kirktastic

I thought there was something wrong with my MacBook Pro just now when I opened the lid and it reported it was Sunday. Sunday? WTF happened to Saturday? Unfortunately, I didn’t get blotto wasted and blacked out Saturday. It was quite the opposite: mundane to the extreme.

So I’m sitting at Sodade having my coffee and coming to grips that I lost another Saturday. I had my tacos blancos con chorizo y queso en tortillas trigos. Like yesterday. Actually like Friday too. I am a man of little variety. If it isn’t broken…

Speaking of broken. Midweek I was suspecting there may be something worse going on with my iPhone 3G than the bugginess of the 2.0.0 software you may have read about on the interwebs. Safari was crashing all the time. And the usual rock solid iPod music playback which has to be the most stable app on the iPhone would crash. It would start skipping like when you play a CD and it encountered a scratch. It would have something to do with Safari since I would click on a link and the damn thing would lock up. Safari and the new apps crashing is something a lot of people have complained about but this freeze up situation where the only way to recover is to force shutdown and restart. Then I noticed something some photos I took on Wednesday…wavy Seaholm Power Plant and Messing with City Hall. On these pages I’ve chronicled my feelings about the iPhone camera being the perfect phone’s achilles heal, but it didn’t actually corrupt images before. Also the phone had terrible battery life — yes you’ve read the 3G has terrible battery life, but mine was worse than my friends who have the phones. It would also feel warm when it was just sitting there doing nothing (clearly it was doing something to put off the heat and to drain the battery). I tried doing a full restore twice with no help.

I went to the Apple Store at the Domain to talk to a genius about it on Friday afternoon. They were out of phones so it wasn’t madhouse packed, but there were a lot of people in the store buying Macs and iPods and whatnot. I told the guy the problems and showed him the pictures and as well as the crash log via Back to My Mac on my home system (iPhones are running a variant of Mac OS X and so when apps crash it writes an error log for diagnostic purposes). It had crashed a lot.

So the guy gave me a new one. It was different than when I swapped out my original iPhone where he just gave me another one and did an exchange. Because of the new AT&T bullshit, the ‘genius’ had to hand me over to a ’specialist’ to deal with it. Although the specialist confessed to me he hadn’t done a swap out yet and had to ask his boss. It was pretty simple but more complex than usual from the Apple Experience we know and love. Effectively he had to re-sign me up for AT&T phone service again. Fortunately in the past two weeks AT&T felt I was still worthy of being their customer.

I went to the Starbucks next door and set up my MobileMe mail account and within a few seconds all of my email was on the phone, but more importantly my address book and bookmarks were there. I would still need to physically dock my iPhone with my computer at home to get my music/videos and apps on it, but it actually meant I could actually use my iPhone to make calls and use the interwebs right out of the box. I’ve had mobile phones for 13 years or so and since getting that first PrimeCo Sony phone I’ve lost the mental ability to know people’s phone numbers. Seriously. I can’t remember anyone’s phone number anymore. The only numbers I know are home and work number. And I have to really think about it when people ask as my poor brain retrieve the phone number I had when I was a kid or my mom’s old number (I don’t know her new one, the phone does). Since getting my first Mac with iSync and the dotMac service my mobile phone and Macs have been in sync (not the boy band) so a lost or dropped phone meant just syncing the new one with the Mac and I would back where I was. MobileMe makes that happen over the air. Fortunately for me, I wasn’t one of the people affected by Apple’s botched transition from dotMac to MobileMe. As usual, it “just worked”.

After reading that you may ask how can I be such a fanboy of the cult of Mac? I just said I bought a faulty iPhone. I’ve posted about troubles with my Macs and iPhone over the years. It is nothing short of witchcraft that computers and mobile phones work and are not the size of refrigerators. And this technology (which I suspect humans received from aliens at Roswell) is not infallible. What makes Apple great to me is how they deal with the problems. When I’ve had hardware failures, they made it right (both of my iPhone swaps could have been software failures that could be re-imaged, but rather than send me home with a phone that might have the same problem they gave me a new one). There are few companies — especially in the technology arena — that do that. The typical response I’ve had from other technology companies is a polite way of saying “tough shit”.