I'm going to start a new segment. I will call it "Irate Wisdom." Today's Irate Wisdom is, if you fly into a city, rent a car, and in the car is this:
It is too damn cold. I mentioned yesterday that I do not like cold, and this is not helping the mood. Fortunately I brought a leather jacket, gloves and a handknit wool skull cap. Hopefully I won't freeze to death.
The phone is working as it should on a business trip. Maybe even too well. I have an app called TripCase, recommended to me by a friend and frequent business traveler, which has all my travel info: my flight, car rental, and hotel. It alerts me if my flight plan changes, and shares my travel info with anyone I designate. The Delta app also alerts me, so I'm getting double alerts when things change. I put my boarding pass in Passbook, so about 3 hours before departure, I get the boarding pass on my lock screen, and it makes it easy to go through security and board the plane with no paper needed. My phone has apparently made me a tree hugger. The National Car Rental app reminded me that I had a car waiting, and the Marriott app allowed me to check in mobilymobilelymobile-ly from the app, so when I got to the counter, the person at the counter just reached in a drawer, handed me my room keys, and off I went.
I'm hungry. I'm going to find something to munch on before I call it a night. Hasta mañana...
It is always a great day when Georgia Tech wins and Georgia loses. I know, you're going to say how Georgia Tech beat a basketball school and Georgia lost to SEC perennial powerhouse Vanderbilt. Unfortunately typing can't show you how hard I'm laughing right now. I'm pretty sure this was the end of the Mark Richt era at Georgia. My guess is, if they beat Florida, he'll get to ride the season out. If they lose, he'll be fired by Tuesday. Hopefully they can continue their losing ways for the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
I got another suggestion for a phone mount today, so I figured I'd go in depth with my laundry list of criteria for a phone mount. Here is the current mount:
It's connected to the air conditioner vent and it's fine, except it's blocking the vent which now that I have people in the back that need air, I would like to have it free to do what it does best, which is blow. Air that is. This was the old mount:
What I loved about this one was that it gave me two power sockets. It did block the vent a little, but not as badly. This one was top heavy, so it would fall out after a while and eventually ripped the socket out of the console. Here is one of the ones recommended to me:
I thought the neck was a little long, but the other criteria I forgot about was that my Pioneer head unit has a 30 pin cable that I attach to the phone so it can control the music and show me the song info and album art. This mount wouldn't accommodate that. It does have me thinking about a newer head unit that could do Bluetooth, but that is money I don't feel like spending currently. The other mount I was recommended:
I really like the concept of this one, since no one uses CDs anymore. My head unit can handle DVDs, but I can count the number of times I've used it. The issue with this one for me is that it would partially block the touchscreen on my head unit, and if you look closely at the next picture, you will see I have a 1.25" lip above the CD slot which I'm not sure the mount would clear:
So here's my current front runner:
It is a Chinese no-name product, but its neck is short so I don't think I'll have a top heavy issue nor will it block the vent, and I get a power port and a USB port, so I can power two devices if need be. And it's cheap which Is good for my bottom line, but as the saying goes, "you get what you pay for." Let's hope what I get is a good product for a low price.
I had a little more to say, but if you look at the previous couple screen shots, you'll see that the phone is about to die. Lots of GPS and Pandora without charging. Good night!
Another mundane day. It's starting to get a little cool for my taste. I come from a very hot country, and though I cannot take the heat like I used to, I still prefer it over the cold. I need to win the lottery so I can buy an island in the tropics, and then I'll change the blog to iPhone on the Beach. A man can dream...
I was bored this evening as well, and so I did what every bored person does: Try the 7 Minute Workout. I downloaded a free app which walked me through it. It actually wasn't too wimpy of a workout, although I'm going to up it to the 21 or 28 minute workout.
I'm up to almost 6000 photos uploaded to Flickr. I've still got a bunch to go, but it feels good to have a backup somewhere. The Flickr app is ok. It'd probably be better if my pictures where more organized. I'll work on that on the 27th hour of day.
I have a few things to do early in the morning, so off to bed I go...
