iDay

Yes, it is iDay. I am very excited, and a little depressed. I am very excited because the coolest thing ever, or at least in a long time came out today. The Belkin Mini Jack Converter for that one thing from Apple. Is it the iFoam? Some packing material I heard. Anyway, I want an iPhone very badly. Fortunately, I am going to get one. I just have to wait like 8 months. And if I am at all lucky, there will be 3G by then. I am OK with all of its "flaws" except for the 3G. That should be better. I have to say I am a little surprised it is not there. There have been reports of people noticing that their Cingular EDGE networks have seemed a little faster and one guy even took a snap shot of his screen on his phone of the results of a speed test. He got 200k or something. And the normal for EDGE is like 150-180k. This could mean that AT&T is doing some work to make their EDGE network a little ore bearable. But still, 200, even 250k if they managed to get their EDGE speeds that high, would not be much of an improvement. If Apple were to put a 3G chip in the iPhone, and who's to say they didn't already and it is a software update away, you would have speeds of 400k-700k anywhere you had AT&T coverage. Not just in that lame little wi-fi hot spots. When I saw the keynote and saw Steve introduce mobile safari that was the "Real Safari" I was excited thinking that omg, the iPhone is going to be the Internet in your pocket. But no, not exactly, he comes along not to long later to tell us that it is only 2G. He had better be glad he is Apple, and that there are still some VERY cool features on the iPhone, because that would have been enough to loose my interest if they were say . . .Sony. I think Apple would make tons if they didn’t get into the phone market. They just had a wi-fi safari browser and a touch screen iPod, and sold it for $299.99, or even $249.99. I would go out and buy it that day. The whole phone thing, I just don’t know. If they had left that market alone, things could have gone well. Or if they had less mobile features and it was more focused on being an iPod and internet device. If it were unlocked, and you didn’t need a new contract, you just needed to take it to your Verizon store, your T-Mobile store, and they would activate it for you, that would in my opinion sell just as well without the carrier lock in. My reasoning I personally think that people are all hyped up about this iPhone is this. People at this point in time, are pissed off at their cell phones. This may be true more or less, but on average people are not 100% satisfied with their phones. But carriers are different. Carriers, people are not only pissed off at, most people hate their carriers, carriers, and their phones. People think of Apple as the company that does things right, the company that makes things beautiful, simple, and easy to use. Now when such a company announces that they will be producing a mobile phone, this is what makes people so excited. Apple technically is going to have their iPhones running on the AT&T network, but is going to keep the interference between AT&T, and their iPhone buyers, to a minimal. For example, the activation of the iPhone is done in iTunes. This basically says to AT&T, “We want our costumers to have the easy of use that they have grown accustom to when activating their iPhones, so you are obviously not in the equation, kay?” AT&T agreeing to this is not a bad idea. Although AT&T might not have much control, they are going to make huge profits. For those of you who did not know this, Apple originally went to Verizon, a much stronger and more reliable network (sorry AT&T fan boys if there is such a thing) and Verizon did not agree to the terms Apple was proposing. Now I don’t blame Verizon entirely, they had no idea what this phone was going to be capable of; they didn’t really get to know anything about it. All that Verizon was told is that Apple would have full control over advertising, and control rate plans, but it would be fair. Naturally, Verizon did not want anything to do with that. AT&T (then Cingular) knew about Apple, and what they were capable of doing. AT&T was able to see that giving up control of one of their phones could bring in large amounts of profits. AT&T eventually agreed, and we are going to see how things play out over the next few months. But for now, we are going to have to just wait. More about me though, I am going to Great America on Sunday, and tomorrow I will be doing iPhone stuff and homework all day. Hopefully I will get to touch one and do a short write off of the multi touch system tomorrow as well. Let’s move slightly away from the iPhone, and on to networking. Out of the box, Macs are fully open to talking to other Macs, I print to other Mac’s printers in my house, and I save files on another Mac’s drive. But I have never actually tried to network my Gateway laptop to any of the Macs. I only wanted to today because I do not have a printer in my room, and needed to print something. I only print once in a blue moon, so this never really came up before. But today I wanted to. I am able to print to the iMac in the basement from anywhere in the house on the MacBook, but I would like the same capability on the Gateway. Well, five minutes on a mixture of google and Mac Help, and I found out that if I installed Bonjour on my PC, it would recognize the shared printers and set them up in the windows printer utility for me. That worked instantly. But then I wanted more. I decided that I wanted file sharing as well. (btw, I used it to transfer this post which I was typing in word from the Mac to the pc) So I went onto google, I went onto Apple’s help page, but eventually got my help from some forums that I was to excited to take note of the name of. (Sorry unknown forum) Long story short, I am able to not only see, but read, write, delete files on my pc from my Mac now, and on my Mac from my pc. Of course, Apple makes it much more beautiful. Good thing I have an XP pc too, because I would not have done this on a Vista pc.
-Ryan

