• I was able to get an adapter to let my iPhone work with my current FM Transmitter setup in my car. It cost me $10. On the way home from the store I plugged it in and started playing music and it’s just as nice as using my real iPod to listen to music in my car. Then I navigated to the phone and made a phone call. This is very cool, and something I’ve wanted for awhile. Throughout the navigation to making the call, my music kept playing, then when I initiated the call, the music paused and I heard ringing through my car speakers. It basically turned my cars sound system into a speakerphone. So basically, the iPhone replaces those expensive bluetooth car phone kits that you can get which tie into your cars sound system (at least somewhat).
• On a similar note as the above comment, the integration with the phone and the iPod continues when listening over the headphones. If a call comes in, the music pauses and there’s a microphone on the headphone wire, so you can start talking. You just give the microphone a little squeeze to answer the call, and another squeeze to end. If you’re just listening to music you also squeeze the mic to pause and restart the music. So simple, yet so smart.
• It desperately needs iChat or some sort of AIM/GTalk/Etc. chat client. I know some folks that are complaining about the keyboard might find this idea horrible, but I wouldn’t be wanting to use it for long conversations, just enough to let me pop online and have a quick IM conversation with someone. You might be wondering why I can’t just do this with SMS, but believe it or not, I am sometimes in places that have WiFi but no cell signal (with how my apartment is situated in the building, my bedroom is one of these places).
• It would be nice if there was at least some game on the device to kill time with. I liked BrickBreaker on my BlackBerry for this, and I usually put Tetris or something on most other phones I’ve owned. I think something like BrickBreaker would work on the iPhone too, you could just drag your finger back and forth to bounce the ball. The interface is already there for it.
• The keyboard is nice, but I’m sticking behind what I said in my earlier post. If you’re proficient on a thumb-style keyboard, you’re going to be slower on the iPhone keyboard. I’ve become pretty fast with it, but in an Apple keyboard demo video, they show a guy do it with two thumbs and he flies through writing an email. So I opened notepad and for quite awhile just rambled on, typing out my thoughts, using two thumbs. It was dropping keypresses like crazy. It wasn’t an issue of it being innaccurate or me fat-fingering words, it just wouldn’t register some of my keypresses. So the software never even got the opportunity to try to correct my spelling (which it is actually VERY good at when I just type with my index finger). When using just my one finger, I’ve already gotten to where I rarely have to correct it, and I actually have faith in it correcting me. I might see a type-o I’ve made, but I’ll continue on spelling the word because 99% of the time, it’s going to realize what I meant to type and fix it for me.

I’ve been playing with it ever since and for the most part, I am very pleased with it. I don’t quite buy into the whole “this is going to change the way everyone thinks about mobile phones.” Sorry, but it’s a VERY nice phone/ipod/browser in my opinion. I don’t think that we’re going to suddenly see a flurry of providers sending people home to activate their phones or anything like that. I was lucky in that my phone activated instantly, unlike some other reports I’ve read of people waiting for a few hours for activation (my guess is AT&T/Apple got swamped with activation requests).

Some of the features I’ll comment on:

