My iPhone has been acting a fool recently. For about the last 2 months I had been dropping calls, and the phone was locking up just acting like a total duchebag. I had placed a call to att who assured me much to my surprise that it was there fault. that 3g service in NYC was assy and that was causing all of my problems. They actually cut my phone bill to 30 dollars for like 2 months which was nice. Im actually suprised that it was that easy. Call complain they say turn 3G off and i say well i need it they say its free. I say ok. It was actually quite painless and after the horror stories i had heard about there customer service i was pleasantly surprised.

I took my phone to the apple store and they pretty much blamed it on att as well after running diagnostics they found nothing wrong with my phone and basically told me tough luck. SO for the last month i have been working with a shoddy ass connection on a phone i love, (when it works. I had stopped answering calls, i used text messages i basically would do anything to avoid answering the phone. Then my symptoms got worse. The phone started locking up all the time. I went back to the apple store and was actually helped in no time. I told the genius dude My phone was actin a fool he said well we can restore it but thats about it. i said whatever lets try it. We ran a restore and chatted about work. His job is great jeans and a t-shirt my job blows suit and tie. I basically agree.

After the restore I was dreading that the phone would magically work for him and the second i get out of the store it would be back to its old assy behavior. Well for once the moons aligned and great Zeus’s beard (or zombie jesus whoever you prefer) was shining on me. He tried to activate and the screen wouldn’t work. I walked out of there with a new phone. So to sum up the story here are the stats:

Phone calls to AT&T: 2
Visits to the Apple Store: 2

I just wanted to post this because well for once I dont actually have anything to complain about. Have a nice day, and see you all at the wing and beerfest!!!

Apple has good stock of factory refurbished iPod units today with some new price drops. The iPods include Free shipping on orders over $50 and a 1-year warranty. Here’s how they look:

8GB iPod Touch for $159.00, original price was $179

16GB iPod Touch for $199.00, original price was $219

32GB iPod Touch for $279.00, original price was $319

3G iPod Nano 4GB for $79, original price was $149

3G iPod Nano 8GB for $99, original price was $199

80GB iPod Classic for $169, original price was $249

160GB iPod Classic for $209, original price as $249

1GB iPod Shuffles for $39, original price was $49

via Apple Refurbished iPod Deals from $39 with Free Shipping – Deal Brothers.

This Friday I received my mac mini. And since I’m migrating all of my day to day computer use to the mini I figure id share some of my thoughts on it.

System Specs:
2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB memory
320GB hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
8x double-layer SuperDrive

Moving my files was painless from the apple interface just hit “option k” and that opens your browser menu. type SMB://ipaddress and once authenticated you can see all of your windows shares. I always migrate files manually, as every automated thing I have ever used misses something. This also assumes that you know how to create proper windows shares.

The first thing I noticed after moving all of my files over was that its insanely quiet. I have spend the better part of 5 years and thousand’s of dollars trying to build a PC this quiet and once I turned my PC off I was blown away by the basically silent operation of this little thing.

I dropped my music library into itunes, keeping all of my ratings playlists, and settings. This is a process I may write a how to about as I haven’t found one that actually keeps everything. I installed Lightroom as although I love the apple iPhoto application its hard to work with multiple files in other editors using iPhoto. Basically transfering everything was painless, I use dropbox for most of my documents so they stay synced across all of my computers without any interaction from me.

I’m using the built in mail app as its really slick and uncluttered, Gmail works great with it if you follow the instructions on setting it up from google’s site. Its such a nice change of interface from outlook, outlook is huge, and cluttered compared to mail and mail supports threaded viewing. I just love my threads.

Ill have to post a update after using it for a couple weeks. But my general impression is that its actually powerful enough for me to use without any noticeable lag in the interface. I’m switching from a quad core with 8GB of ram and nvidia Geforce GTX 280. And it feels fine, nothing slow or laggy. I have to run some tests on video encoding/re encoding and this may be where the sheer brute force of my overkill pc may come out ahead. But overall I’m so happy that my office is quite, and uncluttered.

I know alot of us (GD and I) have been waiting for the Update for a while (FOR-FUCKING-EVER)  since the announcement last year that beta builds were out.  Well its out, and on paper it looks bad ass.  Here is the List straight from Apple (simple). Here is the List from Others + extra WAA-WAAA

5 things I have noticed from regular usage.          

• 1. Fans aren’t acting up as much, but MacBookPro seems to be hotter (My test is touching the part right below the  monitor and seeing how long I can stand it)
• 2. Had to reinstall Eve-Online, shit didn’t even bounce like Apps like to do when I tried to run it the 1st time.  But          people say Games run faster,
• 3. Boot-Up takes longer like by 5 seconds according to my ultra precise Mississippi count
• 4. Safari doesn’t crash on me anymore, and uses less resources
• 5. I now have a non transparent toolbar which I like,  Is it me or it transparency going the way of the gradient?

Now, I am not a power user with OSX, hell I just got parallels installed this morning,  so does 10.5.2 changes anything else for you people that use OSX for more than it being pretty?   BTW did someone say Flash on Iphone?