Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

UserFriendly provides today’s comic-to-share of the day. So very true. There’s such an addictive quality to Blackberries that sometimes it’s hard to let go.

Which is why I don’t have a Blackberry.

I did get a new phone last week though! I have a new Samsung a737 with orange racing stripes! (The racing stripes make it faster! Okay, the 3G network support makes it faster, not that I use it.) I blew through the last of my roll-over minutes in January and February making a new plan with more minutes necessary. Since this landed me with a new 2 year contract anyway, I took advantage of the opportunity to get a new, mostly-free phone. My old phone was starting to behave badly after almost 2 years of vaguely faithful service, so it was probably time anyway.

I like my new phone. It’s orange. It’s also a slider phone and locks itself (well its keys) appropriately. I think it’s slightly bigger than my old LG flip phone, but not so much that I’ll actually notice. It still fits in my little cell case so I’m happy.

Yes, my criteria for cell phones are very basic. I don’t care if it does six million cool things. I want it to work as a phone and fit in my pocket. The orange racing stripes are a great bonus though.

Eventually, I will get an iPhone. Probably when it has 3G support. (Because I don’t need my phone to surf the web but when I do surf the web from my overpowered phone, I’ll want it to be fast!) There’s no discount on the iPhone when you renew a contract, so I can keep waiting.

In other news, it was almost 70 degrees out today. With the sun hitting my windows and the door closed, it hit 78 degrees in my office this afternoon. Fun stuff for early March. I’m not going to get winter this winter, am I?

tags: cell phones, heat, iphone, smartphones, user friendly, weather

Too many interesting links this week… time to corral them into a neat list! They’re really really random this week. I blame the heat.

Weather Happiness: It’s a beautiful day today… meaning that when I went outside to take these photos this morning it wasn’t 95° F already nor was the sun glaring down with its angry rays. This made me really quite happy. Other things that make me happy include my cat, my car’s starter getting replaced under warranty, and the fact that the guest room not only looks like a room again but will probably get a coat of paint today.

In all seriousness, I’m happy for the gray, dark morning and brighter gray afternoon. I got enough sun and heat yesterday!

Gardening and the Evil Vine of Doom: Yesterday after work I spent about 40 minutes clearing the Evil Vine of Doom. The EVoD is a trumpet vine that got out of control and tried to eat the garage. And by eat the garage I mean completely consume it with its ever-spreading greenery. The vine was covering most of the side and half the roof when we tried to remove it 2 years ago. I cut it down to the ground first. Then the roots got pulled and dug up.

Alas, this didn’t work. This vine has running roots… and those roots run along the side of the garage and into the corner behind the rhododendron. It comes back each time I pull it up. Hence its moniker as the EVoD.

So I’m letting the trumpet vine eat the corner of the fence but I’m trying to keep it from devouring the garage again. I planted my rose bush approximately where the vine had started so when the vine tries to come back, it hangs out with the rose bush. Unsurprisingly, I procrastinate weeding, especially when it’s hot, so the rosebush and the trumpet vine were rather intertwined. My wielding yielded a garbage can full of EVoD and a lovely view of my rosebush.

I also took a bunch of indoor gardening photos which I’ll post separately because… well… I can.

Philly Mayor in line for an iPhone: On a random note… slyppi just sent me this great link to Philadelphia Mayor John Street sitting in line for the iPhone. On one hand, go him for doing it himself. On the other hand, if he’s not filing for the vacation day, I hope he gets caught. Yes, the mayor of the 6th largest city(formerly 5th and boy are they sad to have been bumped by Phoenix!)… right, let’s start over. The mayor of the 6th largest city in the U.S. is spending his Friday sitting in the rain for an iPhone.

Oh wait! In an update on Philly.com: Street’s place in line is being held by an unidentified male aide. Street sounds a bit defensive though, don’t you think?

Before he left at 11:30 this morning - he was third in line of about 15 people waiting - he defended himself and declared:

“I’m taking care of my business. By 4 a.m., I sent my first e-mail to my chief of staff. I was doing my job while the city was sleeping. I have my Blackberry with me.”

[…]

“How can you sit here with 200 murders in the city already?” [22-year-old Larry West of Mount Airy] asked.

Street announced that “I’m doing my job.”

Perhaps it’s just the sleep-deprivation making him cranky - Street got in line at 3:30 this morning. But seriously, what was he thinking?

