Bill Roper's Journal

A few notes here, some of which are actually musical.

I continue working on the mystery project at work. I say "mystery project", because something is happening that is a complete mystery to us and we are going to have to call in the expert on this particular library, as it is currently thwarting us. But I trust that a solution exists.

The new phone is now mostly configured correctly and seems to be working well. This makes me happy, because a balky phone is not my friend.

I still have not called anyone about the fence and that is going to have to change soon.

In happier news, Gretchen and I will have a concert at the Festival of the Living Rooms on Saturday at 3 PM CT (2 PM MT, but I am converting to Central Time as more useful for me personally) and we'd love to have y'all drop in. We are finalizing our choices for the set list and will be testing the previously tested tech tomorrow to make sure that nothing has decided to not work just to spite us.

There is a lot of testing in my life at the moment...

It was Julie's birthday today, and I dragged my sorry sick self out of bed for her birthday dinner out at the mall, followed by a trip to Build=A-Bear Workshop. This went better than it might have overall, although not as well as I might have hoped. Let me just say that Red Robin was not having a good day. *sigh*

When we got home, I set out to activate Julie's new phone and failed dismally, because her old SIM card is not compatible with the new phone. I suppose there was some way that I could have checked this, but I didn't, so the final activation of the phone will have to wait for the arrival of the new SIM card. But she seems happy with the new phone, which is good.

(It was phone replacement week here, as Katie's phone fell out of her pocket and got run over by a car. Still worked, but the glass was so shot that it wasn't really functional in any normal sense of the word. She was quite chagrined. It turns out that a repair would have cost only $30 less than the identical new phone, so a new phone seems like the right solution. Fixing it myself would have been cheaper if you ignore the cost of time and stomach lining. These things are all glued together, so you just have to get a heat gun and heat them to 100 degrees Celsius to take them apart. Yeah. No.

But Julie's phone has had a cracked, but functional screen for some time. This produced certain equity issues, so I decided Julie's birthday was a good reason to replace her phone as well. Mind you, I had not been entirely sure that Julie would not *object* to replacing the old phone, as she becomes rather attached to things...

She didn't object, so here we are.)

Happy birthday, Julie!

Or in this case, perhaps one dingy ringy.

Spurred on by whl's observation that the bogus number retrieved for my home phone by the stock telephone voice dialer on my Nexus 5 was, in fact, a garbled phone number that a search engine was returning for Homewood Suites in San Diego and the long thread discussing the flawed dialer on the XDA developers forum, I figured that maybe it was time to report the bug. So I sent in the bug report via e-mail and was engaged by first level support.

Fine. I swapped e-mails with first level support until they finally figured out that I was complaining about the phone's voice dialer, not the "Ok, Google" functionality. And then they gave me the script for things to do on a wonky device.

I figured I'd go ahead and execute the script, which I did to no avail. Except that there was simply no way that I was going to run the "Factory Data Reset", because I didn't feel like spending hours putting the phone back together after executing the equivalent of "Let's reinstall Windows now," which is what tech support everywhere seems to tell you to do when they're run out of good ideas. Further, he seemed convinced that if reinstalling the OS didn't work, then I obviously had a defective phone which would need to be replaced.

I was equally convinced that this pretty much had to be a software problem that was not going to be improved by my wasting several hours, let alone getting a replacement phone and then wasting several hours reconfiguring the replacement.

But there had been a number to call in the message, so I did. And I got another first-level tech who asked me if what I wanted were the instructions for the "Factory Data Reset".

Well, no. What I wanted was a supervisor.

And eventually, I got one. And I explained the problem to him in detail and he is now going to forward it to the development team with my good wishes.

I already found a workaround in the XDA-developers thread above -- if you tell the "Bluetooth headset" to go to the "Ok, Google" search engine and dialer, it will allow my car's Bluetooth to bypass the broken stock telephone voice dialer and use the one that works.

So I am ok for now and we'll see what happens next.