Tuesday, partly because I had packages to pick up from UPS and partly because it’s tough to break out of the car commute mindset. Now that I’ve walked a few times, I’ve found a pretty good route, turning a 3 mile commute according to Google Maps to a 2.25 mile commute. It takes about 40 minutes at my current pace, but that will improve a bit once I get a bit more in shape.
The actual work is great, some of my code is already in customer hands (or at least, will be real soon now). So far they have me cleaning up the sample apps built upon our RasterMaster SDK, all of which were created some time ago and hadn’t been maintained in awhile. So I’ve been giving them some TLC, updating several of them to the Java 1.1 event model as well as letting Eclipse loose on them reformatting them and making them conform to the style of the rest of Snowbound’s Java code. I have a few new sample to write before I really start digging into my “primary” work, the FlexSnap code. I’m starting to finally remember why I got into programming initially, which is a very, very good thing.
I had to exchange my RAZR for the second time this week. The first phone I got shut itself off randomly, and I swapped that one out about a month after receiving it in April. The replacement for that one had this annoying static noise, similar to when you have a cell too close to a computer speaker, but it was ignorable at first, and I figured it was a tower problem. But when I went to Jersey recently, it still kept at it, and seemed to be getting worse, so I called Cingular this week. They overnighted me a replacement for free, and the new phone seems to be good so far. The customer service rep asked me if I wanted to swap it for a different phone, and I considered it, but I am giving the RAZR one more shot. If this one acts up, it is gonna get the boot.
Sorry to hear your luck with cell phones has continued. I haven’t had any trouble with my RAZR for over a year now but Cingular can’t seem to figure out how to run a GSM network down here. I got tons of “Unregistered SIM” problems along with other people at work. The case I have open with them for months has been escalated several times and it looks like they’ve fixed most of the problems.
Is the RAZR as nice as it looks featurewise? It was so tempting – I’m also with Cingular – but I really don’t like flip phones so I went with the Nokia 3120, a really solid and basic piece.
As far as your flip phone aversion, there is a “candybar” version of the RAZR called the SLVR, you might want to check out.
When the phone is working properly, I’m mostly happy with it. It is so tiny, which is why I really got it (replacing the brick of my Sidekick II). There are a few nuisances in the software.. For instance, when I’m sending a text message, the address book shows me ALL phone numbers as opposed to only mobile ones.. There is a way to disable this in the “phone” mode (so it only shows you each address book entries “primary” number, as opposed to several entries for each person, but there is no equivalent in the other modes (SMS, email, etc).
Because of these software nuisances, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it, and with the problems I’ve been have having requiring equipment exchanges, I can’t even halfheartedly recommend it..
Just stay away from these fad phones altogether. I was stupid and got a SLVR L7 from Cingular and if I didn’t spend $300 on the god damned thing, I’d flush it down the toilet like the turd it is. The user interface is counterintuitive, laggy as hell, and WOEFULLY underpowered to the point that I had to downlo-I mean purchase-Motorola’s Mobile Phone Tools to configure the settings to get the phone into anything like proper working order. And it STILL blocks its own number every single time I call someone. I’ve had Cingular send an OTA firmware update which did jack shit, and I’m not about to deal with the Indians on the phone or the mouth breathers in person to try it again.
But hey, it’s got iTunes! That’s cool, right?