Brad’s Life

So I just logged into my AT&T Wireless account, and saw this:

I mean, for real.  Does anyone here think a *FREE*!!!!!! Pantech whatchamacrapit is a good upgrade to my iPhone?  I’m sure Apple uses the same upgrade screen for everyone, but I’m not even eligible for an upgrade at the moment, and if I were, it’d sure take more than THAT to make me want to drop the mother of all cellphones.  <sigh>  The Death Star still has a few things to learn, eh?

I’m gonna be a father (or I suppose I sort of already am one, technically) very soon!  We just had our first doctor’s appt. today, and got to do an ultrasound!  I’ll post it when I can get to a working scanner, but for now there is definitely something there.  So, sometime towards the end of March I will officially be a dad!

So I waited in line all day, starting at 8:00 AM. I was the first person in line at the Waco Dr. Cingular/AT&T store, and the first to walk out the door with a phone. Along the way, I met several great people, including Michael, who acutally makes his living blogging about Apple products (what a job!). He sat next to me while we waited all day.

On first impression, this phone is solid. No freezes or hangups yet, which is already a million times better than the Cingular 8525 the iPhone replaced, and it does what it does very well and…dare I say it…prettily.

Below are some unboxing images for those of you who haven’t seen what the whole shebang looks like yet.

The only feature I can say so far I’m really going to need is a way to easily turn off the email notifications when I’m asleep, while keeping the ringer active if a call comes in during the night. So far, the only thing I’ve figured out is to go into settings->sounds->New Email and turn it off, then back on in the morning, which is a little too much of a pain to be a good long-term solution. Ideas, from any other iPhone users out there?

So I was listening to NPR’s Fresh Air podcast yesterday, and something occurred to me. You see, I was listening to an interview with Dion, the doo-wop singer from way back in the day, the guy who sang “Rosie”, “The Wanderer”, and many other famous hits.

Dion told a story of travelling on the road back in the old days, before music stars had entourages and large private charter busses. He was on the road with several other musician friends of his doing a tour, ostensibly for their music label, and they were traversing the country with naught but an old school bus to carry them. Being an old school bus, it was given to breaking down frequently. So, some of the guys he was with got sick of it, and chartered a flight to their next stop to guarantee they got there on time. They tried to get him on board to split the cost and save a bit, but it would have cost him $36, which was exactly the rent money he remembered his parents arguing over as a kid in the Bronx, and he couldn’t justify spending an entire month’s rent for a short flight.

So, Dion hopped back on the bus, while Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper hopped a flight that barely got off the ground.

What does all this mean? I don’t really know. It just got me thinking that sometimes it’s the little decisions we make, the ones we think so trivial, that can make a big difference in our lives. I’m not saying it’s a good thing to spend hours laboring over whether to get french fries or onions rings every night at dinner, but it at least puts things into perspective. We spend all our time worrying about the “big decisions” about careers, major financial outlays, family planning choices, etc. ad nauseam, but sometimes we are terrible judges of which decisions really will have a major impact on our lives.

Food for thought, at least.

Just found out via TUAW that you can run a quick command in the Terminal to create a banner-style printout saying whatever you want.  Rarely useful, but still pretty cool!

 Link

So, normally I only sync my iPod when there’s a new podcast I want to throw on there. But today, as I was getting ready, I started listening to TWiT. By the time I went to go meet Jenn for lunch, I wasn’t finished, so I synced it onto my iPod to finish listening. So maybe this shouldn’t be exciting, but it sync’ed over to the iPod the place where I was in the podcast. When I went to pick up the TWiT episode and listen to it, after having carefully noted where in the audio I needed to scroll to pick up where I’d left off, the iPod was already there. It knew where I was in the podcast from my computer.

Simple thing, perfectly obvious, but until today I never knew this was part of the package. Yet another plus on the “little things” for Apple!

