Jolt Country

I'm supposed to meet a guy at the Apple store in the mall in an hour. I can't live with my Internet-less flip phone any longer THOUGH I DO LOVE IT. But seeing how the iPhone will be a GPS unit for me (finally!) and an MP3 player for me (finally! yes, I've never had one of those) and a billion other things, I'm psyched.

It came to be like $17 a day if I wanted Internet in my hotel room. What a goddamn ripoff. I possibly could have paid for the iPhone with the money I wasted on the net. (I didn't get it every day, just, like, most.)

Having Internet on one's phone! Hey yeah! I had the thing here at work, went to iTunes, then Podcasts, and found the new one by Adam Carolla. I clicked on it, and it "Just Worked." Amazing. I was... I am enthralled. And I AIN'T NEVER GOIN BACK.

the iTouch was big at Christmas this past year. My nephews all got one. They love that thing. It's about time they threw all the handheld toys into one small compact unit. I heard there was some kind of battery problem with them, maybe that's just a small percentage, tho. Can you do home networking with it? I mean sharing files with the other PCs in the house? My Zune can wireless sync but you need to have the software open on the PC, which does me no good as I use the USB cable to charge it, so I'm, like, right there anyway. I assume programs like instant messenger work on the iPhone but haven't really checked it out.


THE
ALL IN ONE
AARDVARK

I was raised to hate Apple so I have resisted buying an iPhone and iPod for almost as long as I can. I have two friends that have iPhones and, from what I have seen, they are really, really slick. Like ICJ said, they "just work." I would definitely recommend them to people who don't like tinkering with crap to get it to work. I bought a Palm Treo 650 right when they came out, hoping that they had worked all the kinks out of the 600. My review of it was, "great gadget, terrible phone." A little over a year ago I replaced it with a Samsung BlackJack II which I really like. In some ways it's a step back (the no touch screen took getting used to) and there doesn't seem to be as many little apps as there were for the Palm, but really what I found is that 95% of what I need to do is built into the phone (voice recorder, stop watch) and the other 5% I was able to find online really inexpensively (Sudoku and Money Manager). I am hedging my bets on Android 2, hoping that, again, they get all the kinks worked out and that it works. I do feel like it's more of a hacker/tinkerer OS than the iPhone system, which can be both good and bad. It's great becaue it lets you mess with stuff, but frustrating when you are trying to dick with programs when all you want to do is make a phone call.

I don't have an iPod because I don't like iTunes -- and when I say that I mean, "I don't like the idea of iTunes," not that I don't like the program itself. In fact I've been playing with Songbird a lot which is a free, open-source iTunes alternative and I like it more just because it's not iTunes. Maybe I was raped by a Mac as a child, I can't remember. My current mp3 player is a Creative Zen Nomad with a 40 gig drive in it. It's only slightly smaller than a paperback book, has a tiny screen, and (at least once) the hard drive has locked up. I kind of wish it would die so that I could replace it guilt free.

I have a mental hang up with ssd/flash-based mp3 players. I feel like they don't offer enough space. I looked at the 32 gig iTouch and was like, "but, my mp3 player has 40 gig -- and it's OLDER!" Then I looked at my mp3 player and I have like 8 gig of music on it, so even the 16 gig one would be more than enough.

I wish more mp3 players allowed you to just browse the damn thing and drag/drop music on/off them. My Nomad does it with the addition of another program (Notmad). From what I understand, the iTouch doesn't support it at all. It sucks because I have more mp3s than many third world countries and none of them are properly tagged so Songbird and iTunes and all those other tag-based programs just throw their virtual hands up in the air and give me the finger. The long-term solution is, yeah, fix my tags, but I wish I had the option of just dropping an album on my mp3 player like a USB drive and going from there.

Flack wrote:I was raised to hate Apple so I have resisted buying an iPhone and iPod for almost as long as I can.

I am with you - I really hate their marketing division. Every single campaign they come out with turns me off. It's their own fault that they were marginalized as a company (and honestly, I put it to the lack of backwards compatibility through the IIGS and original Mac, though I am happy to hear your thoughts as to why IBM "won": sure, everyone's dad used a PC at work, but Apple infiltrating schools was clever) and at least they survived long enough to make billions on iTunes and the iPod and such, unlike Commodore and Atari.

I have two friends that have iPhones and, from what I have seen, they are really, really slick. Like ICJ said, they "just work."

A perfect example is what happened last night: I got onto the remote Outlook server (for work) to write up my status. It was about 11:30pm, and I wanted to write my status and include the other members of my team in the "To" field. I separated everyone with a comma.

THIS BLEW REMOTE OUTLOOK'S MIND.

A comma? Separating e-mail addresses with a comma?? You'd think I asked the fucking thing to fetch me a curry. What a load of shit: it had no idea what I was trying to do. "The e-mail address myboss@mycompany.com,mycoworker@mycompany.com (etc) is not a valid e-mail address!!!!" It was, like, fucking triumphant that it was able to call me a dipshit shitbag.

Correct me if I am wrong, but e-mail addresses can't have commas, and if Google or Apple wrote Remote Outlook, they would have understood what I was trying to do, and "fixed" it for me. I mean, no way in hell do the developers working for either of those companies spaz out like Outlook did. And this is coming from someone who does not hate Microsoft with passion - it's just, they are miles away from being clever.

