My Phonemageddon Week From Hell and What I've Been Up To

I’m a little bummed to see the cryptocurrencies tanking today so I thought putting together a Steemit post might lift my spirits a bit after having been out of the loop for a week. I had a series of unfortunate events over the past week involving my and my wife’s phones, so I haven’t been checking things online until last night and today. Last week I was working on grading a new driveway at my home for back yard access and terracing part of the hillside to put in a large storage shed. As part of that, I’ve been wetting down the dirt with sprinklers so that when I run the tractor through it doesn’t choke me out from all the dust. It rarely rains in Southern California during the summer time, so the ground gets extremely dry unless it’s irrigated.

The Ill-Fate Location of Phone Doom:

Setting up the sprinklers here last Wednesday I crouched down with my infant son Henry in my hands and dropped my phone from my pants pocket right next to the sprinkler I was setting up. I turned it on for 20 minutes and came back out to shut it off. To my chagrin, there was my phone sitting under the sprinkler, having gotten rained on the entire time. When I picked it up, it was still working fine, so I thought the case had simply kept the water from seeping into the internal workings (the phone is also supposed to be splash resistant). Later on in the day after I had used the phone for several calls and sweated on it all day, it started getting really hot in my pocket. Even though I hadn’t really been doing much with it, the battery was alarmingly low too. Setting it on my wireless charger would barely even maintain charge, and at that moment I realized the phone was probably not long for this world. I promptly hopped on eBay and bought an unlocked ruggedized phone (something I had been thinking about for a while), the Kyocera DuraForce Pro, to ensure I didn’t destroy it after only a year of use like my last 4 phones.

The following day I decided to get cute and try to “fix” the old Turbo 2 so I could maybe have a spare around to use in emergencies like my then current one. I found a forum thread online in which people talked about soaking their phones in 90+% isopropanol. It just so happened that I had a bottle of it handy, so I proceeded to go about the procedure. If you have a Turbo 2, DO NOT SOAK IT IN ALCOHOL.

Here’s Why:

As you can see in the picture, the screen was etched by the alcohol bath. During the drying process, I also noticed that some of the adhesive holding the phone’s chassis together had begun to delaminate from it. Needless to say, my phone was already on it’s way out, but I think I may have driven the nail in the coffin with this isopropanol bath. I dried it out and it worked for another few hours, drained its battery again with much thermal drama, and then it wouldn't take a charge or turn on. I’m not sure if the alcohol finished it off or if whatever had been shorted finally let the smoke out, but either way, I was going to have to wait a couple of days before I had a phone to use again ‘cause it was cooked.

About a month ago my wife’s LG G4 did basically the same thing, but with no obvious abuse like I had done to mine. She has an Otterbox case and the phone looked like brand new. It got really hot, drained the battery, and then bricked. They sent her a new one in a box like this:

The day after my phone bricked however, in spite of the fact that the phone was brand new, the G4’s antenna gave up the ghost. Everything on the phone was fully functional, but the antenna couldn’t find a signal. After much back and forth with Verizon tech support and a trip to the store for a new SIM card to determine the phone was toast and not their cell tower, we determined that the phone was toast. The phone was, while not quite a brick, useless without a WiFi signal. As part of the troubleshooting process, the phone was factory reset and my wife forgot her Google password to set the phone up again with. When she reset it, the phone notified her that after a password reset, the username couldn't be used to set up a phone for another 24 hours! Now it was early Friday, and we had no hope of having any phone at all for at least until mine came in the mail. Lucky for us, the seller of my eBay phone was in the Los Angeles area, so the standard USPS shipping was quite quick and we got the new one the following day on Saturday afternoon before leaving for our friend’s birthday party. My wife’s replacement phone came on Monday, so now we’re both finally back in business.

After that horrid experience, as an added level of communication redundancy, I’ve decided I’m going to get an old school landline again. I bought one of these old-style phones off of Amazon:

It has the nice feature of running off of the phone line’s power only, so even in a power outage, the phone will still work fine. It will be a good little backup plan for natural disaster situations when cell towers tend to clog up and fail. It will also help for when we both have our phones fail within a day of each other!

