law of unintended consequences New Years edition

If you have read my blog for a while you might realize that I have ADD.  If you are following along just fine you might have ADD as well.  Of course, it could also be that my medication is working.  It's not working today due to New Years.  See we are changing insurance and the new copays are lower on my medication.  I still have some, but I'm trying to wait till next year to save some money.  I'm sure that was an unintended consequence of switching insurance.

This is especially true since I get my insurance from work and I just spent an hour or so of work time looking for information about how the moon is leaving the earth's orbit because it came up on Google news.  The internet is frustrating on this point.  You can easily find out that the moon is moving away from the earth at 1.6 inches a year, but I can't find anywhere that mentions how much this increases from year to year.  Since gravity gets weaker as distance increases this 1.6 inches should be an exponential increase instead of a linear one.  In other words the 1.6 inches this year should be 1.600000000000001 next year and 1.600000000000003 the next  and so on.  My great *10^34 grandchildren need to be ready.  Did I mention the ADD?

Here is another example of  an unintended consequence.  My wife's family has decided to have a weight loss contest starting tomorrow.  Everyone who is participating is supposed to bring $10 to the reunion in March and see who has lost the most.  The unintended consequence of this is that I have been eating everything I can since I heard about it just to weigh more before I start loosing.  That way the first few pounds are that much easier.  Cheating?  I haven't seen any real rules yet so that makes it hard to cheat.  Definitely an unintended consequence.

By the way Happy New Year

My answer for Owen Gleiberman

My wife pointed me to this article in which Owen asks "Did anyone else find Avatar’s storyline as lacking as I did? And, maybe more to the point, how much does story matter in a visually driven contemporary blockbuster? Does it matter less than it used to? And, if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?"  True to my description at the top I'm not going to register to answer his questions, but I'll answer them here.

The short answer is yes the story does matter.  Without a good story you don't have a good movie.  With a good story you have a chance for a good movie.

However the story is not everything.  You remember that movie with a great story, but terrible acting and cinematography?  Me neither.  I do remember a great movie with a good story, and great acting, but had no special effects.  The movie was "12 Angry Men".  In it the acting was so good that you don't even realize that the whole thing was done in one room.

In a way that movie was the opposite of Avatar.  Avatar had stunning visuals while 12 angry men didn't.  Both had a decent story.  12 Angry Men had great acting while Avatar didn't have access to that level of acting.  Both movies were entertaining, but in different ways.

Seperating Droid contacts

Some people enjoy turkey for Christmas.  However, I am eating crow this year.  If you remember in an earlier post I complained about not having a setting to choose whether or not the contacts were together.  I found that if you edit the contact and then hit the menu you have an option to separate the contacts.

I kinda feel like this.

Avatar More

Earlier I mentioned that Avatar made me think of "Dances with Halo".  The post was real short and I feel like you need a little more explanation.

The "Dances with Wolves" thing comes from the main character being left in enemy territory alone and becoming a member of the enemy tribe.  There are some other aspects to the story that set it apart, but that's the main story.

The Halo reference comes from the idea of marines in space.  Also the way the technology looked advanced, but not too very far advanced from what we use today reminded me of Halo.  In Halo and Avatar the characters were using bullets instead of energy weapons of some kind.  The vehicles were not using some anti-gravity field to move around.  I could imagine the military using battle suits like the ones shown in the movie for this type of thing.  They look lighter than tanks, and I would suspect that legs wouldn't come off the vehicle like treads do sometimes. The downside to this is that they look taller than a tank which means that they are easier to hit.

The graphics were good enough that I couldn't tell that they were graphics.

Avatar

Today, I saw Avatar.  My first impression was "Dances with Halo", but that's not a bad thing.  I liked "Dances with Wolves", and I liked Halo.  If you like sci-fi it's worth it to see this one. 

Merry Christmas

As I get older time seems to go by faster.  I remember when five minutes took several hours.  Now, it's Christmas time.  As you go out getting those last few things remember why we celebrate Christmas.  I changed my page today and put a link in the "Peace on Earth" graphic to remind everyone of what we are really celebrating.

The fact that God sent His Son into this world to save us becomes more amazing to me every day because of my son.  I don't mind telling you that I wouldn't send my son to save you.  You aren't worth it, not to me, and by "you" I mean the whole world including me. The amazing thing is that God felt otherwise... about us.  Don't let this season distract you from the gift that you have been given.

