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Man this thing is COOL. Still futzing with it, but it works. That number transfer thing really slowed things down, but it is almost done - I am in this funny state where both my T-Mobile and AT&T SIMs work, so I can place a call from the same # from two cell phones.
Thank God Almighty, I'm Activated At Last!
More Later!
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No activation yet. Sigh. Is it possible for time to move BACKWARDS? I think it might be. Anyway, at least I finally have my diagnosis. Since apparently it's monoamine oxidase related, perhaps I should buy a case of MAO inhibitors and move on. 
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Two pieces of good news: my call was answered immediately (amazing!) by a very polite rep, and the other good news is that my account is in their system. It is just that it is "activating" and apparently "activating" can take up to 24 hours - not the 6 minutes the software said when it started the activation process. 6 minutes, 24 hours, why it's practically the same thing.
I really hate waiting.
Update 11:55pmI got an e-mail from AT&T a couple of hours ago that was slurped into my junk mail folder, so I just found it. I guess the 24 hour problem is because of my phone number transfer. Still a huge bummer that I can't do anything with my iPhone in the meantime.
Comments That sucks. I'm seriously considering buying one and paying the $175 termination fee just to have the tricked out ipod. We will see. Some other providers were anticipating this and locked numbers from transfer. Or perhaps they had locked them months ago as a matter of course. A quick phone call to a provider whose name shall not be named unlocked numbers for transfer, which then went through. As for me, I've been with AT&T /cingular since before number portability was possible.
Getting an iPhone had an underlying motivation - T-Mobile, a carrier I've been happy with for years, roams data in California (at least that is what my current phone shouts at me every time I sync my email). Not a big deal before, but now with my role at MacBU, I'll be down in California on a regular basis. Not cool to be roaming data at a gazillion dollars a megabyte. So a switch to AT&T was in my future - the iPhone was the catalyst. It is still a big leap, switching your number. And I think the transfer will cost me, too, because I got a new phone from T-Mobile last year - first one I have ever gotten from them in 6 years of being a customer, but you always get stuck with these two year commitments.
Backstory aside, tonight I was getting ready to head to Redmond Town Center where there are two AT&T stores - I figured I'd be able to get an iPhone there. As I was leaving, I got a call from one of our MacBU PM's (Han-Yi) who was in line at the Apple store. He told me that it looked like they had enough and wanted to know if I wanted one. So I figured it was a great opportunity to divide and conquer - I would stake out the Redmond AT&T stores, Han-Yi would see what he could do at the Apple Store. As I was getting in my car, I realized that I was about to go in the opposite direction from the Apple Store and that would potentially waste a bunch of time (I hate waiting ), and so I decided to bet on MacBU Mojo and drove straight to the Apple Store. My intuition paid off, there was a smilin' Han-Yi with four, count 'em, four iPhones - he found another MacBUer to go in with him. So then we figure - what the heck? In I go, and about 3 minutes later, out I come with my limit of two 8GB iPhones. Then we cackled off to the parking garage, each with three iPhones, and headed off for our respective weekends.
Fast forward to home. I unbox my iPhone. Ooooooo. It is as beautiful as it looked online. I power up my iPhone. Ahhhhhh. The slider is way cool - you can make emergency calls without activation. I dock my iPhone - everything pops up beautifully on my computer. I go through all the steps to set up an account and I take the big leap to do my number transfer: I push "Activate." I wait... I wait... I wait... and 5 minutes later I get:
Your activation requires additional time to complete.
You will receive an email confirmation sent to xxxx once your activation is complete
It's 45 minutes later and I can't use my brand spankin' new iPhone for anything. I can't sync anything. I can't do anything. It just sits there, staring at me, taunting me, laughing at me.
Talk about a freakin' let down. Hopefully something magic will happen in the coming hours.
I hate waiting.
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DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH!
Now I have to stand in line.
Sigh.
Comments Craig go check ebay. The market is totally saturated there are a ton of 8gb at around $250. I'm keeping my eye on this. Try eBay. There are over 1,000 8GB units for sale (as of 8:45 PM PST 06/29), many of which close in the morning (meaning you could be tinkering by Monday evening). Mmm....it's sitting on my nightstand, all pretty and charging...sometimes, the intarweb is not the way to go :-P Go to your local Apple Store. They're open until midnight, and they've probably still got 'em. They obviously made sure that they had the supply chain in order for this one.
I just went to the Apple store and this is what I got:
DOOOOOH!
I hate waiting.
