Blessed by the Potato

After moving in, we noticed that the relatively new (<4 years old “Crosley”) washing machine was not doing a very good job of getting the water out of our clothes in the spin cycle. It got progressively worse so that after just a few weeks, there were still large puddles of water in the bottom of the tub. A closer investigation revealed that the motor had gotten so weak that it wasn’t actually moving the tub at all for the spin cycle: it was just making noise and pretending to work. We called our landlord, who called the repair people. They took a look, and found that the tub seal had broken and water had been seeping into the motor and the rest of the undercarriage: the motor bearing had rusted out and the resistance was just too much for it to overcome and drive the spin cycle. The estimated repair cost was over $400, and this is a washer that’s already had the tub seal repaired once before (the last tenant told us to keep an eye on it). At first, my landlord authorized the repairs, but I talked to her for a bit and suggested that just getting a new washer might be a better plan, and not too much more expensive. She agreed, and told me to basically pick one out and send her the bill. I went for a reasonable, middle-of-the-road Kenmore top-loader that’s also reasonably energy efficient (important since I pay the water and hydro!), it also happened to be on sale for $500 so it was pretty close to the repair cost for the old Crosley (a brand I’ve never heard of, but is supposedly manufactured by Maytag).

Sears delivered it within a few days, and the delivery went very quickly: the guys came in, took away the old washer, hauled the new one down the stairs, connected it and were gone in less than 10 minutes. However, our new washer was possessed. Not surprising, since the bill came to $666 after tax and delivery. During the spin cycle of the first load, it started violently shaking, attempting to walk its way across the room and possibly destroy itself in the process. The instructions said it was important to level it properly or “some vibrations” may be present. So, Wayfare and I spent nearly an hour carefully levelling the thing with no sucess (and many cuts on my hands in the process — they sure don’t sand/grind the sharp edges on the sheet metal around the bottom!).

Finally I gave up and said that there’s no way the washer can be that sensitive to being perfectly level, and called Sears to sort the mess out. They went through the troubleshooting guide with me: was the load uneven? (No, it was barely a load at all, just a few shirts and one pair of pants) Were all the shipping restraints removed? (I said yes, I specifically saw the guy pull the yellow zip tie out of the back that he said held the guts together). Was it level (oh, hell yes). Finally she said there might be something wrong with the washer and set up an appointment to send someone out to look at it next week. After I hung up I looked in the garbage to just double check that the guy got the ziptie out properly. The manual clearly showed a picture of a long tie with two cotter pins attached to it. In the trash was a short yellow tie, and no cotter pins. Cursing, I moved the washer out from the wall and looked in the hole in the back: sure enough, a ripped-off yellow zip tie was stuck in there. With a handy pair of pliers and many stabs at it, I finally managed to pull it out (with, what would you know, two cotter pins attached to it). It was at least twice as long as the piece in the garbage, and the washer worked fine after that. I was pretty pissed that the guys were in such a hurry to get in and get out that they didn’t check that the cotter pins actually came out with the zip tie when they yanked on it, or even that the zip tie was even approximately the right length (it looks like he tore off the third of it that was sticking out the back — there should have been a lot more zip tie, and I think he should have known that). Anyhow, that itself didn’t cause any permanent damage to the washer, though it is a bit of a piss-off since my landlord paid $85 for them to deliver and set up the washing machine. Unfortunately, I caused a bit of damage to the brand new washer when I tried to walk it back towards the wall: I pulled on the top instrument panel to get leverage, and rather badly bent the bit of sheet metal around the back of it. :(

Anyhow, I found out this morning that my grandmother passed away after having a bad stroke this weekend (she was in the hospital all week), so I’m leaving for PEI for the funeral. I’m holding up ok: everyone seemed to think this stroke was going to be the last, so we’ve had a bit of warning to prepare mentally.

For years my parents have raved about “Oliver’s” (Oliver & Bonacini) at Bayview Village [Sheppard & Bayview, North York]; my mom goes there for lunch so often the staff come up to her to say hi when she’s out shopping (or when they’re on their way out if she goes for dinner). Today they dragged me there for a nice family dinner (which the siblings were smart enough to duck out of at the last minute).

I have to say I wasn’t very impressed with the place. Well, the place was actually quite nice: it was quiet, well lit, and had inoffensive decor. The staff was nice and friendly, though we happened to arrive right between the lunch and dinner rush so they were short-handed and didn’t have a clean table ready for us (even though it was only about 10% full). Once seated we had to wait a long while before our waiter came onto his shift, too.