6/18/07

Today was a good day I suppose. I will start with my day, but if that doesn't matter to you, scroll down to some format war news. Ok, I woke up to find that my family had left to my mom's sisters son's 6 year old birthday. So I had the house to myself all day, which was nice. I went down, made a Stouffer's casserole thing in the microwave, and ate that. Then I went upstairs, took a shower, and then I went down to the treadmill and fell asleep power walking. Not literally of coarse. I had my eyes shut and held on adjust kept walking. I got in 3 miles, and burned 350 calories. I Got my heart rate up to 209. It was fun. So I finished that, I started some homework. I did about 15 minutes of homework and then I got a call from my mom telling me that she was bringing me some steak from the party, and asked me to get bo ready for a walk. I said yes, and put my homework away. When she got home we walked bo, I rode alongside her on my bike. About 50 feet from my house, I decided to do a fishtail in a sandpit, and I did, and then when I went to pull out of it, the chain slipped off, so I had to walk out of the sand and walk the bike home. The bike is a nice one, it is only two years old. It has disc breaks and everything. It is not the first time this has happened either. So I am a little upset at Mongoose for building such a bad bike. But that was cool, cause I really don't care and have a hundred other bikes all over my garage. So I went in, ate the steak my mom brought me, and then I got back to homework. I did homework until like 20 minutes ago while talking t Derek. Then I took the MacBook to were I am sitting right now and pulled up Google Reader. Not much struck my eye until I found out that Blockbuster chose Blu-Ray as the HD disc format they will be marketing. This angers me because Blu-Ray players cost more, and it has been what, 8 months that you can purchase a Blu-Ray disc? And the coating on them is beginning to rust already. I like Blu-Ray more in theory, and I was on the side of Blu-Ray for a while, it has more capacity, has a cooler name, and Microsoft doesn't like them, whats not to love? Well, the players. They cost too much. An HD-DVD player is almost 50% cheaper. Half the capacity, meant you have to package your movies with 2 discs if it comes down to it. I am just mad because Blockbuster deciding to go with Blu-Ray is a pretty big punch in the face for HD-DVD. I hope the producers have chosen one of the two by the holidays, because my family is planning to upgrade out TV, out Player, and our sound system. And I don't want to have to old off because the effing producers are still throwing baby fits about why this is better, or this is better. Just shut the fuck up and choose one! If Blu-Ray does become the standard, I would hope that Sony is able to build a quality Blu-Ray player that is not lacking in features and is affordable. If Sony is unable to do this, I will not be buying, I will just stick with the HD on-demand Comcast movies for the time being. I used www.urltea.com today, and I like it much better than www.tinyurl.com. It is prettier, but it seems faster and more reliable. Plus, it automatically copies the shortened url to your clipboard.

Good Night All,

-Ryan

6/12/07

I am disappointed by WWDC07. I was hoping for new hardware. People who say it is just a developer's conference, there shouldn't be hardware, are right. But i have a right to be hopeful because there was a new Mac Pro introduced at last year's WWDC06. I tried safari for windows, and it looked nice, it froze up on me though. I am not a fan of apple's decision to put safari on PC. Maybe it is faster. Then just give us those facts and let the PC users feel bad. Oops, I meant to say make them feel like switching. (he he, no i didn't) I don't use safari anyway, and I don't intend on switching anytime soon. Although I have used it in the last 3 months. I haven't touched IE in like 3 years. And that was because I came across something that could not run in firefox, but now with the IE tab add on I can do everything in firefox, so I leave it alone. I have to say IE is the one of the things I hate the most about Microsoft. But everything Microsoft has built a pretty good reputation for sucking really bad. I have a PC in my room. It is a Gateway laptop running XP, it has a 1.3GHZ processor. I installed Ubunto and was up until 5 in the morning installing it the other day, and when you boot into it, the computer shuts off. I saw the video of WWDC07 and I saw Leopard. A quick thank you/shoutout to Apple Inc.

Apple, I want to thank you.
I want to thank you for making your software seamless.
I want to thank you for making your machines beautiful.
I want to thank you for Aqua.
I want to thank you for leopard which appears to more beautiful than all versions before it.
I want to thank you for being so reliable and a 6 year old mac that runs bug free to this day, and a 17 year old Performa that is now retired but ran just as well.
I want to thank you for giving me an alternative to crappy Microsoft products.
Thank you Apple.

I could continue with a list of things I wish Apple could improve on, but I dont have the time. I spent 2 hours trying to get a Linksys WRE54G to work, and it turns out, just like everything else I have ever ordered from Linksys, the install CD is a piece of shit and should be recycled. The directions do not tell you how to set it up at all. They just assume you have a linksys unsecured router. And that it is right next to were you will be putting this, (not sure why it would be, it is a range extender, it should be far away. So i gave it a poor review on cnet, and that is actually were I got tips and hints to hacking this thing to work. Ahh well, it works really well so far. I have a 90% signal right now, and I am 2 stories and a few walls away from the router. I wonder if the microwave is still going to kill my signal. gtg, I am back in school, and have homework again. ttyl.


-Ryan

4/3/07

Hello, today there was crappy weather. A Hyundai pickup truck is a no definitely not maybe yes probably not. And that is about all that is interesting. I went to school today and I chilled and worked and went home. I was raced by a teacher of mine in my cab. I lost :( but I think I will get over it. I had homework for once so I am out of time for writing any more. I will put much effort into not procrastinating tomorrow. Not that I would have had anything interesting to say anyway. But I like to put in my two cents.

-Ryan