Nadyne: You are getting sleeeeeeepy. You neeeeeed an iPhone. Michael neeeeeeds an iPhone. Two get a better deal on the plan. Buy an iPhone. Buy two. Hurry. Don't walk to the nearest store. Run. Run!! RUN!!!! RUNNNNNN!
Well, off to a going away party.
I really hate waiting.
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I had a great trip to our SVC - I even enabled yet another iPhone fan. I was just catching up on some e-mail before I leave to catch my flight to Seattle when I noticed the time (6pm), realized that it was 24 hour to go until the iPhone shipped - and that's when my brain lost it. With apologies to The Ramones original lyrics, here is "I wanna get an iPhone":
Twenty twenty twenty-four hours to go
I wanna get an iPhone
Nothing to do, nowhere to go-o
I wanna get an iPhone
Just put me in a taxi, get me on a plane
Hurry hurry hurry, before I go insane
I can't control my fingers, I can't control my brain
Oh no oh oh oh oh
Twenty twenty twenty-four hours to go
I wanna get an iPhone
Nothing to do, nowhere to go-o
I wanna get an iPhone
Just put me in a taxi, get me on a plane
Hurry hurry hurry, before I go insane
I can't control my fingers, I can't control my brain
Oh no oh oh oh oh
Twenty twenty twenty-four hours to go
I wanna get an iPhone
Nothing to do, nowhere to go-o
I wanna get an iPhone
Just put me on a Segway, get me to the iShow
Hurry hurry hurry, before I go loco
I can't control my fingers, I can't control my toes
Oh no oh oh oh oh
Twenty twenty twenty-four hours to go
I wanna get an iPhone
Nothing to do, nowhere to go-o
I wanna get an iPhone
Just put me on a Segway, get me to the iShow
Hurry hurry hurry, before I go loco
I can't control my fingers, I can't control my toes
Oh no oh oh oh oh
Ba-ba-baba, baba-ba-baba, I wanna get an iPhone
Ba-ba-baba, baba-ba-baba, I wanna get an iPhone
Ba-ba-baba, baba-ba-baba, I wanna get an iPhone
Ba-ba-baba, baba-ba-baba, I wanna get an iPhone
I'm just sayin'.
Comments You know what the only thing cooler than the Ramones is? This: Makes me want to buy two iPhones, an 8G and a 4G model...then go visit my friends in the Ozarks who have a LOT of land...and guns...with an HD cam, and spend the day getting in touch with my inner Beavis. Then send the link to said video to every MUG on the planet... "it was as though billions of MacMacs cried out...and kept crying forever" hehehehe...FIRE..EXPLOSIONS...FIRE...ehehhehehehhheheh Before you go loco? Craig, If you could drop an email to Nadyne around 16:30 PST reminding her how cool the iPhone is that would make my life easier. We've both been having the iPhone wibble conversation at home for the past couple of weeks. My argument last night was that she needs her brilliant other half to dive into mapping out the iPhone software for extension purposes. :) Oh Man! What would Joey say? Oy.
vmarks posted this as a comment in my last blog entry, but I had to call it out here... it cracks me up!!! And with that, I'm off to catch a plane to San Jose - I'm spending the next two days in SVC.
EXT. NIGHT - BACK ALLEY SOMEWHERE.
STREET LAMP OVERHEAD FLICKERING
You can have the 3.5" screen and 7 hours of battery life. In exchange, you have to give up 152 gigabytes of storage.
Hmmm... I don't know... I do like me some storage....
CRAIG shakes his head, begins to inch backwards
What? Hey, come back here! Opportunities like this don't come every day! It's just gigabytes, and no one really needs more than half a gigabyte anyway, right? Right? That oughta be enough for skateboarding dogs, driving cats, and phone calls to aunt Lulu. She misses you, man, she misses you
CRAIG turns to run
SHADY GUY IN TRENCHCOAT
(shouting)
SHE MISSES YOU!
Streetlight burns out.
SCENE.
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One of my AppleTV's popped up with a "hey, there's an update" message yesterday, and I said "sure, I'll take it". I completely forgot that the YouTube update was coming out this month… so I was pleasantly surprised when the reboot was over.
First impressions - it is way, way cool. My expectations were pretty low of what the video quality would be like - people upload some really bad encodings. But the video actually looks surprisingly good. And Apple once again just nailed the simplicity of the experience - looking at clips leads to suggestions of other clips leads to other clips… I spent an hour surfing Conan O'Brian and SNL shorts before I knew it (oh, I should mention that I started at midnight… oops).