The food all looked excellent, but didn’t seem all that tasty. My dad had the halibut special, and said it was a very good piece of fish that was cooked well, but just didn’t have any outstanding flavour. It was just fish with lemon. I had spring rolls and bruscetta, usually a safe choice for my very limited palette. Both were very oily and relatively tasteless (there weren’t even any onions in the bruscetta!). I was also a little miffed at the pizza: we ordered a “Prosciutto” which has “vine ripened tomatoes, bocconcini & tomato sauce” sounded like a nice, plain pizza for me. It sounded just like the “Margherita” above it, except it also had tomato sauce (and how I hate “gourmet” pizza that just puts globs of cheese down amongst tomatoes and considers it worthy of the name “pizza”). I knew already that bocconcini is a type of soft cheese similiar to that holiest of pizza holies, mozzarella; while I tend to prefer old-fashioned mozzarella, this would probably be a type of pizza I could eat. When it came, it was absolutely smothered in ham: turns out “Prosciutto” is a type of ham. Who knew? It’s something that I’ve found annoying in the pizza world: giving pizzas names on the menu, and then just hoping that you can get the kind you want. Often people will get extra things added or something held off, and in this case what seems like a name (“Margherita”, “Roma”, “Tuscan”, “Sofia”, “Prosciutto”) is actually one of the ingredients, but not included in the list of ingredients below the name. Though I suppose it can help indecisive people put together a set of toppings, and suggest extra toppings for adventurous people to put together (which usually helps the pizza place push more toppings).

Something else that really grated me was the notice on the bottom of the menu that “for the sake of all our customers, we cannot allow substitutions”. It just seems so arrogant to me that the chefs could think that the dish they put together would be absolutely perfect for everyone, and that they aren’t willing to go to the extra work to customize it for each person. It’s like the restaurant is saying that the ego of the chefs is more important than the preference of the customer. And oddly enough, it tends to only be these hoity-toity places that have those sorts of rules. You can almost imagine one of the annoying chefs from the food network (there are lots of good hosts on TV too, don’t get me wrong, but you all know there are a few chefs on that network that just make you cringe and your stomach turn at what they throw together) coming out to lecture you about how the saltiness of the anchovies will play nicely against the bitterness of the balsamic vinegar and refuse to take no for an answer, no matter how much you try to tell them that anchovies and vinegar in pasta is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

While I’m on the subject of poor menu descriptions, I’ll talk about Symposium, a cute little place in London where you eat from these big armchairs. They have fairly good bruscetta (or they did 2 out of 3 times I was there), but you can find it in two different places in the menu. In the appetizers section, it’s billed as tomatoes and goat cheese on bread, which is sort of… ugh. Later on, with their pastas, it’s billed as garlic, tomatoes, and onions lightly covered in mozzarella and parmasean, which sounds much better. I don’t know if they have two different types, or if it’s just a mistake on the menu, or what the story is, but I’m always careful to point to the one in the pasta section, just in case.

Anyhow, to finish off my review of Oliver’s, I’d have to say that if you want to go to a swanky/trendy, downtown restaurant with decent (though not great) food, and show off big bills ($90 for the three of us) without actually having to go downtown, then Oliver’s is the place for you.

I’ve been so pissed off at the LED christmas lights they’ve had out recently. LEDs have the potential to make great christmas lights since they’re efficient and can be all small and twinkly, so it was such a shame that most of the lights were those giant gaudy faceted ones. Today, however, I found some at Canadian Tire that have really small white lights with no crazy facets or anything. They’re perfect! They only came in the long strings of 100, but that works for me… and if they’re efficient enough, I might even use them to light my room after Christmas :)

So I just finished telling someone that I was going to stick with Bell rather than Rogers for my phone service because there just wasn’t any price advantage with Rogers for a basic line, and that I had excellent service/sales reps with Bell the last 4 or 5 times I had to call.

The process of moving my line however, is making me reconsider that.

For those that don’t know, I’m going to be moving out of my halfway-to-res (including food fights in the hallways and monthly fire drills!) apartment into a very nice looking house that’s closer to the hospital. That’ll happen around the end of November. I had heard rumours that you could get stuck with last-minute hassles if you don’t give the phone/cable/hydro companies at least 30 days notice of your move, so last week sometime I called and let them know.

The first call went smoothly enough: “Sure thing, November 27, we’ll move that line over for you and it’ll be operating at the new address around 8 am, guaranteed by 5 pm. Would you like wiring insurance for the new place?”

