New mobile

Yesterday I gave into pressure I should have a mobile phone - a Nokia 2630 (pictured above) - so that Jane could use our old 6230i to call me should we both be out of reach of a land-line. (Camera in the 2630 is low quality and besides I can only download pictures using blue-tooth which we don't have.)

So I spent a happy afternoon trying to find out how to set everything for ease of use. Quite tricky to run check tests because in our house the signal is very dubious and comes and goes.....

What few people could possibly know is that I have to chuckle at the way the buttons do different things according to the number of pushes within a time limit, or do different things if you hold them down, because a very long time ago when black electronic chips were only just becoming available in places like Harwell I was student-poor but had this idea to fit my room with dimmable lights.... and to cut the number of switches and wiring cores realised I could use just a push button with two wires if my electronics counted how many times you pushed it within a time limit. Exactly the same idea so many devices now use. And now such very old history. (Sometimes I very much feel my age....)

Now, there's a nice logical problem with Jane's plan... we have to remember to have both phones switched on and in a suitable accessible pocket. And the 2630 is so tiny I can quite see I won't even know where it is unless I carefully tell my personal computer to be aware.... and that's becoming increasingly blocked by all the things I should be trying to remember.

Which reminds me we have visitors due not so very far away and at the moment the bed is covered in boxes I didn't bother to squirrel away at the time. But I could mobile them, now, - the people, not the boxes - if I had any idea of their mobile numbers - which I don't. And if I walked out the house because otherwise it's quite likely there's no signal. (These practical trivia are everything. )