That was someone's signature that made me chuckle today. Today was a very boring day for the phone, so I'm making up stuff to talk about today. The first is the productivity suite Apple included with iOS7: Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Pages = Word, Numbers = Excel, and Keynote = PowerPoint. I went through the demos for all of them, and it is pretty amazing what I could create on my phone. I could probably create a document, spreadsheet or presentation on my phone, send it to my boss, and he'd have no idea I created it in the strip club grocery store. That being said, there is no possible way I am going to create a huge document, spreadsheet or presentation on my phone. I'd create something pretty basic, or I'd just wait until I got to a full sized computer. But it's good to know I have the option while Paradise is doing her three songs on the stage.
Next was an LTE showdown between Sprint and AT&T. I downloaded the Ookla SpeedTest app to both my wife's and my phone, swiped all apps closed, turned off and back on both phones, and then turned off Wi-Fi on both phones. The Sprint one had 2 bars and the AT&T one 3 bars. Both phones are sitting in the same spot on the couch. I ran the test 3 times:
AT&T
Sprint
This would be one of those things I didn't know I was missing. What I did notice pretty quickly though is that it appears I am being throttled by my new provider, while my old provider is consistent. Very much a tortoise and hare situation here. Not sure how I feel about this throttling deal. I'll have to find a long download situation to see what happens.
And lastly, photo backup. I'm using iCloud, which is working fine, but I'm starting to feel a little pinch on space on the phone. I should have gotten the 64 GB version, but I just couldn't justify the price at this point in my life. I started out using Dropbox, but it filled up pretty quickly and I didn't want to pay for more space. I then saw that Flickr was giving everyone a terabyte of space. I know that Flickr is supposed to be a social media sort of site, and you're supposed to share your photos, but it looks like you can lock your account down pretty tight. However, much like Facebook, there are dozens of settings where if you miss one, someone or some system will be able to see your photos. While I don't care who sees my photos, my wife is a little more particular about it, so I went through all the settings and hopefully locked them down. I'm going to do some testing to verify, but please feel free to find me on Flickr, see what you can see, and report back. I downloaded the Flickr app, but much to my dismay, it only uploaded the last 25 pictures I took before starting the Auto-uploading for future pictures. The Dropbox app only asked me if I wanted to use cellular data, but it uploaded all my photos over the course of a few days. I then went to the Flickr web site, which had a limit of 200 pictures at a time. I did that for about 2000 pictures when I figured there had to be a better way. A quick Google search netted me the Flickr Uploadr desktop app. Now I can do folders at a time. A 13 GB/1500 file batch took few hours, but it was better than 200 at a time. 3000+ photos uploaded so far, and 1.5% of my terabyte. I think this will work out.
The margarita I had is kicking in good. Good night...
You will notice that Siri is not in quotes. It was my favorite sister-in-law's birthday yesterday. How many sister-in-laws do I have you ask? That's not important, she is still my favorite. I went out with her and some of her friends to a place called Jack's Pizza and Wings. I would send you their URL, but it appears someone didn't pay their hosting company, so the domain is parked. Look them up on UrbanSpoon or something. I had more beer than I should have on a weekday, a shot, and a couple slices of pizza. I ask the waitress for the bill, of which I paid for the pitcher of beer, the first round of shots (4), and 2 of Siri's drinks. $20 + tax. I think Jack's will be seeing me more often.
That would also be why I'm posting this at 6:30 in the morning. I got home and all but passed out. Don't worry, I have enough issues with APD and DCPD without throwing being drunk in the mix. I waited my full hour after my last drink before leaving.
My Lightning cables came! <Insert crude joke here, then remove your mind from the gutter>. Staples sent them in a Tyvek envelope so a couple boxes were crushed, but all cables look intact. So now I have one cable for the bedroom, one for the office, one for my laptop bag, one for the truck, and one for the living room. I still need like three more to replace all the 30 pin cables I had conveniently placed (at least 2 more in the laptop bag so I can have one stay in the bag, one in the rental car, and one at the hotel when I travel on business, and the one in the kitchen so my wife can boogie down while cooking without fear of the phone dying). This batch of cables should suffice until the next big coupon.
My job's subscription to Office 365 does not appear to allow the mobile version. I'll have to inquire about that. I'll be testing out SkyDrive Pro and OneNote, which I do have access to. I should also mess with the Apple productivity suite. I don't think I've opened any of them yet.
Lastly I'm going to work on a picture backup solution. I like iCloud, but I don't like that if I delete pictures off the phone, they get deleted everywhere. I wonder if I delete them from Camera Roll and not Photo Stream, if I can recapture the space but still have access to the photos of my youngest stealing the phone and taking 17 pictures of his forehead:
My alarm just went off. Time to get the boys up. Later...
