Fone Phailure!

Like many people, I have a smart phone. In my case it is a Samsung Galaxy SII which I have had for about 21 months.

It isn’t perfect. If it was up to me the changes I would make are:

1. Give it a decent battery life, even at the expense of making it thicker and heavier.
2. …

Yep, that is about the only change I would make. Everything else about it has been fine.

Until the weekend. Then my phone died, and it is resolutely refusing to come back again.

Being of a tinkering persuasion I chose to investigate a little. I managed to find a colleague who had the same phone so I could borrow the battery. Putting the battery from his phone in mine made no difference, so the battery wasn’t the source of the problem.

I then asked another colleague who works in the electronics workshop where I work to prod a few things with a multimeter to see what he could see. He came back pretty quickly to say that when he plugged the phone in he could see a voltage, but that the voltage disappeared when he pressed the on button. He suspected a short somewhere in the body of the battery.

So there was nothing for it but to go and see the nearest Carphone Warehouse shop, which is, luckily only 5 minutes walk away.

The best news is that my phone, being a Samsung, has a two year warranty, and it was still within the warranty period. So its wending its way, who knows where. Unfortunately the store didn’t have any loan phones available, so I left the store feeling very ‘old skool’ without a phone of any kind.

I tried my old HTC phone (HTC Desire) when I got home, and, as both phones are ‘on’ Orange the old phone works with the sim card.

It did leave me with a couple of observations:

1. The screen, which once felt perfectly acceptable, now feels tiny!
2. When you are used to new tech, then old tech feels glacially slow.
3. Both phones are Android, which means that all the contacts etc are available on the old phone. But many of the apps which I would like to install (Chrome, please, the stock browser is horrible) claim to be installed already.

I have a feeling I will get these teething troubles sorted out, just about the time that my proper phone returns to my grateful hands.

There Needs To Be A Word For…

I was listening to Radio 4’s Documentary of the week (last weeks one) titled ‘Do I Have The Right To Be Forgotten?’. It is an interesting exploration of the way that we all put information about ourselves on-line, and we may, in the end, live to regret it.

It got me thinking, and I did something that I haven’t done for a while. I googled myself!

I have a pretty unusual, but not unique name, so I found, as expected, a few hits. Most of them I was already aware of. Some were emails on mailing lists which I sent back in the early days of my Linux usage. They are mildly embarrassing as they show how little I knew back in the day, but they were written a long time ago, and I have learned an awful lot.

There are a few photographs, but not many. They only got indexed if I uploaded them via Ping.fm.

There are some of my namesakes, many of these results are from Facebook. This pleases me because I have deliberately set my Facebook privacy in the past in order to minimise my exposure. This was something I did when I was unemployed and furiously job hunting. Most of the matches that are there are people I am already aware of. I have a namesake living in Spain, but who was originally from the UK. All well and good.

But then I saw a Facebook hit. One of my namesakes is a US citizen who has changed his profile picture to show his solidarity with the National Rifle Association.

Now I know that having the same name as someone doesn’t mean you should expect to share the same philosophies, but to find someone who you would consider abhorrent, that is a bit different. There should be a feeling for the quesy, uncomfortable feelings that that evokes.

Maybe ‘nominative-shameguilt’?