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We decided to head out to Toys R Us to do a little browsing and get a few ideas. 90 minutes later it was over. Shopping done for the holidays and I’m pretty sure we single-handedly pumped enough cash back in to the system that we no longer need any kind of bailout.

We were not planning on buying a single thing today, but the sales were too good to pass up. The store was packed to the point it was hard to get a cart around in there.

Looks like the stores are going to get agressive with pricing to get people out there spending.

I’ve been fighting an issue with OS X’s Mail application and it has finally driven us apart. You see, I have a bunch of friends that like to send me email with various jokes in the form of video attachment and the problem is that once I open the email, Mail takes the CPU on my MacBook Pro to the ceiling and the fan kicks in. Eventually the only way to stop it is to force quit Mail and restart it.

But lately even that isn’t taking care of it. I’ve tried rebuilding the mailbox that I use via imap with gmail but that only lasts for a short while. So until I get this one figured out Mail and I are on a break. I have turned to Microsoft Entourage and things seem to be fine. I know many really dislike Entourage, but I’ve had pretty good success with it in the past as I used to use it to connect to an Exchange2003 server with work.

Back to the internets to see if I can find the solution.

I never paid much attention to the big red vending machines that have been popping up outside grocery stores in our area. I heard a friend talking about renting a movie from the “big red box” and how easy it was. So we stopped by on our way out of the grocery store and Redbox has definitely gained a customer.

Those of you that know me know I’m all for instant, downloadable gratification. Why go out to rent a movie when I can click a mouse and be watching it before you’d be back from the store? Redbox allows you to rent DVDs for $1 a day. That’s it. No membership. No application. Just select a movie, swipe your credit card, and within seconds you’re on your way home with a movie. As long as you return it by 9pm the next day you’re fine. If not, Redbox takes $1 from your credit card until you return it or you hit $25, which ever comes first.

But Redbox wins in an area I never expected - availability. We wanted to see the movie Baby Mama but it is not available for rental through iTunes and a few other places until 10/8. I could have downloaded it from Amazon.com for $14.99, but there is no way that was going to happen. Too much money. Redbox had it on their new releases sign but it was out of stock, so we picked another movie. The next morning I went online to Redbox.com, searched for Baby Mama, entered my zip code, and Redbox showed me all the Redboxes in our area and Baby Mama’s availability. Since it was now available at the Redbox we just rented from I rented it online and Redbox reserved it for me on that machine. Isn’t connectivity grand?

The really nice thing is you can return the movie to any Redbox, it does not have to be the one you rented from. Since I entered my email address when we rented a movie, I now get email confirmations for rentals, returns, etc. immediately. And I do mean immediately, as I was getting the emails while still standing at the Redbox. Nice touch.

So, current movies, decent availability, online reservation, returns wherever I want, email confirmation, no membership, and $1 rental fee. Looks like someone figured out how to get me out of the house to rent a movie again.

So why can’t iTunes and Amazon rent movies at the same time? Nice job Redbox.

While driving home from a party the other night I was reminded why I don’t like regular radio in Pittsburgh. The song Morning Train (9-5) by Sheena Easton came on and we were both laughing about how long it had been since we heard that one. Then we quickly realized how awful it was. But, it brought up how much Sheena changed once Prince got hold of her. So we started searching YouTube for her videos and were listening to Sugar Walls when it hit me that I may have just heard the worst lyric ever - “blood races, to your private spots.” Lame. That one gets my pick for worst.

But what about the best? I’m not sure if this one is the best or not, but it has stuck with me the longest. It came at a time when I couldn’t stand Bruce Springsteen but the girl I was dating loved him and forced me to listen to him all the time. I’m definitely more of a fan of his these days and my favorite lyric has to be “is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” from The River.

What are your picks for the worst and best lyrics you’ve ever heard?

The main reason I had a jailbroken iPod Touch is because I really liked the game Five Dice.  Five Dice is an excellent version of the old dice game called Yahtzee.  I was hoping that the developer would bring it to the App store once version 2.0 of the software was out and they came through.

This is not the exact same game that was available for free if you were jailbroken.  This version has a lot more polish and the graphics are very professional.  The game play is very smooth and the little touches of animation are pretty slick.  Another big difference is that the game is no longer free - it costs $3.99.

