When Bunnies Attack

So I was bored and I decided to make a batch of iPhone (320×480) wallpaper. Here’s a few of my favs:

(All of these were taken with either a Canon G2, Canon SD550, or Canon SD600.)

I thought the computer would limit players to a maximum of 2000 experience points. After all the graph only goes up that far. Apparently I’ve been playing this too much.

With my usage on the iPhone the battery is lasting about 20 hours. To be fair, this includes playing it as an iPod, fielding a few calls, surfing the web, checking for e-mail, and SMSing. But still, with decent phone use I was getting about 2-3 days out of my Moto SLVR L7. This is ridiculous for the iPhone.

I’ve turned the brightness down, try to keep it locked when I’m not using, and not doing extensive browsing. I’ve taken to getting a second charger so I can keep one at work. I’m now convinced that a swappable battery really would have been a good idea.

When we got to Barnes & Noble late Friday night we could see the mass of people assembling inside. It was only about 15 minutes to midnight; my friend had gone ahead and picked up our wristband to guarantee our place in line. Closer to midnight the mass of people pressed in closer. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen such a crowd turn out in anticipation of a book. Then again, this is Harry Potter we’re talking about.

Book 7: The Deathly Hallows. The final chapter in the 7-year saga of Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived. Supposedly all threads wrapped up or at least some major questions will be answered. And above all: Harry must duel with He Who Must Not Be Named.

I got into reading the books a while back, but not really because I was enthralled with them. I had occasionally picked up a volume every now and then while I was at Costco, or stuck waiting in line in Fry’s. I didn’t see the draw. I knew quite a number of people who were serious Potter fans, but I always thought that was a bit silly. It’s a children’s book series after all … isn’t it? I think I saw a good deal on the set of the first five books one day and so I got them.

I had actually seen all the movies but I had never stopped to read the books. While I didn’t think the movies were all that, still there was something about the stories that kept me in a little bit of childish wonder. It was almost as if the movies made having a world of wizards and witches normal and pedestrian. So I started reading the series. I wasn’t impressed. Books 1 and 2 read like a comic book. But I bought the set and thus I was committed to finishing out the first 5 books. In fact, I read the first books so slowly that I used the set of 5 books together in their special holder as a bookend to hold up a series of other books. A fine utilitarian purpose, I think.

But something changed around Book 4 where Harry had the Tri-Wizard Championship. I began to see a much larger progression. The books themselves actually grew up along with Harry in the sense that the writing style became much more complicated, the words a bit tougher, and the characters started to delve into their emotions. There was more examination into the psyches of the characters and longer story arcs were evolving. By Book 5 (wherein Harry gets inducted into a secret clan) the whole tone of the story took a much more serious turn. People really started dying, and the situation was clearly grim. Harry and his friends could no longer count on the protection of the school that had kept them safe from so much evil. Skip ahead to the last book, No. 7, and here we finally have it: Harry’s final year and the ending of the series.

My friend and I stood in our letter group “C” behind the “B”s. The mass of people was unbelievable in such a small store! More to the point, the sweaty stink of hundreds of people started to get to me. It was almost as bad as anime conventions—yes, I used to do staff on them. Some time around 12:20am I reached the counter with my friend and we ordered 3 books between us. We stepped out into the cool night, free and light, and ready to devour the book.

I had shifted my sleeping schedule 3 days before—not exactly on purpose I admit—so that I was waking up at 12pm and sleeping at 5am. The intention was that after getting the book staying up to 5am would feel normal, 7am might have been a stretch. I found my place on the guest bed, my friend on a couch on the opposite room. The sound of the new book bindings crackling filled the room as the first pages of Chapter 1 opened up before us. My friend was clearly faster than I was, but I have almost never read for speed. I like to imagine as in a movie every scene, every crunch of footsteps on the dry leaves, the sizzle of charms flying off the ends of wands, the flickering illumination of dark rooms by wandlight, etc. I took breaks every hour or so to stretch, grab more Doritos, or sip apple juice. But around 3am or 4am my eyelids where just too heavy and I rolled over and slept.