Anyway, YouTube on AppleTV gets two thumbs up - it is channel surfing for the 21st century.
Now, if only my AppleTV had a 3.5" 320 by 480 screen, a battery, 7 hours of video play time, weighed 135 grams, and was 115 x 61 x 11.6mm. And could place phone calls. I'm just sayin'.
Comments Can't someone get this guy an iPhone? EXT. NIGHT - BACK ALLEY SOMEWHERE. STREET LAMP OVERHEAD FLICKERING SHADY GUY IN TRENCHCOAT SHADY GUY IN TRENCHCOAT CRAIG shakes his head, begins to inch backwards Craig turns to run SHADY GUY IN TRENCHCOAT Streetlight burns out. SCENE.
I think you are well within your rights to expense this one to the company. Doesn't someone need to... um... test it or something.
You can have the 3.5" screen and 7 hours of battery life. In exchange, you have to give up 152 gigabytes of storage.
CRAIG
Hmmm... I don't know... I do like me some storage....
Deal?
SHADY GUY IN TRENCHCOAT
What? Hey, come back here! Opportunities like this don't come every day! It's just gigabytes, and no one really needs more than half a gigabyte anyway, right? Right? That oughta be enough for skateboarding dogs, driving cats, and phone calls to aunt Lulu. She misses you, man, she misses you
(shouting)
SHE MISSES YOU!
Okay, how many people have this kind picture of their spouse in their scanned picture collection?! I pity the fool without a spouse/Mr. T mug shot! .
This fine historical moment was brought about by too much time on You Tube last night - this clip tickled my memory and reminded me that I had scanned the above picture ages ago. KT can't recall who took the picture, so credit goes to "anonymous".
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One of the things about me is that I'm a natural born smartass. I always have a quip, a joke, a witty remark - I'm just wired that way. My brain comes up with them all the time. I can't stop it. Living in my head is like living with a drunken Saturday Night Live cast 24x7. I'm amazed I'm coherent most of the time. Anyway, over the years, slowly, painfully, I've learned to stop the really inappropriate or just plain stupid ones from coming out. I still think them - it's like breathing, my frickin' brain refuses to stop - but I don't say the really stupid ones. Mostly. Except every once and a while one gets through, and then I go "DOOOOOOOOOOOOH!" and kick myself afterwards.
I had one of those moments at a team all hands this week. First impression time. The best time, really, for my shields to fail and a smart ass comment that skittered across my brain to get through. I managed to diss a team that wasn't there - but of course with the network effect, the dissed team found out in a matter of nanoseconds.
The sad part is that my point wasn't to diss the team, my point was about my cross platform expectations as an end user, but unfortunately, I just sounded like a jackass.
So next week when I have to face the team that I dissed, the only thing I can come up with is "Well yes, I did say that, but in my defense, I'm an idiot."
I'm CERTAIN that if I had an iPhone, it would have stopped me before I talked.
Speaking of which, up until tonight, I could console myself about not having an iPhone, since Eric Schmidt didn't have one, either. But now he has one. Damn .
Comments Someone please get Eisler an iPhone - quick, before he speaks again! DOH. If I'd had an iPhone it would surely have suggested better words as I typed this on its touchscreen. Still, I gotta hand it to Craig, it takes a good person to say "Hi, I'm an idiot, and I apologize." Craig, you're going to be on stage with Jobs in January. It's nearly a guaranteed thing, if Kevin Browne, Roz Ho, et al., are any indication. Call him up and ask him for one? And, the world wants to know: are you as good at bowling as Roz is? Every year, the Microsoft teams dominate the Mac Bowl. I figure if Steve made Eric wait for his iPhone, I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting one right now :-). Bowling - now there is an interesting question. I am what I think you might call a person of "random talent" - sometimes I look like I know how to bowl, sometimes I look like there was a hole drilled into my brain and most of my gross motor control was removed by aliens. So we will either continue to dominate Mac Bowl, or I will accidently maim someone a lane over. It's hard to say. Heh...the Mac Bowl needs a Mac Blog team...that way all can laugh as I try to two-finger bowl. (No, I didn't originally learn that way, but a sparring accident mangled my right ring finger, so it's either that, or I bowl like a six-year old.)
