Dan Conley

Despite having a category on this site named ‘I am an Apple fanboy’ — it’s attached to this very post! — I don’t actually consider myself a fanboy. I like Apple products, sure, but I don’t think that they are inherently superior to every other piece of competing technology ever. They’re slick, and they do what they do very well, but you pay for that both in the price and the ability to do certain things.

That being said, there are currently four iPhones in my house, a Macbook, an eMac (remember those things), an Airport Extreme and an Airport Express. So, I suppose if the modern, white plastic shoe fits…

Despite what I said at the time, the iPhone 4 line was a disaster. I posted about the thrill of the line, of the friends to be made (and then forgotten: I never learned any of their names, which I quite liked) at hour 1.75. All told it took just over nine hours to get my phone. Nine. Could anyone think that was reasonable? Did anyone think that nine hours was worth the new phone? It’s a good phone, yes, but nine hours? By the time I had reckoned my fate it was at hour 5, during which we moved maybe 10 feet. But despite what Lifehacker says about sunk costs, I wasn’t about to give up just because I had things to do (like go to work or watch my son).

Now I have the phone, though! And a damn fine phone it is. People need to remember that 720p is not 720p is not 720p: the video camera is good, but not great. Elizabeth’s been loving it as I thought she would, of course, and so I get daily videos emailed to me and Facetime requests sent. She doesn’t care about aspect ratios, of course, and so it’s widescreen vertically, or maybe tallscreen, which is at once abhorrent and quite likely the future, because Apple declares it so.

The back and forth between the Apple and non-Apple camps are that this phone is revolutionary and that this phone has ‘incremental upgrades.’ I think it’s somewhere in the middle: sure, they didn’t invent video chat. But they may have invented the first video chat people will use. It’s not for everyday talking, but if you have something to show someone, or would just like to see them, it’s easy to use and works well.

If you hold it properly, of course, which I don’t. My left pocket has been for my phone for as long as I can remember, and so I pull it out and hold it in my left hand. Invariably I have one bar. I can’t believe that made it out of QA. There’s always something, isn’t there, which gives Apple detractors something to latch on to. I can write off Flash; meh. But reception? You kind of need that on a phone.

So now I’m torn, between not wanting to be That Guy flashing the latest and greatest technology at anyone who’s looking because it makes him feel superior, and between needing constant adulation and attention because goddammit I waited nine hours for this thing and I deserve a cookie or something.

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I’ve now used the WordPress iPhone app twice: the day I got my iPhone and the day I’m waiting in line to get another.

I’m fully aware of the absurdity of having woken up at 5am and having waited in line since 6, only for the privilege of giving Apple $400 (Elizabeth got to sleep in) and AT&T two more years of my service. it’s dumb. I get it.

There’s a weird atmosphere when you wait in a line, though. It’s almost festival-like. Hundreds of people with a common goal being forced to endure each other for a period of time. You make single serving friends and get to experience a chunk of your life that’s totally different from the rest; almost like a boring mini vacation.

At least I hope it’s different from the rest of your life; if you queue for a living then you live a poor life.

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There may not be any hoverboards, but I am typing this out on my shiny — if fingerprint riddled — iPhone.

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I’ve been struggling with how to handle my laptop. I want all my music on it, but I’d also like to upgrade to Leopard and use Boot Camp to play the Sims games I got at Circuit City last week during their sale. I decided on Sunday to get an external USB hard drive to store my music on, and then change the location of my iTunes library. As an added bonus, I can partition off 80 gigs to use for Time Machine once I upgrade (which will hopefully be in the next few days, depending on when I can get to the store).

With moving, copying and backing up over the past week, there were a few times when I overtaxed my Macbook and did things I probably shouldn’t have. I’d be running late leaving work, so instead of waiting for it to finish its FileVault stuff I’d ‘fat finger’ it (apparently that’s what it’s called when you hold down the power button?). Generally this is ok, but sometimes I lose some of my preferences.

I imported the 200+ pictures I took at the Toronto Zoo yesterday into iPhoto, and then noticed the bottom of the window said ’227 pictures.’ The rest of them were gone. I checked in Finder and they were still there, thankfully, but not showing up in iPhoto. I did some searching and found how to rebuild your library, but that didn’t work. Since it wasn’t on an external drive, deleting the /Volumes data wouldn’t work either.

