After still more rain on Tuesday we were treated to a brilliant double rainbow and the weather abruptly turned very nice indeed. Cool, sunny and dry. Everyone has been taking advantage of the situation to finally get things done. Plus the cool weather has slowed down the mosquitoes so you can at least outrun the little buggers. They’ve been absolutely horrible this fall. The warm, wet weather we had turned into a plague of mosquitoes that has been driving everyone crazy. Even hard-core environmentalists have been out there spraying to try to get some relief.
The new XS
This is the first time I’ve bought a phone right after Apple introduced it. Usually I don’t upgrade until the next new model is out and I can get a pretty steep discount on the previous generation of phone. That also means that by the time I get my hands on one, the bugs have pretty much been worked out of it. The problem with buying brand new equipment is that often things slip through the cracks that don’t show up in the initial testing and don’t become apparent until it’s out in the hands of the consumers. And that seems to be the case here.
There are reports (which I can confirm from personal experience) that while the device is brilliant in many ways, as an actual phone it pretty much sucks. Cellular reception absolutely sucks!
Now I admit that I live in an area where cellular reception is for the service I’m on (Sprint) is definitely not good. But generally with the old phone I would have 2 out of 5 bars showing, and a decent LTE data connection. With this phone inside of the house I have no LTE connection at all and only 2 bars of standard cell reception. Basically this phone would be almost useless as a phone for me if I didn’t have WiFi calling. (The phone uses my WiFi system to do VOIP instead of using the cellular system. That, fortunately, works brilliantly. Calls are rock solid and sound quality is amazing.)
Various tech media outlets have been reporting on this and it’s apparently a wide spread problem. No one is sure exactly what the issue is. There are rumors that it might be the antenna, but no one seems to know for sure. Whether it is something that can be cured in software or if it’s a hardware problem doesn’t seem to be known yet.
The phone is otherwise brilliant. As a media device the video and sound quality is absolutely brilliant, especially with the AirPod wireless earbuds. And the camera in this thing is absolutely wonderful by anyone’s standards, I’d think.
Take a look… Click on the image below to start the slideshow.
I always thought that if you wanted to take good images you needed a dedicated camera, but this one is just outstanding. The resolution, color, focusing, light sensors, all of it seems to work beautifully.
And everything else seems to work very well indeed. And fast? Wow, this thing is fast. Apps that would poke along with delays and stuttering video now work smoothly. I have a NOAA app that displays weather radar from all over the country and I was used to lengthy delays to load the weather data, render the graphics, display the radar animation, etc. On here it works more smoothly than it does on my desktop equipment.
On a less pleasant note, we got this crap going on out at the old stone bridge on Irish Road, my usual route when I go out on the bike:
The old one lane bridge isn’t very picturesque, but it’s still a bit of history around here and seeing people do crap like this to it makes me angry. You’ll note that most of the capstones are missing. This has been going on for ages. Some jackasses seem to take great delight in levering the capstones off the top of the bridge and dumping them into the river below. And now we have the graffiti, people throwing tires and old furniture off the bridge into the river… This kind of thing is very disappointing. Some of us are talking about setting up trail cams in the trees on the approaches to the bridge to try to catch the jerks who are doing this.
grouchyfarmer 
… as to vandalism, that’s literally everywhere that’s public. No respect. In a society that no longer teaches nor insists on moral values, that is exactly what is to be expected. Even if the vandals were caught, nothing would happen to them, they’re “victims” of their upbringing, you see… [sarcasm in spades].
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