Of Rice and iPhones

Not too long after I got my much loved iPhone, I managed to drop the bloody thing in a toilet bowl while doing my husbandly cleaning duties!  It fell right out of my shirt pocket and plummeted helplessly down into the water, with me screaming in horror all the while. I fished it out within seconds, but I thought the poor thing would be well and truly deceased.

But around the same time, with my Hoax-Slayer hat on, I was checking into a circulating tip that claimed that you could save the life of a wet mobile phone by covering it in uncooked rice overnight.   So I thought I'd give it a go.

Well, the good news is that the phone dried out! I left it in the rice for around 24 hours, cranked it up, and it worked perfectly and has been going ever since.

So did the rice actually save the phone? In truth, there is no way of knowing for sure. It is quite possible that even if I'd left the phone, forlorn and riceless on the bench, it may well have dried out and fully recovered anyway.

Unless you were to take two identical phones in precisely the same condition, immerse them in water for precisely the same length of time and then place one in rice and the other on the bench, there is no real proof that the rice method is effective or not. Even if you did conduct such a controlled experiment, other uncontrolled factors such as the relative robustness of components inside the phones might affect the results. To be really sure, you'd probably have to conduct the same experiment a number of times and correlate the overall results.

The theory is that the rice helps to draw out and absorb the liquid caught in the phone.  That may well be the case. Anyway, regardless of whether the rice saved the day or not, I was just glad to have my iPhone back!

iPad Anticipation!

I ordered an iPad 2 via the Apple Store a couple of weeks ago and I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on it! I already love my iPhone and have installed a lot of useful (and not so useful but fun - think "Fruit Ninja") apps on it.  So, I can't wait to get hold of the iPad and start installing :) Hopefully, it will arrive by the end of the week. It's the 64 GB model, so it should have plenty of room for lots of stuff.

I'm Back!

Well, how time flies!  I added a couple of items to this blog earlier this evening and then realized that it was the first time I'd posted here since June 2007. But, I'll certainly try to make up for my callous and shameful neglect by posting a lot more from now on. Promise! Really! :)

Hell, I even changed the blog template and fiddled with the settings a bit.

Here's a picture of a camel I snapped in Tasmania a while back. Why am I including it here? No reason really. I just like camels:

An old man, a boy & a donkey

This story has moved to it new home here. :)

Evernote

Some software applications or web services become such an important part of your everyday working life that you'd wonder how you'd manage to get anything done without them. For me, one such tool is Evernote.  Evernote allows you to capture and store thoughts, ideas, information from websites, images, scanned documents, files and just about anything else you can think of with ease.

The great thing about Evernote is that you can add notes in multiple ways, including via the Evernote website, its desktop software and its smartphone application. And, best of all, your notes are automatically synched between these various devices! What this means in practice is that I'm never very far from a device that  allows me to add a note to my Evernote account, so I can record thoughts and ideas on the fly. For example, if I'm out shopping, and get an idea I'd like to record, I can whip out my iPhone and jot down the outline of my idea in just a few seconds. Later, at home, I can look at the idea on my Evernote desktop software, expand on it as necessary and file it for future attention. 

Evernote is a very powerful and versatile application that really does help me stay organized, increase productivity and remember things.

Check out Evernote Here