Yesterday I was in the coffee room for cup #5 - or was it #6? #7? It's hard to say - the hallucinations that one gets with that much coffee makes it impossible to keep track. Anyway, after getting cup #N, I stopped by the room next to the caffeine dispensary- the MacBU team has converted the copy room into a video gaming lounge with a Wii and a decent sized TV. (Have I mentioned I love my new team?!) I'd never used a Wii before, but I let myself get talked into joining a game of doubles tennis. It was AWESOME! You really get into it - I was sweating a little by the end. We lost, but in my defense, I am a spaz.
Nintendo nailed it - the sense of "being there" is remarkable. It is amazing how it doesn't matter that the graphics aren't state of the art (or even close). My new Wii is on its way - I can't wait!!
On the other hand, only 8 more days, and I *still* don't know who you have to know to get an iPhone!
Comments What ... you only ordered one? BTW -- we have an XBox360 too. Though the Wii seems to do a better job of relieving the stress. Heh, good luck with the iPhone before June 29th. On the Wii, I think it's showing the gaming industry that how you PLAY the game is more important than how PRETTY the game is. The Xbox/PS3 fanbois dismiss the Wii without realizing that the way it encourages multiplayer play is huge. The fact that it's cheap, and Nintendo, at worst, breaks even on them doesn't suck, but for me, it's the playability of the thing. I'm actually shopping for video games now, something I hadn't done for myself in years. It's the only console outselling the PS2, and now you know why ;-)
Watching Boston Legal tonight, I saw something on the order of 50 or 60 iPhone ads. In fact, I think the entire episode was an iPhone ad. I can't bring myself to give up push email, and I still want one. Who do you have to know to get an iPhone?!
Comments I hate to admit it, but the addition of YouTube is enticing. I must get 15 links a day from friends and family. iPhones would make great ship gifts ... ;) You don't give up push-mail - you use Yahoo's push mail with it. What this means is that you set Yahoo to retrieve the other accounts you care about, or set those other accounts to fwd to Yahoo, and then use the Yahoo push mail. I currently have accounts fwd to gmail, and gmail set to send from the account name that email was sent to, so I can use gmail and it looks as if I was using whatever accnt the person sent to. The whole push bit is a standard part of IMAP now, as is the behavior I described from gmail - so it should all be possible to email and not look like it's any different to the person sending to you.
Sunday after about 4pm is "Craig Time" - from 4pm until I fall asleep, I get to stop being a dad, a husband, a manager, an employee. I'm "just Craig", and "Craig Time" is a lot like "Hammer Time", only different. I usually fiddle with something - hardware, software, media stuff, it's hard to say - but the theme is always "fiddle".
Tonight's fiddle project was to see if I could bring my Power Mac G4 from the year 2000 back to life. Turns out all it needed was a little cable wiggling - it had been moved from Redmond to Bellevue to Great Falls, VA back to Redmond and I guess something came loose along the way.
I hadn't done an OS upgrade on my Power Mac since I upgraded OS 9 to OS X 10.1 WAAAAYYY back. It had a decent amount of hard disk space - the boot drive was 36GB, plus it had a 74GB second drive, both SCSI and 10,000 RPM - I spared no expense back in 2000 to make my dream video editing machine. But the drives were cluttered with a sea of crud, after futzing around forever trying to figure out what mattered and what didn't, I finally said "to heck with it" (in reality, I said something different, but this is a family friendly blog ), and decided to clean install Tiger.
I am amazed how well it is performing - dual 500MHz PowerPC G4's aren't exactly up to par with the dual core 2.33GHz Intel proc in my new iMac at work, but it's not bad. And amazingly, I plugged my Power Mac into a spot where I had a Windows machine - and the video card from 2000 supported my 24" Dell monitor at 1920x1200 (albeit through a HD15 (VGA) cable, not DVI) and input mostly worked with a Microsoft mouse and keyboard (the mouse freezes a little from time to time). And as if hooking my poor ancient Power Mac up to a Dell display and Microsoft input hardware wasn't enough indignity, I also pulled two 256MB 133MHz SDRAM DIMMs out of an old Pentium III machine, and put them side by side with the two 256MB 100MHz SDRAM DIMMs that were in my Power Mac already - and it didn't halt and catch fire. So now I have a gig of RAM instead of a mere 512MB - Tiger seems to like it better that way.
My Y2K Power Mac G4 is back from the grave and ready to party!
