Android Gripe

Dear J-

I suspect that much of this phone’s lack of speed may be attributed to the multitasking OS that just doesn’t have enough breathing room. Now that Virgin Mobile is offering a 3G sled for the iPod Touch (2G and 3G) I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be better off returning to the iOS fold at least until they get more of these bugs ironed out. I do not consider that I have a ton of unusual applications installed but the phone says I’ve maxed out the storage space and regularly runs with less than 25M of RAM available (this is still more than 3x the RAM of the computer I used through college, but that was 20 years ago too) which brings all processes to a crawl.

The one download I shouldn’t have to keep running is a task killer to end background tasks. I also shouldn’t have to have three different email programs (Android mail, GMail, and Yahoo! Mail) so perhaps I could consolidate those into a single client (that would save having all three open too). The same people who regularly extol the cost of service on Virgin extrapolate from experiences with their high-end phones, not what’s actually available (one nice but fragile LG and one complex and slow Samsung, whose 2.2 upgrade hasn’t fixed some of the problems I’ve seen). Yet would VMob be able to sell a $400-600 unsubsidized phone with the capabilities to match the service? Considering the payback rate versus comparable contract serviceswould be $30/month or so, that puts you at 13-20 months to recoup the initial investment, by which time you’re looking at your sadly outdated handset and wishing you had some of your time back.

For what it’s worth the phone itself has been pleasingly solid aside from a few oddities — the auto-brightness is easily confused but I choose to look at it as part of its charm, almost like the phone is breathing. If Samsung had spent the extra $5 to double RAM and flash memory space this could easily be a much easier phone to work with, though if the OS was smarter about managing background applications that wouldn’t be an issue. It makes me wonder if it’s that hard to get in on user testing of new phones; I’d certainly have a mouthful of feedback to the service provider of choice here whether or not they’d want to know.

Mike

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Small Stuff

Dear J-

A communications mishap made me come to the vanpool a few minutes later than they left today. Given the traffic (shocking traffic) that we saw last week we decided to push up our schedules by half an hour, but optimistically said we’d make up for it with only a fifteen minute head start. At some point the decision was made to pull up the head start to half an hour too, which I didn’t comprehend and therefore sat and read my book happily while thinking boy, are they getting here late or what? Eventually I got out to peek in the windows of the other people’s cars and, finding them empty, realized what had happened and, chagrined, got back into my car and slunk off to work, my first day back to real work in nearly two weeks.

Our freezer, full on most days, is now stuffed to the point where something falls out every time it’s opened in the wake of my parents’ visit. There is something about us that must say starving kids because every time either set comes to visit we’re left with more food than our little village can, in good conscience, eat by ourselves. The countertops are overrun with produce (grapefruit and oranges from their trees — thrifty folks like them actually save their fruit rather than let it rot on the ground for birds to chew on and domestic cats to bat around in glee). I took a little bit to work, so it’s getting better, but the mountain of stuff just seems neverending.

Point is these are all relatively small things, as all small things are. Annoyances most people would love to have — I didn’t catch the vanpool, so I had to drive MY OWN CAR. I have TOO MUCH FOOD in the house. I think about a man like Qaddafi, who would turn violence against the world (Pan Am Flight 103) and his own people (turning guns on protestors in Tripoli) to stay in power and realize how lucky I have it already. And then you add in two pretty awesome kids — figgy, who never fails to amuse with some clever antic or observation, and Calcifer, who’s already proving to be mellow and great in different ways — and small stuff is all I have to talk about some days. Small is enough.

Mike

Time Out

Dear J-

We had a full day today; sleeping in a bit after watching a late movie (New Moon, to continue my second adolescence as a teenaged girl; as theVet points out, it’s not so much Team Jacob as Team I-Can’t-Believe-Bella-is-such-a-Jerk), breakfast out, barbecue lunch to celebrate some recent birthdays, and more and more aggravation than you could shake a stick at. I have a fair number of triggers and it seemed like those buttons were getting pushed all day long. Peace and quiet? Not so much, really; chaos and mayhem, yes.

The part I hated about the parties my parents hosted were that things would inevitably be picked up and broken; that happened today — it’s not so much the breaking, which can be fixed, as it was the concealment. Meanwhile figgy continues to wage psychological warfare through stubborn recalcitrance: between bedtime and walking Oliver there’s nothing we can do right lately, nothing that will convince her that cooperation is easier than the same old routine of struggle and suffering. There are few waking hours we can spend together that aren’t filled with some kind of stress.

I’m ready to go back to the work week and that’s driving me nuts; after a week away I should be overjoyed in the slightest things, but I believe I just spent too much of my week worrying about me and the inconveniences to me this weekend. I know on an abstract level that things are supposed to be different now with other people relying on me, but that I’m able to backslide so easily worries me. Maybe I keep swirling down a deviation amplification: if everything I see is directed against me, I’m prone to see the worst in every acion rather than trying to stop and understand.

Mike