I can admit when I'm wrong. Most of the time. Yesterday I mentioned how a watch that does more than time related things don't make it in the market. Somebody pointed out to me that GPS watches are pretty popular. I can agree with that. My guess is, since your phone can do what the GPS watch does and you had to carry it any way, that the GPS watch market is probably dying. I have no statistics for that, and I don't feel like Googling for it at the moment, so I'll just go with logic. I would guess heart rate monitors are going the way of the dinosaur as well with devices that connect to your phone. So while I am wrong, I'm standing by original statement that the smartwatch will be selling for chump change on eBay within 6 months.
LifeProof still doesn't have a case out. I'm strting to wonder how long this is going to take. I saw Spigen has a pretty decent tough case. May have to do more research into it.
Staples is still processing my order. I'm starting to think my Lightning cables may be denied. Hopefully they'll deny it in time for me to get my coupon back and order my monitor.
Phone is still running good. Nothing new currently. I may explore the Office365 suite of apps, pending my Office365 account with my job has the option for the mobile apps.
My wife is using the iTunes Radio and likes it a lot. I may try it too. Pandora seems to be a bit ad happy as of late. I could try Songza or TuneIn, but I'm already an iSheep, so I might as well go all the way.
Speaking of the wife, I'm being told to stop typing my memoirs on a blog. Deuces...
So I fell off the wagon for a bit. I do have a good excuse. I went to my first "annual" company meeting. Annual is in quotes because they apparently haven't had one in a couple of years. With my new company, most employees work from home if they aren't at a customer site, so unless you see someone at a client site, the company meeting is the only time you'll meet a lot of the people you email/instant message/talk with. My boss, when I was interviewing, said that this group of people work hard, and play harder. He was not lying. So the weekend was a bit of a blur. I will admit that I came back home with more money than I left with. I won't tell you how that happened because I don't want your opinion of me to change, at least more than it already has. Let's just say I'm lucky.
Before I get into any new phone stuff (which there isn't much), I'll talk about a couple random things. The first was the Bradley/Marquez fight. Was that not the most boring fight ever? All Bradley did was show that Marquez is old as dirt. I could run around the ring for 12 rounds in 3 minute bursts throwing a couple punches and doing a couple taunts...no, you're right, Marquez would probably cause me to take a nap like he did Pacquiao:
Anywho, I'm wondering if Bradley will get a chance with Funny Money Mayweather. Mayweather will murder him, possibly literally, but since Bradley is a master wobbler when hit, it'd be entertaining to watch.
The second thing is Samsung's smartwatch, the Galaxy Gear. It has been mentioned on my social media timelines several times, so I had to look it up. You Samsung fans will call me a hater, but this is quite possibly the LAMEST piece of technology ever. The first piece of evidence I have is that every watch ever created that did more than tell time, be an alarm, and/or a stopwatch, has failed. Miserably. Remember calculator watches? Several smartwatches are on the market now and not doing so well. So this Galaxy Gear will show you your incoming phone calls, texts, emails, take crappy resolution pictures, short videos, and a have few apps on a tiny ass screen with some gestures most critics are calling un-intuitive. The only reason I can see for buying this is that you don't want to take that brick of a phone out of your oversized pocket, which if you actually want to do some real interaction or take a real picture or video, you still need your phone, or tablet...or phablet. You heard it here firstsecondthird at some point, Samsung should stick to what they do best, which make devices after they have made the components of devices for other manufacturers and then make the actual device better. Key word: after. And yes, they made components for Apple...
So one of the few things to report on the phone is that my wife is extremely happy with hers. "Siri" and she are forming a great relationship, one I'm almost jealous of. I have also tried AirDrop. It was fine. I sent my wife her own contact info so she could set up "Siri" to know who she was. Traded info, and your nasty ass phone didn't have to touch mine. Win-win biatches! And lastly, I tried the new earbuds. I like the ability to control the music player and call "Siri", the mic is fine, but I wish there was more bass in them. They will do fine for my traveling, since the right channel in my favorite Palm Pre earbuds appears to have died. My Sennheiser workout earbuds have fantastic bass, but no mic or music control. I wonder if Sennheiser has headphones with a mic and music control. I'll have to check that out. Lastly, Staples sent me a $40 off $80 coupon. I was going to use it on my second 22" monitor, but then I thought about Lightning cables. The coupon specifically says "no Apple products", but I decided to try it anyhow. So 4 Lightning cables, a item to put me over the $80 mark, and the system takes the coupon! On top of the coupon, I had like $25 in Staples Rewards sitting there, so I got 4 official Lightning cables for $15. That will sort of make up for Georgia Tech sucking like a porn star last Saturday
So hopefully I've caught you up. I'm still recovering from the weekend, so I'm going to go to bed a little early. Good night...
