Category Archives: technology

Blackout…

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As a general rule, I’m not a joiner. I don’t show up at protests and I don’t use my blog as a forum for anyone’s opinions other than mine. Today is an exception. S. 968 – The Protect IP Act is bad public policy and amounts to nothing short of censorship on a scale this country has never seen. Essentially, this Act would grant the government a nearly unfettered ability to order private companies and individuals to remove content, hide content from search engines, and generally make it impossible to continue using the internet as a means of freely exchanging ideas that it has been since its inception. The theft of intellectual property is absolutely wrong and should be prosecuted. Allowing blanket censorship of the internet, however, is like using a nuclear bomb to shoo a fly.

I urge everyone reading this to contact your Members of Congress and tell them that a free and open internent is in the national interest and that they should oppose efforts to censor what we can and cannot see online.

Go global…

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Say what you want about the evils of the global economy, but I’m an unabashed fan. Sure, it means we have to compete with countries that can manufacture just about everything cheaper than we can, but I think that misses the up side… Like being able to order something from Europe last night at 9:30 and having it sitting in Philadelphia 18 hours later waiting to clear Customs and get delivered to your door. I mean isn’t a little friendly competition a small price to pay for that kind of luxury and convenience?

I’ve traveled enough to know that the world’s too small a place to pretend that we can raise the drawbridge and keep everything out. By all means, we should regulate it, set the conditions under which it happens, and fight hard in those areas where we have a comparative advantage, but we can’t roll back the clock on international commerce any more than we can command the tides to go in or out. We need to encourage the kind of world where we can order anything, from anywhere and have it delivered in a day or two. It’s good for us as consumers, it’s good for them as merchants and manufacturers, and it forces us to take a realistic look at the kinds of things our own economy should be doing in the future. If going global isn’t a win-win scenario, I don’t know what is.

Management…

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I’ve got a problem with management. No, not the one that pays me, but the one that attempts to keep order in my photo collection. I love almost everything about my MacBook Pro… except that I can’t ever find the picture I’m looking for to save my life. I appreciate that the computer tries to be helpful by saving pictures taken on the same date as an “event,” but more often than not what I end up with when I download pictures from my phone are a dozen separate events full of pictures that in no way relate to each other. I take random snapshots, not full blown photo shoots. I’ve suffered in silence for years, but no longer. I need something other than iPhoto in my life.

The fact is I like to curate my own files. I like personal control over where they’re going and what ends up in them. I know that’s a very un-Mac thing to say. Steve wouldn’t like my inability to give up manual file management to the system. He’d probably yell. A lot. I’ve come to terms with that, so what I really need is a simple photo editor for Mac that lets me run the show when it comes to building file hierarchies, sorting, and naming images. It’s possible that iPhoto would let me do this if I found the right way to ask it, but so far it’s been a no go.

My research mission for the week is to find just such an app. First stop is the 30-day free trial of Aperture 3 to see if it’s file management system is more likable than it’s consumer-focused cousin. After that it’s possibly a side trip to Photoshop Elements for editing and good old fashioned manual file management to keep myself organized. I’ll let you know how it goes. If anyone has any other ideas, I’m all ears.

4S

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Some of you are probably expecting a detailed iPhone 4S review. There are plenty of them out there already. Adding one more to the mix doesn’t seem like a great use of time. All I’ll say is that after a weekend of heavy use it’s an absolute winner. I thought I was going to be disappointed that it wasn’t a newly redesigned phone, but what I didn’t expect is that it’s just the shell that’s the same. All the electronic innards are new, improved and seamless. If you’re due for an upgrade or even if you’re not and just want to step up to a best in class piece of work, do yourself a favor and give this thing a test drive. It’s a game changer. Again.

Live blogging the launch…

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In the past, I’ve been in the habit of live blogging iStuff launches from the line at the Apple Store at Saaddle Creek. Since a trip to Memphis seemed a bit excessive even by obsessed Apple fanboy standards, I thought I’d change gears a bit this time around. I promise I’ll spare you the details of sitting in the kitchen casting longing looks out the door every time I here a large truck pass by. Today, I’ll focus a little on unboxing and adding a few pics and initial impressions.

If you’re wondering what I’m doing to pass the time, check out the forums at http://www.macrumors.com. They’re always a great time waster. Oh, and laundry. I’m doing that too. Judging from the line the local morning news programs are showing at Towson mall, hanging out here at the house seems like it might have been the best idea. Plus, sitting around in the rain never seems like a good idea.

Without further runup, here’s what we know so far…

– 0611: Package out for delivery from the UPS sorting facility in Newark, Delaware. Delivery address is still wrong on their website. Status: crapshoot.

– 0822: Six cups of coffee down. Dogs snoring. Tapping foot impatiently. Updates and pictures as breaking news happens.

– 1014: Still waiting. Coffee count is 12 cups.

– 1151: Still waiting. Hail the size of marbles and torrential rain. Switched to Coke Zero. If I’d have gotten up early this morning and stood in line I’d be up and running by now. Lesson learned.

– 1224: The mail truck sounds an awful lot like an UPS truck. Sadly, it only brings bills and other junk mail.

– 1336: And still waiting. Next launch I’ll be back in line. With iPhone 4 I was home, activated, synced, and at the Flying Saucer by this point in the day.

– 1428: Still waiting. Last visages of patience evaporating and beginning to seriously ponder the likelihood of finding a phone “in the wild” at a retailer at this late hour of the day.

– 1451: Aaaaaaand there goes the FedEx truck.

– 1523: FedEx truck #2 delivering on my street. Yet no UPS.

