JLGoolsbee.com

Six months ago, I posted an entry about needing to get a new Mac… well, I never did. I continued to use my trusty 12-inch PowerBook G4, and I still am. There are many reasons I never went through with those plans… chief among them was that I couldn’t afford what I wanted (a Mac Pro), and I hated the design of the alternative (an iMac). Six months have passed since then, and with those six months came a few changes… 1) a new design for the iMac that just screams “I am the perfect mix of form and function”, and 2) OS X 10.5 Leopard, with it’s 300+ new features.

So, Saturday evening, armed with my $100 iPhone rebate (not much, but hey – every bit helps), me and my dad set out for the Apple Store Willowbend in Plano (only a few miles from my house). Dad’s not really a Mac guy; I think he sees how form and function complement each other in Apple’s designs for some of their products (for instance, he really likes the new Nanos), but he has yet to take the plunge on a Mac for himself and/or the family. Anyways, we browsed the store for a few minutes and I showed him a few of the finer points of Leopard. After a few minutes, I let one of the Mac specialists know I was there to buy an iMac of the 2.8 GHz variety… he paused for a minute, and said the words I was most afraid of hearing at that point: “We’re out of stock.”

Now, I’ve never known an Apple Store to be out of stock of something, but then again this was Leopard release weekend and so I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised. The specialist let me know he would go check the stockroom just to make sure, and then call the 3 other Apple Stores in the DFW area to check their stock. As he expected, the stockroom check confirmed they were out. However, what I didn’t expect (and I don’t think he did either) was that all the other stores were too! The entire DFW area was out of stock of 2.8 GHz iMacs. Can you say bummer? I did, along with some other things as me and dad walked dejectedly back to the parking garage, stopping only to play with the lightsabers in Sharper Image.

Not to be completely depressed about the evening’s events, I placed the order online as soon as we got home, and it should be here (in Abilene) by the end of the week. The specs, for those of you interested in this sort of thing:

iMac – 24″

• 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme
• 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM – 2×1GB
• 500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB of GDDR3 memory
• 8x SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR

Overall, I’m happy with the configuration I finally settled on… I probably spent hours reading benchmark test after benchmark test, scrutinizing minute details here and there, and forever configuring and re-configuring different variations at the Apple Store online, but this is what I ended up with.

The end of the week can’t come soon enough.

So, it’s been a little quiet around here as of late. My apologies.

First, if you’ve hanging on for dear life just to read my review of the iPhone, you’re about to be sorely disappointed because this is not it. While I may still do that someday when I’m really bored (read: not anytime soon), I feel like enough has been said already, by people who said it much better than I can. If you really want to hear my opinions, my gripes, and what to consider if you’re thinking about getting one, just ask me – I’ll be more than happy to give an answer to any/all of that.

Second, many of you want to know why I wasn’t in band Monday afternoon, and why my Facebook and Twitter statuses alluded to my having some sort of medical problem. Well… here’s what happened. I was sitting on my bike on the “porch” of Hunter Hall, waiting for Erin and Amanda to come out the door to go to one of our weekly meetings. When I saw them come out the door at the other end of the building, my brain went into some weird mode where my thought processes were in line with the thoughts of a 7 or 8 year-old… I knew they were over there, and that I was over here, and that I needed to be over there… so I proceeded to ride my bike off the 2.5 ft ledge of the porch. The problem with that was two-fold: I didn’t have enough momentum to make it work, and worse, I realized what I was doing just as I was about to roll off the edge, and I squeezed that front brake hard… too hard. Essentially what happened next was that I fell over the front of bike onto the rocky concrete below (from where I was sitting on the bike, easily 4 to 5 feet), and then the bike fell on top of me. Now, I’ve done worse – just ask my mom. I’ve had more bruises and scrapes from my shenanigans as a child than I care to remember, but that period of my life was at least a decade or more ago… so I honestly don’t know what I was thinking when I thought I could just ride off that ledge. Anyways, I scraped up my elbow, and I’ve done something to my foot, thought I’m not sure what other than that I know it’s not broken… I just can’t really put any weight on it. And that is why I wasn’t in band on Monday.

I’m not sure if anybody noticed, but the site went through a major redesign about a month ago. It was a long and arduous search to find a clean and good-looking theme I liked that I could build on, and I finally found it. ColdBlue by WebRevolutionary is a very well laid out theme, and it was relatively easy to modify the design to give it a little touch of me. If it looks weird in your browser… use a modern browser. If it still looks bad, let me know. Seriously.

