Wired Up

I have an unabashed love for gadgets. And no, they don't have to be pink for me to gush all over them, although that helps.

Recently I've been thinking of changing phones. For one thing, my current job uses Lotus Notes on a Mac, which translates into I can't be arsed to even try plugging in my HTC Diamond (running on Windows Mobile 6) to see what happens. That, and I am outraged by how this supposedly high tech phone can do practically everything, EXCEPT let you customize the bloody alarm clock tone. Or the SMS alert tone, but that's not so bad, since I usually have my earphones in and the vibration tips me off.

Let me explain how crucial it is for me to wake up the way I prefer. I hold grudges. Fact. It's not nice, it's not mature, and it's not good for my health. Little things set me off, and it doesn't have to be a personal attack, it just needs to piss me off, then I ride the pissed off wave for a loooong time.

So when I can't wake up to a soothing tune, I spend the rest of the day being pissed off. And there's nothing soothing about the default tones the Diamond has for its alarm. I spent a long time cursing the goddamned Taiwanese company, until I realized its not their fault; Windows Mobile is retarded.

I swear to God, I Googled "windows mobile alarm mp3" and variations thereof till the sun came up (no, literally, then again, I started at like 3am) when I first got the phone. There were a couple of third party softwares out there that promised to allow MP3s as your wakeup call except they insisted I pay, sometimes stupid amounts, or they didn't work. Not much luck, much cursing ensued, and I was suddenly grateful that my job had irregular hours on alternate days, so I didn't have to set my alarm that much.

Most importantly, I didn't have to wake up in the morning. Consistently. Day after day. If you can't tell, I'm not a morning person. Except staying up for the beginnings of it and sleeping straight through the rest.

So now that I've started at this pseudo-office job, waking up everyday is tough enough without having either an inaudible or a banshee-esque alarm tone making it harder. I came thisclose to trading in my phone for a Sony Ericsson slider Walkman phone. And to be honest, the only reason I didn't was because I can't really go back to that level of n00bness anymore. I would get the Xperia X1, but it's a lot chunkier than my current phone and I really don't like slide-out Qwerty keypads. Messaging with one hand is impossible unless you have ridiculously long thumbs.

Figuring I can't just give up without one last fight, I Googled again. And found it.

It being SpoonAlarm v2.0 by the Spoontools. It's a small app, pretty simple, but it works. And it's free. Of course, it would be nice to donate a little something something to the guy via Paypal; if everyone who got the app gave him a dollar, that would still count for something.

And because I'm so damned happy, I'm going to make a donation. Once I verify my Paypal account.

Make sure you get v2.0 though. I downloaded the earlier version before I found v2.0 and it didn't work all that well. For one thing, when selecting your alarm tone, it didn't differentiate between picture files and music files and showed you every single bloody thing you have on your phone. For another, it didn't allow for recurring alarms, so you had to set it every day. The new version fixes all of that. If the first thing that goes off is your Windows Mobile notification sound, go switch it off under sounds and notifications. Of course, this might annoy you if you use reminders. I don't. So I'm happy.

So now my phone is more or less complete.

I did another search and supposedly, you can sync Lotus to a Windows Mobile phone via third party software. But to be honest, it's just too irritating having to use Lotus to begin with (it's really not the prettiest thing around, is it?) for me to attempt to fiddle with it. That, and the fact that it's running on a Mac just brings on a wave of despair. Besides, I use Gmail and Google Calendar (this lovely thing called mail forwarding) and my phone has WIFI and 3G and Opera, so I just get online and browse.

I was going to end off this part of the post with, "And now all that remains is fixing the fact that I can't create contact groups so sending SMSes to multiple people is a bitch", except I did a quick search and fixed it.

Get Group SMS is a freeware that just adds an additional option to the menu bar for you to select a group. The tricky thing is, you need to sort your contacts (or the ones you'll be SMSing en masse all the time) into "categories" first. I find it a lot easier to do this on your PC with Outlook first (just select the people, click Edit, then Category, then select the category. Go to the Master Category List to make up your own), then sync it to your phone. From there, if you're adding new contacts, just edit the category portion to save yourself pain in the future.

This is why, at times, I feel like I'm really a guy.

One of the things about my job is that there are times I'm not in the office at all. PR people constantly cajole us out for press conferences or events to launch something or another, or we need to go out and interview people or review places, things like that. It's not a bad thing, generally, because there's usually free food or goodie bags or some sort of a treat, like champagne at 10am, free flow, mind you. Oh, such a hard life.

But it can be quite a pain when your deadline is a couple of days away, the event is a big hoo hah over one small thing that you're not going to use for the article that's due anyway, and you have enough events that day that it makes no sense to go back to the office, but you've got an hour or two to kill in between them.

Which is why I'm contemplating getting myself a netbook. They're small, they're cheap, they let me go online supposedly anywhere, and they give me word processing power on the go. I know Sitex is on now, but braving the bargain hunting crowd is a little too much for me. (Singaporeans love their IT fairs. And their food fairs. In fact, a fair of any kind usually sees a pretty good turn out, unless there's admission fee.) Besides, they're cheap to begin with; I'd rather keep my dignity and fork out a little more then go squash with hoi polloi on my precious weekend.

The only thing is, I can't quite decide how low to go with my netbook. I'm not willing to spend more than $700, but it's got to have at least 80GBs memory, and be fast enough that I won't start tapping my fingernails on it (which is something I constantly do with the Mac at work, driving people nuts, no doubt. Maybe if I do it enough, they'll mob the IT guys and make them change my computer). I can do without silly things like a built in camera (yes, because I'm going to video call who, exactly?), but I KNOW for a fact that I'll be tempted by little nifty stuff like that.

Why can't I have a cheaper obsession?