some news

[calimac]

1. To my amazement, when my anti-virus program finally expired today, I was able to re-load and register it with the help of only one quick call to customer support. I'd thought my renewal had been canceled, but somehow I now have it for four years instead of the offered two.

2. On my trip to the wildflowers, my cell phone died. Not exactly: it was still on, I could still make calls on it, but the screen was totally dead. I took it to a repair shop and they said it could actually be fixed, for $90. I judged that, since I could buy a new one for $50 (I'm still sticking with clamshell dumb phones), I'd be willing to go through the hassle of learning a new model.

The one that the AT&T store is selling these days is from a company called LG, which they claim stands for "Life's Good." Yeah, well, it would be better if your cell phone weren't so irritating for its lack of options, like one to silence the on/off tone without also silencing the ringtone. And boy did I struggle to write my first text message on the thing, because instead of putting in what you type it changes it to what it thinks you mean, and it's always wrong. At one point it thought that "home" was "gooe" and asked me to add that to the dictionary, so I had to inform it that "home" is a word. Then I lost the whole message while trying to figure out how to put a period at the end of it.

3. Review later, but this will probably not go in it, so:
Dear parents, When you take your small son to the symphony, even if you dress him up for the occasion, if he spends the whole concert squirming, rattling his program, whispering in your ears, and so bugfck restless that he chews up the end of his tie, then he is bored and he is not appreciating the music. I don't blame him - I wouldn't have gotten much out of such advanced stuff as this when I was his age, either - but please put him, and yourselves, and me - the innocent bystander you chose to sit right in front of at this open-seating concert - out of our collective miseries and let him play outside or something.

Comments

[voidampersand]

The Lucky-GoldStar Corporation rebranded itself as LG. "Life's Good" is their advertising slogan. They make all kinds of stuff, including the batteries and electronics for the new Chevy Bolt EV.

Weird about the dictionary. I think you should take it back to the store.

[calimac]

By plastering the slogan over everything, and refusing to say what else LG might stand for, they're doing their damndest to make that what it stands for.

I don't think there's a specific glitch in the dictionary. I think it's just generally scrod, and this is how it's supposed to work. I've already taken the phone back to the store once, to ask questions about a whole bunch of things not covered in the manual or the online tutorials, all of which aren't there because the phone can't do that, like separately switch off the "on/off" sound clip as I mentioned.

I won't say the AT&T store staff were unhelpful, exactly, but the air they radiated of "explaining cell phone functions to customers old enough to be our grandfather is not how we want to spend our work time" was intense.

[voidampersand]

What you want is T9 predictive text. I don't know what model phone you got. Looking at this phone, it may be that text entry is in ABC mode and T9 mode needs to be enabled using the Left Soft Key Options in the Compose Screen. Or it could be just a crummy dictionary. But there is no good reason to ship a phone with a crummy dictionary these days. That's why I was thinking it might be a defective unit.

[calimac]

But predictive text - it doesn't work precisely like T9 as described here, but it's very like it - is exactly what I have that I'm finding so difficult. There's nothing wrong with its dictionary, it's its inability to properly predict the text and the unintuitive protocols for communicating with it that are causing the problem. You type in a number, it guesses which of the three letters associated with it you mean, you scroll because it always guesses the wrong one, then you type another number, and it corrects what you told it the previous letter was, and now you have to scroll through 9 possibilities instead of 3. I'd typed 4663, and though I kept correcting it in the process, somehow, amidst all the typing and scrolling, it convinced itself that I meant "gooe" instead of "home". Since that's not in the dictionary, up came a pop-up asking me to add it, and the only way to get out of that was to tell it that "home" was the word I wanted to add.

The only way to get around this is to press an "OK" button to confirm you meant what you said after each and every letter that you've finally gotten right. Fnck that.

If I could abandon "predictive text" and figure out how to make the text entry revert to the system where 1 means a, 11 means b, and 111 means c, which is hideously slow but at least it gives me what I type, I'd happily do so. But I didn't try texting until after I'd been back to the store, which is why I didn't ask how to do it.

[voidampersand]

Instead of trying to choose what each letter is, try entering all the characters and choose the word. There are only a few words that correspond to 4663. The number of words that start with "g", "h" or "i" is much greater. The more possible words there are, the more key presses you have to make in order to select between them. T9 is supposed to make text entry easier. I would hope that the way it's implemented on your phone allows you to select a word with the minimum number of key presses.

The other mode is called ABC mode. There is a button you can press to cycle through entry modes. It's in the manual. There also is 123 mode and symbol mode.