• Keyboard: It’s definitely nice, and a LOT better then I expected. I am able to comfortably use it for typing URL’s, SMS, and brief emails. So I am impressed … but … it is not going to replace physical “thumb” QWERTY keyboards. If you are proficient (and by proficient I mean you type with both thumbs and can look away from the keyboard without making massive mistakes) with a thumb keyboard, you will be slower at data entry on this. What they say about “trusting” it is true. You need to just type away and let it figure it out, it is extremely smart. But typing with one finger is just slower then going with both thumbs, no doubt about it.
• Browser: This is definitely something that sets it aside from any other mobile device. Having a real browser on the phone is so nice. You can comfortably read websites like CNN, blogs, etc. I actually hope that bloggers/sites do NOT try to release special iPhone themes for their sites. It would be an injustice to the browser on the iPhone. I was out with friends last night and folks started having various side conversations and I started playing around with it and before I knew it, I had cleared out my unread items in Google Reader. It was completely comfortable to do. My eyes didn’t feel strained and navigation was nearly flawless.
• Phone: It’s a pretty good phone. The sound quality is decent, getting the keypad up and working with it is easy enough. iTunes sync’s all of your contacts over from your Address Book on your Mac, so I was able to easily have all of my contacts available.
• SMS: It uses the “conversation” style txt messaging, sort of like BlackBerry’s. So you can easily carry on txt conversations with multiple people and not get totally lost in the conversations (I txt a lot, so this is great to find out).
• Google Maps: As many people have already said, this is quite possibly better then Google Maps itself. It is actually one of the applications I’ve been using to show off the iPhone to friends and none of them have not said “Wow” and left their jaw open after seeing it.
• WiFi: It reliably picks up my secured home network, so in the apartment I can easily browse, taking advantage of my broadband speeds. If I’m out and it senses a network, it asks me if I’d like to join it instead of using EDGE.
• EDGE: I really haven’t had problems with the speed. It’s not as fast as browsing at home on my computer over broadband, but I would not call it painful by any means. I wouldn’t have expected it to be as fast as my home computer browsing either.
• Voicemail: This is really nice. When a voicemail is left for you, it evidently gets downloaded to your phone or something along those lines. You can just click listen and the voicemail instantly starts playing. There’s no need to dial in to voicemail.

Anyhow, I’ll try to do a follow up post after I’ve had some more time to play with it some more as I did with the Blackjack. I will mention a nitpick I just found out this morning however …

I went to get in my car, where I have a setup for an FM transmitter that I use with my regular iPod. It’s not one of the iTrip things that relies on sitting flush against the top of the iPod. My transmitter basically plugs in like a set of headphones would. I’m not sure if part of the plug is too fat to let the pin go far enough in or what, but regardless, I couldn’t get it to play music with my FM transmitter, instead it defaulted to playing with the iPhone’s built-in speaker, which is obviously unacceptable for listening to music in your car. So it looks like I will be looking for some other means of playing music in my car if I don’t want to carry my regular iPod.

Anyhow, that’s all for now. And yes, Pat, I know I’m a lamer.

Battery Life
I can definitely understand why folks were making the comments that they were in regards to the battery life.  It’s a good thing that it comes with two batteries.  The standard battery that it comes with is probably at best a back-up battery.  I let it charge over night and then gave it what I’d call average use throughout the next day.  I probably spent about 30 minutes on phone calls during the day, and occasionally checked out things in the mobile browser, it also was keeping my email and calendar sync’d.  That evening, I had to make a call where I was placed on hold for awhile (total time on the call probably 30-45 minutes) and then the battery went dead on me.  I did realize afterwards that I had left blue-tooth on all day, so I’m sure that drained the battery faster, but still, I was a bit surprised that it didn’t last at least the full day.  Since then, I’ve been using the extended-life battery that came with the phone and battery life hasn’t been an issue for me.  It has a 3 bar battery indicator and it usually still has 2 bars left when I plug it in to charge at night.  I haven’t been leaving blue-tooth on either (I always forget my headset anyhow).  I do make sure to carry the other battery with me just in case I need it for some reason, it’s small enough that it slides easily into my bag.

Input
Well, as I stated in my last post, I’m very glad that it has the thumb-wheel and escape button like the BlackBerry’s do.  This definitely made converting over pretty simple, not to mention it’s a great navigation tool for devices like this (at least if you’re right-handed I suppose).  As for the keyboard, it does fine but it’s not as good as the BlackBerry’s was.  I actually blame this on the shape of the keys more then the layout of special-characters and punctuation.  Sometimes it seems to miss keystrokes, not often, but just enough to be noticeable.  The Missing Sync has been great for keeping my contacts consolidated and helping me transfer files to the device (I just got my 2GB Micro-SD card for it).  I also like that you can tell the phone how you want it to act when plugged into a USB port on your computer.  You can specify that you want it to connect for sync’ing, to act as a mass storage device or that you want it to connect as a modem.  That’s pretty spiffy if you ask me.

UI
The UI is working for me for the most part.  It does seem to go “quirky” on me at times though causing me to cycle the phone off/on.  For some reason the mobile browser will act up sometimes and basically return nothing on web requests.  Rebooting seems to be the only way to get it back to working.  This seems to affect my calendar sync’ing and email pushing (which leads me to believe it’s actually just polling quickly) as well.