Edit: Hanging out on the sidewalk at 3:30 a.m. is an excellent way to get shot in Philadelphia, regardless of location. There were better ways Street could have done this that would have made him look good rather than make people question him. This would have been a great opportunity for positive PR!

tags: evod, gardening, gardens, iphone, john street, murder, philadelphia, philadelphia mayor, photographs, photography, roses, trumpet vine, yellow

For those of you hiding under a rock, tomorrow Apple releases the much-touted, marketed, anticipated, drooled over and discussed iPhone. The rate plans, from AT&T/Cingular, aren’t too bad, especially if you already are with that carrier (which I am). I’ll end up paying $17 more than I am now. This will get me twice the text messages I have now as well as the unlimited data access. If all goes well and there are no hidden catches, I’ll end up paying about $15 less a month than the new plan price for the same features. I can deal with that, I think.

The raves and rants about the iPhone are already flowing - AAPL has been bouncing around in about a $6 range for the the past couple weeks. The iPhone has been so hyped that apparently there’s some nervousness that it might not live up to Apple’s promises. I expect it will be the new status symbol of the summer.

I don’t actually have plans to go stand on line or get an iPhone tomorrow. I’m not saying it won’t happen, but I’m not actually planning to do it. If we happen to end up at the Apple Store and I happen to touch one and want it really badly, I might end up with one if there are any left. It would be really handy to have at Pennsic, for one. While I’m not currently expecting to have to keep track of work stuff at War this year, nor to do conference calls from my yurt, it would nice to have compact computer capability. Of course, the last thing I want to worry about is losing or damaging it. So… yeah. I’m being a bit zen about it and leaving my iPhone purchase up to fate. And by “zen” I mean “indecisive”. I still want one but I’m already hearing about improvements to network performance for the second generation (but no prediction on when we’ll see G2).

It’s a cell phone but it’s also an Apple product so I expect it to be a solid piece of hardware that I’ll be happy with for about twice as long as the average comparable hardware by another manufacturer. (I’m still quite happy with my 3rd generation iPod too… and the batter still works!)

I honestly won’t be stunned if I want an iPhone as soon as I play with one… but I think I’ll need to touch it first to be completely convinced. Really, I’m resisting… can you tell? ;) Will I be successful? Oh, probably not.

tags: , apple, at&t, cingular, iphone, technology

I am waiting for packages. I had forgotten how exciting that could be - there are things in the mail that I am excited to have arrive so I can play with them! Yes, this is positively silly, but I’m happy about it so here I wait, changing my mind every couple hours about which box I want to have arrive first!

Some random links from my open tabs:

• Jon posted about “The truth about auto fuel-saving devices”. The truth is, of course, that none of them work and the EPA did the testing to prove it. A better way to save fuel? Clean out the trunk and/or backseat - the excess weight reduces your car’s fuel economy.
• Speaking of Eco - ecogeek has the top 10 list of environmentally happy sky scrapers. A couple are actually in the US! (Note how many are in or planned to be built in the oil-rich Middle East too…) #10, the Urban Cactus in the Netherlands, really appeals to me though… If I were to move to Rotterdam, I’d totally want to live in the Urban Cactus. It’s a fun list (with pictures!) that shows just how innovative architects are getting when it comes to alternative energy sources and green design.
• Apple’s iPhone is set to launch at 6 p.m. on June 29th, giving eager fanatics all day to line up to get the first of the iPhones. Also, Safari is in Beta for Windows - you can now run Apple’s browser on your PC! Of course, I’m a FireFox girl myself… but that’s still pretty awesome!
• The Pennsic University site has the schedule of classes posted for this Pennsic. Now I can start planning which classes I want to go to even though I will inevitably miss most of them!

tags: apple, environmentalism, iphone, packages, random, random links, safari

Friday Flowers

Sometimes the light is just right and sometimes I’m lucky enough to get the shot. Sometimes the light is just right for just one shot. This is one of those photos - the follow-up shot I took a fraction of a second later lacked the glorious filtering of the sun through the tree. (I encourage you to click on the thumbnail for a bigger version of this photo - it’s one of those photos that you miss the details and effect at this size.) This tree is one of the older trees just inside the wall. The trunk is twisted and gnarled, the major branches have been taken off, but it has fresh young branches growing from its trunk and it is blooming with all its might. It’s also a far paler pink than the other trees, more a blushing white than pink.

The other photo is a close-up of some of the blossoms from the same tree. I love how the soft sunlight filtered through the tree onto these flowers. The close-up was actually taken before the full tree photo - the sun was playing hide-and-seek with me that whole walk.

