Zigackly!

Loyalty

The timelines still seem a little random to me. Lost definitely did a much better job. Time to start explaning the science behind those wormhole looking things. If I'm kept in the dark for more episodes, I'm going to lose interest. And what was up with that hysterical journalist ? Completely over the top acting.

The coffee shop trick was nice.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1653554/

Twanging Your Magic Clanger

I missed Jake. He's become a real good source of one-liners these days, especially when it comes to insulting Alan so the fact that he was missing from the episode was a big bummer. And what's up with the series re-using women actors ? They had Chelsea in other roles before and yesterday Liz Vassey appeared again in a different role than what she played before. Remember her being one of the soccer moms with kid that was Jake's age ? Now she's a dermatologist witth a daughter ? And get Alan someone steady. I'm tired of his jokes.

My rating: 2.5/5

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1746125/

Time for a change

These days, my life seems to revolve around a few things - Aditya being the biggest of them, Apple products follow and then finally anything to do with TV (and some movies) including how to watch them online or on your iPhone. Most of the times, my thoughts about these subjects are either too long to share on my Facebook profile, or I am just afraid I'm going to seriously alienate a few of my friends given my incessant drooling over my iPhone or on what I watched on Hulu/Netflix yesterday.

That's when I remembered my blog which I've been ignoring for quite a while although I'm still donating $4.99 to Six Apart every month! Maybe it's time for me to start contributing regularly to my blog with just my thoughts about the tech world a little more frequently now.

So, if you were a previous casual reader of this highly outdated blog, keep a watch !

A true laid back state

So recently we got back from a relaxing and I mean a truly relaxing week at Maui. Even if I was running behind the kid, it was still relaxing because of the reduced mental stress. I didn't have a laptop and  ever since I was at 37,000 feet over California, my cellphone was in airplane mode except for short intervals of getting driving directions. The absence of my frantic pace of checking emails, news, Facebook posts and stock prices, it was truly a relaxing time for my mind.

So I began to wonder if that's how everybody is in Hawaii and I did notice some things that folks usually might not. The observations are evident if you think about them, but I found them interesting.

• On my third day at breakfast, I decided to check on the stock prices. It was around 10 AM which is when I would usually check stocks in the office, but in Hawaii, 10 AM means the market has already closed!! You would have to get up at 3:30 to really follow the market and you don't wake up at 3:30 at a beach resort. You just DON'T !!
• I had to go into a number of retail chains to get stuff. Anybody who's visited a Safeway knows that a couple of years back, they completely redid the design of their interior. But in Maui, it's still the same old look. Then I went into a Subway (because sometimes you just need something quick) and it still has the same old design with that guy walking into a subway! Haven't seen that around here in ages.
• And in front of the Safeway there was a Longs Drugs. Huh ? Longs ? It got bought over by CVS. Even before the stores were re-designed, the receipts started printing as CVS and there was signs all over the store. But in Maui, you had no idea that Longs doesn't exist anymore!
• And then to top it all, I saw a Mail Boxes, Etc with the blue logo and all that. I didn't even know that those operate anymore under that name since UPS converted most of them to the UPS store!

All this just proved to me that Hawaii is simply a laid back state. People don't seem to care about what's happening in the mainland. And why should they ? Just taking one look at the beach and the blue water made me forget everything. If I had stayed in the water for 2 more minutes I would have probably decided to sell my house and move to Maui!

Another interesting tidbit I realized - almost everyday I'm bound to see a vehicle with a license plate that's not from California. Maybe not a passenger car, but at least some semi that's transporting goods. It's fairly common on the freeways. But that's when I realized that the chances of seeing something like that in HI are almost zero.

I must say that my Hawaii fever is going to take a while to die down. It was hands down the best vacation I've ever had. I was just talking to a friend the other day who mentioned that it's probably just the cost that stops people from going their often. My next step is to make a friend who knows a guy who knows a guy who has a condo in Hawaii and will let us stay there on our next trip :)

Till then, Aloha!

Mint Quirk

So I ran into a nice little Mint quirk the other day. I have two credit cards - let's call them "Card A" and "Card B". For some reason, Card A was showing a $7.65 transfer from Card B (and vice versa). I've never done balance transfers and wouldn't anyway for such a small amount so I couldn't figure out what's going on for a couple of days. Then finally, I accidentally clicked on the details on Card A one day and it showed me the merchant name - which was a local coffee shop. I did the same on Card B and it said the merchant name was Target. That's when I realized what was going on. I had returned something in Target for 7.65 and had recently bought coffee with some folks which also co-incidentally cost 7.65. Apparently, Mint decided to match these two entries as a transfer from one account to the another.

I first thought about why Mint would do something stupid like that. But, I guess that's how it matches a debit from my checking account as a credit card payment - by matching a similar credit. So, all in all, it's a good feature. It's just that in rare cases like these, it's going to look weird.

Now that I think of it, it's not really a quirk. It should be a bug, since they can look at the merchant name and identify it's not really a transfer.

