KitKrash, Part of the business

So a couple weeks ago Cindy upgraded the firmware on her Galaxy S4 to version 4.4.2 which is known as “KitKat”.  The Android OS likes to attach odd names to different releases of their operating system.  Well since doing so she has been complaining about various things and a quick search online reveals she is far from alone in her complaints.  Evidently 4.4.2 is widely recognized as being a buggy release.  There are many reported issues but the one that has been really annoying Cindy was the bad response lag when interacting with the phone.

Unfortunately there is no simple way to flip back to the previous stable version of the firmware, the only methods I saw to do so involved rooting the phone, something I would not rather fck around with.  There was a reported “fix” for the lag issue, a factory reset.  A factory reset is just what it sounds like, it erases the phone and sets it back to the way it comes out of the box.

Now of course you don’t want to do this without backing up your stuff ahead of time.  Samsung provides a utility called Kies to perform this function.  I fired it up and did a full back up.  After getting the green light from Cindy to blow the phone away I did so.  After the wipe completed I reattached the phone to Kies and did a full restore which should bring the phone more or less to the point it was before minus a few minor tweaks.

After completing the restore I handed the phone to Cindy and had her check it out.  All of her apps were there, her emails, her pictures, etc….. great.  As she was digging around on the phone I heard her say “no…..”.  I asked what the NO was about?  She said she lost all of her old text messages.  I told her they were supposed to be part of the backup, in fact I remember the backup pausing for a long time as it was backing up the old messages, yet they were nowhere to be found.  Cindy was very distressed by this.

This morning I reattached her phone to Kies and was unable to see any of the messages as part of the back up, how nice.  Depending on how crucial these old messages are viewed to be by Cindy will dictate how much more effort I will put into seeing if I can come up with a resolution.  Needless to say I am not very happy with how Kies performs.  If I knew old messages were going to be in jeopardy we could have used the built in back up functionality in GoSMS Pro to back off stuff ahead of time.

So yesterday I posted one of my many random observations from the gym.  The gym is a great place to people watch. People do a lot of silly things while working out, there are literally millions video examples of this peppering the internet.  Hell, take a look at the president’s gym routine.  If I saw that going on at my gym I would probably post commentary on it as well.

When I post my observations I try to make sure they are descriptive but not personal.  I describe what I see, smell, or hear that strikes me as odd or funny but I don’t preempt it with names  like moron, dipshit, d-bag, etc… I am basically just the gym reporter.  I also have admitted multiple times that at one point or another, I have been guilty of the very things that I find funny today.  Most people that I notice simply do not know any better, however that does not mean it isn’t funny.

Well more than once I have had people take offense to my commentary, viewing it as mean spirited instead of the observational humor it is intended to be.  Unfortunately this is just part of having an opinion, pissing people off.  Sure I could follow the rainbows, puffy clouds and unicorn approach to Facebook posting as many people do, never post anything even mildly controversial, opinionated, deep, dark or negative but that would be pretty damn boring, at least for me.

My opinions and thoughts that I have posted on Facebook and my blog have raised more than a few eyebrows over the years.  I know I have pissed off many people and that’s ok.  It’s what having an opinion and personality is about.  Some people will get it/like it and some people won’t.  I don’t get angry with people if they disagree with me, I certainly spend enough time being disagreeable myself.

I am going on my 11th year of putting myself out there, if you choose to tune in or tune out, it’s all the same to me.