stutopia.com

what else is a dog to do in the summer? oh yes, for this dog, the livin’ is easy.

I purchased this iPhone because I passed up v1. Not believing that I should disable features such as 3G or Push, my only options are wait until a firmware update corrects the piss-poor battery life or buy an extra charger for work/vehicle. Just buying a new charger + usb dock connector would run me about $48.

Another issue is I am experiencing about 1-2 soft resets when I open a random app, which is occurring daily. The screen goes black and I get to glance back at a silver apple logo for a minute or two. I don’t know if this is the memory leak to match the well-known battery leak, but that would be just perfect. It’s been close to one week with this phone and I’m tired of having to bring my charger back and forth to work. I’m not using it extensively, but 12-hour shifts are not forgiving to this phone in its current 2.0 (5A347) firmware.

One pesky thing I found with my iPhone 3G setup was voicemail. I did not see any documentation included with the phone of how to set it up (and even if it were in there, it shouldn’t require google if you are a skip-the-manual type). I tried pressing the voicemail button in the phone screen and it did nothing. I call my own number and  get a message stating voicemail has not been set up for [me]. Okay…I read some forum post about pressing ‘*’ when calling your own number to begin the setup process which worked for me. Upon googling, there were so many varied solutions that I think it has to do with the type of customer you are; whether you ported your number from another carrier, are a new customer to AT&T or are an existing customer who is upgrading. I am the latter. Either way, I wish the process weren’t so murky.

I have done it now. I went and picked up a new iPhone 3G 8GB monster. Now for a little backstory: I had my grubby hands on the original a year ago, but it didn’t want to register since my number is part of the business account. Not to be deterred, I picked up a Motorola RAZR v3xx which sports 3G as well. The two best things I love about that phone was I could use any mp3 file for ringtones and the ability to teather it to my macbook pro. Two things that I cannot do with this new phone.

What made me decide to make the jump this time? The App Store. Endless potential extendability. The reason I say potential is that I do not know what it takes for an app to be approved for distribution at the store. Thus, some great app may not make it to those pages due to rules Apple and AT&T have made due to hardware or network constraints, respectively.

Here are some of my favorite free apps so far:

• Twitterific – ability to post photo links in twitter entries from the iPhone
• Shozu – ability to post photos taken by the phone to multiple sites (flickr, facebook, picasa, twitter, wordpress, etc)
• AP Mobile News / NYTimes – I guess this is what it feels like for Kindle users to have news RSS feeds at their fingertips
• BoxOffice – who wants to go see a movie? Here are the times for this theater
• Pandora – amazing customized streaming radio stations that is powered by the Music Genome Project (hello parties and streaming radio to make great use of that AUX port in your savvy ride) How is this even legal?
• Save Benjis – here’s a great tool for the intelligent shopper in us all

Just saying…Spore looks to be a pretty fun game to customize and socially interact. Here are the characters that I have made with Spore Creature Creator Trial version. The creature parts are limited in this version, but it still is fairly impressive to see its flexibility. Hint: to make things bigger or smaller, use your mouse scroll over an object. Here are some celebrity Spore creations.

I guess it’s an ongoing scare, with select tomato-producing states in the clear now. The only problem I have is guessing if the fruit‘s origin from a store or dish. I’m not sure if origin is something that’s marked on a sticker or not. And when I’m eating papaya salad, I don’t like to mull over whether or not the Lao store got their tomatoes from a state in the clear or not. How aggravating.

On a raft in the one of the many seas of productivity, I cannot help but feel the ebb and flow like the slipping in and out of weekends. There’s something to be said about being a homeowner, where every spare moment there exists some flavor of maintenance and in my case preparation and customization. Recently, I’ve filled in all the picture frame holes in the walls around the house. We’ve also hung up art and photos as well. I’m glad that my garage is not too huge otherwise I know I’d have more organizing to do.

Now that we got a TV in the living room, I’ve got some initiative to run some cables through to it. Not only coax, but CAT5 as well for content. One thing I loath is making trips in the attic, but for this I think I have to make an exception. I need to do a home run otherwise my only option is to put a splitter in the wall as the otherside is the master bedroom where an existing coax jack lies. There is no option for ethernet sharing so that too, will have to be a new run. Then there’s the task of mounting the TV to that wall. I’d like to get a fancy arm mount to point it towards the kitchen, but I guess a stationary one will do.

Working 12-hour shifts makes it difficult to get these things done during my work week. I really wish I could get more things done, but it’s almost not worth trading it in for some rest. I guess you really have to work hard to relax hard.

So there I was at the Shell station at Victorville at around 1am. I decided it was probably a good idea to filler up at the halfway point. So I get ready at the pump, press the left-most button and am shocked at the trap I fell in. I had inadvertently selected the middle-grade fuel rather than the regular.

Now I thought that was brilliant on the part of that gas station (not sure if this is the way all Shells are across the board); however, not so awesome for me. I decided not to cancel out the transaction simply because I was too tired and did not want to run the risk of having the card not authorize the second time around. Plus, it was super cold that night and I didn’t have a jacket. Anywho, I felt a bit taken and had to document this event in the hope some other future traveler doesn’t suffer a similar fate, especially in these high-gas-priced times.

Woohoo! I’ve been anxiously checking snail mail for the last month wondering when my DTV converter box $40 coupon is coming. I went to their site and they have a page to check its status:

Your application has been approved. Based on your application approval date of 02/28/2008, your coupon(s) are/were scheduled to mail on 04/25/2008.

I can’t wait to hook up to the projector with a DTV signal. Then we’ll get CBS and ABC on our temporary “big screen.”

Update (4/26): Woohoo! They’ve arrived.