I was actually fussing with sounds yesterday because I’d finally set up my voice mail (under duress–I don’t like voice mail), and didn’t like the notification sound. Turns out that the only options for the sound are “on” or “off”, but since I was in there anyway, I changed the sound for new text because the default sounds too much like one of the sounds in the aMSN theme I use on my laptop and if the laptop is on, I don’t know which it was, and I also checked to see whether I could change the sound for new email, which is kind of “meh”. Then, it occurred to me that I get notifications for new texts and (as of yesterday) voice mail, but I didn’t get notifications for new email. It doesn’t make much sense to have a sound for new mail if I’m right there, holding the phone to check, so I was going to shut it off, but decided instead to investigate why I wasn’t automatically getting new messages. I had push enabled, but I’d left the fetch option at the default of “manual”, primarily because it didn’t seem like something that I needed to change. I knew what it was, but didn’t see why I’d need to change it.

I poked “Advanced” just to see what was in there. Lo and behold, there would be the reason I wasn’t getting notified…email doesn’t support push, so it was using my chosen option for fetch…manual. In the words of Adam Savage, “Well, there’s yer problem!” 🙂

I changed fetch to every half hour. If that doesn’t seem too hard on the battery, I’ll bump it up to every fifteen minutes, and if it does drain the battery too quickly, then I’ll bring it back to every hour. Interesting that my new favourite toy is an iPhone, since the phone bit of it is the least of my interest. I answer it, of course, but P. made a very good choice in getting a smartphone–especially an iPhone–because were it not for SMS, IM, email, browser (blogging and Flickr-ing) iPod, games and doing fun stuff with photos, and for the increased file access and ability to customise after having jailbroken it, I’d hate hauling a mobile around just as much as I hated it ten years ago. Man dear Jesus, I hated my phone back then; it seemed like every time it rang, it was a call I didn’t want. Work, calling me to come in for a shift when I was either asleep or had plans to do something fun, or (after I went to KS), someone calling half an hour before start time to tell me that (s)he couldn’t make it in for a shift so I’d have to find somebody else in a big hurry, or some family member, calling to ask me to do something I didn’t want to do. I hated the interruption, but I don’t mind this so much. V. used to call to ask me to do (something I didn’t want to do), but now, he’ll just text, which somehow seems less annoying and invasive. When I get texts, email or an IM, it’s as likely to be something I want to read as it is to be something I don’t. Maybe I’ll just never give the number to anyone who annoys me, or at least nobody else who annoys me, since a few already have it. I don’t think I even mind voice mail as much as I hate it on our VOIP line. On the VOIP, when there’s voice mail, it makes the dial tone beep when I pick up the phone to make a call (I could cheerfully throw the phone across the fucking room!), and in order to retrieve it, I have to remember the code, which for reasons I don’t understand (I don’t mind computer passwords at all), annoys the hell out of me, and then play back in the sequence that the calls were received. The iPhone’s voice mail does ask for a password, but it just doesn’t irritate me so much, and I have a visual list, so I can play back whichever I choose, in whatever order I choose, or look at the list and ignore them all, plus I can stick it on speaker if I want. I still don’t like voice mail, but I’m okay with it, especially since I can just ignore certain (football/basketball/NASCAR) calls (football/basketball/NASCAR) and let (football/basketball/NASCAR) them leave (football/basketball/NASCAR) messages. Heh

Damn…just noticed that my numeric battery isn’t on. Stupid AT&T made me reboot my phone three times yesterday so they could tell me, “There’s an outage in your area. That’s why your voice mail isn’t working,” so that’s probably what messed it up. Meh…I think it’s Boss Prefs that does that; I’ll have to fix it.