Taking sides at a young age

Given my iPhone 5S is nearing its 2 year contract, I can get an upgrade to the 6 or 7 or whatever comes by November. 

Jr. already has got her own 5S and her iPhone 4S is now a hand me down to the little one. I have since been getting an earfull on how the 4S is useless! It has no memory. It has a poor battery life and keeps losing charge. It is slow and there is a long list of complaints. 

Also the little one is hoping that I get the new phone and she automatically gets my current phone as a hand me down... with a phone number. She now has a busy calendar and friends to call on play dates.. which will soon be called "hangouts"

Another thing I learned is that when a girl goes from elementary school to middle school and does the same thing with the same friends in the same houses, it still goes by a different name. It is not a Playdate anymore. It is a "hangout". 

Life was simpler when I was a kid. Same cricket bat, same electric box used as stumps, same bunch of boys.. same rules for what gets called a 4,6 or out. None of this playdate vs. hangout stuff. We didn't even have a name for when we all got together and played cricket or table tennis or went to the beach on our bicycles.

Given all the playdates and possible future hangouts, the little one made us wander to the phone section in target to "check out" the phone deals. Of course she points to a 5S and goes "it is 40$ per month ONLY appa!" 

If ONLY she knew what that ONLY meant for a two year contract! That is when San takes her to the wall and goes "why dont you pick one of these phones. they are larger, have more memory and come with cheaper plans"

The little one wanders through the display and comes back to us and goes 

"that wall is ENTIRELY full of Android crap!" 

I burst out laughing but looked the other way.

Jr. and San were shocked by the way she said it with all that frustration.

Given San uses a Xiaomi Android phone, not sure how she took it.

Looks like we have an "i-ddict" in the house. They got this one young.. 

Now we wait for November. 

The arab and the camel

My mother used to tell us a bedtime story called "the Arab and the camel". In that story an Arab is pitching a tent to keep him warm in the cold desert night. His Camel tries to get in the tent and he says "no". Then the camel puts is head into the tent and he goes "okay, will let him do that".. slowly the neck comes in... and beore he knows it, the camel is in the tent and he is outside! It was an elaborate version of the "give an inch, take a mile". Why bring that up? 

My iFamily of devices kept screaming for an OS update to iOS 8! I do not risk doing OS updates while traveling abroad. There is a back story to that which is better off untold. 

Came back to the US and hit "update" only to get a message saying "This update needs 5.1 GB more space. you have to delete items from your phone and retry" or something to that effect.

Seriously?!

I got a 16 GB iPhone 5S a year ago. The thing has hardly a few hundred songs, 30-35 Apps and NO videos permanently stored. At any time I have 0-50 pictures on the phone and a few videos in the Camera roll. 

Slowly the OS upgrades keep taking up so much space, that it is almost one third of the storage space. That is tragic. 

For now I am sticking to the old OS. I hope there is a way to turn the "reminder to upgrade OS" off ,as it does not make sense to upgrade right now. 

If the OS upgrade is a must, and it needs more memory, we should get that addiitonal memory for free, no?! 

Had the same gripe with Windows ten years ago with all those "patches" taking up space. Now it is Apple.

Someday memory will be cheap enough and we will have enough of it on our phones for it to not matter. Till then, we have to budget for a phone with more memory than we think we need, just to accomodate future memory grabbing OS installs that tout bug fixes!

Sigh! 

Musical phone

Jr. has been encouraging me to go for the iPhone 5S since the day it was released. We even went and stood in line at the local Apple Store. There were 100 guys still in line for the 33 remaining phones in the store. We left after the "line keeper" lady gave us the scoop. Apparently she said the same thing to all the other folks in line! So they were all hoping that somehow the folks in front of them magically drop off? The takeaway from that experience was "we live in a world full of hope" and "always do the math before standing in line the next time".

We learned later that Jr.'s real motivation for daddy getting a new phone was to get my iPhone 4 as a hand me down. At every opportunity she reminded me (her mom is made of tougher stuff and they both know it!) that she is now a middle school going girl, all her classmates have their own phone, how she "needs" an iPhone, how it is going to make our life easy etc. etc. 

Finally we went to the local store which promised an exchange program of sorts where they give you money back for other Apple products. We took with us an iPhone 3GS and an iPod which my BIL had gifted San with a personal engraving. San loved the engraving so much that she decided to store the iPod and pray to it daily than play it. So the thing died without being used.. or so we thought.

The story guy powered up both devices and declared "you get 2$ for the iPod and 5$ for the iPhone"

I said "really? 2 bucks?" and he goes "you would have got $2.60 if it was not engraved!".. btw, the battery is not dead, it works fine!

The little one put the headphones on and declared "This is awesome! such good sound and it is like the entire iTunes is in this little thing! I am going to use it.. " and has been inseprable from the iPod since this discovery.

We told him to give the 3GS back. I might as well keep it at home and pray to it instead of parting with it for 5 bucks. 

The phones are all set. I now have a nice 5S and Jr. has the 4 which she has been customizing since morning. In other words, she is removing all traces of me from that phone and is succeeding rather well. 

I told the little one "You see this 5S.. that is what you are going to get in 3 years when you go to middle school". She was not impressed. 