The surprise is that I bought my wife a 5s. I left it for her as I went out of town for a few days for a company meeting. She was very excited about it. She usually gets my hand-me-downs, but she wasn't under contract and I could sell my 4s for the price of a 16GB 5s. I got her the one that is not Space Gray, but not Gold either. So yes, that one. Now to find her a case so she stands a chance if it falls on concrete again...
I'm delaying the surprise. I got way too busy today.
All my eBay stuff sold. Only one person has paid me. Another person is in Russia, which wouldn't be a big deal, if in my auction description, there wasn't this:
I only ship to the United States! NO EXCEPTIONS!!!
It's that big on the page. In my selling preferences, I've restricted selling to people in the United States. Yet some loophole allows Borishnikov to bid on my item. Niet biatch, niet.
I still haven't gotten around to buying Lightning cables. I need to make that a priority very soon as running around with one cable is not where it's at.
I got a haircut today for the first time in a couple months. This working from home a majority of the time is wrecking havoc on my hygiene. Don't worry, I still smell like roses. Anywho, my barber and I were discussing the craptacularness which is Atlanta sports when he said even the Dream are "getting merc'd." I hadn't paid much attention, but I thought "getting merc'd" was a bit strong...until I saw the scores. Can an Atlanta pro team win SOMETHING?
Phone is still humming along. Nothing of note or annoyance to report on today. Maybe tomorrow. Speaking of which, I have to get up ridonculously early. Good night.
I believe this is the theme song for Atlanta sports:
I've been in Atlanta for 19 years. I grew up a Knicks, Giants and Mets fan. For some reason or other (usually a player strike), my allegiance to those teams wavered. As I've gotten older and my interest in pro sports revitalized, I've attempted to adopt the home teams, but the home teams have not attempted to pick me up. I'm not going to lie, the Hawks probably don't have a chance as I still bleed blue and orange thinking of Ewing, Oakley, Mason, Starks, Jackson, Anthony, G. Wilkins, Skywalker, King, Houston, Sprewell, Grandmama, I could go on and on. But I've tried to jump on the Braves and Falcons bandwagons, and I usually jump off pretty quickly. Last night was just bad. I only stayed up watching the Braves because they had tied the game, and were up a run so it seemed a Game 5 was imminent. Much to my dismay, they go down a run in the 8th, and I'm up at 1:30 AM for no reason. Suckas. And the Atlanta "Waste of a new Stadium" Falcons? All they had to do was make it to a Super Bowl last year, and no one would have questioned the stadium. Now they are throwing crazy money at neighboring churches and losing most of their games to build one...
Cool things with the phone today. The first is a benefit of AT&T, which is their wireless hotspot network. Starbucks and McDonald's use the AT&T wi-fi network. You're saying, "Marco, the wifi at those places are already free dumbass!" You are right, but if you don't have AT&T, you have to join the network, and then you get that annoying "Agree to our ToS biatch!" message, AND THEN you get redirected to some cheesy ad-riddled page. Since I'm on AT&T, I just walked into Starbucks, my wifi connects, and I go along my business. Insert slobbery raspberry in your direction here.
The second was the personal hotspot. It ran faster than the wifi at Starbucks. I almost tested it and a voice call at the same time, but I was doing something important for work, so I didn't want to chance a disconnect at the time. But know that I will test it out, and soon.
I've got to start packing the stuff that I've sold on eBay. I should have a small surprise in store for tomorrow. Not for you though. Not for me either...
Nothing crazy to report today. Apparently you cannot watch Monday Night Football on an iPhone, which seems silly but I'm sure ESPN has a good reason. I'm also sure the good reason is stupidity. The Falcons appear to be further proving why they don't need a new stadium. Matt Ryan is my fantasy QB though, so I need them to do a bit better.