Google

I just saw this article about yet another new phone, but this one is from Google.  I'm not really salivating over this like the article says.  I think the article itself is propaganda, I think the "leaks" are just marketing, and I think that the phone will be one an HTC phone that Google has spiced up a bit and then branded. 

I do like the idea of the phone being unlocked to begin with, but I'm not sure that it will sell.  Most of the time people buy their phones through the carriers by entering into a contract with the carrier.  I’m not sure that the carriers will buy into the menu idea and still subsidize an unlocked phone. 

On a larger scale I’m intrigued at the things that Google is doing as a company.  At first Google was just a search engine/marketing company.  Now they are doing web browsers, cell phone operating systems, maps, email, corporate email, productivity software, and operating systems.  The article that I started with begins by saying “Watch out Apple”, but it looks more like it should be watch out Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell and anyone else in the technology sector.  I included Dell because after Google got android on phones they are contracting to make their own phones.  It’s not a big leap to think that they would do the same thing with Chromium.  I like these developments.  I would like to log in to Google Apps someday and take care of problems that happen on one of my branches Google computers that are running Chromium, or have someone in the company able to coordinate service using Google latitude that was deployed to our android phones. 

I’m concerned that they wont be able to pull it off.  I’m not questioning their technical skills.  I just think that as a company Google will not be able to focus on doing these other things well and maintain their focus on doing search.  I hope I’m wrong in this.

The Droid adventure continues

Yesterday I posted about a problem I had with the Droid voice search.  I have fixed the problem.  Well, I think I fixed the problem.  When I posted the problem on this blog I also posted a complaint on the Motorola support forum.  Doing this required me to register which in turn required the serial number of my phone.  So it is possible that one of the techs at the support group reached out and fixed something over the air, but they haven't taken credit for doing it.  I handle some of the helpdesk calls at work and I take credit for fixing stuff if they call me.  I do this even if I didn't do anything to fix the problem because I will get the blame for the computer not working even if I didn't mess it up.  So I think I fixed the problem.

Here is what I did:
First I exported all of my contacts from Outlook.  I have multiple email addresses, and almost all of my contacts are in Outlook.

Next I imported them to Gmail.

Then I went into settings > Privacy> factory data reset.  I had to reactivate the phone.  When I did I only told it about my gmail account.

Then I called someone.

Then I joined the phone to one of my other accounts and tested the phone call again.

Here's what I think the issue was:

I think that the phone does not look at Exchange contacts in the same way as it looks at Gmail contacts.  The first time I tried the voice dial thing I tried to call someone who was not on the Gmail contact list.  Somehow this confused it and it got stuck searching the web instead of looking at the contacts.

I didn't spend as much time as usual trying to get my thoughts into coherent words this time.  I apologize for this.  I just wanted to get this fix posted.

More on the Droid

I should have just put all my findings in one blog.  I wasn’t thinking about how separating the different complaints would look.  Sorry about that. 

I have the car dock.  This makes the phone answering and speaker thing even more annoying because the phone knows it’s in a car dock, but still wants me to swipe to answer, and it wants to send the conversation to the regular phone instead of the speaker.  I think that Motorola makes Bluetooth kits which would explain this problem.  The other problem that I have in the car dock it that the voice dial does not work.  A co-worker also has the droid.  On his phone the voice dial works.  When you press the search button you can say “Call” and the phone part comes up to ask you who to call.  On mine doing the same thing results in a Google search for the word “call”. 

Yet, periodically it gives me this message to mock me.

I told my Verizon rep that this does not work.  I think it's been three weeks now, and I haven't heard anything from him.  Apparently he doesn't work either.  I'm not the only one with the problem.  You might notice my post on the Motorola site.  If you are about to buy a Droid make sure that you test this before you walk out the door since some of the phones work and others don't.

I have posted a lot of complaints about the Droid, and if you will bear with me I should be able to finish up (unless I find something else).

I like the combined inbox.  I have more than one email account, and it's easier to check them all in one place.  They tried to combine the contacts some as well and messed it up a bit for me.  My father's nickname is Mike.  His name is Roy, but everyone has always called him Mike.  My father's father and his father before him were named Roy.  My grandmother started calling my father Mike to lessen the confusion.  The nickname stuck and it is my actual name.  Thus like my father I can be called Mike, but I don't have the jr after my name.  Instead of calling me Roy to really confuse people I have always been Michael and my father is Mike.