Leave of Absense

To the handful (one, not two hands) of people who have regularly read my blog, I'd like to announce a leave of absence. My experiments with blogging started around four years back. Not that I was into blogging and had a lot to say, but because I work as a web applications developer and wanted to learn about blogging and experience it first hand. As it turns out, I don't have a lot of interesting thoughts that I want to openly share with the wide world - you are still welcome to meet me for a beer and enjoy them.

So, I'm taking a hiatus from my sporadic blogging to concentrate on some other things. But, I will be back!

Why I bought the iPhone

Let me start this review by a honest disclosure - I'm a huge fan of Apple products. That doesn't mean that I stand in line overnight for each and every product, nor do I buy some Apple product just because it's the latest fad or the newest arrival. What I mean is that I'm easily enthralled by anything that Apple does and really enjoy my time working with it's products (owned/used - PowerBook, iBook, iPod Mini, iPod Nano). So, when the iPhone was out, I really really wanted to buy it. But, Apple only had service with AT&T and I was stuck with Verizon till late September. That forced me to be content with just drooling in the Apple store and not really doing anything about it. But, my contract finally expired, Apple dropped the price and I caved in to the temptation. I bought it on a Saturday night and spent 4-5 hours activating it and then playing with almost all of the features. Here's what I found.

Activation

If you read any negative reports, simply ignore them. Activation (including porting from Verizon) was a breeze. Any process has some bugs and some people will encounter them. That's just how technology works. So, any one who had a problem, I'm sorry but that doesn't mean there's issues with activation. That just means, YOU had a small issue and had to deal with it.

WiFi or EDGE ?

There's so much talk about how you should wait till the iPhone goes 3G. I think whether or not you should wait depends on what you are going to be using the Internet connection for. Me - I was content with the connection on my Motorola and it's wimpy screen. So, this was definitely a big step forward. I intentionally shut off WiFi on the iPhone and tested some surfing on EDGE. My typical tasks - checking email, checking movie listings, reading Slashdot, finding the nearest Starbucks, even doing a TypePad post - were pretty much fine on EDGE. I didn't really mind the delay. Even downloading a 8 min video on YouTube was not painful at all. Of course, you can't beat WiFi, but if you have to fallback on EDGE, it's really not the end of the world unless you are reading news at 10 clicks a minute.

Safari

It's a full fledged browser. What else do you need ? I tested some AJAX stuff and it worked. I tested opening PDF files and it worked. I tested Google docs and it worked in read-only mode (Google rocks!!!). I tested SSL connections, I tested multiple tabs, I tested all sorts of form inputs. Everything works. So, no complaints. Well - one BIG complaint is that it doesn't support Flash, but I'm sure it will eventually (more below on app support on the iPhone). I wish I could do a copy-paste and I wish I had a small disk to save images, etc, but other than that, no complaints at all. Dropdown menus appear in a little different way though and you need to get used to it.

Among other things - I blogged, checked my bills, accepted Evites, replied to Facebook/Orkut posts - so it gives me all I need.

iPod

The iPods I have are the Mini and a really old Nano. Both with no video support and the Mini doesn't even have color. So, the latest iPod features are way too much. I had PoTC:Curse of the Black Pearl downloaded long time back which I transfered to the iPhone along with some Office episodes and a bunch of music files. The sound and video quality is much more than satisfactory for me. Browsing while listening to some tunes on this puny device is an experience you have to have. It's just FUN.

YouTube

Hey - it's YouTube. Need I say more ? The sound quality is excellent, the video depends on the guy who uploaded. Overall, easy search and navigation.

iTunes

Haven't really used it yet. Interesting part in the new iTunes on the Mac/Windows though - you can create custom ringtones. I downloaded a tune and was able to edit it and make a custom ringtone. Costs a couple of bucks, but is pretty cool.

Mail

I configured Yahoo and Gmail. Yahoo supports Push so works really great. My phone already had the emails downloaded overnight. Gmail was quite fast too although given it's "conversation" view I could see my sent emails in the Inbox which is a little weird. I heard that Google is coming up with IMAP support. If that comes up, it should be really great. I'm completely satisfied with the Mail support. In fact, I didn't touch my laptop the whole day today since I checked emails on the iPhone.

Built in Apps

Maps, Weather, Stocks, Calculator, Notes - all good. Most of the them are Dashboard widgets with links to Yahoo.

- Maps is really nice since I can quickly find places and call them or get directions.
- With the iPhoto integration, there's not much left to desire with Photos. It syncs cleanly and the picture quality is really great. The "album flipping" adds a nice touch.
- The Camera could use some zoom functions though. I wanted to take a picture for the contact book but you really need to move close to the face - or maybe the idea is not have a good picture, not just the face.
- SMS shows the messages with nice "text bubbles".
- Calendar is pretty much like iCal but the way to set the time is pretty cool with the rotating dials.