Another example: I make a call with the iPhone. I put the phone to my ear, and the screen goes dark. I move it from my ear... the screen comes back on. I understand it knows where it is in space and all, and helpfully blacks the screen when I am talking, but it's still cool to see it in action.

I don't have an iPod because I don't like iTunes -- and when I say that I mean, "I don't like the idea of iTunes," not that I don't like the program itself.

Yeah, it sucks - it's the one thing I don't have working on my phone yet. The entire program feels terrible: I hate the kind of GUI that it (and Steam) has where it can't adhere to common Windows windows stuff because (palm to chest!) it's VALVE or APPLE and adhering to standards is for Excel or some crap.

Ah well, with last.fm and the way the thing does podcasts, it's not a big deal, and I am sure I will figure it out.

ICJ, have you messed around with the Frotz iphone app yet? Apparently it links right up with z-code games on the IFDB, etc.

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSt ... =287653015

I've read that it's nifty, but that it's niftiness is marred by sluggishness.

JJ "might get an iPhone later this year" Sonick

I told it to download it last night but it didn't: trying again. Yeah, I think this will work out wonderfully, as there are a bunch of zcode games I never got round to completing! Thanks for the reminder.

Annoyotron is coming up as "Annoy" in the games list, after I downloaded it. I'll figure out how to fix this, Ben!

Why? That seems pretty annoying just the way it is.

Are we GAMING? or meta-gaming??

OK, here's my take on it after a week and a half of using it:

http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?acti ... &pid=99428

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I am with you - I really hate their marketing division. Every single campaign they come out with turns me off. It's their own fault that they were marginalized as a company (and honestly, I put it to the lack of backwards compatibility through the IIGS and original Mac, though I am happy to hear your thoughts as to why IBM "won": sure, everyone's dad used a PC at work, but Apple infiltrating schools was clever) and at least they survived long enough to make billions on iTunes and the iPod and such, unlike Commodore and Atari.

Well that was just it though. I think to people our age, we think of IBM as a "computer brand" and Apple as a "computer brand". But to people like my dad, especially back then, IBM was a "computer brand" and Apple was "some toy they were putting in the schools to help kids read." In his eyes, Apple was like, oh, Leapfrog or something. Of course to us as youngsters, computers were computers and we didn't see the branding or associate it with anything (other than Apple's was more colorful and IBM's was big and blue. If Apple's marketing plan really was to "wait a generation", it worked. But yeah, without the Internet and before most people had modems, if you wanted to get ahead at work you needed a computer at home that had the ability to read the same disks you used at home. If your boss used Lotus 123 you couldn't import that data into Visicalc and then export it the following day before sending it back to him.

Try to imagine a world where Commodore actually stayed competitive and started to produce phones and software apps.

The C-phone would be light tan in color and look eerily like the Mattel Merlin game. It would have a small flip-up joystick, in order to navigate the options. There would only be five options, however and when selected, two of the five would have pop up saying 'under development'. It would run on three rechargeable 'C' batteries and usage would be about an hour an a half before needing to be plugged back in.

The Commodore music software (necessary for transferring your music and game sids to the C-phone) would run under Geos 6.0. Which is enough to make me shudder like a dog shitting peach pits. The transfer cable would be three feet in length and also light tan in color. This would plug into the rear of a computer using the patented C= serial card (sold separately) which needs an ISO adapter (also sold separately).

A customer could also simply download music by calling the Commodore music hotline and if all circuits are not busy, they could have songs transferred into their phones
at anywhere from 300 to 2400 baud. (fees apply, paypal accepted)


THE
NOT DISGRUNTLED
OR ANYTHING
AARDVARK

Speaking of Apple, anyone who buys one of these things deserves a fucking punch in the gut. The only buttons are on the proprietary <s>headphones</s> earbuds and you have to listen to a voice read off your playlists and song info?. But you still have a stupid cord and something you have to put in your pocket, they couldn't just make it into a pair of headphones without a cord or give it the 3 (only 3) buttons it needs.

Wait... CO... what is that thing?

AArdvark wrote:Which is enough to make me shudder like a dog shitting peach pits.

Well, if you do ever decided to make the C=Phone... you've got a good start on the press release.

I should make the 1541 "head banging" sound my ring tone.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Wait... CO... what is that thing?

Sorry, it's the new iPod nano. In their quest to simplify and stylize the thing they've come up with a block of metal with nothing but a headphone jack. It seems like the ultimate expression of apple's design philosophy: style over substance and proprietary over user control.

CO wrote:Sorry,

You should be, Eric. You should be.
(is your # the same? I'm making one final last ditch effort at utilizing my bachelor's in CJ. Going for Monroe County Correctional Officer (CO, har har). Civil service exam is 4/5, piss test and physical agility immediately follows then "the background investigation". That's where YOU come in. Potentially.

straw wrote:

CO wrote:Sorry,

You should be, Eric. You should be.
(is your # the same? I'm making one final last ditch effort at utilizing my bachelor's in CJ. Going for Monroe County Correctional Officer (CO, har har). Civil service exam is 4/5, piss test and physical agility immediately follows then "the background investigation". That's where YOU come in. Potentially.

I'm there dude, I'll PM you my cell and work number they can call me at my job if they like. They never call though, I don't think people ever call references.

So you're looking to work at the jail? You ought to do probation, you'd be great for that. You wouldn't let them get away with shit.