Oh yes.. forgot all about the title.. It was not just a take on Musical chairs. The new phone and the 4 have been updated to IOS 7 and we as a family love the iRadio. The clarity is amazing and the song selection so far on the Bollywood channel is nice. For some reason it plays so well on bluetooth in our cars on the 5S compared to the 4.

I was on the fence on this purchase even after I was already eligible for an upgrade for more than a year.  

Was a good decision to wait for something after the iPhone 5.. 

Good job Apple! 

That was Jr. inaugurating the camera on the 5S. Considering the background was so bright, would have expected a washed out pic on the 4. This one practically took a High Key image.. Nice! 

Now I have higher expectations three years from now.

Another addition

We have a new addition to the electronics in the house.

A mac mini.

The old Dell from 2002 died(?) finally after making a few croaking noises. The blue screen showed up many times. It is possible to revive it with a hard disk wipe and installing some later software and OS versions. Instead we chose the less time consuming path and upgraded to a Mac Mini.

Technology has sure come a long way in a decade, huh?

Have not had a chance to play with it since I set it up on sunday night.

The kids love it though! Every day they tell me something they figured out how to do on the Mac just to show me how retarded I am..

Have gotten used to it!

Today we had a short discussion on "Can we sell the Dell on craigslist? who will even buy it?"

San came up with a "Can we donate it to the temple?" and the answer from the rest of us was "don't insult the temple with this computer. they already have computers from two years ago that folks have donated. this goes in a museum"

Do not know if we will find someone who will use the old computer..

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Cupertino blues

Follow your heart!

Something that is a cliched phrase in this world of self help books and in your face advertising. "What does it even mean?" asked my 5 year old a few months ago. The example I gave her at the time was inspired by what she was holding in her hand at the time. My iPhone!

Told her that this guy who started the Apple company was told by many people that Apple is not a phone company and they should not be making phones. He went and did it anyway and it is now the most popular touch phone. That is what we mean by follow your heart.

She got it. She understood the concept of "believing in yourself", "doing what you think is right" and "pushing to be successful" after my elaborate story. It is true that over the years I have told stories from the Ramayana or Mahabharata or recently quotes from Bikram Choudhury to my kids that try to instill values of dogged determination, believing in your own strengths, admitting your flaws and valuing life in general, but when you hold a product in your hands that you will swear by as a five or eight year old, the point hits home faster!

It has been a rocky week in the household. The hand started swelling and hurting the last 48 hours and apparently the simple trick is to just lift it above the heart level, take Ibuprofen and rest. Something that I did not do for two days straight because of my love for work and hope of getting back to the Yoga room. I stayed off painkillers, spent 12+ hours working and let my hand hang from the side all day for two days straight. Sleepless nights followed and the family refused to help me at home because of my "stupidity".

There were also some tense moments with the kids getting introduced to violence that hit closer to home with a shooter taking out 3 people less than a mile from our house and injuring more. The roads were blocked off and schools were in lockdown mode for a day. There were cops with guns in plain sight at busy intersections. Things that we have not seen in Cupertino in our last 5+ years of living in this city. The kids were visibly upset and shaken.

The news of Steve's death made us all sad. Have never shed a tear in my life for someone I have not met personally. Yesterday I did. So did a lot of folks I know. When you are a techno geek who prides himself on thinking outside the norm and you came of age in the late eighties, chances are Steve Jobs was an indirect influence.

He made technology hot. The internet and the WWW have changed the world and I was probably one of the first folks to test out Netscape Chat beta where the allure was to talk so some college girl in Maryland who opens her chat with "F/S/20, beautiful night in Baltimore" and things have come a long way since then. The Apple Quadra on which I downloaded that Chat application is as big a part of that memory as I typed "M/S/21 It is raining cats and dogs here in Philadelphia".. Drexel was a Macintosh school and so was RPI!

Still remember going to a theater in 19th street to watch "Mission Impossible" the day it was released, to catch a glimpse of what a Macintosh laptop with AV capability could do (they had dropped flyers in the University to advertise this) and our group of grad school buddies could not stop talking about the Mac that night. Tom Cruise and the action were a distant second as we walked back to our apartments. All we wanted was to find ways to convince our professors that the laptop was somehow a project requirement!

Today the little one came to me and said "Daddy, does this mean there won't be an iPhone 5 which we want to buy?" my heart sank. Told her "No. There will be an iPhone 5 and we will buy it when it comes out!".

She also asked me "why are you all so sad. It is not like Steve Jobs is like Kollu thatha (great grandpa) and family. When Thatha died and everyone cried, I cried too because he was MY thatha too. But Steve Jobs is not family and you cannot do anything for his family because you don't know them!".

My daughters schools use iMacs in every class room. They are so used to Apple products. They cross 4 Apple buildings every day at a minimum which are at the edge of our street. They know Apple is synonymous with Cupertino.

Still that was a tough one to explain, but explain I did.

Finally she asked me "So you want me to come up with something like the iPhone when I grow older?" and my response was "Try your best to.."

We also had a followup conversation on what she wants to be when she grows older and she had a clear well thought out answer which was instantaneous..

"I want to be a doctor, a teacher and also have my own Target store which does not have the pizza place in the corner!"

You could teach at a medical college, but owning a target and running a department store at the same time? why? All because you dont like the Pizza store in the target?

Well, we have things to work on and she is not yet six, but following ones heart does lead to complications for other hearts!

All said and done, Steve Jobs will be missed.

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