It’s been a frustrating week. Nance’s phone switch to Android looked like it had failed because she stopped receiving texts from other networks. We figured that it was either a bug in her phone or a bad port of the number. And then we discovered that in fact, it wasn’t ANY other-network phone that she was dropping texts from, it was ONLY iPhones. Huh.

Turns out Apple did something unbelievably evil. When you have an iPhone, your phone will now use iMessage instead of a real SMS to talk to other people if it thinks it can, even if you enter a number. The problem is when you get rid of your iPhone, you don’t *necessarily* get rid of the link from your phone number to iMessage. Net result: everyone who has an iPhone thinks they are texting you, but in fact the messages silently fail.

Once we figured this out, we called support; yes, they said, they could delete the number. 2 hours. No worries. Nope, 2 hours later, it was still broken. Called again. Did we say 2 hours, we meant 24. Nope. 36 hours later, the answer was give it more time.

Net result: this is Apple’s bad decision. By “breaking” SMS and moving it to their own protocol, the company added a tricky and largely undocumented step in getting moved to a new phone. Talk about lock in. What’s worse, it’s easy to blame the new carrier or phone, when in fact it is working perfectly. Crossing my fingers we’ll actually get this fixed one of these days.

Mood: frustrated.

There’s an old expression that the best camera is the one you have with you, and honestly, that feels a bit lame. After all, I carry around a slightly battered Nexus 4 most of the time – a phone that has been panned for its lack of a decent camera.

Well. I’m full of it. One sunrise, taken with my cellphone.

Life is all about grabbing moments like this. I sometimes think that our pocket cameras rob us of the moment though. I don’t need to see the sunrise on my little glass screen when I can sit and watch it, almost FEEL the photons whamming in to in real time. I clicked my one shot, and then just absorbed the morning. Aah, morning.

I’ve seen too many sunrises of late. No matter how hard I work, things always seem to be just a tiny bit out of my grasp. More focus is required; I’m working on it!

Today finds me exhausted. My new schedule has me at my desk by 700a, and running about like a mad thing. The day will be long, alas, and I’ll get home after 800p. Ugh.

It’s at times like this it’s good to think a little about how we spend our time. Me, I’m overly programmed. I fly, I am trying to learn to play tennis, I play the flute, I run a department, I research. And I love. Frankly, the last one is the important one, yet in the helter-skelter twists and turns of day-to-day, it can be the thing that ends up lowest on the list. We’ll make time… later. Not good.

So today, as I drag myself out of bed and head down A1A, I catch the sun just beginning to rise. Life is good, despite being overcommitted. And I realize that this is all temporary. I can be busy like this all my life if I choose, but that’s not a life lived. So, I’ll tilt my windmills today, and then get home tonight, and reprioritize. Our workload is unending; it’s finding the right balance between good honest hard work and life that matters.

In the words of Beckett, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”, because I know that going on is completely and utterly worth it. It’s all about today, and enjoying the ride, picking out what’s wheat and discarding what’s chaff. Onward!