Happy Sunday!
With my youngest’s birthday celebrated and the children’s book complete, printed, and delivered, my pet projects are now officially done.
The editing gig, meanwhile, may not pan out. At the moment, it appears to be delayed by a month. So for now I can move back to writing my short story.
I also had to replace my smartphone yesterday. That’s never a fun experience. To this day, mobile companies still suck at showing you all your options, being honest about deals and warranties, and they especially suck at migrating all your information to a new phone. That last one’s comforting in a way, because if they’re this incompetent at porting over all our information, that means they’re not reliably storing everything about us.
I’m also happy to report I didn’t need to use my old Facebook account to sign into any apps or recover any data. It was a nice confirmation that the social media giant’s not as tied into my life as I thought.
Despite the fact that I’m not a big fan of smartphones, I do take good care of them, keeping them pristine for as long as humanly possible before I have to finally give in and deal with the salespeople. My old phone smoothly ran every app I use on a daily basis and was comfortable to operate. I’d even gone as far as replacing the battery twice to keep it from the electronic scrapheap in the sky.
Well, two days ago, my phone stopped turning on entirely. It served me well for many years, but it seemed its time had come. Back when I played mobile video games, digital cameras weren’t all that great unless they were expensive, and the overall novelty of “smartphone technology” hadn’t worn off yet, getting a new phone was an exciting experience.
But nowadays, it seems like more features are taken away than added (such as the removal of physical headphone jacks), more user rights are taken away, and more surveillance is enabled by default.
I didn’t have to “jailbreak” this phone, but I did have to enable Developer Mode to get navigation back to a way that made sense on Android 11. The so-called “pill” gesture navigation system they’re trying to foist on the general public is awful. With it, I found I was accidentally closing apps all the time, even during normal use. (I suspect the pill nav was designed with those bubbled (rounded) displays in mind, but I can’t stand those.) I got frustrated enough that I was tempted to move to an open source smartphone OS like OSes, but ultimately I was able to bring Android 11 to heel by restoring the more useful button-based navigation interface.
In the end, I’ve essentially gotten a modern upgrade to my old phone with more (albeit unneeded) storage and horsepower. I’ve still got a headphone jack, an accessible SD card slot, my data is still here, and all-in-all, I’m happy.
Yesterday evening, after everyone had gone home from the birthday party and I’d finished performing my “dadly duties” (you know…opening packages, assembling things, carefully placing stickers, setting up electronics, that sort of stuff), I took my daily round on the internet (which is a limited tour these days, let me assure you), and afterward, I found myself bored. I didn’t feel like playing any video games, reading any books, or watching movies, and I caught myself typing out Facebook‘s URL from muscle memory. (Neurological networks are evil things, indeed.) I stopped myself midway when it dawned on me that I had deleted my Facebook account. With a smile, I knew that was the clearest signal a writer could ever receive. It was time to get back to writing.
In short, boredom works.
Nick Enlowe 