iPhone 5s Day 17: Sorry for the wait

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 first second third 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...

iPhone 5s Day 8: A conversation with "Siri"

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...

iPhone 5s Day 6: Not much happening

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.

iPhone 5s Day 5: For the love of money

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...