But, there are a few content changes as well:

• The Photos page still serves up my photos from Flickr and uses Lightbox to show the images in their galleries. Click on any image in an album to open the Lightbox, and then click on the left or right side of the image to go backwards and forwards (respectively) through the gallery.
• The News page no longer shows my “dugg” stories from digg. It now shows my Newsgator clippings, which is even better. Everyday, I read tons of news in feed reader, and the clippings are news stories that caught my eye or that interested me for some reason or another. Until recently I had no way to share those clippings with anybody, but some recent changes at Newsgator now allow me to do so, which is fantastic.
  EDIT: Also, the sidebar module that showed digg stories is gone as well.
• The Weather page is gone; if you used it, sorry.
• The HSU page… will be back to its previous usefulness soon.
  EDIT: Actually, I don’t have time to give the ‘ole HSU page the attention it needed, so it’s gone as well.
• The Archives have been redone, and it should be much easier to find one of my older posts, assuming you know about when it was written and/or what the title of the post was. If you still can’t find what you’re looking for, the search bar can be your friend too.
• Colophon… is pretty much the same, with a few updates to plugins here and there.

I’ll try to crank out a post more often than once every two months; we’ll see what happens.

Yes, I know you’re all in suspense, waiting for my iPhone review/opinions… simply put, I didn’t want to post mine immediately just to have it be lost in the storm of reviews that flooded the internets in the first week or two after the release. Plus, I wanted to give a review that was based on a few weeks of real-world use in real-world scenarios.

All that to say: It’s coming soon. Promise.

EDIT: Almost forgot, if you have an iPhone, feel free to browse this site on it; I’m making use of an excellent WordPress plugin made by the guys over at ContentRobot.com that serves up this site in a very iPhone-esque theme.

Today at 6:30pm, about 24 hours after I purchased my iPhone, I finally was able to finish activation with my number being ported from T-Mobile…

So last night as far as I got was waiting for activation, after having tried it once already. The first time I just figured maybe AT&T got overloaded with the volume of number-transfer requests, so I didn’t change anything the second time around… it was only afterwards that I did the research into number portability over at the FCC’s website, and learned that if you’re moving your number and you are changing the metropolitan area your phone is registered in, the FCC doesn’t allow the transfer. Now, I never really got the chance to test this using iTunes, because here’s what happened the next morning…

I had expected to get an email back from AT&T letting me know something – either that the transfer had succeeded, or that it had failed – but I had no email… I waited till about noon to call an AT&T rep, and after about 10 minutes of explaining where I was in the activation process, the rep had no other advice than to just wait it out, and said that when I was able to, that I should restart the activation process, and instead of trying to port my number over I should just get a new number, and then call AT&T’s number-transfer department (888-898-7685) and handle it in that fashion. So, at about 4:30pm I got the email from AT&T letting me know that the number could not be ported over… bummer, but it was what I’d expected. I restarted the activation process, this time choosing to get a new number… about 10 minutes later, my iPhone was unlocked and I was up and running on AT&T.

After syncing and playing around with the iPhone for a bit, I called AT&T’s number-transfer department… it’s an automated system, and it asks you to type in the number (I assumed it wanted the number I wanted ported over). After typing it in twice (and it telling me something about not having that number in its records), it transfered me to a human. The rep asked me a few security questions to make sure I was who I said I was, and then asked for the number I wanted transferred, the T-Mobile account number that the number was on, and then a couple security questions to verify I had access to that account… 2 minutes later, the rep told me it was done, and that in exactly 6 minutes, I should power-cycle my iPhone and turn off my T-Mobile phone, and that when I powered up my iPhone the number should be switched, and good for making and receiving calls – instantly… no waiting for it to transfer the receiving calls part. 8 minutes later (for good measure), I power-cycled my iPhone, and BINGO! It was an instant and total switch, in the space of 6 minutes, where as I had waited 5 hours and then about 16 hours on my previous attempts through iTunes.

So… if you’re trying to transfer your number and are having similar difficulties, I’d recommend this method of getting a new number and then calling to have your number transferred… in fact, both of the reps I spoke to seemed to bemoan the fact that AT&T was using that iTunes-based method, hinting that it was causing more problems than it was solving and that it was much easier to just call in and do it manually. I for one agree with the reps – calling in was definitely easier and quicker.

More on my opinions of the iPhone itself later.