I’m sure there will be people that enjoyed the jailbroken version complaining about the costs, but I think it is definitely worth the few bucks it costs.  The game is every bit as polished as any other professionally developed game and I see no issue with the developers getting paid for their work. 3.99 - what’s that - a cup of fancy coffee or a pack of cigarettes?

Hopefully they will make a ton of money from this little application and put some of it back in to the game to provide over the air multi player capability.  That would be pretty cool.

If you grew up playing the game Yahtzee you should take a chance and spend the few bucks it costs to try it out.  It’s definitely worth it.

In infrastructure we face outages of systems at any time.  When people can’t get to their applications, data, or email one of the most important things we can do is to communicate openly and honestly with them until the issue is resolved.  People tend to be a little more understanding of the issue if they at least have some idea of what is going on.

Seeing Apple start to communicate on the recent MobileMe issues is a great start and I hope they start to be more open with any system issues they are facing to help keep everyone more current with information.

I realized a mistake I have been making with purchasing applications from the iTunes App store and the iPhone.  I thought it would work like this:

• Purchase an application from iTunes and it would then sync with the phone - check.
• Check for updates to purchased applications with iTunes and have those updated applications sync to the phone - check.
• Purchase an application using the iPhone and have it sync back to iTunes - check.  Well, that’s how I thought it worked once.

Continued from Part 1…

Thankfully I was able to get her phone operational again by holding down the button at the top edge of the phone until it asked me if I wanted to power it off.  I powered it off and back on again and all seemed fine, but I lost just a tiny bit of confidence at that point in time, kind of like when a car has an issue and you never quite trust it again.  It happened to me a few more times that night - some times it would let me power it off and some times I would have to hold that top button and the button on the front at the same time until the phone reset itself.  More recently none of those tricks seemed to work and I had to do the top and front button reset dance numerous times before the phone finally came to life.  That one was really scary.

I am not a stranger to computers and failure.  I am in my 22nd year in infrastructure and see bugs all of the time.  But this one hurt a little somewhere deep inside because, like many, I had fallen in to the fuzzy, happy world where Apple would never, ever make mistakes like this.  And this was just one little piece of the issues that would rock my happy little Apple world and slap me right back in to reality, where you remember that these are things engineered, designed, coded, and tested by humans.  Humans are imperfect and make mistakes, and now the entire world knows that Apple makes them as well - Activation, 2.0, MobileMe,  Welcome to the real world Apple.  That’s a lot of things happening at the same time that should have been avoided.  It will be interesting to see if Apple learns anything from this.  Scaling is hard.  Enterprises are hard.

The 2.0 software and the App store are an amazing example of systems and integration.  But they are not perfect.  I have applications crash on me all the time.  I actually blame Apple for most of these as I don’t believe any application’s crash should be able to take down the phone’s OS, but it sure seems like that happens a lot.  Those apps that just crash back to the icon screen I believe are probably the developer’s issue to resolve, but the rest should sit firmly on Apple’s shoulders.  If you are running applications from the App store I would encourage you to check for any updates daily.  The developers seem to be working hard to get any bugs eliminated and I have seen a ton of updates to applications over the last 2 weeks.

I don’t know if Apple has a beta program for these developers and their testers, but they need to get one in place if it doesn’t exist.  Right now we, the people, are Apple’s beta testers and that would bother me a little less if I hadn’t paid 10 bucks for that privilege on my Touch and if Apple would have just stated that initially.  Let’s be honest, Apple still would have picked up thousands and thousands of people that would be willing to test their software - and probably pay for the privilege.  But, no application crash should ever take down the entire phone.  Period.  

It’s probably a good thing that Apple is out of iPhones all over the country or this could be a bigger black eye than it already is.  It will be interesting to see how many people stay up late at night clicking that Check Now button in iTunes when the next release rolls around.  Apple, we need 2.0.1 or 2.1 or what ever you are going to call it, soon.

What do you think, will you be cautious the next time Apple releases something or will you move ahead as you normally do because it is the next great thing from Apple?

There is so much to catch up on since Apple released 2.0 for the iPhone and iPod Touch that it’s hard to figure out where to start.