Eventually I realized that I had screwed up. I had a backup of the library on my external drive, but reformatted it yesterday to make a partition for Time Machine. Before I did, I copied that library’s AlbumData.xml (which I think was right) to my desktop. That was smart — it’s obviously not a problem with the pictures themselves — except it’s not the right file. I actually needed Library6.iPhoto, which is now long gone.

So, it looks like it’s time to manually re-import the library. I haven’t done any tagging, which is good, but I did rotate a bunch of photos, and I may have to do that again. All things considered I got off lucky, sure, but as I was already looking at needing to browse through the 200 from the zoo and rotate/delete… bah.

Make backups, kids. Another reason why I need to get Leopard post-haste.

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So maybe you heard, yesterday I bought an iPod Shuffle. From now on I’ll be using ‘ipod’ over ‘iPod’ because the librarian in me says ‘use the authority file’ but the cynical part of me says ‘the capital P looks really lame.’ Elizabeth’s ipod, which I stole — er, have been sharing — a while back, is having hardware problems and I don’t think we ever bought her AppleCare for it. It hasn’t been an issue, because it plays well as long as it’s using the line in jack of our car and I have it plugged into the cigarette lighter that doesn’t actually have a cigarette lighter in it. But she just accepted a position that’s not four blocks from where I work, meaning that I’m going to be biking again. This is good, but means I need a new fancy music playing device.

I’ll save you the train of thought leading up to my choice and suffice it to say that I walked into Best Buy and bought myself a shuffle. The clerk asked me what color and I was caught off guard, so after realizing Apple runs their plastic through a Fluffy Bunny Pastelization Filter before applying it I just chose silver. I opened the package while waiting for Elizabeth to get done with a meeting, so I’ll throw out the warning for future shuffle buyers: have some damn scissors handy. After 5-10 minutes of prying and sawing with my keys I was finally able to yank the box out of the wrapping. Can we get rid of clamshell packaging yet?

The main concern I had about the shuffle was that I still needed to listen to podcasts. I only listen to a handful (some people just ramble on and on), but I look forward to a Wednesday morning Giant Bombcast and a Friday morning Basic Brewing Radio (not to mention Lying Media Bastards, which seems to be semi-annual at this point). With no screen, there can be no ‘Podcast’ tab, and the nature of a shuffle means that my 90 minutes of video game talk will be sandwiched somewhere between The Card Cheat and Nice Weather For Ducks. There’s no room for documentation in that tiny case, though I did find some on their site in PDF form, but this is how you do it:

1. Autofill the shuffle (or not, if you’d like)
2. Take off a few Marilyn Manson songs to make some room
3. Wonder why you still have Marilyn Manson songs in your library
4. Add the podcast(s) manually (drag them from the Podcast tab in iTunes onto the Shuffle)
5. Drag the podcast(s) to the top of the list

The shuffle won’t play anything tagged Skip when Shuffling (which all podcasts are by default), so when I’m at the gym I’ll only get music. When I want to listen to mah stories, I switch it to Play in Order and press play three times to restart. Since it remembers the playback position of the podcast, it will pick up where I left off. Last night I had an hour of random songs on the elliptical, got into the car and resumed hearing exactly how much I did wrong on the mead I started on Monday.

Now, then, does anyone know if the songs will repeat before all of them are played? That would be an interesting feature.

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I’ve had a fairly long and storied unrequited love affair with Apple. Here’s a brief chronology:

• Fall 2003: iTunes comes out for Windows, I download
• Fall 2003: Man I want an iPod
• New Year’s 2003: Acquire an eMac, ditch Windows
• Summer 2005: Finally get my damn iPod
• Fall 2005: After never getting a printer to work (and wanting a Media Center), buy new PC
• Christmas 2005: Buy Elizabeth an iPod for the hell of it
• Winter 2006: Disconnect my iPod when the screen said ‘Do not disconnect’ in flashing red letters. Apparently they meant it. (AppleCare replaces it)
• Fall 2006: iPod mysteriously breaks again, Apple doesn’t repair because I closed a car door on it and they think that’s the problem
• Fall 2006: Get a crappy 512 mb player, hate it, eventually steal Elizabeth’s iPod
• Spring 2007: Buy a Macbook, increasingly use it more than the PC
• Spring 2008: Elizabeth’s iPod develops an issue with the headphone jack, plays with skips or static
• Yesterday: Buy a 1 gig iPod Shuffle
• Next year: Buy an iPhone, experience Nirvana

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