Then, they call back a few days later and were very rude to Wayfare (her summary “hey bitch, you called me!”), and demanded that I call them back without really saying why. When I called back I got a pleasant person who explained that there was a problem with my move order because there was a line already in use there without a move-out order. I said “Hey, it’s a month away, but trust me, they’re moving.” Then I kinda put my foot in my mouth just a little bit by giving them more information than their tiny brains can handle “They should be moving out on the 18th, and I’ll move in the 27th or so.” “Ok sir, I’ve changed your order to move the 18th now.” “Whoa! No! Bad phone monkey! Keep it the 27th of November [at this point I still wasn’t sure of the date we’d move, and figured later was better than early, since we’d probably have to spend a fair bit of time cleaning/painting/repairing the old place after we moved]” “Ok, November 27th it is…”

Sure enough, today, October 27th rolls around aaaaaaaand my phone’s been cut off. The message when I pick up says the phone can only be used to call Bell at 310-BELL, so I do. After dealing with “Emily” I get a tech who speaks very little english with a heavy Indian accent and a fuzzy phone connection. She says that it shows on her screen that my order to move is for November 27th, and also that my line’s been cut off. No idea why that might be, but she can’t do anything about it… I need to call back in the morning for the day staff.

Grr… what happened to leaving a few people on the phones at night with the power to actually do something?

Update: I phoned in this morning, and got a decent person. Turns out the move is November 27, but the cut-off date had been mistakenly entered as October 27. To turn it back on, all they have to do is flip a switch in the central office, which I’m told will happen today… but Wayfare’s having conniption fits because she’s got an important teleconference at 1…

My old cell phone had a small crack in the antenna, and its already mediocre reception became downright shitty. At the same time, my parents decided to upgrade their phones from that same Samsung to the new Motorola Razr V3C (they upgrade their phones every 2 years or so). Since I’m on a family plan with them, they got me one too. It’s a very expensive phone, and Bell offers $125 or $175 (IIRC) off for committing to a 2 or 3 year contract (respectively). I was all for signing up for 2 years again; we haven’t changed cell phone plans in over 6 years, when we left Rogers and the permanently-mounted carphone and got modern portable cells. Moreover, since we’re on a family plan, we pay practically nothing for each phone (I think it’s less than $20 per extension, though that’s because we only have like 200 minutes to share — not that we even use that much), so the savings would be significant. Nonetheless, my mom was afraid of locking in to that long a time and bought the phones outright (yikes!).

I’ve had it for a week now, and here are my thoughts:

The Hardware

The look is fairly distinctive, and you’d have to be living in a cave not to have seen a Razr ad somewhere. I like it. First off, the very fact that it’s a flip-phone is going to drastically reduce the number of calls I accidentally make from my pocket. The screen is quite nice, a colour LCD with something like 200×100 pixels (about 1″ wide by 2″ tall). There’s also a small screen on the back (about 1 cm square) that displays the time, date, signal strength, battery power, and a thumbnail version of your wallpaper when the phone is closed.

The keypad is a little different, being a single piece of metal rather than discrete buttons. I find it makes finding the keys without looking a little harder, though it does help make the phone thinner. There are three buttons on the side, up by the screen. First is the fairly standard volume up/down rocker on the left. Just above that is the speakerphone button. The speakerphone function is pretty neat, and seems to pick up my voice from 3′ away clear enough for the person on the other end to know what I was saying, though they could definitely tell I wasn’t speaking normally into the phone. Then, on the right side, is the voice activation button. This is in a really bad spot, since it’s directly opposite the volume key, and I invariably hit it with my thumb when trying to squeeze/stabilize the phone to adjust the volume. The function itself is pretty cool, though. You press it, and then you can give voice commands to the phone, including having it look up and call someone from your phone book, check the battery status, check the signal, or dial a number you dictate. There’s no need to train the phone or record your friends’ names in advance, it seems to do a good job of doing a speech-to-text conversion. However, while it will recognize just about any name in your phone book, it only has access to a limited number of phone functions. In particular, the one other thing I would want the voice command feature to open up doesn’t work: recording a voice memo. More on that later.

There’s no external antenna, so I should be ok for a while without snapping it off. The signal is quite good, even in my parents house (which is some strange signal black hole, second only to the cottage on PEI, where our phones invariably try to connect to the towers across the Northumberland Straight in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, rather than the one 4 km away, but that sits oddly enough behind a large hill, rather than on top of it). For the first time ever, Wayfare has asked me to speak softer, so the microphone has very good pickup (helped, of course, by the fact that flip phones inherently get better voice quality by being longer and closer to your mouth when open). The battery life is also pretty good, running for 4 days on standby, along with a day spent inputting my contacts and playing with the settings, etc.

