iPhone 5s Day 10: We're going to the fair

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.

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...