DivX Video Test
I’ve had several people tell me they could not watch the videos I’ve posted. Everything thus far has been .mp4 which quicktime plays. I hate uploading video to google or youtube because the quality isn’t very good. So I thought I would try a few other formats and see if these are any better.
No video? Get the DivX Web Player for Windows or Mac
iPhone Blogging
I downloaded the new iPhone Word Press app today. I’m giving it a go and so far everything is great. If you blog and have an iPhone I suggest checking it out.
iPhone 3G
I’m a big fan of the iPhone. You can do more on the iPhone than any other phone on the market today. I bought the original iPhone three days after the release. So when the launch of the iPhone 3G was announced, I was very happy.
Some friends and I decided to camp out at the local Apple store this last Thursday night to ensure we could buy one. We got to the store at around 12:00 AM, to our surprise no one was in line. To kill some time we decided to grab a movie at Monaco, we watched Hellboy 2. After the movie we went back to the Apple store to see if anyone was in line yet, and there were four people in line. At this point is was 2:00 AM with six hour’s to go before the store opened. (Through out the night employees of the Apple store would peak out the curtains to see how many people were in line.) So we chatted, browsed the internet, and generally did what we could to stay awake. Through out the night people trickled in two at a time. By 7:00 AM there were probably 60 people in line. So with one hour to go, there was a lot of activity inside and outside the store.
At 8:00 AM on the dot, the large glass doors entering into the Apple store opened up and out comes running 20 (cracked out) Apple employees screaming with joy. They give us a brief run down about how the process would work and start by letting the first ten in line in the store. I was number six in line so was in that first group of ten to enter the store.
By now it’s 8:15 AM and I’m in the hands of Amy (an Apple employee). She informs me that she will be with me the entire process. She starts by asking me what I want today and I let her now that I was getting two 16GB iPhones, one black and one white. So she says great, let me go grab the phones. She returned promptly and we begin the process of upgrading my old iPhone to the new iPhone 3G. She ask me a series of questions and I answer them. She often tells me that she has to go ask her manager questions as she had only been trained the process a few days before the launch. The process of getting my iPhone upgraded took roughly two hours. Now you’re probably thinking two hours is a typo, it’s not. Don’t get me wrong, Amy was very nice and seemed to know what she was doing. The process took so long because the “easy pay” hand held devices would continue to have “errors”. During this two hours period Amy and I had plenty of time to chat and I learned some interesting things about Apple and herself. One interesting thing she mentioned was that a training video they had watched said that each store should be processing around 100 iPhones an hour. I estimate that this store would only be processing 4.
After they get some problems sorted out and we get my phone upgraded we start on porting Ronda’s number over from Verizon to AT&T. This process probably took about an hour and a half. We were having the same issues with the “easy pay” devices.
With both phones now purchased and ready to get activated via iTunes, I find out that iTunes is down. With iTunes being down, I could not activate the phones for use. I was told that the Apple store had done everything they could do and to go home and continue to try iTunes throughout the day to activate the phones. I do believe is wasn’t till around 4:00 PM that iTunes was back up and letting us activate our phones. I was able to activate my phone in about two minutes. I then proceeded to help Ronda activate her phone and it also seemed to go smooth. She was able to make calls from the phone right after it was activated. She was however not able to receive calls until later that evening after we called AT&T. They informed us that the port did not completely take.
So with both iPhone working now, I calculate that the whole process, of waiting, buying, and activating the phones took twelve hours and thirty minutes.
Did you get an iPhone 3G yesterday or today? If so, please comment on how things went for you.
How Many Times?
Recently Ronda and I were listening to the radio and she mentioned that the new song by John Mayer drives her somewhat crazy. I asked why and she said it was because how many times John Mayer repeats the chorus, “Say What You Need To Say”. So the next time the song came on we counted, we counted 25 times he repeats “Say What You Need To Say”. So I guess he is really trying to drive home a point, Say What You Need To Say.
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Re-Birth
Yes, once again it’s the re-birth of the blog. I finally got a little time yesterday to put up a new WP 2.5 compliant theme. I have had many things to blog about lately but haven’t blogged. So what made me start blogging again? Memory. I am not very good at remembering events in my life. So, if I blog things that happen, my blog is my memory. So we will see how long it last this time. I was on a roll for sometime until JaguarPC lost my data again. It was the third time that I had lost data and I wasn’t happy at all about it. So my blog was once again lost. I was able to recover the mysql database but everything else was lost. Now I’m hosting my own site and have many backups. I can’t wait to start blogging again and sharing news about my family and life in general. I’m also getting a feel for WP 2.5.1 which so far I’m pretty happy with. Until next time….