Comments I have the same family of machine - a single 400mhz G4 powermac gigabit ethernet. Currently, it's a 1.33ghz G4, 1.5gb ram, usb2 pci card, firewire 800 pci card, and all sorts of hard drives attached. Oh, and a 8x dual layer dvd burner. I loaned it to a friend who is more of a Windows / PC fellow. He was using it and said that it died on him, but he had diagnosed it and decided it was the power supply. By the time I got over there, he had stripped every screw out of the machine and was holding the power supply victoriously. I shook my head, reassembled it, pressed the PMU reset button on the motherboard, and it came alive. It needed a PRAM battery. Which, after 7 years, isn't unreasonable. Okay, so the fact that you used that movie poster? That rules. 2nd Best Zombie Movie EVAR This movie was one of my favorites of all time - and the tagline "They're back from the grave and ready to party" has stuck in my head for over 20 years now. "Send more cops"
Today was a long freakin' day - it started with being jarred awake by my alarm clock in the Marriott in San Francisco at 5:20am and ended in Redmond at 9:15pm when I finally got my boys to sleep. My flight was uneventful (something I am always grateful for!), and I got to the office at 11am – and there were the donuts. The first thing I thought was "didn't we have donuts yesterday, for goodness sake?!" – and after a couple of minutes, I realized that "yesterday" was a week ago – man oh man, I cannot believe how fast the past seven days flew by!
Next week is full immersion in Mac BU – I’m really jazzed to start digging in.
On an unrelated note - kudos to the MacBook designers. I fell asleep last night with my MacBook on my chest (watching Minority Report, a favorite) and woke to seeing my brand new MacBook on the floor of the hotel room, still open, sticking straight up into the air. And it was unscathed! What was that Timex thing – "can take a lickin' and keep on tickin'" – maybe Apple should get the rights to that phrase and use it for their MacBook line .
Comments Craig, welcome to MacBU -- I didn't get a chance to meet you at the Million shipper party so I'm still looking forward to it. Also, I ate your donut, so if you grabbed one that was someone else's. :) mel (aka Matt Elggren/Word test) iBooks (and MacBooks, too, I guess) will withstand a substantial amount of abuse. Mine was not only dropped to the floor several times, I also spilled Cola over the keyboard once (while it was running). Still, it works completely fine.
Instead of going to WWDC today, I went to Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus (SVC) to visit the Mac BU folks there – a good chunk of the product team is in SVC. Thanks to some concrete disintegrating on 280 (or something), 101 was a nightmare this morning - it took me an hour and forty five minutes to get from downtown San Francisco to SVC (I spent longer in a car than I spent in the airplane getting from SEA to SFO for cryin' out loud).
Traffic aside, it was a nice visit. I wish I could have met more folks – of my 6 hours there (it was supposed to be 7+ hours, see traffic complaint above), I spent 3 1/2 in conference calls back to Redmond – doh! Ah, well, I will be down on a regular basis, so there’s plenty of time to get to know folks. And the Seattle-San Jose commute sure beats the DC-Seattle commute I did for almost 2 years at AOL!
As a side note, I still can't believe the multi-year flashback that happened to me yesterday that had my type "OS/X" instead of "OS X". ("How ya gonna do it? PS/2 it!"). It bugged me so much that I just committed blogger sacrilege and corrected the entry without even any strike tags (although I left the comment evidence).
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Today has been an interesting day so far. I haven’t had much time to attend sessions; I’ve spent a good chunk of my day with a variety of folks from Apple. What I found is a genuine interest and passion to ensure OS X is a great platform for our software, and that same interest and passion for working with us to ensure our software is great on OS X. At the end of the day, what else could one want in a partner?
Now off to deal with some pressing email and then back to hopefully catch another session at WWDC.
Comments "At the end of the day, what else could one want in a partner?" Someone who doesn't spell "Mac OS X" as if it were IBM's OS/2 ? :D - sorry, couldn't resist. It was interesting to see a familiar name on the MacBU blog. I currently work at AOL, and it seems like just yesterday that you were speaking about platform services. I also managed ICQ/ICQ Mobile and AOL Mobile operations previously here, so have more than a passing familiarity. ;) So, to the gist - how about hooking up an ex-colleague with a beta of Entourage 2008? As you know, we just moved to Exchange Server here, and running Entourage on my Intel-based Macs is painful! I'm also quite jealous of your ability to get a 24" iMac. I end up using my own gear a lot due to the process here.... DOOOH! I can't believe I did that. PS/2, OS/2 - OS/X. gahhhhhhhhh! What about CP/M? I'm not sure you're quite old enough for that though.
