Fun At Home, Or “Why You Shouldn’t Play Hide And Seek With A Phone”

Posted on by Jordan

Here was the plan for our weekend:

Sleep in Saturday, then Heather would go take some pictures for friends, and Hannah and I would hang out during the morning. The afternoon would be open for whatever, and then we didn’t have any plans beyond Church Sunday.

Let me tell you how things actually went:

2:00AM Hannah wakes up screaming, she was unable to explain why. One bottle and lots of rocking later, she is peacefully sleeping again. Veteran parents may have developed a system wherein both parents aren’t completely disrupted by this kind of thing. Heather and I haven’t really gotten that down. Or maybe we just forgot already. When Hannah woke up every night, we had some sort of system and I think we both felt we were sleeping ok, but now that a middle of the night wake-up is so rare we both end up being disrupted.

5:00AM The On-Call phone rings (thanks to some changes at work I am back on the roster for on-call) and a key system is throwing errors the front-line support guy doesn’t know what to do with. I did a little digging (three cheers for being able to VPN into our systems from home) and talked to the help desk guy and we decided there was a chance this was being caused because some elements of the system weren’t up from their overnight maintenance mode yet. Had I done a little more due diligence prior to heading home from work I may have been quicker to realize what was going on, but my on-call skills are a little rusty. 🙂 Back to bed by 5:45ish

6:00AM Heather and I agree that we are probably done sleeping. Somehow we have lost the sleeping in skill. I start on the traditional Saturday pancakes… right after starting a large pot of coffee. Hannah wakes up a few minutes later, and we have a little family breakfast!

6:30AM Help desk guy calls back, things are still broken. Armed with coffee, I review the error logs again and realize this must be due to an upgrade performed the night before. Queue two hours of phone calls and e-mails working to coordinate a least-downtime solution.

11ish AM Heather is taking pictures and Hannah and I are keeping busy around the house. Hannah by finding everything her little arms can reach while on her tipsy-toes and grabbing it, me by looking for quick-hit chores I can do while keeping her occupied. Wash the sheets! That’s an easy one, I will pile the blankets over here, and as an added intensive to stay out of trouble I will let Hannah play with my phone on top of the pile of blankets. That should about be her ideal distraction for a few minutes.

So, I started the wash, and sat down to see what kind of games Hannah and I could improvise. But wait, somehow Hannah managed to bury my phone deep in these blankets… Nope not in the blankets… maybe under the … nope. Not to worry I have SeekDroid setup on my phone I will just cause it to ring and know what she did with it…. “Unable to contact device” Up to this point I had been a little foggy I suppose, between the short night and the post-crisis-rush feeling I wasn’t anywhere near my sharpest. And yet, it really didn’t take too long to realize where my phone was!

You may have heard of someone who dropped their phone in some water and was able to dry it out with a bag of rice or some similar approach. Those techniques may in fact be effective, but I am willing to bet not on phones that were placed at the bottom of a running washing machine for several minutes!

And really, after that the weekend was fairly uneventful. 🙂

-Jordan

 

Phone Review

Posted on by Jordan

It isn’t like we haven’t done things worthy of blogging about, but I decided I wanted to write down my thoughts on the new phone while it was still kind of new.

First off, what is it: Motorola Droid 2

Touch screen, with a slide-out physical keyboard.

More raw processing power than the computer I so proudly took with me to college 10 years ago. Has more storage space too.

As a phone it works as well as any other phone I have owned.

Beyond being a phone it is little portable computer, complete with internet, GPS and a camera. This let’s it do a lot of things, that don’t seem particularly novel to me right now, but would have been mind-blowing just a few years ago.

Speaking of the GPS and camera… The camera is quite good. Not quite as responsive as my point-and-shoot, making quick snapshots impossible. On the other hand, the quality is more or less on-par, and I always have it with me. Having a camera with you is one of the first steps to actually taking pictures! The GPS is more than functional, but in most applications requires that the screen be lit at the same time you are using it. Running both the screen and the GPS eats the battery in a shockingly short amount of time. This isn’t a limitation when using the phone as an in-car navigation device, as long as I packed a charger, but it means the phone isn’t going to provide constant aid in navigating an all-day hike. To put it bluntly I would guess the phone life when displaying a map and my position is between two and three hours. I did however discover in rare applications when you don’t need the screen on and only want passive monitoring the battery life is much better! Running a tracking tool for recording bike rides only drained about 10% of the battery life in around an hour and a half.

Hmm, so I didn’t even manage to describe all the features without some editorializing… something I have been fighting every time I thought about writing this post.

The problem is, I feel like I need to be using the phone all the time to make it seem like it’s worth it. I know that isn’t really true… but it’s kind of the thought floating around behind anything else I think about the phone. I imagine that will fade, and I can already tell you it would be hard to go back to my old phone (even if it were still working properly)

TL;DR: Great phone, can’t say I *needed* it, but it’s really useful now that I have it.

-Jordan