April 2008 Archives

I’m having a problem for the past few days with my iPhone. There’s a weird icon on my status bar and I cannot make heads or tails out of it. Look at the top “status bar”. The two rightmost icons are battery indicator and alarm indicator, which are fine. But what is the leftmost one? Here are two screenshots of it, in black-and-white and color mode (iPhone icons have two modes, depending on what screen you are viewing).

Apple and iPhone are really failing me here. A natural thing to do would be to click on the icon to get more information about it, but I can’t do this. When I click/tap, nothing happens.

I looked in the iPhone user guide. It talks about all sorts of fun icons that may be on the status bar on page 14, but this particular one simply isn’t there. So we have an undocumented icon. Great.

The icon may have something to do with my data usage. I was roaming internationally a lot over the past week, and the icon appeared sometime during the trip when I couldn’t place some international calls any more. Which in itself is weird, as I have an international plan with AT&T and everything has been fine. Until now.

I went to AT&T site and some data plan indicators were red there, but I do not understand them and I have no way to interact with them.

What Apple has failed to do here is to meet my expectations, which are very different for iPod and media stuff and other non-vital gimmicks that I don’t mind being “out of order” once in a while, and my phone that needs to be rock solid and I need to be able to immediately make sense of everything that is going on, relating icons to my past knowledge and such. This icon doesn’t mean anything and I don’t have an easy way to find out what’s going on here and what can I do about it and it’s really bothering me.

UPDATE: the answer, as often, is less conspired than I thought and is here. (Why I did not find it with my original search, I have no idea.) And they should still update the manual too, or have some disclaimer about what versions it does or does not apply to. (I guess that this TTY thing was added with a software update, and the manual hasn’t yet been updated to reflect that.)

On a recent flight, I finished reading “Mao: The Unknown Story” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. (The image below is the cover of the European version. The US version has a different cover for whatever reason.)

It was an extraordinary reading experience for me in many ways. First, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book for this long I started reading it in February of last year (2007), and finished now in April 2008. So I read it for more than a year. Not daily, of course — it was mostly a way for me to fill time when having nothing better to do on long flights.

This already shows you one of the great qualities of this book. It is immensely readable and can be continued where you left off without any trouble at all. Sometimes I didn’t touch it for months. Yet when I picked it up to continue, I sort of recalled the gist of where I left it off and could carry on straight away. The book is divided into thematic chapters and thus you can have a go at it piece by piece and don’t have to digest the whole thing right away.

Tomorrow (Friday), I’m off to CHI 2008. I looked at the program and I’m a bit overwhelmed at this point, as there will be a whole lot of things going on. I’m hoping to meet some great people and see some interesting things that are happening in the HCI world. Maybe I’ll blog some about the actual content too, maybe not. I’ve been so low on blogging due to this semester being very difficult and time-eating. Part of it is that my schedule dictates that I have to get up at 7 each morning. I’m not a big fan of this, but what do you do. And there are many 14- and 16-hour days.

Today is actually a pretty typical example.

• I had my first class (interaction design) at 8:30am to 10:30am
• then a quick meeting with my design team about the current project
• 12 to 1:30 gadgets class
• pick up some things for the conference from HCI admin office and bring them to Master’s lab
• 2pm to 3pm a phonecall
• 3pm to 3:30 design user research meeting
• 3:30 to 4:30 preparing for project team meeting
• 4:30 to 6:10 project team meeting
• 6:10 to 7 preparing for user research (pick up supplies, print stuff…)
• 7 to 8 user research — we’re doing this cool design project where we have to go to people’s homes and learn about ways of family management so that we can build a smarthome device to support some aspects of that

I’m not trying to show off anything here with this calendar, I have many friends in business whose schedules I’m sure are much worse each day than this. It’s just that I’m pretty tired each night so there’s very little bandwidth left for extracurricular activities like blogging.

The up side is that I’ll be travelling for the next ten days so it’s a bit of a break from school. Even though I may have to do a little schoolwork during that time, but I’ll mostly try to avoid it. On Friday I fly Pittsburgh to DC, DC to Vienna. I land at Vienna Saturday morning, and will spend Saturday in Vienna — sort of a daytrip. It’s cool as Vienna is a very nice old European city and I also have some personal/family connections there, I was last in Vienna 18 years ago as a kid visiting my late grand-aunt, so I’ll be visiting some places related with that and generally be a tourist. And Saturday night it’s off to CHI to Florence.

I don’t think many of my readers go to CHI, but if you happen to be one of those who do, grab me for a quick chat

I still have to upload my Paris pictures. Darn, I could use the smarthome device that I’m making myself, getting pictures uploaded is such a hassle.

(Update: I got a question about what are HCI and CHI and what’s the distinction. H is for Human, C is for Computer and I is Interaction. They are both the same thing, just labelled differently. Originally it was CHI but then some people thought humans should come before computers. See also a previous post by Rodrigo on this).