Keyboard

No real complaints there. Yes, it's small and fat finger syndrome does come into action sometimes. But, once you get used to it, it's pretty fast and doesn't really bother me anymore. It does get time to get used to though. Especially when you want to make a phone call, or ignore it or want to accept a call while you were surfing. Other phone always have a "TALK" or "SEND" button but here you need to know what to "click". No rocket science, but just a different way of doing things.

Battery Life

No complaints. Over the weekend, I pretty much surfed as much as I could and then we watched some YouTube videos and even then it was probably 40% free. There's no battery meter though - it's just the tiny icon at the top so I don't know how many minutes I have left. I'm sure the icon would have turned red if I used it for some more time, but a good indication like "25 minutes left" would have been nice.

Screen

The touch screen is nice, but after paying so much money for it, at least in the first few days, each smudge makes you skip a beat. For every 5 minutes of usage, I was probably cleaning the screen for 1 minute with the included cloth to remove the smudges. I'm sure that will die down eventually. They sell a protective cover for 15 bucks but I didn't really like it. You might want to clean the screen before watching a movie or something - especially when there's a reflecting light.

Yahoo and Google

OK, this isn't really a part of the iPhone review, but thought I'd include it anyway. Yahoo is cool with it's push based email, but otherwise there's one thing to say about mobile support in Yahoo - plain and simple, it SUCKS! The first thing I did was add a bookmark for my my.yahoo.com page so that I get all my RSS feeds, stocks, TV listings, etc. But Yahoo does absolutely nothing to that page for the iPhone. Then, I go to Google and it immediately recognized that I am a mobile user and showed me a customized page and it was very very easy to add content there. I finally remembered Yahoo has http://m.yahoo.com and went there. Even then, the interface wasn't as smooth. All this after I've seen numerous ads about how Yahoo has won the mobile war. Far from winning it, I don't think they even have basic preparations for it. Looks like I might have to build my own RSS interface with larger fonts by default.

Should you buy it ?

I agree the price is steep and yes, the data plans add to the cost. But, if you are an Apple fan or if you like to play with tech toys, I think this should be a no-brainer for you. But again, you could buy lots of other things in $399, so I'm not going to say much about it. Apple recently said that they are releasing an SDK next year so I'm sure there's going to be a lot of applications - I'd really love Flash support, Yahoo Messenger (maybe Adium).

There's always a big problem with buying Apple products. A few months down the road, they'll release a newer version with SO MANY new cool features that your older model feels like a rock. My 3-yr old Powerbook feels like one now with the scroll pad, the camera, Core Duo, etc. So, be ready for disappointment in a year :)

Happy Shopping!!

TV Trivia

Funny line in last week's 30 Rock -

"Help me Liz Lemon, You are my only hope"

and the line was said by none other than Carrie Fischer playing a guest role. If you didn't get the joke, you probably live under a rock.

Netflix Down

Man ... this is the worst thing to happen to an ONLINE video rental company. And that too on the day that they reported earnings that don't seem to help.

Yahoo - Why do you suck ?

Oh the great warlords at Yahoo, why do you make me feel pain ? Why are so bent on cranking out products that don't seem so ready for prime time ? Why, oh why are you so keen on making me switch to Google ?

If you must know why I'm cribbing so much - it's the new My Yahoo design. I use My Yahoo a lot. On my page, I have tons of stuff - a daily cartoon, all my stocks, all my RSS feeds, movies, TV schedules, calculator, etc, etc and I use everything. That's my most visited page by far on any given day. All my browers (FF, IE, Safari, Camino, Konqueuer) on all my machines have My Yahoo as the default page. So, you know I'm very dedicated to it.

Yesterday, I was suddenly told that I will not get TV schedules any more. I will have to go to the new My Yahoo for that. Fine, I upgraded. But the new one told me I can't movie timings on it yet. WHAT ???? So then my dear Mr Yang, what's your problem in allowing me to continue to see the TV schedules on the old page ? Is it really consuming so many of your resources ? Why must you make me even think about this ?

Also, I swallowed my pride and decided to still switch. But the new one looks UGLY. Check these links if you don't believe me. Here's the old one and then the new one. OK, I don't expect things to be perfect. But hey, I didn't do a lot of customizations to my old page. Just used one of their standard themes and added some content. So why does it look so ugly on the new page ? None of the colors match, the cartoon image is scrolling and the middle column has suddenly become thinner. So now you expect me to spend an hour fixing all this and still not get movie times ? Why ? Why isn't the transition smoother ? Why don't you spend some more time on this before you release it ? And some content has changed to. In the currency calculator, I had a quick conversion from USD to INR. That's lost. The applet is still there, but it's showing me Yen and Euros and Pounds.

And don't explain beta to me. If this is beta, get me my TV schedules in the old one. This is just a repeat of maps and mail. The new ones just aren't ready for prime time (yet).

I still have hopes for you Yahoo. I hope you retain my love and my devotion for you. If not, Google is just waiting for me to switch.