Life is a State of Mind

This is a proxy review of my partner’s brand new iPhone.

I am impressed. My biggest concern was that this new “smart” phone would have loads of features and suck as a phone. This would be like 99% of the “smart” phones on the market and thus no big surprise. I am thrilled to announce that my presumption was completely wrong. The Apple iPhone works very well as a phone. Listening to Erci’s voice picked up by the iPhone and heard on my Nextel i580 and through the Prius speakers sounded clear. Putting the iPhone to my own ear, other people’s voices were clear. The audio quality is excellent, and not just by my small sample and subjective hearing, objective tests bear this out. Furthermore, it works as a full-duplex speakerphone, yay! Previously only Nextel got this right. Ad-hoc conferencing of multiple calls is awesome too. So first and foremost, this new mobile really works as a phone. It’s about time.

Now for the sad news, as a PDA it is not quite ready to replace my Palm Tungsten C. The Notes application fails give me what I want, and it fails to reproduce what I already have. I want lots and lots of plain text notes available in my hand-held that sync up to the desktop computer automatically. Palms do this pretty well (though the 4kb character limit, the lack of search within a note, and perennial sync problems are all annoying). The new iPhone does not have any sync yet, the note application is hobbled by this and the fact that it looks hard to search/navigate/read. I could not even figure out at first attempt how to create separate notes (Edit: I was foolish, pushing the + button adds new notes/memos, but still no sync yet).

This could be fixed easily in software. I think I could even fix it via habit by just using Safari to hit my own blog sites and use blogs as notes… but that means new habits. Must think on this a little.

Datebook works well and it does alarm for meetings (which is the main reason I still use my Palm).

Now I want an iPhone, but am I willing to break an 20 months (remaining) contract with Nextel, or eat the cost of having two phones? Perhaps I’ll wait for version 2.0. Decisions, decisions…

As predicted, the update to AppleTV was available this morning and I downloaded and installed the update via remote control… it took about 12 minutes. YouTube is now a menu option and we enjoyed some Robo Chicken Star Wars spoofs as a test.

Navigation of YouTube is going to be interesting; I have to figure out how to subscribe to the YouTube stuff I know I want and hope that is easier to navigate to then. Video quality was surprisingly good, much better than the home video stuff we’ve added to iTunes for ourselves.

Erci has been taking additional cooking classes from Chef Nongkran Daks of our favorite local Thai restaurant, Thai Basil in Centreville (near Picante). Sunday night she made beef Tiger Cried as an experiment, and it was astonishingly good. I just finished the left-overs, so that means I’ve had Tiger Cried for three nights in a row and I could keep on going if there were more. Yum!

I am a very lucky man.

If you would like to take a class yourself, Chef Nongkran Daks offers classes periodically at the restaurant and occasionally through the Smithsonian Resident’s Association:
http://www.thaibasilchantilly.com/cookingclasses.html

So I am a slacker. I pre-ordered the Apple TV as soon as I could, and I was one of the first to get one shipped, but we’ve been so busy that it sat in it’s shrink wrap until this morning. I finally pulled it out and hooked it up.

It’s the first HD content we’ve ever seen on the Sony WEGA KV-40XBR800 we’ve had since 2002. 1080i looks good, real good; though I still insist that standard NTSC looks awesome when they pay attention to detail the way beer commercial makers do routinely.

The main reason we have this AppleTV is to view content we cannot get from Satellite, Cable, or off the air. We want the fantastic content that comes from the internet, but we want it on the big screen TV rather than on our computer screens. This is kind of the opposite of slingbox, which brings your PVR/DVR content to any computer you want to watch it on.

Terra; The Nature of our World is one example of the fantastic programming you can only get online. I am hoping we can hack the AppleTV to pull from my Democracy Player (soon to become Miro) feed as well as from iTunes and YouTube. There is a lot of fascinating programming on Democracy Player as well. By the way, if you don’t know what I am talking about, download Democracy Player for your Mac, Linux, or Windows computer for free and check it out for yourself. There is of course of lot of silly stuff, but there is also some amazing quality.

Low-Resolution videos saved to iTunes show up and play just fine, but the images are a little fuzzy from being blown up to fill the big Sony screen. High Definition theatrical trailers are stunning (as you’d expect any advertisement to be). Mark Day’s “For Parody Purposes Only” looks great, and of course Terra makes the purchase worthwhile all by itself!

We’ll, it’s official, Dr Vogel says I have Plantar fasciitis in both feet, though more severe in the right foot. He gave me a shot of Cortisone in the right foot and had a nurse tape up my right foot. It already feels a little better (only an hour later). I am getting scheduled for physical therapy and fitting for prescription orthoses. The good news is that nothing is fractured, sprained, nor broken; and I am not likely to need surgery. Yippea!

This explains why standing on my feet all day at living history events and dance events hurts so much. It helps enormously to know for sure what it is, and to have a plan.

In other news, the Virginia Primary election is over and we can focus on the general election in November. I am working on my usual political information page (soon). I’ll be continuing another three year term on the board of directors for La Belle (there were not many others willing and able). Erci and I had a fabulous time at Arthur Murray’s Showcase event back on June 2nd (aside from the sore feet) and we danced respectably well. Erci’s new loom has arrived and it now takes a chunk of space in the family room, and I get to spend more time with her while she weaves. The pool remains (for the first time in it’s history) closed for maintenance with masonry problems and filter problems. Sigh…