Work, laptop and technology fluff

I am waiting for the new work laptop to arrive. While the only problem was a bad hard drive, my Thinkpad was old enough that the IT group didn’t want to support it anymore. (Oh darn?) So they successfully retrieved my data and loaded it onto a brand new Thinkpad. Shucks, and I didn’t get them anything! I’m optimistic that this laptop might be lighter. Please let it be lighter!

So I’ve been without a computer most of the week but I was able to get work done anyway. Logging into Outlook web access every 30 seconds is a small price to pay for a new lighter, faster, cooler laptop. I’m really glad I did a full sweep of my mailbox recently. It would be really annoying to be going over my pitiful mailbox quota on top of everything else this week!

Speaking of work, WebEx is a very cool thing and appears to be working quite smoothly on my fabulous Mac. We’ve started using it for our bigger meetings instead of NetMeeting because NetMeeting just can’t handle gracefully the volume of users we need to stream simple presentations to. I think I’ll use the Mac for all future WebEx meetings too - it’s nice to be able to multitask and still see the presentation (much bigger screen here). It helps since, in the case of today’s presentation, I spent 2 or 3 weeks working with the project team on the presentation (and we did a full practice run-through Wednesday morning) and tend to zone out if I’m just staring at the presentation. Amazingly, it’s easier to pay attention if I can divert some of my focus to babbling here.

Apple & iPhone fluff

The date is getting closer… the iPhone approaches. A little over a month from now we’ll be able to order it if all goes well. Though I’m not usually an early adpopter, I’m hoping to have one in my hot little hands by the beginning of July at the latest. I can’t wait to play with it! Apple’s stock has been doing very well lately. I hope the iPhone release happens on time and drives it up even further. I’d love to see another stock split by the end of this year.

If you are amused by the Apple “I’m a Mac.” ads, the UK ads are also available on the UK section of Apple’s web site.

Also, Steve Jobs came published another missive - this time about what Apple is doing to become a greener company.

tags: apple, cherry blossoms, flowers, iphone, laptops, spring, technology, webex, work

Academy Awards
I didn’t actually watch the Oscars last night but I did catch Scorsese’s acceptance in Italian… which induced very entertaining dreams in Italian. I’m not even sure which award he was accepting at that point. This morning I browsed the results over at CNN. I loved The Departed so I’m delighted it took so many awards. Pan’s Labyrinth also deserved all the awards it got and more. Little Miss Sunshine, a film I never would have seen if it hadn’t been for slyppi, had a good showing too. I think Abigail Breslin should have been awarded the best supporting actress Oscar, having only heard about Jennifer Hudson’s performance in Dreamgirls (which was described to me as amazing except when she wasn’t talking or singing - apparently she showed no ability to react). Breslin was just amazing in every way.

Apple and Cisco and iPhones! Oh my!
Last week it was announced that Apple and Cisco will share the iPhone name. All lawsuits connected to the iPhone name dispute have been dismissed and both companies are quietly going about their business. Very quietly… like there aren’t any exciting details leaking out about the deal beyond, “Under the deal, they will also work together in the areas of security, consumer and business communications.” (BBC News) This agreement was just in time for them to debut the iPhone commercial during the Acadamy Awards though no actual product name is mentioned. It’s a cute commercial and says absolutely nothing about the product except that it’s coming in June. The montage of movie clips of famous actors and actresses answering phones is fun, with a final “Hello” harkening back to the original Mac commercial just in case you missed the implication of all those other hellos.

Weekend and SNOW!
It snowed here last night! Another couple of inches fell to cover over the greening areas of the lawn. Unfortunately this week is likely to be too warm for the snow to stick around long. It actually started snowing mid-afternoon sometime. I was driving back from visiting lisaf in NY. As soon as I crossed into PA the sleet started. Within 10 miles it had turned to snow. By the time I got home it was seriously snowing!

The weekend was good. We wore ourselves out romping around NYC Saturday. I didn’t spend nearly as much money as I feared I might. LUSH and Crumpler were my weaknesses, but I knew that going in. I did get a new camera bag (which was the whole pretense of going to Crumpler in the first place) but I also got an awesome green handbag too. Not that I carry handbags, but this one is GREEN! LUSH was… an adventure in impulse shopping. We ate good food, drank good wine then spent the evening being lazy (which was good since we were whole-heartedly exhausted). Sunday involved really tasty breakfast food and driving home (which was tiring before I hit exciting driving conditions).

tags: academy awards, apple, cisco, iphone, movies, nyc, oscars, snow, travel, weekend

Now I’ve actually watched the keynote (The crib notes were pretty amazing! But I stayed up way too late watching most of the Quicktime version of it last night.)

