Time For a New Phone

Back in February I lost my phone on a roller coaster and miraculously retrieved it with the help of a bit of engineering. I wanted to replace the phone back then but then saw the price of a new phone and held off. Last week I finally got on the Apple website and purchased a new iPhone 17. Some people feel the need to have the latest phone with all the bells and whistles. I just need a smartphone that can be updated and takes good pictures. I didn't get the Pro model nor did I feel the need to wait 6 weeks for the iPhone 18 to come out. Besides the base model won't be available until around April 2027.

I ordered the phone on Thursday and it arrived at my house on Friday. Unfortunately I had to drive down to Southern Utah to see a play with my oldest daughter and so I needed to have a friend grab the phone off the front porch as I didn't trust an Apple box to make it through the weekend without a porch pirate running off with it.

I arrived home Saturday afternoon and knew transferring data from my old phone to the new one would take awhile so I put it off until Sunday. Until then I made sure it was fully charged. Then I got my old phone and new phone together to start the process of making the new one have all the software and data from my old phone.

I made sure to pair the two phones and started the transfer process. After about a minute, it stopped. I started again only to fail again. This happened two more times before I wanted to try something else. Unfortunately I initialized the phone without pulling any data from my old one. It transferred the SIM to the new phone in the form of an electronic or eSIM. The only thing my new phone had was my number but none of the data. I had to keep my old phone for all of the applications and needed my new phone to be a phone and text message receiver.

This morning I got up and had a number of meetings. I had to log into my company's VPN and fortunately I still received the multi-factor authentication token on the old phone. Once I completed my meetings, I logged onto Apple's tech support website and initiated a support chat session. They told me I needed to reset my phone to put it back in new-phone mode and try the transfer again. I told them I worried about erasing the eSIM and they said I could always contact my carrier and get it reinstalled.

I went to reset the phone only to be told I had to wait an hour. I guess that is a special feature for spouses that are tired of their partner doom scrolling and wanting to wipe the phone. It sort of upset me because I wanted to reset the phone immediately. I went and rode my indoor bike waiting for the hour to pass. Once again I am glad I had my old phone so I could listen to music while I rode.

It came time to reset the phone and so I did. When it came back up I expected it to be in new-phone mode. It wasn't. Apparently I needed to "Erase All Content and Settings." I clicked that menu option and expected to have to wait another hour. Fortunately it went into erase mode immediately. At this point I discovered something even Apple technical support didn't know: there is an option to erase everything but the eSIM. I clicked that and the phone came up as expected.

While in the chat with Apple tech support I learned another trick on how to transfer data from my old phone. The first time I tried it, I just set the two phones side-by-side and waited for Bluetooth to do the transfer. That didn't work and so this time I connected a cable from phone to the other. My old phone has a lightning port while the new phone has a USB-C. I couldn't find my cable like that and so I had to make one from an old lightning cable with a USB-A connector and a USB-A to USB-C converter. Surprise, surprise, it worked. The data transferred from my old phone to the new one in 16 minutes.

Unfortunately that is not the end of getting things working. I use a continuous glucose monitor or CGM to tell me my instantaneous blood sugar. They are good for 15 days and I am only halfway through the life of my current one. Without a prescription they are about $50 each from Amazon but I highly recommend getting one even if you are not diabetic. I didn't want to throw my current one away and start a new one. I looked at the website for my CGM and they had instructions on how to transfer the sensor from one phone to another. I followed them and the process worked perfectly.

The last thing I needed to do is connect all of my Bluetooth devices. I have some wireless earphones as well as a number of wireless speakers to connect. Oh yeah, I also needed to connect my smartwatch. That didn't take to long to get sorted and I felt successful. That amazed me because halfway through this whole process I considered ditching Apple products permanently. Unfortunately I still wasn't done though.

Apple engineers think they are smart and know what you want in a phone. While that may be true for Gen-Z and Millennials,  it is not true for me. The new interface has this concept of an "Always On" display. I don't like it. When I hit the sleep button on my phone, I want the screen to go black and not waste any battery. It is what I am used to. I don't need to see the time continually. That is what my watch is for. I turned that feature off and consider my new phone ready to use.

