razr

Goodbye RAZR, Hello (phone with much less sexy name)

Posted on by grahams

I have given up on the Motorola RAZR. After my third phone started doing the same annoying GSM waveform buzzing during calls (which both sides could hear) as well as turning off on it’s own again. Cingular had a few different phones I could exchange it for, and I ended up choosing the Samsung D807. It’s similarly sized (a bit thicker), but feature-wise it blows away the RAZR in just about every aspect (including LESS BUZZ-ITUDE!). The only downside is apparently Samsung didn’t implement SyncML properly or something because it is unsupported by iSync. So that really sucks, but I figured out a workaround (export my whole address book to a vCard file, use a tool to split it up until individual files, and send them all to the phone over Bluetooth. It’s not syncing, but at least I have my contacts on the phone now.

The camera is much nicer on this phone (1280×1024 vs 640×480), and I posted a few pictures to my Flickr Photostream from it. This is one thing that is much easier on the new phone. The RAZR didn’t do EDGE, so its data connection was really slow, but even worse, you couldn’t close the phone or exit the MMS sending screen until the message had fully been sent, or else the phone would just cancel the send. So if I wanted to send an email or a picture, I had to keep the clamshell open for a minute or two, which was pretty damn annoying. The new phone, I send it, close it, and throw it back in my pocket, making it much easier to send random pics as I walk around Boston.

Where our hero wakes up refreshed each day and doesn’t dread going to work

Posted on by grahams

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.

Bulleted Quasi-Unrelated Information

Posted on by grahams
  • Last Sunday I caught Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story with the film club. It’s a Paintball Mockumentary starring Rob Corddry from the Daily Show. Funny, but you don’t need to see it in a theatre, and you won’t be rolling around on the floor paralyzed from laughter.
  • For whatever reason the past few weeks I decided to catch up with the rest of the world and watch 24. I had watched about half of the first season about a year ago when I was laid up with my leg. I enjoyed the episodes I watched then, but somehow got distracted and never finished it. Well, last weekend I picked up that torch and blew through like 12 episodes of the first season, and moved directly into the second season, which I finished a few nights ago. The show is way over the top, but it’s fun, and eliminating the week-to-week suspense by waiting several years to start the series makes it less frustrating. My dad watches the show, so I’ve seen a few episodes of the third season, from when I was living at home again, but I had no idea what was going on when I was watching it… I watched the first episode of the third season directly after the last episode of the second, which was good, because they left a serious cliffhanger going on there that would have driven me crazy.
  • My new phone is pretty nice so far, but there are a few things that frustrate me. A few of you have asked for a review, I’ll get to that in a week or two, or something.

New Phone has Landed

Posted on by grahams

I got my new phone yesterday, and it was activated this afternoon. It seems that not all the services have finished catching up in the move from T-Mobile to Cingular, so while I seem to be able to receive voice calls, Text Messages and other data kinds of things seem to be blackholed for now. Hopefully this will clear up soon, otherwise I will give Cingular’s support it’s first go-around… Anyway, be aware that there may be some hiccups in the next few days as the carriers catch up…