After the Apple Design Awards were over around 8:30, I adventured out to find Dave's. My directions were "on 3rd across from the Westin". I knew how to get to 3rd, but I had no idea where the Westin was - until I remembered that I saw a "Westin" access point show up on the wi-fi list in my hotel room, so figured the Westin must be near the Marriott, only on 3rd. After a few minutes, there it was. Daves was very neat - a great little pub-in-the-wall. Sadly, there were no drunken Mac developers - apparently they don't start to trickle in until after 10:30pm.
Unfortunately, I have a mountain of email - I officially started my new job on Friday and by Monday I was on all the aliases and BLAMMO – the full storm of end of year review, end of year business planning, and day to day issues hit my inbox. So after having a beer, I had to sadly depart (I just got back to my hotel room a minute ago). John & Shawn – the bartender there (a very nice lady but I didn’t get her name) says you are a good group. She did her best to estimate the size of your gang(*) and I bought you guys a round. Enjoy.
(*) As a side thing to ponder, what is the right word to use for a collection of developers at a bar? Gang? Gaggle? Herd? Pod? Colony? Flock? Coallition? Mob? Muster? Brace? Swarm? Convocation? Horde? Troop? School? Dray? Crash? I have no idea. Annnnnnnyhow, back to email. Happy happy joy joy.
Comments Dave's is a great little place. And when the geeks go there, the bartender loves us - we drink a lot, tip fairly well, aren't too noisy and don't get into fights. Perfect crowd for a bar. :) Unfortunately, I'm not in SF for WWDC (Way too geeky for me) but I look forward to "your people" setting up an interview for me with you - and, unlike developers, when we meet at Macworld SF 2008, *I'll* buy. :) I think a group of developers could be called a "hack". :) Heh...Craig, you friggin' rock, and in this case it wasn't "Shawn" it was "Schoun" pronounced "Shawn". Thanks John - my pleasure! Now that's a funny coincidence - that the bartender said she remembered the name "Shawn" (Schoun) and there was a Shawn commenting on my blog about Dave's. LOL I'm Shawn King, host of Your Mac Life. The "other Shawn" is Schoun Regan, IT Genius. If you ever see us together, you'll know how funny mixing us up is. :) I'd go with "a loop of programmers", but 'brace' is inspired, too. I didn't make it to Dave's but heard about it after. Too bad for me. ISTM that would be a curly brace of developers...?
Dude, that was so full of Teh Awesome
Okay, I'm a slacker - I haven't left my hotel room yet. I have two good excuses - first is that I am going to check out the graphics & imaging tracks today, and they don't start until 10:30. The second is that I installed Leopard on my Macbook this morning. I'm posting from it right now, in fact - when I'm not randomly switching between spaces just because it looks cool. I'm listening to the Stevenote playing in a separate space - spiffy!
Mr. Welch - by the time my day was done yesterday, I couldn't find anyone that could tell me where Dave's was - I missed out on the rounds of Diet Cokes. My apologies. I plead multiple counts of ignorance as my defense. Anyway, off to WWDC Day 2!
Comments How are you finding the beta? "I couldn't find anyone that could tell me where Dave's was..." If they don't know where Dave's is, you're hanging out with the wrong crowd. :) As for buying "Diet Cokes", you have a reputation, as a fellow Canadian, to at least set those deadbeat, mooching developers up with a round. Dave's conveniently lets you buy ahead of time so you don't actually have to be there to buy. You're welcome. :) That's okay Craig. It's on Third, across the street from the Westin, which used to be the Argent. You can make it up tonight after Stump :-P Okay, well now I know where it is, that's a start :-). And thanks to Shawn, I now know that I can pay in advance. I'm not sure I wanted to know that :-) And for Jamie, I can't say anything about it really because we're all under NDA, but I will say that I used the beta all today and it was great. "I now know that I can pay in advance" Think of it this way - if you pay in advance, you won't actually have to hang out with "those people". :) "I will say that I used the beta all today and it was great." Craig, I think you'll find that if you read that Apple NDA you'll find that you can't even admit that you *have* the beta, let alone talk about it. :)
It's not over yet, but I am taking a little break in between meetings. My first Stevenote was definitely a cool experience - Steve is a terrific presenter and the 90 minutes was close to flawless as I have ever seen. And they did a great job herding 5000+ people into one place and then out again.
Safari for Windows was a surprise, and leveraging the downloads of iTunes is certainly a great way to drive distribution. I am fascinated to watch and see where that goes!
That’s about all I think I’ll say – the rest of the conference is confidential and my best bet is to just shut up and attend.