My friend must have left silently after that to retreat to her real room to continue reading and turned off all the lights. I woke up somewhere around 8am when the sunlight was pouring in through the sliding glass patio door. I rubbed my eyes, readjusted the pillows, and went back to reading… She made some omelets with turkey, we did Fresh Choice for lunch, and ordered pizza in for dinner. At all other times I was power-reading through the book. Finally, at 10:30pm Saturday night I closed the back cover on 758 pages of the tome. I was emotionally and physically exhausted, having witnessed an ending that I thought was really worthy of the story. Tonight, Sunday, I reread quite a bit of it for the second time.

So, two reads of Harry Potter Book 7 in two days. I’m really happy with that. Thank you, J. K. Rowling.

Hm. Maybe it’s me but my batteries seem to be draining really fast on my iCoolness. I know I’m using it a lot and even though I’ve turned the brightness down a bit it still seems to be sucking energy rather quickly. The problem is that let’s say you go look for a restaurant:

You hop onto the Google maps, type in the city, type in the name, then try calling them. Hm, too early for a reservation? Let me try OpenTable.com. So I click around in Safari to try to find it and after a few minutes of browsing I’m clearly not seeing a way to make a reservation. I switch back to maps, make a contact out of the restaurant name and wait a few minutes. I call them back, this time I get someone and I put down my reservation. Great. Now I trade a few SMSes with friends I’m meeting there, and finally end up calling one of them.

All in all I probably spent about 20 minutes on the iExpensive trying to do this complete restaurant booking. And that drained like maybe 15% of my battery life right there. As an iPod it actually has really decent battery life. But as an Internet device it’s limited.

I hope in v2 of the phone they either have a way to pop in spare batteries or they find a way to upgrade the battery life.

Yesterday I took the plunge. That is, my bank account took the plunge.

Yes, that is an iPhone in a pink leather case. And it’s mine! Muahahaha!! 8GB of space for music, videos, data, and other flotsam that will probably find its way on this phone. It really is more of a mini-computer than a phone. The interface is quick. The display is one of the most beautiful things I’ve held. And it feels good-sized in the hand.

Activation and choosing the rate plan was so darned easy I couldn’t believe it. And since I’ve been using iTunes for a couple of years now the data management on it was very easy too. No learning curve at all. However, I did have to retype all of my contacts from my old phone and e-mail into the iPhone. One thing that greatly helps Mac users is the integration with iCal, iPhoto, Address Book, and iTunes. If you keep all of your contact and media data in these four apps, the iPhone can see them all and suck them into its memory with ease.

So it’s the Mac Way of doing things. If you’re on a PC, I’m not saying you’re S.O.L., but it’s going to be more tedious. The bundled equipment are few, but really it’s a phone. You get the Super Earbuds with the little talky-clicky mic thing—I haven’t tried it yet. There’s a cute little power adapter now for the iPhone. There is no software since you are required to have a computer and download iTunes 7.3.

To learn how to use it, I’d say go watch the iPhone videos on Apple.com, or find one of the bazillion tutorials cropping up on the Net.

After a day of usage on it I have to say it is a very nice phone overall. The web browsing over EDGE is slow, but not abysmal—when you’re home or at work on wireless it’s darned fast. I nitpick about the lack of cut-and-paste abilities because I do a lot of that. The SMSing is OK—I can do without cutesy chat bubbles. The iPod playback is amazing, but coverflow doesn’t do much for me. The time/alarm system takes a second to get used to flicking up/down a series of wheels for hours and minutes settings. I’m glad you can passcode the phone and your V-mail! I haven’t gotten any visual voicemail yet so I’ll write up on that later.

As for stability, well, hm. I was playing back a song today and the phone totally crashed. Crashed HARD. I mean holding the home button did nothing. Holding Home+Sleep did nothing. I plugged it into the Mac and iTunes didn’t see it. I mean, I was about this close to running off to the Apple Store to get it looked at. I tried holding Home+Sleep again for a longer time (about 15 seconds) and FINALLY it came back. Rebooted itself in about 30 seconds and I was back, no loss of data. Still, that’s unnerving that the phone can be crashed so easily. I rely on the phone to work all of the time and I don’t want to miss calls if it silently crashes in my purse.

Big note: Absolutely get a case. I know it adds bulk and ruins the “sleek” look. But I’ve seen these things dropped already and the dents are very obvious on the phone. I choose the leather because it adds a little bounce to it.

