July 2008

My wife and I went to see The Dark Knight at 12:45am. I am a huge Batman fan and this movie did not disappoint. It was just a hair under three hours long, and — aside from the fact that I knew I was going to be late to work today — I didn’t want it to end. The film is at least as good as Batman Begins, if not better; and I thought that was the best Batman film ever. I also thought that all of the Oscar talk for Heath Ledger as the Joker was merely because of the actor’s untimely death, but after seeing his performance I don’t see how he couldn’t get nominated. Run, don’t walk, to see this in the theater. It. Is. Awesome.

With my special training program, anyone can eat 100 treadmills in 7 weeks.

I have gotten over a dozen phone calls today from (949) 374-5125 and (208) 650-4253. I had been answering the phone on the first or second ring and there would be nobody there. At first I assumed it was just some moron repeatedly calling the wrong number. But just now a call from the first number yielded a telemarketer asking me which free gift I wanted to receive.

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One of the cool new features of the updated iPhone software is the ability to take a screen shot. If you hold the home button and then press the power button, the system will save a screen capture to your “camera roll” library. You can then email it or save it to your computer when you next synch, just as if it was a photo taken with the camera. I’m sure this will come in very handy for developers and debuggers.

And, of course, it gives us all a cool way to show everyone what we have on our iPhone home screens. Here’s mine. Nifty, eh?

Contextless Content: A portion of a conversation, usually from an instant messenger platform.

brother-in-law: Unfortunately, a war on master bathrooms won’t attract the attention of any A-list superheroes
GatorDVG: That’s where you’re wrong.
brother-in-law: I’ll probably get someone like Black Vulcan, or the Panther, or Super Mario
GatorDVG: Isn’t Super Mario a plumber?
brother-in-law: Yeah….I’ll probably get him
brother-in-law: Or even his lame-o brother, Luigi
GatorDVG: I’m pretty sure your new wife has him on speed dial.
GatorDVG: I seem to remember them having a very poignant relationship several years ago…
brother-in-law: That would explain all the mushrooms in the closet

Seventeen hours have passed since I upgraded to the new iPhone. Can it possibly be too early for me to make sweeping generalizations and pass judgment? No. I didn’t think so either. The folks at Apple sort of painted themselves into a corner on this one. The original iPhone was just so incredibly, amazingly, stupendously better than every other cell phone on the market. I am sure most users are going to be thrilled with the 3G, even ones who used the original. So far, though, I am not.

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I dragged myself out of bed at 5:00am today and played 18 with Andy at Hillcrest Country Club. I shot an embarrassing 63 on the front 9, but an at-least-average 55 on the back 9. (My father-in-law gave me a round of golf lessons with the club pro at Lakeside Country Club as a gift for my 35th birthday. The goal is to break 100 before Christmas.) We were done by 9:30, so I grabbed a copy of Wired and drove to the Apple store in the Westfield Century City Mall.

I got in line at 10:05am and was (surprisingly) the 18th person. The store website said that they would open at 11, and I figured if I read every single article and advertisement in the magazine, I’d only have about an hour to stare into the sun waiting. My plan did not work. By 10:25 I had finished reading. But that’s okay. That’s when the fun began.

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For a long time now my friends and I have been complaining about “affirmation cookies”. Fortune cookies just aren’t as cool as they used to be. It seems like all the fortunes we get now have messages that aren’t … well … fortunes. Instead they say things like, “You are a kind person,” or, “People respect you.” Don’t give me that crap. Tell me not to get on the 405 on my way home, or that I’m going to have an adventure this weekend, or even to beware the bald man.

Yesterday I got my first fortune fortune cookie in years. It read:

You will never need to worry about a steady income.

That’s certainly nice to hear. Of course … it could mean that I’m about to get a life sentence for a crime I didn’t commit, or get hit by a bus. But I’ll try to be optimistic about it.

It’s been just over two weeks now that I’ve been using my new Apple MacBook Pro (running OS X 10.5.4), and I think I’m now ready to post a list of the ten things I like most about it.

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On May 1, 2008 I received a traffic citation while driving approximately 5mph in the middle of a bottleneck on Sunset Boulevard. A motorcycle cop driving between the lanes was stuck next to me because the guy in the other lane had drifted too close to my lane. He looked at me and nodded. I looked at him and nodded. We inched forward in the congestion. He looked at me again. I smiled and he motioned for me to pull over. “I can’t possibly have broken the law,” I thought, “I’m not even going 10mph!”

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The restore I did yesterday on my iPhone failed to fix the problem I was having with the camera. Even after completely wiping the phone and resetting multiple times, the camera simply refused to save photos to its internal file system. I was ready to just complain at a Genius Bar in an Apple store this weekend (when I will no doubt be getting the new iPhone anyway), when I decided to do one last Google search for an answer. And, of course, Google provided. I followed the advice of olemono posted on April 22 and now the camera works again!

A few weeks ago my iPhone randomly decided to stop saving photos taken with its camera. It would act like it was taking a photo, but it wouldn’t actually save the photo to its internal photo file system. I didn’t realize this until I had taken a few dozen photos of my dad and me golfing in Connecticut, so I was pretty bummed. Since then I’ve been wanting to do a full restore to see if that would fix it, but I was afraid of doing that because I didn’t want to lose all my SMS conversations.

Enter Syphone. This little Mac utility will retrieve SMS threads from your iPhone and allow you to save them as PDF, txt, or XML files. It worked exactly as it claimed on the first try. (Reason #231297 why I am happy I switched from M$ to Mac.) I’m in the process of restoring my iPhone now.

Rap Lyrics Explained With Charts and Graphs

• Jacuzzi and / or hot tub
• the rim of a volcano
• marriage counseling