AppleTV

Apple also announced AppleTV yesterday. It’s a pretty cool little box at a sweet price point! AppleTV brings the Mac to the living room allowing you to view everything you can view in iTunes right on your television. Movies, music, tv shows, podcasts, album covers… if you can enjoy it in iTunes, AppleTV allows you to enjoy it on your television. It has all the appropriate audio and video ports to connect to HD televisions. You’ll also find USB and Ethernet ports on the back and wireless (802.11n) built in. AppleTV will synch with one Mac quite happily. Just like an iPod, you can select what actually is moved over to the AppleTV from your computer (Mac or PC running iTunes). But that’s not all! It will also stream from another 5 computers. (I believe you can only have 5 computers authorized to connect at a given time rather than having a lifetime cap of 5. When you need to stream from the 6th computer, I expect you’d be able to de-authorize one of the other computers.)

The price is right: $299. And if that USB port can be used to connect additional storage, the 40gb hard drive becomes less prohibitive. It starts shipping in February and you can order it now over at the Apple Store.

AppleTV is a cool toy. I personally don’t watch much on my television (well, on the Fop’s television because I don’t really want to claim ownership to that monstrosity) so AppleTV isn’t very valuable to me personally. I can see how the Fop would have use for it more. If we had one, I would load music onto it for parties and when I’m kicking around the first floor as well as play with looking at my zoo photographs on the big screen. (Yes, I’m a little vain that way.) And maybe I’ll get into watching more video in iTunes over the next year…

And then, the iPhone demo…

I want the iPhone even more now. A lot more. I had full-on fangirl moments while watching the iPhone demo. The most amazing part is not the rich browser, the full e-mail client, the iPod functionality or the widgets. The most amazing, astound, revolutionary part is the interface itself. Apple took out over 200 patents during the development of this phone. Go Apple.

Remember yesterday I said that I didn’t want to have to remember the complex key combo to make my smart phone convert into a waffle iron? I’m pretty sure the iPhone can make waffles with fewer than 3 clicks of buttons labeled with intuitive icons.

The iPhone interface is just… smart.

Navigation is so incredibly simple. Touch the buttons, scroll up and down with a quick drag of the finger, and if you get lost (or just tired of playing with the Weather widget) there’s a handy-dandy Home button to take you back to the main screen. Apple has built in a cool little elastic band effect. If you drag your finger up and off the touch-screen (i.e. run over the top margin of the touch-screen) while browsing, whatever is in the window (songs, messages in your inbox, a Google map) keeps scrolling as if you gave the list momentum with your finger drag. It’s Very Cool.

The zoom feature - it’s a 3.5 inch screen which is big but still quite tiny. If you’re surfing a complete web page (the NYT was the example), you can double-tap the screen to zoom in on any point. You can also use a “pinch” move (opening or closing your fingers against the touch-screen). This multi-touch functionality is at least one of the patents.

The iPhone is an Apple product and therefore the switch between portrait and landscape display is beautiful and automatic when you turn the phone. Go, go, go accelerometer! Other terribly smart things the iPhone does include: pausing your music when you get a call, switching off your speaker when your bring the phone to your ear, and sensing the ambient light so it can adjust the screen brightness appropriately to your environment. Pretty cool stuff though not individually revolutionary.

Cover Flow

Cover Flow is quite possibly the coolest new feature of the iPhone. Cover Flow sounds like a fairly mundane feature and for some reason makes me think of surfboards. The demo on the Apple web site doesn’t do it justice. When you’re in landscape mode you can go into Cover Flow and scroll through the cover art of all your music. Drag your finger to move left or right, click a cover to view it (the album and artist info appears below the image quite helpfully), click again to go into the track list, keep clicking to select and play a song. It’s beautiful (and somewhat mesmerizing) and the closest thing to 3-dimensional data interaction I’ve seen on a 2-dimensional screen on a consumer electronic. As well as surfboards, this feature reminds me very much of descriptions of interacting with data in science fiction. If only the covers were flowing holographically in space for us to manipulate with our hands instead of just our fingers on this amazing little device…

A new revolution, thanks Steve!

