cell phones

I’ve had a Blackberry Pearl for a few months now and, in general, I love it. It’s a great phone. I love that I can check scores on ESPN and use Google maps and — as a surprise bonus — I can send and receive phone calls and text messages. Here’s what bugs me: The keyboard lock feature is not smart. Like most “candybar” type phones with an exposed keyboard, there is a way to “lock” the keys so you don’t accidentally dial numbers when it’s in your pocket. If you hold down the pound key (#) for a couple of seconds, the keyboard locks. Issues:

1. To unlock the keyboard, you push the pound key and the call key. But if you hit the scroll ball, you get a screen with options “Unlock”, “Emergency Call”, and “Cancel”. If you choose “Unlock”, instead of unlocking — which is what you’d expect — it tells you to push the pound key and the call key to unlock it. Okay, yes, I know that. Why is one of the options “Unlock” if it doesn’t actually unlock the phone? Not smart.
2. When someone calls, if the keyboard is unlocked it automatically unlocks so you can answer the call. But when you finish the call it doesn’t return to locked state; you have to hold the pound key to lock it again. Not smart.

Those aren’t major bugs, but I wish there was a way to correct them. I found some software to let me change the color of the LED behind the scroll ball, but the only hack I found to change the way the keyboard lock feature functions doesn’t seem to work.

The first thing I did after crossing the marathon finish line was call my girlfriend so she could come get me. It was the last call I would make with my trusty RAZR. My hands were slick with sweat and the phone was coated with the salt and grime that had evaporated from my body during the 26.2 mile run. When it smashed to the ground it shattered as if it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen. The stomping feet of dozens of runners crushed what was left of it into the asphalt. I would have laughed if I’d had the strength. Instead I just sort of stared at it and made a sort of grunted smirk.

On Monday morning I went to the Cingular store near my office and bought a new RAZR. I got the same model for $100 (with a $50 mail-in rebate). It took me a few minutes of trudging through the Motorola site, but eventually I found the instructions to pair my Bluetooth headset to the phone.

This month’s issue of Discover Magazine featured an article on The Math of . . . Changing Lanes. It was the usual drek on reasons why I shouldn’t drive like a maniac. It’s the sort of thing my mom would clip and mail to me with an “I told you so”-type note attached. Sneaking its way into the first column is this almost-too-crazy-to-believe fact:

… drivers are about 35 percent less likely than usual to die in an accident in the month after receiving a traffic ticket, and that driving fatalities increase immediately following the Super Bowl — 68 percent in the losing team’s state but only 6 percent in the winning team’s state.

So they’re saying that February (or, lately, with the longer post-season, March) *always* has more traffic fatalities than January (or February)?! That’s hard to believe. That’s very hard to believe.

How’s this for serendiptious alliteration? Last night after seeing a television commercial for Cingular cellular I said:

I would switch to Cingular but Sarah said their service sucks.

I used to work for a paging company about 600 years ago. InterLink Paging. This was back in the dark ages, when mobile phones were still the size of shoe boxes and it actually made sense to own (or lease) a “beeper”.

Anyway. We used to have a policy that a phone number had to be out of service for at least 6 months before we were allowed to give that number to a new customer. It made sense to me. Sure, every now and then if we were “low” on numbers - usually an order hadn’t been fulfilled by Southern Bell in time - we might assign someone a number that had only been out of commission for five months or something wacky like that.

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I don’t know if I’m ever going to get used to “hands-free” kits for mobile phones. I was inadvertantly fooled by a man speaking into his “hands-free” kit this afternoon. This was probably the thirtieth time this has happened o me.

I was strolling through the Century City Mall when I found myself walking towards a small, bald, jogging-suited man - probably 5′6″ or so. He looked me right in the eye and said, “Bulls***, MAN!” with a huge smile on his face, as if I had just told him something incredible. I stared at him for a second with what I’m sure was a terribly confused look on my face. Then I realized he was talking into a miniscule microphone dangling from a fishing-line-thin wire plugged into his ear.

This happened to me just a few days ago at the Coffee Bean, too. I was holding the door open for a guy walking into the store. Instead of giving me the universal “guy nod of thanks” or anything like that, he looked me right in the eye and said, “You gotta be SH***ING me!”.

A recent survey of 6,000 people by recruitment company TMP Worldwide found that irritating mobile phone rings are the top workplace nuisance, followed by malfunctioning equipment such as photocopiers, fax machines and printers.

I recently finished my first stint as a contract programmer. (Although I was employed for a few months in 2000 on a contract for Home Shopping Network Direct, a subsidiary of the television channel.) I worked from December 1st until January 31st for a company in City of Industry, CA called 2by2.net. I did some active server page development and worked on their jabber-based IM for a while. It was a decent gig, even though I really didn’t fit into their corporate philosophy. Easily the most annoying aspect of the job - aside from the hour-plus commute (each way!) - was the fact that every single phone in the office had a distinct ring tone. They were all unbearably aggravating. What was even worse was that every single employee had a mobile phone and all of those had distinct, cute-sy rings. If you bring your cell phone to work you really should keep it on silent alert. Research proves that you’re probably bugging the hell out of someone.

“It’s the interface, stupid!”

I got in a discussion recently about text messaging on mobile phones. I don’t understand why so much money is being pumped into this concept. Even those nifty little thumb-keyboards are not going to get people to start sending eMail over their mobile phones en masse. Y’know why? BECAUSE IT’S A MOBILE PHONE!

Why do we have eMail?

1. To transfer files
2. To send spam
3. To communicate with someone who cannot or will not allow us to reach him on a telephone

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Greetings from Amazon.com.
We thought you’d like to know that we shipped your items today, and that this completes your order.
Thanks for shopping at Amazon.com, and we hope to see you again soon.

One of the reasons cell phones are such a hazard is that people hold them, keeping one of their hands from the wheel. That’s why many of the proposed laws ban hand-held cell phones. But that’s just a start. If holding a cell phone is dangerous, so is holding a hamburger. That’s why a law should mandate that McDonald’s sell only hands-free Big Macs in their drive throughs.

New Origami Trick: Turn Paper Into a Functional Phone

“I recently held a working prototype of the new phone–about the size of a credit card–and listened to the ringing at the other end, marveling at the quality of the audio transmitted through the combination earpiece and microphone. And when my call was done, I unwrapped one of the phones like a roll of toilet tissue to examine its unusual innards.”

Baby! It really doesn’t get much cooler than this! My Visor and my cell phone combined?! Awesome! The only drawback is that my Visor is much larger than my phone. What I really want is a Visor/phone combo that’s only as big as my phone. With a camera. That plays video games. And unlocks my car. And it better be shiny.

The Sprint PCS web site is cool. I can see exactly how many minutes I’ve used on my phone this month. You can add features and change passwords and voice mail and yadda yadda yadda too. Technohip.

Now I have one of these. Ho ho ho.