– 1544: It’s here. It’s here. It’s here!

– 1616: It’s now the traditional time on iPhone launch day when AT&T chokes.

– 1705: AT&T activated is still hosed. They are allegedly running 2-3 hours behind demand. After 5 years of doing this, one might think they’d have gotten an effing clue.

– 1759: Finally broke through the server jam. iPhone 4S is restoring from backup. We’ve got a pulse.

Dear Lord, please don’t let them screw this up…

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Today is the first iPhone launch that doesn’t find me standing in line somewhere. The first iteration was the local AT&T store, but after that I discovered the grownup candyland that is the Apple Store. As much as I don’t particularly like hanging around large groups of people, launch day crowds are something a little different. We’re all geekily obsessed in more or less the same way. Plus there’s always a smattering of hot nerdy chicks in line and really, who doesn’t like that?

This time around, in the absence of confirmed in-store reservations, the better course of action seemed to be ordering direct and waiting for my shiny new precious in the comfort of my own home. Judging by a look around at the weather, that’s probably for the best. There’s still a part of me that feels a little bad about missing the lineup. Not needing to get up at 2AM and having fresh hot coffee, my fuzzy slippers, and an actual chair to sit in temper that feeling just a little bit.

If the internet is to be believed, my phone is now out for delivery. I’m still more than a little concerned that UPS will jack something up at the last minute, but in an effort to maintain some semblance of reasonableness I’m working under the assumption that I’ll have a tasty new treat in my hot little hands by around noon. Then I’ll need to find something else to look forward to (i.e. obsess over)…. Sooooooo when did they say iPad 3 was coming out?

Failure to communicate…

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At least once a week, UPS shows up at my door with something I’ve ordered from somewhere. In all those orders I’ve never once had a problem with the delivery address showing up wrong on their website. After calls to both Apple and UPS, their website stubbornly insists that my iPhone 4S is going to be delivered to Elkton, Delaware. That’s a problem for two reasons: 1) I don’t live in Delaware and 2) There is no such place as Elkton, Delaware. The street address is right. The zip code is right. It’s just the damnable server refuses to update the state. Everything was right with my original order (yes, I checked three times to make sure the shipping address was right and even had the nice customer service people at Apple pull it up just to be sure). But somewhere between Apple and UPS we’ve apparently had a failure to electronically communicate. And I’m just paranoid enough to believe that this is going to cause a delivery delay. On any day but Friday that would be obnoxious, but correctable. In this case, delivery is scheduled on Friday so the correction wouldn’t take place until after the weekend. If you’re in any way obsessed with getting your hands on new toys at the earliest possible moment, you understand. If your phone is just another appliance, well, I don’t think I can explain it.

I did get to have a relatively nice conversation with a gentleman from UPS Air Cargo in Louisville this morning. He assures me that it’s just a glitch in the website and the actual manifest shows delivery to my actual address in Maryland. I’m mostly inclined to believe him since he rattled off my correct address before I told him what the issue was. Still, I’m now both obsessed and paranoid and that’s not a great combination of ways to spend the next three days. Maybe I’ll call tomorrow and see if I get the same story. Or I could just drive to Louisville, pound on the door, and ask them to hand it over.

Feeding addiction…

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I got up at 2:45 on Friday morning to order a cell phone that not one living consumer has actually gotten a chance to hold in their grubby little hand yet. Websites ground to a crawl, crashed, reloaded, and then crawled again, but I stuck with it for almost four hours. Some people might call that obsession, but I like to think of it as dedication to the task at hand. Sticking with it was better than the alternative of getting up the following Friday to go stand in line at an Apple Store or AT&T retailer in the hopes of getting one on the first day of release, like I have the other four iterations of the iPhone.

My precious, precious iPhone 4S is, even as I write this, sitting on a pallet somewhere in Eastern China waiting to be loaded onto a Fedex jet and flown to Alaska to clear Customs, then on to the Memphis hub for sorting, and then into Philadelphia for local routing. Not that I’ve looked into how this usually works or anything. Assuming there are no hiccups with Fedex getting from there to here, I should have my shiny new bauble delivered right to my door around noon next Friday. From manufacturing plant to consumer on the other side of the world in a week and all synchronized to happen the fay the item is first available in stores. You’ve got to admit that’s pretty slick. Who says international commerce doesn’t work?

Maybe it’s just one more addiction I’ve gotten myself into. Fortunately it’s mostly harmless to everyone else and doesn’t leave that hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach the same way putting $500 on red tends to do. So yeah, after 16 months of waiting for the next great thing, I’m just a few days from getting a fix to carry me through another year. Then I’ll be after the next big thing. When you’re feeding addiction, that’s just the way it goes.

Increment…

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It would be easy enough to climb up on my soapbox and do a hack job of dismissing the iPhone 4S as an incremental upgrade. It would be easy because, let’s face it, that’s exactly what Apple rolled out today. Bump up the processor, tweak the antenna, and roll out a spiffy new version of iOS with a few new capabilities and call it a day. The company will make billions, investors will be happy, and in another year or so another incremental improvement will roll off the line.

Today’s update wasn’t the iPhone I wanted, but it was the one I expected. It’s a nice little upgrade from the one I’ve been carrying around for the last 15 months and It’s the one I’m going to take pains to get my hands on when it shows up October 14th. If this iteration sticks around for a year, the cost breaks down something like $17 a month. I guess that’s not a bad price for an incremental improvement.

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it’s enough to let Apple dig a little deeper in my wallet. Technology is a painful, painful mistress.