kirktastic

It is Saturday again. The week crawled by like a bus in traffic. Work isn’t really inspiring me. I feel like I’m in a groundhog day situation where every day is the same. I need to get something else. If you’re hiring for a challenging job that I can do anywhere with an internet and mobile phone connection. Bonus would include working in a non-Microsoft Office/Windows environment.

Meanwhile my iPhone is still the bee’s knees. The 3G signal here at Sodade and Tacodeli is great. At my house it is so-so, and at the Domain in front of the Apple Store or Starbucks it is non-existant. ATT could fix that in an afternoon putting the 3G antenna on the tower that sits in the Domain. The commute on the bus goes by faster with faster interweb. Since the $ I saved by taking the bus paid for the new iPhone, that is good. Only in places like by the greenbelt and lake where there’s not a shitload of cell towers does it faulter. At the office, it comes in at 5 bars. The 3G call quality is good. I was on a conference call yesterday and the people didn’t know I was on a mobile phone and I could hear people writing things on their notepad. It was like being the room but without the torture of actually being in the office.

It isn’t all perfect on with the JesusPhone3G. The battery life does drain while doing data/voice on 3G (PC World says, the talk time sucks, but is actually better than other 3G smart phones). The upgraded software is great with the App Store but many of the applications will crash (Safari, the browser crashes more in the version 2.0 than 1.1.4, I’m hoping Apple will be pushing out a 2.0.1 update to clean some of this up).

The dotMac service that allows my MacBook Pro I carry around with me and the old one at home that acts as a Media/Print Server to stay in sync is now called MobileMe. The key new benefit is that it will sync your iPhone/Macs (or even Windows PCs) bookmarks, address book, calendar over the air. So if I add a bookmark on my iPhone it tells my Macs at home and they are updated automagically without me having to find my USB cable. The transition went horribly. It was supposed to take 4 hours but lasted nearly 2 days (you could still get your mail on your computer or iPhone but the webmail was busted). It was also revealed that the push feature wasn’t real time between the website and the home Macs — it happens in 15 minute intervals). As a mea culpa Apple gave us paying customers a free month on our current subscription. Which was nice.

One of the reasons that the dotMac-MobileMe went so bad was they decided to push it out on the same day they released the new iPhone and the iPhone update for the existing iPhone. So in addition to a rush of existing users (there are only about 1 million dot mac subscribers) you also got a bunch of people playing with the new push feature on their iPhones. The secret to migrating computer shit is to do it during a slow time period. This is the same reason the iPhone activation computers crashed. You had everyone hitting the server at the same time. Apple has historically been the undisputed kings of event marketing. Apple doesn’t just come out with new products, it is an event. Apple gets zillions of dollars in free PR and advertising. Most companies would kill for that kind of press and few can pull it off. People line up to buy their products. But it could just be they’ve gotten a little too big for this. Don’t get me wrong, the next iPhone launch will draw lines and dumbasses (but not me) to line up, but they are not going to try and do everything on the same day.