I finally took pictures of the phone with its case and screen protector:
My apologies for the shininess and glare. Taking the pictures on my glass desk probably wasn't one of my brightest moments. But you can see my college diploma in the reflection, that should count for something. Yes, I graduated 11 years ago. Yes, it got put in that frame probably 8 or 9 years ago as a gift from my wife. Yes, it just got hung up last month for the first time. Anywho, you can see that the case adds very little to the phone. The screen protector is bubbling up slightly at the bottom, but not enough for me to complain. I hear the customer support for Tech Armor is pretty good. If it gets any worse I'll test it out.
I've gone on quest for a new cradle for my car. The cradle I have now used to go in the cigarette lighter, but it was top heavy and would fall out every once in a while. It also eventually ripped my cigarette lighter out of the front console. Luckily cigarette lighters are cheap to replace in my truck. The cradle also came with a way to connect it to an air conditioner vent, which is working fine, but I hate that one of my vents is blocked, so I want it back in the cigarette lighter. So a cradle that goes in the cigarette lighter, provides power, and isn't top heavy. I found a few that may fit the bill on eBay and Amazon. I'll have to go through the reviews and see which Chinese DEATH BY FIRE cradle will be least likely to kill me due to fire.
Ok, I'm doing a lot of yawning, so I'm going to go to bed. And by bed, I mean go upstairs and surf on my phone some more while seeing if the Braves can lift the city's spirits or if the city will be doubly somber tomorrow. Deuces!
Today we went with my in-laws to the Georgia National Fair in Perry, GA. I will admit up front that I am a city boy, and country life is not one of my favorite things. I'm not sure how I keep getting dragged to these things.
The first thing (well only thing) to go wrong was that Waze gave me bad directions, and I followed them even though I knew better. That added about 20 minutes to a journey that was already an hour and a half. But we get there, we meet up with the in-laws, and we spend close to an hour looking at cows, sheep, goats, horses and rabbits, all the while my oldest is complaining of the smell (which wasn't that bad considering all the cows, sheep, goats, horses and rabbits), and dodging piles of shit, piss, or shit and piss. The youngest enjoyed himself though. We also watched an equestrian competition. I don't know what the proper name of it was, but 3 - 4 riders go around the ring, and someone says commands like "trot", "extended trot", "parley (maybe?)", "gallop", "stop", and "walk". Must be the sport lover in me, but I actually found myself trying to judge the horses, which I apparently either got completely wrong, or the judges had CJ Ross type ineptitude. I'm going to go with the latter.
Then we eat and proceed to the carnival games and ride section. When did carnival rides and games get so damn expensive??? We spend close to $60 for everyone to get 3 rides and like 2 games. Once again, it's not about me, and the two people it was about did have fun.
The one thing I did get to do was mess with a couple of the camera features: square and slo-mo. Square basically auto-Instagram-izes your photos. I took this one of an apparent country saying painted on a wall in the cafeteria:
Easily uploaded to Instagram with no cropping necessary. This added Apple feature kills my need for another app, Squaready, though I may keep it for pictures I forget to use the square feature on. And then the slo-mo. I feel like Apple took a weird middle ground with this one. The slo-mo works fine, but then there is the sound going with with video. To me, you would either play the audio back at half speed to match the video, or have no audio at all. Apple chose to play the audio at normal speed. In my example videos, it doesn't look strange because you're looking at the back of my subjects, but if you were watching someone's face, it would be worse than a dubbed kung fu movie. First, normal speed:
And then there's slo-mo (20 seconds of video in real time):
As I've said before, a gimmick, but something fun to play with. *EDIT* Why did I put "EDIT" here rather than deleting and re-typing? Because I spent all that time formulating the previous paragraph, and I refuse to delete it. Anywho, it's Google's fault. If you use Google's Capture app to upload a video to YouTube, you get varied results. Once it was slo-mo video, normal speed sound. The next time it was normal video, normal sound. Uploaded from the Photos app to YouTube, my video stays intact.
We ended the day with the whole family going on a Ferris wheel ride together. The boys loved it, and my wife and father-in-law put on brave faces. I was able to show the boys where we parked because the range on my keyless entry goes a lot father from a couple hundred feet in the air. We then packed in the car for the ride home, a fun time had by all.
One crazy thing that happened was that when we got in the truck, I get this pic mail:
She sent it to me and three other people, all of whom are not in my phonebook, so I assume it was case of a fat finger. It still had my wife's eyebrow going up though lol. If you know her, tell her to send something more interesting than a selfie next time.