After the initial panic of not being able to communicate with the outside world, our 24 hours of being cell-phone dead helped me to really appreciate how much we’ve come to rely on these new technologies. I realized that I’m constantly checking the weather, reading social media and news, chatting with friends, and doing web searches on lots of different things that I find interesting. I do this stuff almost constantly I’ve realized, and getting away from it gave me a little bit of tranquility back to my mind, at least for a little while. Since the new phone came in, I’ve found myself avoiding using it whenever possible, thus the reason why I hadn't checked Coinmarketcap.com for a week until this morning. That was a bit of a slap in the face seeing Steem had dipped below a dollar.

The New Phone, Kyocera DuraForce Pro:

As far as my new ruggedized phone goes, I love it. One of the nicest features is that it has a thumbprint reader on the power button so that you can secure and unlock the phone without entering a PIN (the PIN is still there as a backup). This constant PIN entry was a frequent annoyance to me in the past, but a necessary one to avoid my toddler unlocking and deleting all the content on my phone. Other cool features of the DuraForce Pro are hard buttons for the triangle/circle/square at the bottom of the screen (easy to find in the dark), a hard button for the camera and a programmable hard button for the app of your choice.

Although the computing hardware specs on the Kyocera are a little less stellar than the Droid, the phone uses an older Android operating system, and so it’s a lot snappier when switching tasks and opening apps. It still uses an Octa-core processor and has the same 3 GB of RAM. And because of the smaller screen and less power-hungry processor and GPU (I don’t think my eyes are good enough to notice the difference on a screen this small), the battery seems to last forever, in spite of the fact that the mAh’s are lower. The second day I had the phone, I listened to music and podcasts (nice and loud speaker by the way), and talked on the phone pretty much all day, and the battery was still at 47%. Even when brand new, my last few phones never came close to that unless they were just on standby in my pocket the whole time. Overall so far it’s a kickass little phone that I would highly recommend to anyone who needs a rugged phone that sort of harkens back to the no-nonsense flip phones that would last for days without charging and you could use them as a baseball without wrecking them.

More Pics of My Project

Below are a few more pictures I took of the progress I've been making. I hope you enjoy them.

Did a Little Bit of Grading Here in the New Driveway:

This is the new driveway I'm building to have access to the back part of my hillside property. The segment of the retaining wall you see here was part of the excavation and site prep that I did last year. What you see here was just par of the hill and it's now terraced and ready for road bed gravel.

Some Former Work I Did Last Year:

The above is the area I relocated the household propane tank to in order to make room for the driveway last year. I finished this just before the tractor broke. The tractor was up on blocks for several months and I've just gotten back to using it for excavation again. In the foreground of this pic is where an old shed was that had been destroyed by vandals before we bought this property. The pavers the former owners used for a foundation are setting on the retaining wall to the right of the propane tank.

A Pic of My Tractor:

It's a Massey Ferguson 204 Industrial tractor originally built in the early 60's. I've done a ton of work to this machine to get it running the way it is. To the front is affixed a later model (70's vintage) Model 200 bucket loader, and the 3-point hitch has a Gannon Box with ripper shanks and hydraulic top link to dig into the hard decomposed granite soil we have here. In the background you can see some more terracing I was able to bang out last week using the machine. It still needs a few finishing touches though when I get some more time. Now that the tractor's back up and running better than ever, I'm really appreciating how stoutly-built the 204 is. I ran it hard all day digging and grading in nearly 100 degree heat and the temperatures on the automatic transmission oil and the engine coolant stayed below 180*F.

The Site of the New Shed:

This is the area I excavated to place the new storage shed into. You can see my parts tractor's loader bucket in the right part of the picture. Under the tarp is a power plate compactor I've been using to tamp down the soil as it's put into place. Next will come a gravel base and then concrete for the foundation. This little building will have exactly 120 square feet of floor space at 8' x 15'. This size was chosen to maximize the storage space that can be built without a permit. Unlike the metal pre-fabricated sheds that it will be replacing, I will make it stand-up height as well, allowing me to stack quite a bit on shelving off of the floor so that small equipment like my lawnmower can be stored there.

The Old Sheds

These are what the new shed will replace. I have to stare at these blocking the nice mountain view in my back yard every time I look out the back window. Once all of the stored items are moved and the junk is disposed of, I will be able to demolish these eyesores and see this instead:

All images in this post were taken by me using my Canon T2i