So.

[3rdragon]

I'm here in Zambia. We've spent the past four and a half days at MCC headquarters, being oriented, getting over jet lag, and preparing to go to our various assignments. A, who's in the city, is being dropped off with her host family as I type, and the rest of us, all heading for Southern Province, leave tomorrow morning. I won't get to Macha until Friday, though, because the other two get dropped off first, so arriving tomorrow isn't feasible, considering travel times and the fact that we'll need to do a certain amount of set-up work in every place.

I mentioned on the other blog that I'll be cooking for myself. Setting up a household requires an incredible amount of stuff.

I have a new phone, too. It's the fanciest phone I've ever had, and it's going to drive me crazy.

I think there's a reason Microsoft is doing really poorly in the cellular phone market. (Maybe the same reason I got this phone for free.) This phone is like pocket-sized Vista. Possibly worse, actually. There are about 27 pictograms (admittedly, with labels) in the menu, and 31 options in Settings, and it still doesn't do most of the things that I could consider basic features. For example, setting the timeout for the keyboard backlight (which is important, because when it's on, the keyboard is illegible), or setting a different sound for you-have-a-new-voicemail/text-message type alerts vs are-you-SURE-you-want-do-delete-this-contact? type alerts (really, do I need sounds for menu-operation alerts? Presumably I'm looking at the phone as I delete contacts, yeah?) AND it took me forever to find most of these things, because almost none of the 31 settings options are intuitive. I won't pretend that my cheapo, free-with-the-phone-plan US phone was any sort of optimal setup, but it mostly made sense and I didn't feel like the designers sat there and went, "Okay, how can we disguise this option so that it exists but is nearly impossible to find?"

It's lots of fun how the menus are set up so you're bouncing all over the keyboard to navigate anything. I wouldn't have said that the keyboard was that big; I've never before been bothered by the amount of distance between different buttons on the keypad of a cell phone. And it's really easy to double-click accidentally, or think it didn't respond the first time, and call someone when you just wanted to look up their phone number, or go a couple of menu levels deeper than you intended to.

And it's SLOW. I'm not talking about the wifi or something complicated, I'm talking about navigating my contacts list (which has maybe ten people in it, so it shouldn't be that hard, yeah?) I get that stupid swirly on my cell phone.

It's a T20 keyboard, too. I don't know that this is actually a problem with the phone (though QWERTY isn't really set up to be 20 keys), but I've used T9 just enough that that's what I expect from a cell phone (not that I'm good at it or anything). If it were actually QWERTY, I could adjust, but it's not, so I'm back to hunting and pecking. The phone has a dictionary, which is probably great for automatically detecting what letter you're trying to hit in text messages, but doesn't help much with entering names into the contact list.


Long story short, I'm just really glad that I'll have a computer and access to the internet, and won't need to use my phone all that often.

Things are going pretty well, though.

Comments

[animangel.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you're there safe. Have fun on your adventure!

[3rdragon]

Thanks!

[phantomcranefly.livejournal.com]

Same here! (And good luck cooking for yourself, too. :) Not that you'll probably need it, but still.)