Steve Jobs spent over an hour of the keynote just on the iPhone demo. I think I could have watched him play with the iPhone for another hour. It’s an incredibly device. Just incredible. I was ready to buy an iPhone, before touching one myself, just a few minutes into the demo. What did it? It runs OS X. OS X. On. A. Phone.

What makes this phone revolutionary is the innovation and the whole package. This touch-screen is amazing. Taking the keypad off the phone is almost as cool as taking the floppy drive out of the computer. This is not just an iPod+Phone device. It’s a tiny little Mac for your pocket that happens to also make phone calls.

tags: apple, appletv, iphone, macworld, os x, steve jobs, technology

The keynote at Macworld went well - AAPL is up $7+ today.

Apple Computer, Inc. is now Apple, Inc. which seems both insignificant and significant all at the same time. Remember when Apple changed from a color logo to a monochrome logo? Today’s name change is far more subtle but means far more. By dropping “Computer” they are admitting that their roots no longer account for their core business. It’s been a long and nail-biting wait, but I think it’s almost safe to say that Apple may have a stable future. I’ve always said that Apple isn’t going anywhere but now I’m almost convinced of this myself! Of course, I’m also a Red Sox fan, so I still worry even when things are going well. I wonder if Apple, Inc. finally paid off Apple Records sufficiently such that there will be no additional lawsuits. The last I heard was that Apple Records would appeal the May 2006 decision in the UK courts but that was months ago.

So, about that phone…

The iPhone has been announced! Let’s start with the important information, the size!

• Dimensions: 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches
• Screen size: 3.5 inches (diagonal)
• Screen resolution: 320 by 480 at 160 ppi
• Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Battery life: 5 hours of talk/video/browsing time or 16 hours of audio playback

My 3.5 year old 3rd gen 40gb iPod is 4 x 2.5 x 0.75 inches (approximately). My fairly new LG flip phone is 3.5 x 1.8 x 0.75 inches. And neither of them are nearly as cool as this iPhone! Size does matter, at the iPhone is a little bigger than I usually like my cell phones to be, but useful functionality will make up for needing to buy a new case! It’s a touch bigger (less than half an inch taller, the first dimension listed above) than the current video iPods and but the iPhone’s screen is considerably larger (3.5 inch cinema vs 2.5 inch).

That battery life doesn’t suck either!

That little screen… my first laptop, a Powerbook 165, only had a screen resolution of 640×400. Of course it was 4-bit grayscale and only had 128K (yes K, that’s smaller than MB and much much smaller than GB) of video memory.

But back to the iPhone. Other important details for us Mac heads:

• The iPhone won’t be available until June. Yes, June. Steve Jobs may be a god, but he’s a bloody tease too.
• It will debut on the Cingular network only - there’s a multi-year exclusivity contract in place.
• You’ll be able to buy them from the Apple Store and Cingular.
• There will be 2 sizes available, an 8GB model for - $599 and a 4GB model - $499. Expensive and a little small but the new Samsung BlackJack is $449 and other PDA/smart phones currently on the market run from $400 to $650 even with less functionality. (Base prices, before discounts from contracts, etc.)

A Thneed’s a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!
It’s a phone! It’s a camera! It’s an iPod! It’s a browser! It’s a WIDGET MACHINE!

Were you actually interested in the functionality? Yes, it runs widgets and a slim version of Safari! It also supports POP3 and IMAP mail. There’s a 2.0 megapixel camera built in as well as WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, Edge and Quad-band GSM. I can’t wait to try one of these out. Maps, weather, e-mail, music, not to mention all the classic cell phone features, only smarter!

Everything is done via touch-screen, no pesky stylus required. But do not fear! The qwerty touchpad is predictive which basically means that it will figure out what you’re trying to say rather than inputting your typos. From the various demos availalbe on Apple’s site, it looks like the rest of the interface will be as intuitive and slick as we’ve come to expect from Apple.

I’m really not one to combine my toys. I have resisted the combined cell phone + (camera, music player, video player, browser) for a long time. Call me a luddite, but I’d rather have 2 devices that work really well and do exactly what I want them to do. I don’t want to need to remember the magic key combination to make my cell phone convert into a waffle iron at some critical moment. That said, I think the iPhone may be the combo device that does it all well. Apple’s amazingly talent for intuitive design will save the world. Well, may save my world at least! …if only we didn’t have to wait until June…

tags: apple, iphone, macintosh, macworld, steve jobs, technology