Now let me finish watching Matt Schaub self destruct and also verify that my house isn't going to float away in this storm.
This one is going to be short. I was just about to go to sleep when I remembered I didn't post anything. So here's a quick play by play:
- Went to the Avondale Estates AutumnFest. Had an apple pie with bacon in it. They say everything is better with bacon, and that is no lie.
- I've been implementing cost cutting measures in my life, one of which was reducing the amount of money I pay Comcast a month. First casualty of this change was I no longer get ESPNU, which had the Tech/Miami game. So I may be revisiting that. But the ScoreCenter app did a good job of keeping me updated, and I'm not sure when they implemented this, but there are now links to video clip of the scoring play. We did lose, but we had The U shitting their pants for most of the game. I'll take that after last week's performance.
- "Siri" is doing a fantastic job of understanding me. The Google apps, not so much.
- Played with the slo-mo function. Pretty cool as far as gimmicks go, since normal people don't need slo-mo. I recall a Dave Chapelle skit about slo-mo making things better. I'll post a couple videos tomorrow and let you be the judge. No, not that kind of video...
- The Shazam app is pretty damn good at figuring out songs in the worst of environments. Give their engineers a gold star and a lap dance.
- I know he's a A-/B+ level fighter who fought what looked like C level talent, but Miguel Cotto looked quite impressive tonight. As a couple of the commentators mentioned, it would have been interesting to see this relentless left hook to the body Cotto against Funny Money.
- My wife dropped her iPhone 4 on concrete for the second time in its lifetime. This time it was the front, which now matches the back. Looks as bad as it sounds. I may not be selling my 4s after all...
Ok, this was way longer than it was supposed to be. Good night biznatches!
Nothing much doing today. Nothing new discovered on the phone, though I didn't really get to mess with it much, and I'm running on fumes, so today's post will be a conversation with "Siri":
Me: What is your name?
"Siri": My name is Siri.
Me: What is your sign?
"Siri": It is nice of you to ask. Can I help you with something?
Me: I just want to get to know you better.
"Siri": I'd like that, Marco, but I'm afraid it's impossible.
Me: Did you know that the impossible only takes a little bit longer?
"Siri": I'm sorry, Marco, I'm afraid I can't answer that.
Me: So, what are you wearing?
"Siri": In the cloud, no one knows what you're wearing.
Me: Maybe I should come to the cloud with you.
"Siri": Who, me?
Me: Yes you. And you should bring a friend.
"Siri": I should, eh?
Me: Yes. We should have some fun beneath the sheets.
"Siri": I don't know what you mean by 'We should have some fun beneath the sheets'. How about a web search for it?
Me: You're ruining the mood Siri.
"Siri": You're certainly entitled to that opinion.
Me: We'll continue this conversation later.
"Siri": I can't wait Marco.
Me: I bet you can't.
"Siri": I'm not sure what you mean by that?
Me: Don't worry about it.
"Siri": Ok, I won't.
Very boring conversation, I know. Maybe some interesting stuff will happen tomorrow. My mom's church is having a fish fry. Maybe I can find an excuse to use the slo-mo feature...
I admit I watch Scandal. The season opener was bananas. I'm going to use the line "I am the hell and the high water!" on my boys one day.
I also watched the second half of the Texas/Iowa St. game on the phone using the Watch ESPN app. Iowa St got robbed twice in the final minutes. Picture was crazy clear and no pixelation or stuttering. This was on wifi though. I'll have to see how games come through on the road.
This has nothing to do with the phone itself, but I've connected my phone to my laptop via Bluetooth, and enabled the proximity lock. Basically if my phone gets further than about 3 feet from my laptop, the laptop locks itself. You are saying "why the hell would you need that at the house?" You obviously haven't met my 2.5 year old. Turn your back for one second and he's replaced that entire page of text with ejxgsvjak6/$$;7!2 ehhhh. And a smile.
Another annoyance with iOS. Why won't they make it so the home screen works in landscape? All they have to do is turn the icons and move the top bar. Seems like a no brainer to me.
I'm a little slow, but I just realized the lightning cable doesn't care how you stick it in, like you know, like...