Comments
Wow - thanks for all the good wishes! I'm scrambling to prep for the WWDC - I only accepted the Mac BU role a few days ago, so it's a bit of a fire drill and I haven't kept up with the various comments. I'll try a bulk response here and see how it goes.
Kermit: I agree on the surface it could seems weird that I'm complaining about $2 a show given the money I spent to get set up. It's not $2, it's $30-$50 to buy a season, and that adds up, year after year, whereas the AppleTV's & Xbox 360's are a onetime investment. Also, I might want to watch back episodes of Seinfeld, but I don't want to watch them enough to spend $40 or whatever * 9 seasons. Same with Friends. Or Will and Grace - or pick your favorite sitcom. $40 per season * 40 or 50 or 60 seasons is a HUGE investment, and I'd never make it. I would, however, download ad supported versions and watch those (like In2TV from AOL) (hint, hint, iTunes guys ).
Kyle: DirectX for the Mac would be a heck of a project, but I think getting to work on applications for the Mac platform while inside Microsoft has got more than enough excitement for me.
Stephen: THANK YOU for the great Jericho news. It is unfortunate that CBS' response to folks in the internet and DVR age was not to figure out how to embrace the internet and DVR age, but was rather "PLEASE, would you watch it on our time schedule on your TV, just like the good old '70s".
VMarks: I have seen solutions that allow you to make h.264's out of MS-DVR files, but not that would add all the meta data to make it into a TV series. I would definitely use a product that seamlessly integrated my recorded TV into iTunes.
Spyros: Here's what I did (probably easier to script it as Kyle suggests, but if you only want to do a few items and don't know how to use the scripts, my manual way might work for you): Drag and drop the video file you want to change to a TV show into iTunes. Select "Get info" from the options menu. In the info tab, enter the name of the episode under Name, Artist and Album Artist are the name of the TV series (like "Battlestar Galactica"), the Track Number field gets the episode number (like 5 of 24, but the "of" number isn't needed, so you can just enter 5), the Album field is the name of the TV series plus the season info (like "Battlestar Galactica, Season 5"), and the Disc number field is filled out with 1 of 1. Next the Video tab: select Video Kind: "TV Show", under Show ender the name of the series (like "Battlestar Galactica"), Season Number and Episode Number are as you would expect, and for episode ID, what I have done is put 4 digit number: 2 digit season number followed by a 2 digit episode number like 0105 (season 1, episode 5).
Okay - gotta get back to getting for the WWDC. My first in-person Stevenote - I can't wait!
Comments Oh, if you're going to be there, you DO realize it's traditional for the new head of the Mac BU to buy drinks for the MacEnterprise people on monday night, at Dave's, right? Long-standing tradition, goes back years and years and years. Roz hadn't mentioned that one. Dave's, Monday night, MacEnterprise folks, round of diet cokes. Got it :-) :-) congrats, but now that i have the chance to speak with you, i want to say something, please make MSN Messenger better, MSN Messenger 6 for mac just sucks and its terible for chatting with windows users, make it like windows live messengers please it will be great Thanks a lot for the tip, I'll try everything to see which approach works best:) The bulk method responses seem to work nicely, I'll admit:D Anyway, have fun at WWDC (yaarrg... me jealous); long live the Mac!:) Right, Diet Coke. Just set up the tab, we'll take care of all the Diet Cokes. :-P
F
Comments So Craig, about that "if you use someone else's standards, you don't make any bloody money" quote from your interview? :-P Oh, yeah, I remember that :-). Yup – those were the platform days: owning the platform was the name of the game. Frankly, platform battles are exhausting. I've been working on end-user applications and solutions the past few years, and I find that I like that a lot. That's one of the many things that appealed to me about Mac BU - than chance to work on awesome products for end-users. Hee...actually I thought it was a good interview, especially the parts talking about the joys of the banking industry. Since my current "real" job is with an insurance company that is moving from "EVERYTHING IS COBOL AND COBOL IS EVERYTHING" to WebSphere and DB2, (yes, I do drink a lot more of late), and I am the "not mainframe, not windows" guy, I can relate to that environment.... "What port is the CICS transaction gateway running on?" "What's a port?" Oh look, John found that bourbon in the bottom desk drawer.
I'm posting this from my hot new Black MacBook - I'm not only on a new laptop, I'm giving ecto for Mac a spin. I ordered my new laptop Monday night from MacMall - tricked out with a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo Intel processor, 2 GB RAM, and 160GB of hard disk.