Windows Mobile definitely has some ground to make up when compared to the BlackBerry.  It’s not really bad, but RIM got it right.  Their core applications and functionality seem to be “hardened” and continue to respond quite well despite any silliness that running applications might try to do.  Windows Mobile doesn’t protect itself as well it would seem.  But the applications that do come on the device work fairly well.

I especially like the home screen.  It shows my upcoming calendar events and gives me a look-at-a-glance view of SMS, email, etc.  There are roughly 5 icons across the top.  Several icons always stay easy-to-access like contacts and the calendar.  The rest cycle through recently opened applications.  You can also hold in the thumb-wheel from the home screen to get quick access to things like alarms, the Task Manager (to stop applications for example), etc.  It makes a decent attempt at expecting what the user might want to do as well with the soft keys.  The left always stays as the “Start” button (so many other words that would work better there …), the right generally will take you to your contacts listing, but if you just received an SMS txt for instance it will change to take you directly to your messages.

Conclusion
Overall I’m pleased with the device.  It is doing a good job at providing the services I wanted it to.  When compared to the BlackBerry it’s a rough comparison.  Device alone, I think the BlackBerry might be a better device, but when it comes to sync’ing email, calendar, contacts, so far the Blackjack has been easier for me to get running on, as well as tethering it to my MacBook, and it’s good enough on the other stuff to not make you long for your BlackBerry.  So I guess it really comes down to your needs and whether the battery life is acceptable to you.  If you’re the type of person traveling a lot and not able to plug your phone in once a day, the Blackjack is probably not the device for you (you can charge it off a USB connection to your computer if that makes any difference though).

So far I’m very impressed though. Most of the people that I first told about my purchase immediately responded with either “the battery life sucks” or “you’ll have to tell me what you think of the battery life.” So far … not really seeing what they’re talking about. For one thing, the phone comes with two batteries (one normal and one extended life) and an external charger so you can charge whichever isn’t currently in your phone. To some extent the fact that the phone comes with two batteries would seem to strengthen their implications, but still, unless the phones battery life starts really nose diving over time, it’s doing good for me still after 24 hours (on the extended life battery).

I think my charging habits might be a little different then most folks though. I tend to plug my phone in to let it charge every night while I sleep, so a phone has to have a super short battery life in order to bug me (less then one day of normal use). But anyhow, I can write more reliable information on the battery at another time.

Getting up and running on the phone has been a breeze. I’m having a much easier time then I was with my BlackBerry 8700c. With the BlackBerry, which I still consider a great device, it was pretty difficult to get any sort of decent calendar snyc’ing or tethering going on if you didn’t have an Exchange account, and it was just recently that you were able to change your reply-to address on outgoing emails (on a per-email basis that is).

With the BlackJack, I have access to POP3 and IMAP email (which is nice) and can take advantage of the Push service (offered by Cingular) for my GMail account. I was also able to use GCalendarSync to sync up my Google Calendar (bi-directional sync over the air). So it’s almost Exchange-like as far as my email and calendar functions go now.

I was also able to quickly get setup for tethering my MacBook and BlackJack, allowing me to connect to the Internet via my phone. This was another issue I had with the BlackBerry that lead to me participating in Alex King’s BlackBerry Bounty. If you stumble across this post while trying to figure out how to tether your BlackJack and MacBook, I used this post and this one to figure it out.

After getting the tethering up, and email/calendar, I looked for a good way to bring my contacts from GMail over to it (which I had spent a decent amount of time de-dup’ing and formatting, etc). This (and some other snyc’ing concerns) led me to find The Missing Sync for WindowsMobile. After exporting my Contacts from GMail (in Outlook format) I was able to import them into my MacBooks Address Book. I had to do a little further formatting because of how GMail stores names as one field, but that was easy. Anyhow, once they were in my Address Book, I was able to use The Missing Sync to sync up my contacts to my BlackJack (the program sync’s other items on the device as well). After that, I was up and fully running.

All things considered (Internet searches, dead ends, etc) I probably spend 2.5-3 hours getting all of that setup the way I wanted it. I’m now very happy with my device and it’s chugging along nicely for me. I don’t think that’s bad at all.

