Dave’s Happy Place

Here is my list for the perfect mobile phone. Hopefully Nokia stumble across this and create the “Just for David” Nokia.

MUST haves:
Alarm clock - a must if away travelling
Countdown timer - the one on our stove is broken
Colour screen - it just seems nicer
Small - it’s got to fit in the jeans pocket without a problem.
Changeable covers - for those unlikely occasions where it decides to take a joy ride down the concrete driveway.
Calendar - it’s got to be able to remind me of meetings when I’m at work and away from my desk.
Synchronization with Outlook - that’s what we use at work.
Either Infrared or Bluetooth for the Synchronization - I already have an Infrared adaptor at work and Infrared on my laptop at home. I also have Bluetooth in my laptop.
Good synchronization software - I don’t like using unuseable things.
Good phone editting software - I don’t want to update everything on the phone using the phone.
Good synchronization with Windows Address Book (WAB) - because I don’t have Outlook at home.
Good stand-by time - because I don’t like charging the phone all the time.
At least one good standard ring-tone - because I don’t want to do the whole polyphonic thing, I just want to choose a discrete yet cool ring-tone.
It’s got to be easy to navigate around the phone - I am really starting to dislike the whole Nokia standard scrolling menu. You don’t know what is next and you can’t remember where you just were. There’s enough real estate so move with the times and do the 4 way scroll thing (most new phones have this).
Predictive text - because when I have to send an SMS I hate doing it. The faster the better.
Vibrating alert - because you can’t hear a phone ring when there’s lots of noise about.

NICE to haves
MP3 player - might start taking the train to work and it would be good to be able to listen to music without having to carry along an MP3 player as well.
Predictive text auto word completion - why has no-one done this? PDAs do this as you scribble on the pad. There’s enough screen real-estate to do this on most phones now so why not.

Might add more as I think of them…

Why does every mobile phone these days come with a digital camera? The photos I have seen them produce are pretty poor - definitely no where near the quality of a typical digital camera, even with the 1.3 mega pixel varieties.

Consider one typical use case. You’re out at night with your mates and you’ve had a few beers. At some point someone’s probably going to want to take a photo just because they can. Problem is you’re out at night and there’s no flash on the camera and the only light is the dim corner light in the pub an eternity away. Oh, and did I mention that it’s dark. You probably can’t really see clearly yourself so you probably don’t have much hope of seeing what your pointing at using the LCD.

Anyway, it seems that I am the minority on this subject (otherwise every camera wouldn’t have a digital camera). Plenty of people seem to like taking photos of friends (during the daylight hours) and having that photo show up when that person calls. Quite nice, but I don’t think I would bother and would simply rather have a cheaper, smaller, lighter mobile phone that did what phones are meant to do - let you contact people, and let other people contact you.

Nokia have a few cool phones coming out that don’t have camera’s, but they also don’t have some of the other features that I would like. Currently I have a Nokia 6100, which is the bees nees except it’s slow and that’s getting really frustrating.

The up and coming Nokia 6030 looks like my next phone candidate, or perhaps I’ll move over to Sony. Probably not, because I like the fact that with Nokia phones you can easliy replace the cover if it gets damaged.

Isn’t it strange how some shops seems to have appalling customer service but you can’t seem to pin down why. In this particular instance Digital Mobile in New Lynn have well and truely rubbed me the wrong way.

I think the main thing is that I get the impression they don’t give at rats arse about the customer. It appears that they either just want to sell you the most expensive mobile phone they can (with features that you don’t actually need) or in my case, they don’t seem to particularly care that your phone is broken, which is going to be a real PITA for you.

The other day I was waiting to be served (to eventually find out that nothing had been done with my broken phone) and I overhead a salesman talking with a prospective phone purchaser. In this case it was a girl that seemed to be about late college age. The salesman basically said something along the lines of “you need this phone because it has all the features you could ever need. It’s got bluetooth integration so you can get (i.e. spend more money) a cordless bluetooth headset and walk around with the phone in your pocket and keep talking.”

From the blank expression on the girl’s face she didn’t appear to know what bluetooth was and would likely never need to walk around talking with the phone in her pocket wearing a silly little headset over here ear. Hopefully she didn’t pay the $900+ for the phone he was showing her and got something that would do all that she ever likely needed for

A couple of weeks back the microphone on my phone just simply died. I have Vodafone phoneInsure with my phone for just such a case. Or so I thought, seems I didn’t read the fine print though because I have been royally screwed by them thus far.