It’s also a camera phone, with a ~1 megapixel camera on it. The camera isn’t too bad for a low-res camera, but I haven’t found a way to view the pictures on anything other than the phone’s screen (which is decidedly nowhere close to a megapixel resolution). It has a 4x digital zoom, but no other way to focus and no flash, which isn’t surprising for a phone. While it might help for those rare moments when you want to take a picture but only have your phone with you, I find it’s not really worth it for camera phones to exist at all. Just by the very possibility that you might use your phone to take a picture, you’re no longer allowed to use your phone in the locker room (though that was a faux pas to begin with), or on tours of our lab, etc. Not worth it, in my opinion (plus that’s got to be a fairly large contribution to the price tag).

The charging port is mini-USB, which should make cross-compatability with other chargers possible in the future (e.g.: the Blackberry also charges via a mini-USB port). More on this below…

The Software

All this neat hardware stuff is nearly killed by the software.

For starters, there are 6 options at the phone’s “home screen”, and you access each one through either one of the 4 directions on the direction keypad, or the two “soft keys” just above that by the screen. My first instinct would be to use the direction pad to move some sort of selection box amongst the options (or to perhaps scroll through more) and then select with one of the softkeys, send, or the center button of the direction pad. Instead, hitting a direction key instantly opens the function on that side. There’s no clear way to open up a more detailed menu (turns out you just hit the centre part of the direction pad), and while that information is in the manual, it wasn’t really explained well enough or emphasized early enough — something I think should have been done since no one in my family found it intuitive (though it might save time when you get used to it and get it tweaked right). The 6 default options are not ideal, at least to us: you have your mobile browser, games/apps, contacts, recent calls, picture viewer, and messenging centre (for voicemail and text messages). It took a few days, but I realized that you can change what those 6 options are through the preferences menu, buried 3 levels deep after you hit the centre button to get the general menu (there is no “menu” button, unlike my Samsung phone).

So, the first thing I did was replace mobile browser, recent calls, and games (it doesn’t come with any games, you have to buy them!) with calculator, voice record, and datebook. The fact that it comes with a calculator is going to be really handy, and not something I’ve seen in a cell phone before. The datebook will also be quite useful to me. But the thing that had me saying “holy shit!” out loud is the voice record option. About 2 years ago, when some of the first MP3 phones were first coming on the market, I actually wrote a letter to Samsung and Motorola, begging them to use the hardware that was already in place to let people use their phones to record audio such as brief reminders or even meetings/lectures. Turns out they listened (or already had this on the development track), and there is a voice memo record function on the Razr. I don’t know if this has quietly become standard or what, but I was really surprised it wasn’t mentioned in the phone’s list of features on the box. It’s such a useful thing to record notes to yourself with — I used to burn airtime on my old phone calling myself to leave messages on my answering machine. No more of that now! Of course, the odd thing about the voice record is that you can’t get to it via the voice activation commands when you hit that side button. You would think this would be one of the best things to have that function access (much more important than say “send picture to”).

Now, let’s do some quick logical thinking. Charging port: mini-USB. Advertised on box and in manual: a way to sync your contacts list with your computer. Present on phone: camera with 48 MB of memory. Conclusion: this phone has some way to connect to your computer via USB for syncing your phone book and transferring photos, and potentially for use as a small USB drive to carry with you.

At least, that’s the conclusion I came to. Turns out I was completely wrong: the USB port is for charging only, unless you buy a special USB cable and software package from Motorola for $50 US. The syncing and transferring functions were only intended to be done over Bluetooth. However, seeing as how neither my desktop nor laptop have bluetooth, this sucks for me (and even then, looking online it appears as though you still need to buy the software package). I call this some of the biggest stinking pile of bullshit surrounding this phone. Now, it is handy that you can charge it from your computer’s USB port, since you might be able to bum a charge from just about anywhere without having to take your adapter with you. However, this function appears pretty buggy: windows keeps bugging me for a driver when I plug the phone in, and it only seems to charge for a few seconds before disconnecting itself. I have found drivers online that will satisfy Windows and let the phone charge, but it still doesn’t seem to charge up beyond halfway.

As I quickly mentioned above, the phone has no games pre-installed. You have to buy them from Bell, paying not only about $5 per game, but also wireless browsing access fees to download them. Not such a huge deal if you have a plan that includes data, but we don’t. I don’t know what went wrong with cell phone companies and games. The first phone I remember having games was Dan’s old Nokia, which had 4 or 5 actually fun games preinstalled (snake for sure, and I think it had asteroids too). My old phone came with 3 games on it, and they were all slightly different versions of the same “automatically scroll sideways and dodge crap” game. One was a “run for cash” game where you had to run down the road, grab cash, and dodge cars. Another was the exact same thing, except on a motorcycle where you grabbed gas and had to avoid rocks, too (they move slower than cars). The last one was in a plane, and you had to not only avoid whatever random crap was in the air, but also had to worry about the ground contours taking away your “lanes”. The big problem with that phone though was that no matter what the volume was set at for calls, the games played at max volume, no matter what. So you could never play them on the subway or in a waiting room, making them useless (like I’m going to play my cell phone when I’m at home and can tolerate the noise?). But now, to have to pay just to get some of these crappy games loaded on to a $300 cell phone is nuts.