So, if that headline didn’t catch your attention, I don’t know what will.  Actual, not-so-dramatic story below:

So the magsafe adapter on my Macbook Pro started showing signs of wear a few weeks back.  Just small signs, really.  There’s a little plastic sheath that goes over the part of the cable that connects to the magsafe head, and it had started to split a little bit.  Not a big deal, right? Well, it wasn’t until yesterday.

See, yesterday, I got home from work and pulled up the trusty MBP, plugging it in to charge back up.  Just after I sat down, I noticed my screen backlight kept coming bright and dark (a signal that it was switching back and forth between battery and outlet power).  So, I looked at the magsafe plug head, and it wasn’t lit up.  I adjusted the cable a bit ’til it lit up, and all was well for a few seconds.  Those precious few  seconds later, though, there was a spark from the plug head, some wires began to glow, and there was a bit of smoke coming out.  Luckily, I caught it quickly, no damage done that I can tell.  Good thing this didn’t happen when I was asleep one night ,eh?  It was at this point that I decided to unplug the power supply, and call Apple.

It’s pretty clear to me from the conversation that ensued that this wasn’t Apple’s first rodeo with this sort of issue.  They asked a lot of questions about if I was harmed, if any furniture was harmed, the color of the smoke, how long the smoke lasted, do I feel ok, did my computer appear to be ok, did I take any pictures or video, etc.  In the end, they are sending me a replacement adapter, and having me send back the original.  The only problem I have with that is that I’m sorta left hanging all weekend.  It’s possible the new adapter will ship today and get here Monday, but it’s also possible it will go out Monday and get here Tuesday or Wednesday.  So, I’m rationing battery very carefully.  This post is being typed at maximum speed so I can get it up and get the MBP shut back down for use tomorrow as well.  I’m having to move some of my bored-browsing to Jenn’s computer for the time being.

I’ve got an Austinite friend who might be kind enough to pick me up a new secondary adapter from the Apple store before she comes into Waco tomorrow, so let’s hope that pulls through.  If I get around to it, I might add pictures to this post later so you can see the [overdramatization] charred, blackened remains of what was once my MBP power supply [/overdramatization], but that will have to be when I’ve got new power ready to go.  I won’t chance the upload time on the battery right now.  It’s like I’m in a bomb shelter using up the last bits of clean water…

The real question is, is it better for battery economy to keep the MBP asleep when I’m not using it, for a light battery draw and quick-and-ready access, or is it better to shutdown and start back up, for no intervening battery use, but a huge waste of power at the beginning and end of each session?  A penny for your thoughts…

Tyler, this one’s for you!

Note:  Most of these are pretty pedestrian mistakes, but I still see them frequently in my line of work.  On occasion, I do commit one or two of these errors.  Most of the time, I just want to pull my hair out when I see others do these things…

Anyone else happen to notice it’s freaking SNOWING today in Waco?  Someone needs to let the weather man know it’s now April, and the time for snow has passed.  I hope this doesn’t turn into a “The Day After Tomorrow” style nutcase weather situation…

Here I am back on my mac soapbox…

I was looking recently for a reliable way to backup my computer, and came across this article, which seemed like the perfect fit. It’s geeky, it’s solid and simple, and it makes use of the power of the Mac OS X’s *nix underlying framework in a powerful way…at least until you get to Page 2. There, it goes from a nice, geeky CLI “rsync” command to using AppleScript and iCal to run it daily. Now, AppleScript and iCal are great apps, and both have their uses, but has this guy ever heard of “cron”?

Cron is one of the most powerful and awesome things that a *nix system has. I don’t know a whole lot about it’s inner workings, but I know that creating a crontab with this script would be ideal. It would run completely in the background and be perfectly reliable, instead of requiring a lightweight Apple program to run an Applescript just to run a CLI command.

It seems these guys are just musicians who happen to be Apple fans, so I guess I’ll cut them some slack, but I’d really like to hear from someone who knows a little more about Cron, so I’ve got the chance to take the great CLI instructions given here, and rewrite page 2 into a detailed set of instructions for setting up a crontab. Anyone? If not, I’ll learn Cron myself just to write the instructions. Help!