A poem for my newish Samsung Galaxy S

How do I hate thee?

Let me count the ways.

I hate the way you downloaded all my Facebook, GMail and Twitter contacts to my phone's contacts without asking; even every single email address I've emailed before rather than just my saved GMail contacts.

I hate the way I spent literally hours cleaning up your bs auto-downloaded contacts to exclude those Facebook weirdos I'm only friends with out of courtesy or laziness to clean up my list, and those GMail addresses I once sent an email to, only to have you recopy ALL OF THEM when my husband accidentally enabled auto-sync. I hate that the only way to stop you doing this would have been to let you delete them from my GMail and Facebook accounts.

I hate that I can't permanently disable auto-sync.

I hate the way your morning alarm works. I hate that I can't have the "smart alarm" AND have it set to vibrate without playing a melody. I hate that I can't seem to have the snooze function work without a smart alarm.

I hate the way you beep and light up when you're done charging. Because of your poor battery life I have to charge you every night, and because I haven't got quite fed up enough to stop using you as an alarm clock I charge you by my bedside table. Cue getting woken up every night in the wee hours when your battery is full.

I hate the disconcerting way you become uncomfortably hot during Skype calls (I can't say I've noticed it with normal calls).

I hate the way you display sms recipients and senders in my call log, and that there's no obvious way to switch this off. Do you have any idea how many key presses and finger scrolls it takes to just find the last or second last person I called? One button on my last phone. ONE.

I hate the way that if my friend's number isn't in exactly the right place in the contact, even though I definitely have their number saved against one of the five joined accounts linked to their name, you refuse to tell me it's them that called me or smsed me, and I can't even add their number to a new sms I'm composing.

I hate the way you seemed to magically turn yourself off of Silent mode in church on Sunday, treating the whole congregation to my adorable "Pac Man dying" sms notification tone. I know I switched you to silent, so don't try and convince me I didn't.

~~~

Look, so you're quite technologically cool, and your screen and processor and stuff is up there with the other great smartphones. And I love the connectedness of having Skype and Facebook and Twitter right there. But really? I'm hoping some things improve when I upgrade you to Gingerbread, but I am not getting my hopes up too high, either.


Not a lot of love,

Moo

New job

OK, first things first. Here's the long promised post about my new job.

It's quite a funny story how I ended up here. In this post from December about my 30th birthday, I mention the band I hired for the party, the Red Hand Blues Band. Between their sets we chatted and I learned that the double bass player, Martin, runs a development company. He mentioned, conversationally, that they were keen to find some programmers who were interested in working from home or part time. After that (and a tequila with tabasco and orange!) we both carried on with what we were there to do and didn't give it much further thought.

In January I sent my CV to the recruiters I had been working with ever since moving back to SA and, as an afterthought, to Martin as well. I heard back from the recruiters, went on a few interviews; eventually I was one interview with the CEO away from accepting a job with an online contract managment firm.

Cue an email from Martin to say that my CV had ended up in the junk folder, but if I'm still looking would I come for an interview. I almost didn't go, but he seemed keen and I didn't have anything to lose.

After the longest, most comfortable and most in-depth first interview ever, I was really torn because both positions felt like a good fit. Martin was also very keen to get me on board, and during the phone call where I told him I had to weigh my options and make a difficult decision, he told me he'd be buying a computer for me to work on in good faith in the meantime.

The biggest deciding factor that made me choose this job over the other is the diversity of projects they do (rather than maintaining one piece of software like in the other company) and the diversity of technologies they use. The focus is on my own core skill, ASP.NET, but there's a lot of scope for learning new things. There have been several occassions that showed me it was the right decision. Not least of all the boss' amazing attitude towards family and work-life balance when it transpired I was already pregnant at the time of the interview!

It's a small development company, doing mainly web stuff, but for an office with 7 people (one of whom is a designer and one a copy writer), we maintain some seriously heavy-weight clients.

I'm enjoying the work, I'm loving the people, and I'm seriously appreciating the very human and honest managerial style.

I am a little in danger of being that annoying new guy who thinks they should change everything to what I'm used to, but it can be a little frustrating to not have source control or coding standards. While it's a good exercise for me in relinquishing control and adapting, I like to think I do bring some good suggestions that at least give food for thought even if we don't implement them straight away.

So, that's the story of my now-not-so-new-anymore job, and what I believe to be the divine hand in leading me to it.

New post - do your eyes deceive you??

Ok, so I have been promising various people a new post on here for various amounts of time for different reasons.

So I'm going to do one of those lists of things I intend to post about in the near future again, the idea being that I'll update this post with a link to that post when it's done. As if that's worked before...

Anyhoo. Coming up, on Moonica's Musings:

• About my new job that's not so new anymore
• A review of my new(ish) Samsung Galaxy S phone
• Pregnancy updates (yes, that's right, if you've managed to miss it somehow, I'm pregnant, yippee!!)

Thanks for not having given up on me yet (if you're reading this, I'm making the assumption). Now that I've got something interesting to talk about again (see last point above), I may even update the blog semi-regularly.

Moonica.