I don’t know why I never post photos here. But I take pictures. And lots of them. By the thousands. Don’t ask why I have the spasmodic trigger finger. But I do.

Some friends were heading out to the Fire Arts Festival at The Crucible in Oakland and I tagged along.

They had some really impressive displays, some which I’m not at all sure were safe. Flaming dragons, horses treading through fire gardens, playing Dance Dance Revolution with fire being thrown in your face (Dance Dance Immolation). And they had an entire theatrical production called The Fire Odyssey based on Homer’s Odyssey.

I think the best thing about this was the hands-on nature of it. It gave you an appreciation for the craftsmanship and heart that went into creating these artpieces. OK, maybe it was more about people showing off what cool things they could do with computers and live fire…

Ick. I mean, garish colours, illegible type, AND I’m also using a canned Wordpress theme? Oh, the horror! (Run away!!!)

Really, this site has no style. Period. Don’t try to adjust your TV set, it’s fugly. I put this site up a few months ago on a whim and something worthwhile will probably be coming at some point. Something cute actually. But until then I’m kinda focusing my efforts on spiffying up my resume. So, a thousand humble apologies for the lack of the style coming from someone who is trying to do web UIs. As they say, the cobbler’s children have no shoes.

I’ve been struggling all evening with something which should be relatively simple: displaying images on web pages. I have a background image and another image on top of that. One is a PNG, one is a GIF. On Firefox, MSIE 6, and MSIE 7 it renders things perfectly. However, Safari seems to try to transform color spaces. I’ve carefully anti-aliased the GIF image and the part that melds into the background is now the wrong shade of gray. Changing the GIF into a PNG seems to correct the problem. Weird!

If you consider yourself a techno geek and haven’t heard about the iPhone then we must confiscate your Geek Card now. It was surely one of the most over-hyped things I have ever heard of. True, Apple’s marketing machine went into overdrive trying to drum up excitement over the launch. However, fans and news have taken it to a level beyond anything I could have imagined. It was so hyped, so good, so tantalizing that I almost considered getting one myself.

But. I didn’t. I didn’t stand in line for 30 hours like some friends did. I haven’t sunk $600 into a phone and had to upgrade my cellular contract.

I told a close friend that I would be very very surprised if my iPhone could be activated within a relatively short time. I said that the overwhelming number of sign-up requests would probably overwhelm both Apple and AT&T. Guess what?

“iPhone Activation Problems Cause Lots of Headaches” (San Jose Mercury News)

Um, yeah. Figures. But let’s be more realistic: the iPhone is a WiFi computer, not just a cellular phone. That means it is susceptible to all sorts of nasty stuff that affects computers like viruses, network flooding, and web page errors. A cellular phone to me is a very special device which needs to always operate as a phone without fail. Can a phone which is so computerized actually be able to multitask as a phone and a computer? I don’t know. I would think that it should be able to, but the problem is that this has never been done before on this scale. I think that the second and third generation iPhones will be quite good. But for right now it’s just going to be a big headache.

Honestly, the main reasons I didn’t get the iPhone were: I like my current phone (Motorola SLVR L7) because it’s small, functions as an iPod, and I can browse the Internet over it; the iPhone is too limited; I kinda got a new car. Um, err, yeah a car.

So last Wednesday I got a very brief call from the dealership saying my car was in Los Angeles! Yes! Yes! I had put the order in sometime in May and wasn’t expecting to take ownership of it until the end of July. But, the plant in Oxford cranked it out pretty quickly and it was soon on a boat bound for the U.S. Then I got word of it being transported to the dealership and prepped for delivery. I got to the dealership early on Friday morning with my old car (Babs) clean and glistening. The rep I was working with came in and we started the trade-in/delivery process. About two hours later I had all the paperwork and a brand new key in my hand! Yes! And moments later I drove off…

I’m still learning about the operation of this car. It’s phreaking complex. We’re talking a pretty full onboard computer—and I don’t even have all of the convenience and communications options installed! Language settings, daytime running lights, lane changing preferences are all stored on a key transmitter. The trip computer tracks mileage, fuel efficiency, and diagnostics. The radio allows for normal and aux inputs, speed-variable volume controls, and tone. Oy. It’ll take me weeks to learn and remember everything!

[Update 2007.07.25]
And of course being the hypocrite that I am I did eventually get an iPhone…