Today was one of those days that seemed really busy but I don't feel like I accomplished much. I had to take a drug test for a client that I will be on site for in a few weeks. If you know me, you know that I've never even smoked a cigarette in my entire life, but drug tests still bring out the imaginary weed smoker in me. I also sold the co-sleeper bassinet thingy that the boys spent the first 6 months of their lives in. That was kind of sad, but what are we going to do with it but let it sit in our already overcrowded house? Besides, the sale of that bassinet will cover 6 lap dances some of the iPhone cost.
I also bought an office chair. As many of you know, I got a new job where I either travel to clients or work from home and remote into their systems. I started out working in the dining room, which if you can avoid sitting in a dining room chair for 8 - 10 hours a day, you would be very wise to do so. We then moved the boys in together so I could have an office, and I started out with an Ikea desk and a vintage lounge chair, only slightly better than the dining room setup. I then upgraded to this desk which I got for a super steal on Craigslist. I've bought one 22" monitor, also on crazy sale, because doing documentation on a 15" screen is not where it's at. I plan on buying one more monitor and a chair mat, and then I will consider my office complete. Oh and a dual monitor stand. And one more UPS. Then I'm done for real. Hopefully I can write these purchases off...
As for cool iPhone stuff, I didn't do much today. I didn't get to ask Siri any good questions, but all my commands she did without issue. I'm even able to talk more normally. With my 4s, I had to enunciate and slow down, and even then it still had issues. I found out my Staples app is malfunctioning, and deleting it and downloading it again only half fixed it, not sure what that's about. Oh, I did my first voice + data call. It was as orgasmic as I dreamed it would be. So now if you call me, I'm REALLY really not paying attention to you.
I have one annoyance with the Control Center, which is while I can turn Wi-Fi on or off, I can't get to the Wi-Fi configuration screen where I could pick what network I want to connect to. They should make it so that if I tap and hold, it would bring that screen up. Not sure where I can submit that idea, but I'm going to find out. My guess is that it will be sending a message to my congressman, but at least I can say I tried.
I'll end this one on a bittersweet note. My oldest completed his first homework assignment. It only took him 10 minutes and was some counting stuff he could do easily, but still...I'm not crying, something just poked me in both eyes. By the way, he is using the Ikea desk, and as with most Ikea things, they fit him better.
Today I actually used "Siri" a lot. If you are new to my blog, you will see that I put "Siri" in quotes. My sister-in-law's nickname is Siri, and since she was invented first, she gets to be quote free. You can also imagine me doing air quotes every time you read "Siri" much like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers:
"Siri" is WAY faster. I assume it has to be the phone and/or iOS 7, since I was on wifi most of today, but my 4s never got back to me this fast. I wonder if her responses have change to the perverted line of questioning I asked her during our initial courtship. I might check that out tomorrow.
I guessing you're wondering about the title of today's post. In my life as a parent, I've discovered that children are good for love, laughter, and sucking every dollar out of your wallet. This of course severely limits the amount of "toys" an electronics lover like me can buy. So this evening, I spend a lot of time using the 5s camera taking pictures of stuff to put on eBay and Craigslist. Camera is super fast. It's also got a bunch of functions I haven't tried out yet, like slo-mo and the Instagram-like filters. There was one annoying part, which was the iCloud Photo Stream sync. I spent like an hour waiting for the photos to sync wirelessly so I wouldn't have to plug in the phone, since I only have the one Lightning cord currently in the bedroom. I give up, go upstairs to get the cord, come back down, and the pictures have all magically appeared in my Photo Stream folder. Fuck you iCloud.
Battery life was very good today. Several calls from work, a lot of video streaming, some GPSing, some Pandora-ing and all the pictures I took today, and I was at about 11% by the time it was bath time for the boys. I know some of you are like "it's almost dead Marco!" but realistically, I just need it to survive about 12 hours. If I'm away from a charger more than about 10-12 hours, then something has, once again, gone horribly wrong, and you should call the people for me.
I got confirmation from a friend that there are non Apple Lightning cords that are certified unlike the Chinese DEATH BY FIRE cables. AmazonBasics and Monoprice have them. The Monoprice ones are a smidge more, but the shape of their USB A connector looks like the Apple one, which means it will fit in the Palm Pre car chargers I have laying around. One less thing to buy.
I'm officially on my job's phone plan, which means I no longer care about my data usage. At least until my boss yells at me about my data usage. If they saw my Sprint data usage, they probably would have told me to keep expensing my bill. I guess we'll see how that goes.
Why didn't one of you mofos tell me it is 12:15 AM??? Good night...