Anyhow, I’ll try to get more into my thoughts on the interface and input mechanisms (I’m so glad it has a thumb-wheel like the BlackBerry) in a later post, as well as revisit the battery life topic. I definitely think some more time will need to be spent with the device to really figure that out.

Close to a year ago now, I started watching Lost. It was already into its second season, but my roomie had bought the first season on DVD, so I decided to watch it to see what everyone was talking about. I was almost instantly hooked and within a week or less, I had finished watching the entire season. I think they were 13-14 episodes into season 2 by the time I finished season 1. I decided to buy those episodes from iTunes, quickly caught up, and was then watching it as the episodes aired on TV. We’re now 6 episodes into season 3, and I haven’t missed a single episode for the entire series.

Near the end of season 2, I started to lose my love (or perhaps infatuation) for the series. So little was being revealed, and I’ve grown to loathe the flashback mechanism that they use in EVERY episode, taking up half of the episode pretty much and doing nearly nothing to move the main plot lines forward. So little has actually been revealed, and what worries me is that some of the things I consider still unanswered, the writers have said they consider to be wrapped up. Without giving anything away in case you like watching the show and aren’t up to date, those ‘answers,’ as the writers call them, are anything but answers.

There are other series now following this general format (not really the flashbacks thank goodness, but the killer levels of suspense in every episode) and that worries me somewhat, at least with the current way things are done. Some examples being Heroes, Jericho, etc.

So what’s the point of my post you ask?

Well, what I’d really like to see the networks do is contract these series, and then hold to it. I don’t mean contracts for seasons like they have now, I mean the whole series. In other words, they should say, “Ok, Lost writers, we think this could be successful for 5 seasons, so work out all of your story arch’s, realizations, etc within that time.” After 5 seasons, the series is ended, and all is well. The folks watching the series should feel at least most of the questions asked in the series were answered, and feel some closure after the series finale. Think of it as a real long mini-series, with a definitive beginning and ending. The problem I see with the current way things are done is that the writers never know when they’re going to need to finish things up, so they either end up doing it quickly and poorly, or they never get the chance to do it at all.

I forget where I heard it, or if it’s even true, but I remember at some point being told that many times, series are not given true endings because the networks never know if they might want to come back and make a made for TV movie later or whatever, but really, that’s just silly. What’s the last TV series you can think of where after it was all over, someone went back and made a movie for it (and the movie wasn’t a mistake to make). One point to make here, because I know some of my friends, but Serenity doesn’t count for Firefly, what Fox did to that show was just wrong.

I really wish an idea like this could take hold. I think we’d start seeing some great TV series show up on TV, and I’d venture a guess that DVD sales for series based on this format would at least meet if not exceed DVD sales for current/past series.

Anyhow, I think most people that come across this blog are pretty familiar with TiVo’s and DVR’s in general, so I won’t really lay into the benefits of one, but I definitely recommend getting one based on my experience so far. Being able to pause a program if I want to go get some dinner going, or set-up season passes to record an entire season of a show (not to mention you can tell it to skip recording re-runs of shows), etc, is real nice.

If you do decide to get one, feel free to list me as a referrer ;) The email address my TiVo account is on is mwalters8[at]yahoo.com (you need that to indicate I referred you). Don’t bother trying to email me there though, I rarely if ever check the account other then to get emails from places like TiVo ;)

First, I’ve only met one or two Doctors ever that have anywhere close to as strong of a God complex as EVERY doctor on the show¹. Second, if a Doctor had ever acted like any of those Doctors on the show in my direction as an EMT I’d have gladly slugged them and then turned in my resignation ;)

Just too bad, they have an opportunity to tell some neat “war stories” and show people that might not know any better what it’s really like, but unfortunately they have ruined it by hiring writers that appear to have no background knowledge of EMS and allowing them to go way too over the top in their story telling.

1. I’m a former EMT, so I have a pretty good idea of how things should be … Long story but there was a period of time where I left the computer field because I thought EMS was what I wanted to do for a career, obviously I was wrong since I’m now back in IT, heh. [back]

1: Downplay training

Eh … I don’t mind teaching myself stuff. I actually learn better this way. I’m willing to admit that I might very well be an exception on this though.