"Neat story, but what does it have to do with your phone" you say?  Well, since I assumed you said that I'll tell you.  When the phone imported my contacts from the Exchange server it saw Mike and Michael with the same last name and assumed that they were the same person.  This wouldn't be a big deal except that there is no setting that I can find to tell the phone to treat the two as different.

Another thing I noticed is with the lattitude part of the maps.  It seems to almost work.  By that I mean that someone who I have shared my location with can get my last updated location, but the updates seem to be sporadic, and I can't find any setting that will allow me to change how often this update get's sent.

This leads in to the feeling that I have gotten throughout dealing with the phone that there are settings beyond my reach.  I don't really want to have to adjust everything on the phone, but I do want to be able to.  I feel like I could fix some of these things on my own if there was a setting to change.

Droid battery

I'm tempted to create a new blog and name it "Mike's Gripes". Keep in mind what I said at the beginning about how I liked the phone in general. There are plenty of good things about the phone that the marketing departments of Verison and Morotola should be letting you know about. I feel that since they are already bringing you all the good stuff it is more valuable to hear the things that they wont be telling you.

For instance, the battery is not as good as I would like. Seems like all that neat stuff that it does takes power. I opened the battery cover on my phone (don't do this with yours) and took the battery out to get an idea of the size and weight of the battery. The weight is barely noticable, and it's fairly thin. It's thin and light enough that doubling the size would not cause me any grief.

Above I mentioned that you shouldn't open your battery door. The problem that I have come accross with it is that it comes off more easily than I want. I hesitated bringing this up because I realize that there's a balance between comming off at a slight breeze and needing a cutting torch to change the battery. What I want is to be able to get the battery cover to open when I want to while not having it fall off the phone as a result of getting out of the car (which happened last night). The cynical side of me wonders if this is not a feature designed to sell after market replacement battery covers. I tend to doubt this though since you can prevent the cover from coming off by putting some duck tape on the cover right over the Motorola, Google and Verizon logos. While you have the duck tape out you can go ahead and make a case for the phone (I'm never buying a cell phone case again). 

Tiger Woods

I just saw the SNL skit about Tiger Woods.  I thought it was funny. I suspect there is more truth to it than we imagine.

 I have some advice for Tiger and all of the celebrities out there (not that I think they are reading my blog).  This bit of advice was given to me by CSM Purdy many years ago when I was in the Army.  He told me "Son, you can't hide nothing from nobody."  I don't remember what I was trying to hide, but over the years this has proven to be true.

Droid

At the risk of seeming like a grouch I'll go on about what I don't like about the Droid.  The swipe to answer thing is neat to look at.  There are a couple of problems with it though.  First of all it takes some getting used to.  My wife who also has one has swiped the wrong way several times.  This turns the sound off so that the next call does not ring.  


This isn't a big problem.  This is just something to get used to.  The problem comes when you are driving.  I don't have a Bluetooth hands free set up in my car.  That means that answering the phone requires me to swipe the phone and then somehow put it on speaker while not crashing.  


The reason this bothers me is that it would be easy to fix.  The phone has a gps.  It wouldn't be that hard for a piece of software to look at the current speed and change this behavior if say the speed was greater than ten miles per hour.  Then you could give the user two big buttons and send the call to speaker if the user decides to answer.    This wouldn't be that bothersome for a passenger and it might just prevent an accident.

           

  

Droid copy and paste

I got a droid a little while back. This is strange for me as I usually don't go out and get the newest toys to come out. Instead, I tend to wait til the price comes down and the bugs get worked out. This time, however, I went ahead and took the plunge.

Overall I like the phone. There are some things that I don't like about it though. These have not been critical for me, but they might cause problems for others. Rather than create one long post with all the problems so far I intend to create multiple posts to break it up a bit.


First of all, I tried to copy some text from an email. I can't find a way to do it. I was trying to fix another problem and got tired of having to manually enter a password on one of my accounts because the characters are hard to get to on the droid keyboard. The Blackberry I had before could do this. Why wouldn't a droid?

Google changes the world

Just noticed this.  Apparently, there are more than 7 continents.  Go to Google maps and select terain view and zoom all the way out to see what I mean.