I've never had an Apple laptop before - just desktop machines. I started playing with it when I got home about 2 hours ago. Man this thing is sweet.
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About a month ago, I was figuring out what desktop PC to get for work. I have a laptop that I'm not too happy with and I wanted a little more horsepower. And a bigger screen. And a bigger hard drive. And a real video card. Other than those things, I was perfectly happy with my laptop.
I'd also been looking for an excuse to buy a 24" iMac for about a year - the spot in our kitchen back in VA was about a half inch too short to accommodate it (doh!), so I was stuck getting a 20" one. I have a space now, but the 20" one survived the move and so I couldn't really justify buying another.
So I figured - make it my work machine! Why not find out if the corporate buying process at Microsoft can handle it? I figured it was possible since we have a Mac team. Sure enough, the corporate process handled it, and it just showed up late yesterday afternoon. Whaaa-freaking-hoooooooo! It's fully tricked out, too:
I have meetings, meetings and more meetings today, so I can't do any with it until tonight - bummer!
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We finally got around to calling DirecTV to have our service moved to our new house in Redmond (after two months of paying for service that was only working in VA, we figured it was about time). During the week the DirecTV people came out to put up the dish and get the wiring installed - well, they came out twice, the first time the person got so flustered by the complexity that they literally took off without telling KT. Anyway, today was the big day to get the screens all working - and after spending 2 hours getting all my DirecTV boxes set up and another hour on the phone with DirecTV activating them and diagnosing problems, I sat down in the media room to watch some HD HBO - and the HD DVR/DirectTV tuner TV craps out after 5 minutes of being on. An hour of rebooting it, unplugging it, letting it sit, no luck.
And the movers killed my beautiful Alienware ALX machine. Liquid coolant gooed over everything. Bah!
I really hate moving.
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Right before we moved from DC back to Seattle, I decided to upgrade my Mac Cube harddrive to 250gb from 125gb. For some reason, the drive was only recognized as 125gb, not 250 - and OS X wouldn't boot from it. Gah! Then the swirl of moving happened, everything got packed, and I forgot about it.
Fast forward two and a half months, my stuff is all out of storage and unpacked in my spiffy new home office. I just got home from work, all jazzed to get my Cube working again. I got out my stack of harddrives (don't ask), and no joy - no 125gb harddrive to be found. I looked EVERYWHERE - no joy. It has simply vanished. Luckily, I found the original 30gb drive - made in 2000 for gosh sakes - it even has an Apple logo on it (I didn't notice that before). And it still boots - thank god! It is merrily updating to OS X (Power PC version, of course ) 10.4.9 and iTunes 7.2 - with all of 5GB free.
Next stop - my Mac Mini. I have found my power supply, keyboard, mouse and monitor - but no Mac Mini.
I hate moving.
Comments 120 GB drive is the max size for Cube. Due to the limitation of the IDE controller larger hard drive are recognized only as 127 GB. Get a 120 GB drive and format it by starting the Mac from the install CD. Great blog by the way! Welcome (back) to Seattle. If you're looking for a good church, let me know. I know of one. ;) You can install a drive larger than 120GB with the help of Intech's SpeedTools ATA Hi-Cap Support Driver ($25). See http://www.speedtools.com/ATA6.shtml and the FAQ at http://www.cubeowner.com for more info. Laurie - awesome tip - thank you!! 750GB drive, here I come!
You know, it's funny how we have so little reverence for such speeches.
Used car salesmen turn national holidays into parodies, with the Lincoln on stilts bit, Independence day becomes 'Give me liberty or give me johnsonville brats', and so on.
There's no substitute for a really good, moving speech.
Sometimes, a soundbite doesn't do it.
"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter to me now, because I've been to the mountaintop, and I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has it place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's Will, and He has allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I have looked over, and I have seen 'The Promised Land'. "
Or "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
Perhaps I should instead say:
"I will use my iPhone on the seas and oceans, on the beaches, on the landing grounds, listening to music in the fields and streets, watching videos in the hills. I will never give it up..."
Posted by: vmarks | June 30, 2007 11:28 PM
True, these historic speeches have made their way everywhere. For me, it isn't so much about lack of reverence (although I certainly am an irreverent bastard!) - it is that they are part of the culture and so I use them. It is remarkable the impact these speeches made - how they have become so ingrained into the culture.
And you are right – the sound bite is no substitute for the full impact of the original.
Posted by: Craig Eisler | July 1, 2007 9:55 AM