So I got some exciting news in the form of a possibility late last week. Without getting specific—and therefore getting myself into trouble—let me say that certain solutions may present themselves to several looming problems. As a guy who prefers to reduce problems wherever possible, this is obviously a positive development.

However, the news is tenuous, dependent upon several things happening just so and also a lot depends upon me in terms of how well I can represent myself. What that means is that I spent the entire weekend feeling like I was under a lot of very intense pressure. It’s a stressful thing to want something, but not want to get your hopes up for fear of being assaulted by crushing disappointment and then subsequently finding that the attempts to drive hopeful thoughts from your mind increase the level of stress. Cyclical and recursive in a way that no one would enjoy, that’s how I’d describe the whole weekend.

My efforts to distract my mind from obsession have yielded the following results, which you may or may not care to join me in regarding. Really, it’s up to you.

Ring-a-Ling

I got a new phone. From work, natch, so it isn’t some super sexy slab of awesomeness, but it is 4,399,716,884 times cooler than my old phone. It’s a Motorola v276 and it has a few spiffy features I like. The one thing it has is a functioning voicemail feature, where my previous phone did not.

It turns out that not having voicemail is a strange thing. One might think the reaction to having no voicemail is “I should make sure to have this phone with me at all times since I can’t miss a call and find out what someone wanted.” Maybe a normal person would subscribe to that concept. But not me. I decided that if I wasn’t going to be able to return missed calls, I didn’t care if I missed them at all. As such I barely ever carried my phone around with me.

Now there were other factors: I generally hate having excess stuff in my pockets and the old phone was compact but it was a brick. It’s easily twice as heavy as my new phone and it has maybe 40% of the features the new one does. That discomfort made it even more unlikely to be carried. I also never got any accessories for it, so it had no case, no belt clip, etc. When carrying it can only be accomplished via pocket and that is a poor option, the concept of a cell phone rapidly loses appeal.

In addition to better form factor and a few key accessories (as dorky as a belt clip makes me look, at least it’s a tolerable transportation option, and as long as my comrades and associates can get ahold of me, I assume they’ll cope with having to be seen with a Class-A nerd), it has a camera which is fun in the sense that having a crappy camera on you at all times is fun. I figure it like this: For all those times when I thought, “Man, I wish I had a camera for this—no one will believe it!” Now I do. It’s a little thing, but it keeps me entertained.

I do wish it came with a few games and an easier way to get the excessively lame ringtones updated into something awesome, but it’s better than nothing.

Actually, is not having a cell phone better than having even the coolest one ever? If so, I guess it isn’t better than nothing, but it’s better than before. Improvement: It’s also a good thing.

Strange Design Decisions

A few days (weeks? I dunno, they all blend together) ago I was talking about the flexibility of Unix-style operating systems and contrasting that with OS X, which is sorta Unix-style but covered with a think blanket of sassy GUI goodness that occasionally hampers the “selling point” of Unix.

So last week I was trying to accomplish something with iCal: Specifically getting a recurring event to happen on the last day of the month. The article I found explained how to accomplish this with a fairly simple set of command line acrobatics but the end result had me scratching my head.

This, in essence, is why the developers in the open source Unix universe spend so much of their time carefully crafting sometimes arcane configuration files for all their projects. It’s not that everyone will want to do something out of the ordinary, or even that anyone will want to do something the developer didn’t think was important, it’s that they might. What I think Apple, despite all their design brilliance and the generally high quality of their software, misses often is the fact that things can be simple without being crippled in terms of flexibility.

Update

As it took me forever to get this post finished, I have since encountered further developments on the front mentioned at the top of the post. It turns out that Thursday is now significant. As the outcome of that day will impact the next several years, I classify it as significant.

I’m sorry if my definitions are not up to your lofty standards.