all things me

I’m about to upgrade my phone’s firmware. Wish me luck!

It’s been acting up lately: rebooting suddenly. The screen pixelates and goes black, and after a while it reboots to the active idle screen without having to enter the PIN code. Odd and annoying. And today was the last drop — it started playing Nokia Tune when someone called me! Of course, there are many things that can cause this but then I had just had it. That’s it, you’re getting an upgrade.

Let’s see what happens…

@10:03 pm: At least it’s not bricked. The computer says the upgrade was successful.
So, I had done a backup of everything on the phone and now I restored it. It brought back my selected theme and even the very customised menu. It is missing some of the applications I’ve installed but I listed those (the important ones) before the upgrade.

So, now I’m at version 4! My old version was 2.0628.0.0.1. I hadn’t upgraded before because my operator either hadn’t approved of many of the previous versions or hadn’t bothered to approve them.

Unfortunately, now the music player doesn’t open directly to the playlist but in a completely useless menu. Now there’s one extra step between me and my lovely music. Getting it on full blast (ehm, 20% volume) quickly is sometimes crucial — after a long day at work and there’s a kid, or just other kind of noisy crowd, on the subway/train/bus.

The colour palette at the train station this morning (Friday morning, that is):

(Not very good quality because a) camera phone + little light, b) I thought I needed to hurry to catch a train.)

A couple of things I’ve noticed in my phone after the upgrade:

• Multitasking/memory management is better: the music player no longer crashes if I want to use e.g. Widsets at the same time.
• Music player works correctly with the headphone remote: previously when I hit pause, the music paused but didn’t restart when I hit play. If I hit stop, the player shut down. Now when I hit pause, the song pauses and restarts without a hitch. Also, stop button stops it and playing starts from the beginning. I would prefer the stop button to close the application, though, because I’m afraid it’ll start playing on its own if I forget to lock the remote.
• The font seems bigger or clearer. Also, bold font has appeared in many applications — maybe now the phone obeys what the 3rd party programmers have intended.
• [Added Feb 12] The email program no longer crashes when I want to remove an email from both the phone and the email servers.

The phone hasn’t rebooted accompanied with pretty coloured pixels — but it’s too early to tell if the upgrade fixed the problem I had.

Just when you think — again — that you’ve misjudged someone, they remind you that you were right all along. Or maybe my sense of humour is too different from theirs.

Today as I was eating my lunch and reading Duma Key (S. King) one of the nice co-workers noticed that I’d read a lot since yesterday (yup, I started reading before bedtime and suddenly noticed it was wayyy past my bedtime). The annoying one made a comment that I’m probably reading secretly in my cubicle. I replied, “yeah, I’m known to be such a lazy and slow one.”

Accusing me of reading on company time? Unbelievable.

I’m on summer vacation today and trying to advance my course work. I’m taking a course on writing and I’m finding it very difficult to write about something I’m not the least bit interested in. We don’t have much material nor instructions, these are supposed to be “free compositions.” But what if I can’t think of anything to write about “image” and “profile”. Or “surprising situation in language usage.”

Yesterday I went to see the construction site with Dad. Nothing much seemed to have happened on the outside but my neighbour (current and future neighbour, as it happens) told me the floors should be done.

We went around back to check the balcony and they’d put up rails now. Dad even peeked in the bedroom window and urged me, too. I did take a look and saw the bedroom closets. Dad saw all the way to the kitchen but I didn’t because the window is high for my height and I couldn’t block out the light well enough to see far into the dark apartment.

But whoa, is the balcony big or what. I seriously have to think how to furnish it. One or two chairs around a small round table are not enough. I could put a hammock in there.

Dad also pointed out that while I’m talking about “a long time to wait” for even the info on move-in day which is mailed to us seven weeks prior, that day is not very far away. It really isn’t!

On Friday of next week I’ll finally get to see my apartment! I know, I could’ve booked a viewing earlier but I didn’t want to see the under-construction mess it has been in. Now I received an invitation: Each occupant gets a whole hour of walking around the apartment, ooh’ing, aah’ing — and taking photos!

Can’t wait! Stand by for photos.