On July 11, 2008, we were getting ready to leave for a vacation to Myrtle Beach when I noticed the 2.0 software release for the iPhone was out.  Since my wife has the original iPhone I decided to download 2.0 and apply it once we got to the beach.  2.0 downloaded so fast that I figured I might as well apply it before I got in the shower, so I did.  (By the way, this was less than 10 minutes after my wife begged me not to touch her phone before our trip as she likes to use it when we’re on the road.)  Hey, it’s Apple, and Apple has never let me down before.  What could happen?  Well, thousands of you probably know the rest - after the 2.0 update the phone reset itself and needed to communicate with Apple’s servers to activate.  Since those servers were totally overwhelmed, nothing was happening.  So I jumped in the shower and figured it would be done by the time we were ready to leave.  No such luck.  I checked the Apple forums and found I was definitely not alone, but we had to get on the road so I grabbed my wife’s iPhone, her laptop, my laptop, and my backpack and we headed out the door. 

She was not a happy camper.  No phone to play with on the road trip meant no Goggle Maps.  It doesn’t matter that the awesome Garmin Nuvi 350 was less than 5 feet from her head, it was not her phone and Google Maps.  So she asked to use my iPod Touch since it was jailbroken and had FiveDice on it.  Well, unfortunately I had restored it to factory default to get ready for the 2.0 software for the Touch, which didn’t come out for another 13 hours.  If the software had been available for the Touch I would have never touched her phone at all.  So, no FiveDice.  Strike 2.

Then it hit her that we packed the Nintendo DS and that would surely give her plenty to do for a while.  Except that it was packed in the trunk of the car, which was an amazing feat in itself as we were originally going to take the mini van but decided to take the car to get better gas mileage.  The DS was buried deep in the bottom of all the luggage, beach chairs, and body boards.  Strike 3.

I had no intention of taking her laptop to the beach that day, but I grabbed her PowerBook because I didn’t know if I would have to complete the activation process on the same computer that had started it on or if I could use my MacBook Pro.  Unfortunately I wasn’t smart enough to grab the power supply and the battery on her PowerBook has seen better days.  If we’re lucky we’ll get 30 minutes on a full charge.  So I turned on her PowerBook and killed every program that started up and launched iTunes.  I turned the screen down to 1 little bar and hoped I could find a wireless signal.  Thankfully the hotel we were in that night had wifi and the iPhone activated itself almost as quickly as I plugged it in to the PowerBook.  Success!  We can now use the iPhone as a phone.  ”Apple must have resolved their capacity issues.”  ”Hey, where’s all your data?”

Next came the fun of holding my breath through the longest initial restore of data to a device in my lifetime.  I would continually take the screen down to 0 bars, then back to 1 a little later to watch the restore progress.  The battery indicator was down to 14 minutes and had turned red.  Not good.  Turn the screen back off.  With just 7 minutes of reported battery life left the iPhone retuned to its glorious former self.  It was a phone with all the data she had on it previously.  Life was good.

“Hey Valerie, check out all these cool apps I loaded on here for you” I said with the joy of a child on Christmas morning.  ”Watch how…hey, why is it just a black screen with an Apple logo in the middle of it now?”  Uh oh.

That would not be the last time that I saw that black screen with the Apple logo.

To be continued…

I love Wordpress. It’s an excellent blogging platform. I love my iPod Touch and my wife’s iPhone. Now I get to play with them together as Wordpress has been released on the iTunes App store, and of course, it’s free.

I can’t see myself doing long posts with it as using the portrait keyboard on the Touch means I have to type one handed, but for shorter posts, like this one, it will come in handy, especially when not in front of a “real” computer.

Speaking of which, I’ll have to update on my first week with the new 2.0 software and the new apps that I have been using. I will say that I still have issues with AT&T and Apple, as I have already posted, but I underestimated the power of the App store and 3rd party apps. My Touch has taken on a fresh, new life - but that’s for another post; one that requires a real keyboard!

Thank you to the folks at Wordpress for the iPhone/iTouch app. I’m using it to write this post and so far it looks like a winner. The only thing i could not see how to do was add an html link inside the post.