Firstly Vodafone phoneInsure isn’t anything to do with Vodafone. My phone died on Easter Friday so I went into a Vodafone retailer. They said they couldn’t do anything since Vodaphone phoneInsure were on holiday for the long weekend (and every weekend) and they can’t access anything on their network to lodge the claim. That’s just ridiculous!

Then I filled out the Vodafone phoneInsure form and faxed it off to them on Tuesday morning after Easter Monday. I then called them 3 hours after faxing it off to see if anything had happened with it. I hadn’t filled in the mobile phone number on the form because it was under the section saying “contact details”. My phone was poked so I left that off. Seems that section is actually used to figure out the account number or something. Why is crappy usability just about everywhere? Anyway they just left the form lying around rather than calling me on the business number that I had filled in to get the phone number they needed.

Anyway, I eventually got the claim number and my girlfriend dropped it into Digital Mobile (a Vodafone retailer) with the claim number. She had to fill in some other form and they took the phone. 4 days later I hadn’t heard anything so I went into Digital Mobile on the Saturday. They still had the phone there! Why hadn’t it been sent somewhere to get fixed I pondered. It seems that since there was a phoneInsure claim number they assumed that the phone was simply going to be replaced. It was just a broken microphone so I was sure that was going to be less than the excess of $125!

Digital Mobile also mentioned that I should have heard something from Vodafone phoneInsure within 48 hours of lodging the claim (which I hadn’t). So I called up Vodaphone to figure out what the process is supposed to be and it turns out they mail out the claim information, which I never got at work. What shabby customer service. At least they should call and check that it had been received. Email would have been faster as well.

On Monday I called up Vodaphone phoneInsure and they said that the claim had been denied because it wasn’t caused by impact or liquid damage. So basically I have been paying $7 a month and need to pay a $125 excess just incase I fall into the pool with my phone or smash it on the ground.

Just to make things worse, when I took it back to Digital Mobile to get repaired they said it was going to take 10 days to repair. 10 days later they called and said it wasn’t going to be covered by Nokia under warranty since it was purchased 13 months ago. Dammit! So now it is costing $108 dollars to repair (which was less than the excess anyway) and I still won’t get it for another 3 business days. By the time I get it back I will of not had a phone for over 3 weeks. What a pain in the arse.

Perhaps it would have been easier to buy a whole new phone!

I’ve done my fair share of painting/renovation to date. Most of this has simply been re-painting in order to make things look more modern or, more commonly, just less old or less crappy (that’s a highly technical painting term). This is why the kitchen cabinets are being done at the moment. The old painting is pretty average, which translates to complete rat-shit. There are runs everywhere and the surface wasn’t prepped first so it peels off in strips if it gets knocked.

Only 20% of the time spent painting is actually spent physically painting though. This is unfortunate since its the only part that is remotely enjoyable. The rest of the time is spent doing mundane stuff like stripping the old paint (particularly unmotivating), sanding back the old paint (particuarly boring), filling holes (not too bad), filling gaps (at least you get to play with a calking gun), resanding (at least this doesn’t take long) and so on.

Anyway, I’ve just finished putting on the first sealer/primer coat on one side of the cabinets so most of the mundane part is over. Yay!

I work in the software business. The fruits of your labour is a CD that contains an installer, some documentation, and ultimately users interacting with nothing more than different coloured pixels on a computer monitor. It seems so … um … un-real. If you turn off the monitor, poof, it all goes away. There’s nothing to hold, feel the weight of, push or click or turn to get things done.

Lately I’ve been working on repainting our kitchen and, although the work is somewhat laborious, at the end of it there will be a beautiful kitchen to be admired every time I go into the kitchen. You’ll actually be able to see the blood, sweat and tears (not literally luckily) that went into the transformation. It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside to think that you were able to, and did, do that work to create something real.

At the same time during the repainting I’ve often thought how frustrating it is to do all the repetitve bits and pieces. For example, there’s three doors that I am working on at the moment. Once I’ve finished one it would be nice to just go Ctrl-C, then Ctrl-V twice.

Perhaps that’s why I stay in the software business because the repitive nature of physically creating things is just not my cup of tea.