She who must be obeyed has two phones. This is a deliberate ploy to annoy me, because whichever phone I call first, she never answers and I have to call the other one. One phone has a call scheme which offers free calls all day, the other is cheaper in the evening, or something like that. I have long lost track as to the rationale for the two phones. I just know that, in spite of the undoubtedly deranged strategy, they cost her a load of money in calls every month and that she regularly forgets to carry both of them, or either of them. One phone is a generic Nokia piece of junk, the other is an iPhone.
Whatever your feeling about Apple, or an iPhone, there is no doubt that the boys and girls from Cupertino are reasonably competent at design. The iPhone is designed to be easy to use, and indeed it is. This ease of use includes the application icons; crisp, clear and easy to identify.
But she who must be obeyed is not interested in functionality; cuteness is all. So out went several man months of very clever design effort, and instead she installed a Doreamon theme. You remember Doreamon, he recently appeared on some slippers.
It was now impossible to identify an application unless you squinted to read the caption; but what does that matter when you can have twenty Doreamons looking up at you. There was a brief dalliance with Miss Kitty,
but Doreamon remained the favourite.
Along came the latest upgrade from Apple, and now we could download applications onto the phone. Naturally I was keen to hack my phone to try this out, and I soon had a number of cool games and applications to play with. But upgrading the phone would mean goodbye to the Doreamon theme, so she who must be obeyed resisted for some time, until yesterday evening.
At around 2100 she decided she wanted the upgrade, mainly because there is game called Trism that I have been playing that she wants to get her hands on. She gave me the phone with clear instructions not to screw it up, declared herself tired and went off to bed. See you soon, she said unrealistically.
The clever guys who have produced the hack for the iPhone had come up with a new version to go with the latest firmware offering from Apple. So I downloaded the necessary software and tested it on my phone first. If I buggered up my phone, I could spend the next day trying to unbugger it. If I buggered up her phone…… well, that just wasn’t an option.
Thirty minutes later and my phone was updated and working fine, time to hack hers. Thirty minutes later and her phone was working fine, except you couldn’t make any phone calls. Would she miss this minor lack of functionality? Probably. Shit. Damn thing just sat there with a little message saying No Signal instead of a throbbing connection bar.
Thirty minutes later and I had run it again, just in case something had gone wrong the first time. No Signal.
An hour later I had resurrected the original versions of the hacking program and the Apple firmware and run through the process again; maybe there was something about this new version which didn’t suit her service provider. No Signal. I contemplated suicide. Then I contemplated murder. Either would avoid facing up to having to break the news that I had magically downgraded her iPhone into an iPod.
Getting rather desperate, I prepared to stage an overnight break-in where the only thing stolen was her phone. But then, suddenly, Signal! Big signal, happy signal, can make phone call signal, my ass-saving signal. Appears that there was actually nothing wrong with the phone, just the service provider taking down the service for a while. Bastards.
Thirty minutes later and I had re-installed the update I had started with some hours earlier, and all was well. Then off to the iTunes application store to download some suitable applications for her; and finally dragged myself into bed around 0100.
Woke up bleary-eyed this morning and gave her the phone. “Thank you, but when can I have my Doreamon back?” I contemplated murder.
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2008-09-15| Time for a change | Pattaya Days says[…] I warmed up for the grief-stricken exercise this morning by updating the firmware on my iPhone. It did not go as smoothly as it had in the past, probably a warning sign, but I am now running on firmware 2.1 with everything unlocked. She who must be obeyed will be wanting the same service, as I have also located a source for her beloved Doreamon theme. […]