Blackberry 9900 Woes solved with DuckDuckGo

I have a blackberry 9900 cell phone and rely on it for all my communications needs. A few months ago, I was so confident in my cell phone that I decided to downgrade my lan line to a dry loop. This gives me internet access via DSL, and saves me money in monthly telephone charges. I had heard that many people were doing this, and it seems that the home telephone  will become obsolete, same as the public pay phone.

The cell phone carriers are constantly promoting their services and devices, and a month does not go by that I don't receive some latest brochure or snail mail, keeping me informed and envious that I have not subscribed to their latest and greatest product offering.

Obviously, cell phones are the future.

A week ago I started experiencing  problems with my Blackberry cell phone. It started with the battery charge dropping from 100% to 10% within a couple of hours. I was forced to charge my phone a few times a day, and even then, it would magically lose charge, and it didn't matter if it lay untouched.

I googled using this text, "blackberry 9900 phone keeps restarting", and found pages and pages of results, most of them pointing me to 3rd party forums, such as crackberry.com and blackberryos.com. There were two common solutions, that I hesitated to deploy because they seemed drastic and extreme:

1. Restart phone is Safe Mode and remove 3rd party software that may be draining the battery.
2. Backup the phone, wipe it clean and reload the OS, applications, and data

The most sensible solution, appeared less frequently, and that was to return to the retail store where I purchased the phone and ask for help. Unfortunately, the last time I did this, I was directed to another "service" location which specialized in trouble shooting and parts replacement. Once I got there, I had to put my name on a waiting list, and it looked like it would be weeks before they would get back to me. I eventually solved the problem on my own.

Frustrated, I changed tack and decided that my Google search results were a problem because they did not give me exactly what I was looking for. I was not looking for forums that commiserated with me and suggested solutions that I did not trust.

So I switched search engines, to DuckDuckGo; pasted my search text, and immediately got back results. Now, since this was my first time using this search engine, I had to get comfortable with the visual layout and quality of the content.

Boy, was I surprised by the search content quality! The answer appeared in the top of the search results,
http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/BlackBerry-Bold/My-blackberry-9900-keeps-restarting/td-p/1294099/page/2,

A couple of people suggested that the battery might be loose, a bit too small for the casing; this would cause the battery to lose its connections to the charge pins, any time the phone was jarred or shaken. I also remembered that I had dropped the phone a few times, since I had bought it two years ago, and that may have contributed to the problem.

I opted for the solution that seemed most reasonable and stuck a piece of paper at the top of the battery to reduce its wiggle room. Bingo, the phone restarted, and from a registered 10% charge, it came back with a charge of 95%.

Problem solved by using an intelligent search engine, DuckDuckGo!. Now, if there were an equivalent, verb for this search engine, I could easily tell my friends what I did, "No, I didn't google, I ducked" ... not sure they would understand.

addendum ... Truth is, after all my frustrated attempts, I am still with the same Cell provider, same phone, and have learned to workaround the problems. Why, because, when you buy a phone from a service provider such as Bell, Koodo, Wind, etc, you have bought a phone that is  limited to work within the original vendors' radio frequency. Yes, what most of us don't realize is that you can have a smartphone with all sorts of capabilities, but for communications, you will be limited to whatever cell network that you purchased the phone from!

... and unlocking the phone releases you from being tied to the original network provider.

Good luck finding a network provider capable of supporting your phone. Mind you, if you move from Bell to Telus, no problem because they both support the same cell network.

As for  moving your expensive smartphone, from Wind Mobile to Telus, impossible! - sighhhh !

I cannot understand how we have become such a throw-away society. I am going to toss throw away this troublesome phone, move to a new provider, and buy their preferred phone. What a waste!

Mind you, I am considering a dumb phone... only voice and none of the fancy internet connections.

Ok... I will miss taking pictures, but I do have an old digital camera; unfortunately, I want it all, within one device, and available on impulse... duh?

Brief history how I got here

I have worked in the IT industry for many years and continue to be impressed how rapidly this industry is changing and how difficult it is to keep up with changes and continue to practice our skills.

My father was a shoemaker and so was his father before him. Most of their work was spent on repairing outworn leather shoes with primitive tools, not designing or building them. The work was lonely and time-consuming, but it allowed them to be independent craftsmen and business operators.

Mind you, when they first started in their trade, they were taught all the necessary skills, including making new shoes. But in practice, each discovered, in their own time, that selling new shoes and making them were different skill sets, and their strength was in making, rather than selling. Thus, their livelihood became dependent on repairing shoes.

My career in IT has followed a similar path. I learned my technical skills to design and build software solutions in school, and I sharpened my skills in the workforce. In those early years, every large corporation maintained and funded their own internal staff of programmers and business analysts who developed software for internal use and provided opportunities for their employers to be ahead of their competition. The IT job market was hot and you were always guaranteed of a job.

Then a change swept through IT. Business solutions providers such as IBM and SAP, saw that there were many internal application that were very similar in their design and programming, especially in vertical markets such as insurance, banking, manufacturing, etc. Internally developed systems became dinosaurs within the IT industry, and off the shelf solutions from these providers became the new norm. Companies no longer sought programmers and business analysts for developing internal solutions; instead they sent their RFP's (Request for Proposal) to these solutions providers and selected the solution that met their requirements. If there were any internal staff remaining, they would not develop any new solutions, but become trained in the vendor's solution to act as technical liaisons between their employer and the vendor. Programming was no longer a hot skill, demand for programmers dropped, and job titles such as "systems analyst" and "programmer/analyst" disappeared.

It was during this period of change that I opted to leave the security of employment and become an independent contractor; and why not? My "per diem" compensation increased, along with contracts in a variety of industries and technologies. I didn't make the jump with my eyes closed. I worked for a consulting firm for a couple of years, learned the business model, and decided to try it on my own. I became a valued member in projects which required all the skills I enjoyed: programming, business analysis, project planning/management. Each contract had a different emphasis on these skills and the variety of contracts ensured that I could practice and be current with my skills set.

After 20 years of contract work, I began to experience a slowdown in opportunities, a downgrade in billable rates, and a shallowness in the quality of opportunities. In the early years, I would have agents and companies calling me for contract work; now I had to call them and could no longer expect the contract rates that I had experienced in the past. Something had changed, but it was not clear to me, exactly what, until I discovered that the work was being outsourced abroad, to India, Romania, Russia, anywhere the labour costs were significantly lower than in Canada.

Time for another change. Rather than looking to develop new systems, I focused on integrating systems with each other; in other words, cobbling them together. Hence the title of this blog.

A story about adapting to change which you may find interesting!

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