I am serious when I wrote that I almost ditched Apple products forever halfway through the transfer process. I have used the automatic transfer to move data from old phones to new ones in the past and thought it to be a time saver. If I had had to reinstall my eSIM, I would have boxed the phone up, sent it back to Apple, and gone back to my old phone until I could find a Android phone I could be willing to live with. That may have taken awhile. 

Planning a Family Vacation

I don't know how we planned family vacations before the ubiquity of the Internet and sites like AirBnB or VRBO. With tools like these you can quickly research family vacations and get a rough idea of what is feasible and what is not. Recently I had someone pay back a sizeable loan and so I have a little coin ready to spend. I thought I would take my adult kids and their families on a nice family vacation.

The first thing I did was quickly check on places I know we like to visit and got an idea of cost. Next I set a reasonable budget. I got some money back but don't want to spend the whole amount. I am preparing for retirement and want to make sure there is plenty for my wife and me. Some ideas I had include going to Hawaii, taking the family on a cruise, renting a large home near a National Park, as well as a few others. I talked to each of my kids and shared my thoughts.

Everyone likes the idea of Dad footing the bill for a family vacation but everyone has different interests. That is where Internet research can help. Doing a generic search for "Family Vacations" returns way too many results. Besides, while a family with young kids wants to do something like Disney World, my daughters who are single want to do other activities. We keep throwing out ideas but are still trying to decide what people want to do.

The other issue we have is getting everyone's schedules to coordinate. While we all love instant gratification and would love to leave right now for Hawaii, that doesn't fit everyone's schedule. My wife says I have too many trips planned in the next 2 months with a work trip to Japan, another to New York, a personal trip to Disney World with a grand daughter, and an October trip to Ohio to see our youngest son. Normally that wouldn't be a lot of travel for her but she is coming with me to Japan and New York so now it is.

I have always been a scheduler and my kids are too. That means all of my children have the next year planned. I guess we just need to find a time that works for everyone and commit it to the calendar. It may not be for a year or so but at least it will be planned.  

Google Maps in Dead Zones

My wife and I just completed a lengthy road trip to Glacier National Park. I knew we would put a couple thousand miles on the car so we rented one instead of taking a vehicle of our own. Besides neither my wife nor I have cars that get very good gas mileage. We purchase cars more for snow driving than summer and that makes them less than ideal for long drives.

As long as you stay on an interstate road, you are pretty much guaranteed to have mobile service the whole trip. What happens when you venture off into less-traveled paths? Well I can assure you that we had hours of travel in Montana with absolutely no mobile coverage whatsoever. I wondered what would happen in Google Maps and now I know.

I often complain that some software applications were written by people that never got full credit on their homework assignments in college. There are two companies where that is not the case: Apple and Google. Generally those guys know their stuff and this road trip proved that. Most of the time we would lose service and the app kept plugging along seamlessly. This became impressive when we could still see our car on the map. My guess is that the Google Maps app caches a number of map tiles in the surrounding area before you drive into coverage-less areas.

No it was not perfect. There were several instances in Glacier where the car appeared to be driving significantly to the right of the road. We seemed close enough I didn't worry about it. We also drove into some areas where the map showed nothing. For the most part it worked pretty well.

Google Maps turned into a lifesaver when we drove into Canada. The Toyota Corolla did not have a dual-unit speedometer. It only showed the current speed in miles per hour. That doesn't do much good when the speed limit is posted in kilometers per hour. Fortunately the moment we hit Canada, the units in Google Maps switched to metric and showed us our speed as captured in the GPS. I could see that 80 kph actually works out to 51 mph. I also kept track of the appropriate speeds for 60 kph and 40 kph. Those are the speed limits we encountered on the curvy mountain roads in in Waterton National Park.

The one letdown of trying to use Google Maps in dead zones is having it inaccurately provide your estimated arrival time over a lengthy drive. We started the drive with phone service and it had us arriving at home around 6pm. We drove into a dead zone and that time shot up to 6:30pm. We got back in service range and it came back down to 6pm. That happened a few times on the drive and so the second time, it didn't surprise me as much.

Overall Google Maps is a great application. We used it constantly to get around and keep from missing the turn on the small road to our cabin we rented. Without it we would have made quite a few U-turns. Furthermore it impressed us with how it worked even without mobile phone coverage.