A Crippled Phone

So, to sum up, the Razr V3C has some pretty decent hardware on it, which is completely crippled.

However, there is hope. The games that you could buy from Bell for the phone are simple Java games: the phone has a Java engine, and should play a variety of compatible games, if you can just get them on there. As I said, I found drivers for it online that get rid of the prompts Windows throws up for the new hardware wizard. In addition to those were some instructions and tools for flashing the firmware to restore functionality to the USB port. However, the problem is that most of these tools are for the V3 (note the lack of “C”), which is the more popular version. It’s the black one (mine’s grey), and runs on a different type of cell network and has a number of other differences, which makes the hacks for it not work with the V3C. Furthermore, different carriers sell different versions of the V3C. For example, Bell and Verizon sell very crippled ones: you can’t even do file transfers with bluetooth, let alone USB. Reportedly, the ones sold by Telus aren’t quite so crippled. This is of course complicated by the fact that the information you need to get this stuff working again is scattered all over the internet. Nobody wants to host the files needed, so they tell you to “check Google or Kazaa”, which is not terribly helpful.

So, with all of this misinformation and conflicting reports and different models, it’s hard to figure out just how to hack your Razr. It took me hours and hours to do, most of which was spent in trial-and-error with some of the programs, and even more spent reading all kinds of forums. Here’s what I figured out:

1. Bell has removed the “Java App Loader” from the phone entirely, so even hacking the configuration files won’t help you turn it back on. While it looks like a straightforward way to load games onto your computer, any guide suggesting you edit a “seem” file to enable it and then use a program such as Midway to get your games on your phone just won’t work. If you’re with Telus, it might…

2. The one use for editing seem files that did work for me was adding the menu option to turn the “camera shutter” noise off entirely, instead of just choosing how I’d like to be annoyed. For reference: seem file 2742 page 0001, offset 005e, enable bit 6.

3. You’re going to need at least 4 seperate pieces of sub-legal software to do anything with this phone. The first is the driver set, which is still kind of buggy. The second is the Product Service Tool from Motorola. I first got this as another way of trying to enable the Java App Loader (apparently, you can send your phone to Motorola to have them enable it for you at significant cost… all they do is load the phone into this program and upload a profile). Since it’s a Bell phone, this program actually did nothing for me, however, it appears to stabilize the USB connection for the other programs you have running. The third program is one called P2KCommander (often bundled with P2kSeem). This is a very basic data transfer program to move data between your phone and computer. It’s how the games and other things go on (I haven’t tried custom ringtones yet, but I might), and how the pictures come off. Lastly, you’ll need the “710 Game Editor” program to create the configuration files the phone needs to run the Java games.

It’s really annoying, but even with the PST program running, the phone’s connection to the computer craps out after about a minute, making any transfers painful at best. Some important notes about P2K: I saw it mentioned elsewhere that you have to set the file retrieval limit to “unlimited” for it to work with the Razr. More importantly, and not something I noticed anywhere, is that the default “slow/safe” data transfer rate doesn’t work at all. The connection seems to crap out before it even finishes handshaking. Use “normal” and you should be able to work with it, though it is sill annoying. Every time the connection dies, you’ll need to reset the phone. Also, it seems to work much better if you plug in the USB cable with the phone initially off — plugging it in will turn the phone on, but it won’t connect to the network.

So, what have I gained from my hours of tinkering? First, and most importantly, I got Tetris, which was $6 from Bell (plus approx. $3 to download it). I’ve managed to take pictures with it and get them off the phone without paying Bell for the data transfer over their network (and, if you don’t have data transfer as part of your package, it’s billed at 5 cents/kB, so each picture would run at about $11). And, I have the theoretical ability to take any MP3 file I have, convert it to mono sound (reports say that stereo-encoded MP3s crash the phone), and use it as a ringtone (I haven’t tried this yet… I don’t usually care what noise my phone makes as long as I know to answer it and it doesn’t send shards of glass down my nerves).

In conclusion: 5 cents per kB, holy shit. What are they smoking? Hopefully, providers and cell phone manufacturers will stop selling crippled phones and let us actually use them (especially when they cost so much, even if you do commit to 3 years).