2: Give no recognition

Definitely important. I personally don’t need public recognition as much as just an occasional, “Hey, that was pretty sweet how you did x”

3: Plan too much overtime

Obviously this is bad. Bad as in planning overtime is bad, not as in the point is bad.

4: Use management-speak

I personally just don’t have time for people that feel they need to use the full extent of their vocabulary in every-day speak. I’ve previously worked places where folks were like this a lot, and it was annoying a lot. It’s not that I can’t follow the conversation, but … get to the frickin point.

5: Try to be smarter than the geeks

AMEN! Probably one of my favorite points on the list. Some of the best management advice I ever heard was, “Surround yourself with people that are smarter then you. Then listen to them.”

6: Act inconsistent

Well … I don’t disagree with it, but this isn’t particular to managing geeks. Managers of all types do this. Yes its bad, but the day I find an employer that doesn’t do it … I’ll kiss their feet. I don’t think I’ll be kissing feet anytime in my life, heh.

7: Ignore the geeks

Yeah, this happens. I don’t really get affected by it to be honest. I will admit that it is a large factor in me viewing jobs as just a paycheck and nothing more though.

8: Make decisions without consulting them

Yup. I agree. This nearly goes hand-in-hand with point #5 if you ask me.

9: DonǃÙt give them tools

It’s nice so long as the company can afford it.

10: Forget that geeks are creative workers

This is probably my favorite on the list. I look at programming as engineering. My Dad was/is an Industrial Engineer. When you need to build something that’s never been done before, who do you call? Someone like him. It’s the same thing with us in web programming. Sure, we may not be re-inventing the wheel every day, but our application of the tools we have is rarely the same any two times, and sometimes we’re completely figuring it out on our own. It is a creative process. People forget this FAR too often.

It appears to me that the service will scan in your feed, display the titles and excerpts to your 4 (?) most recent entries, and offer some options for subscribing to the feed. Until today I believe it was, they were displaying adsense ad’s next to the content. My problem is I don’t see what this is doing for me? If I wanted a pretty straight shot for folks to look at my feed / subscribe to it, I could either use feedburner (Randy seems to be saying it’s different … I’m not saying he’s wrong, but I don’t see how it’s all that different) or obviously I could do something custom on my own site.

It just seems to me like FeedPass is basically saying “Hey, let us spiffy up your feed and make money from advertising on it.” Where’s the added value? Why do I need / should I use FeedPass? What am I missing?

To the credit of the administration over at FeedPass, they have removed their advertising until some things have been figured/worked out.

I just think there needs to be some more value before they can really warrant taking my content (potentially) and earning money from it. They need to either be enhancing my content or preferably, providing some kind of added value to me as the author of the content. Perhaps that’s getting into some technorati type things like tracking inbound links, etc (because Technorati absolutely sucks these days), or maybe providing some kind of improved statistics I can’t get from elsewhere … I don’t know, but in my opinion right now they’re not doing enough to give them the right to earn money from my content to be frank.

Basically what I found was that if you compare the EX to the Hybrid, it takes roughly 200,000 miles for the hybrid to start saving you money. If you’re willing to drive the DX model, even after 400,000 miles, the hybrid hasn’t started to save you money.

Obviously this tool has a couple of “flaws” I should probably point out. For one, it assumes that gasoline cost per gallon will stay the same throughout the mileage/cost projection. Also it obviously doesn’t take into account maintenance costs on the cars, but I think this is ok since regardless of which one you were to choose, maintenance costs would be incurred. Third, gas prices obviously vary based on your location, so that would impact the time it would take to start saving money. Even given these faults, I still think it illustrates the point, even if it’s not 100% accurate.

Honda Civic Sedan EX vs Honda Civic Sedan Hybrid
Honda Civic Sedan LX vs Honda Civic Sedan Hybrid
Honda Civic Sedan DX vs Honda Civic Sedan Hybrid

UPDATE: In fairness to Honda, I suppose I should mention that my calculations were based on Highway mileage. If you want to see the difference just adjust Car 2 down to 30MPG on each of the above examples (Hybrid city mileage doesn’t change significantly, the Civic hybrid gas mileage on the sticker is 49/51). It does make a difference, but not until roughly 200,000 miles on the DX.