No Business Naming Things

I’m still enjoying this thing just as much as I was, but there is a more noticible flaw I should mention. Google tells me this is not widespread but it’s not unique either. The problem is that when the iPod is paused (or no longer playing) it will sometimes unpauae itself. Pressure on the headphone plug will often make it happen, but that isn’t the exclusive cause. Sometimes there’s no reason at all (that I can see.). It seems to have become less frequent over the last few days but is not better entirely. I may have to try the stock iPhone headphones and see if that helps - it could be some kind of short from my headphones.

Oh yah… The battery life. Boy does that ever suck. With 15 minute mail updates I might get 2 days out of it.

This is being written from the new Wordpress iPhone app. It was hard to get going - there were security issues with xmlrpc.php that resulted in XML parse errors and crashes but after fixing those it appears to be okay.

Destructoid: off the reading list.

Not only is Fat Princess pretty damned offensive, so is the gasbag who wrote the above. Ugh. Why must the majority of gaming sites be so bloody juvenile?

I caved and got a 16g iPhone today. Perhaps under other circumstances I would have waited but I desperately needed some retail therapy to smooth out what’s happened recently. This is probably adequate to brand me a shallow asshole for life, but I can own that. We all deal in our own ways.

So, verdict after 5 hours of ownership: it’s good. It’s everything I expected it to be and there was only two things that pissed me off. The first, which lays at the feet of Apple, is the (relatively) minor pain of putting on custom ring tones. There is no way in hell that I’m going to pay again for a 30 second clip of music I already own. While Apple doesn’t make it EASY for you to create your own, a liberal application of Garage Band and this tutorial does the trick.

The second is an application problem with FileMagnet. I really wanted a decent PDF reader for this thing and every PDF I’ve thrown at FileMagnet has either frozen it or simply not worked. The thing only cost me $4.99, so I can’t complain TOO much, but I will complain more if I can’t get it working in time.

We went to see The Dark Knight last evening in an effort to keep distracted.  I was expecting a solid film but even I was impressed with it - there is finally a live action Batman film to displace Mask of the Phantasm as the best Batman film.  Anything worth saying has been said elsewhere but I really have to acknowledge Heath Ledger - he is the definitive Joker.  His performance puts to shame every Joker performance before it and I can’t fathom it ever being bettered in the future.  Just wow.

My dad came home to find my mother dead in bed today. We’re not sure what happened. We’re going off to Halifax just as soon as we find out what the arrangements are.

I dont remember my last conversation with her. It was a week ago or so. I was going to call her last night but thought “eh, I can do it tomorrow.”

You can’t always do it tomorrow. If you have something you want to say maybe you should say it today.

So, Rogers has thrown another option into the iPhone pricing ring - a limted time $30/6gb offer.

This price seems pretty close to right for me - I could definitely live with it. I still can’t swallow the 3 year commitment, however. Given my history with phones (and iPods) I’m skeptical that I could make any device last 3 years, particularly one with a touch screen. Throw in a contractless option (or a more reasonable 1-2 year contract) and they’d have me sold.

Uh… interesting timing? It’s almost as if the Large Throbbing Brains at Bell and Rogers started their weekly monopoly conference call like this:

Rogers Brain: “We’re getting hammered in the press for this iPhone thing. This would be a good time for you guys to slip in that SMS policy you’ve been lusting over recently. With the press I’ve been stirring they might not even notice…”

Bell Brain: “My God, you’re a genius! I can get that ivory back scratcher I’ve always wanted…”

I’m sorry, but this is absolutely f’ing absurd. The fact that we pay so much to SEND SMS is bad enough as it is - name ANY other form of communication that doesn’t involve a ROUND TRIP TO MARS that costs $1/kb. With this change it’ll be $2, given that they’ll be screwing us at both ends.

Lets think about this for a second and play with some numbers. I admit this is a naive exercise that doesn’t capture the true volume of data the carriers have to deal with but even if it’s off by a factor of 100 it still doesn’t reflect the severity they’d have us believe. The article I linked to claims that Canadians send 45.4 million SMS messages a day. Let’s assume that every message is as big as it can be, which according to the SMS specification (buried here) is 160 characters. Naively assuming a character == a byte, that means there’s roughly 7,264 million bytes which is just over 7gb. So, all of Canada generates so little SMS traffic that it can be stored on a solid state memory key. THIS is the burden we’re supposed to believe the carriers are struggling to accommodate? Are we really to believe that 7gb of traffic costs $6.8 million a day (45.4m * $.15) to deliver? Let’s put that volume in context: how much bandwidth does your average voice call consume? Something tells me it’s a helluva lot more than 160 bytes.

To sear it from a different angle, use the $2/kb data rate as a benchmark. Suddenly the unpopular supplemental iPhone data rate of $.50/mb seems downright generous doesn’t it?

This is a cash grab, pure and simple, and it’s easily the most sickening one to date from our beloved Canadian telecommunications monopoly. At least we’re seeing some blowback from our political parties - the NDP appears to be on this, at least superficially - they’ve started a petition here.

At this pace I should be disappointed on a weekly basis.

I just got around to playing the PS3 demo of Civilization Revolution and all I have to say is that much like every other Civilization game it’s DANGEROUS.  An hour and a half of my life just disappeared and if the demo wasn’t timed I’m sure I’d be playing until sometime tomorrow.

The experience is very streamlined - a lot of the resource/citizen management you need (or get) to play with in other Civilization games is absent as is tedious road building.  They’ve distilled the experience down to its core and it’s SLICK.

I cannot own this game.  I cannot afford the time.

I should have figured this out before the get go but I cannot BELIEVE how hard it is to find prescription drug information via Google.  It’s nothing but spam.