the musings of a geeky girl
Just about 1 month after I placed the order, I finally received a shipping notification for the Vaja iVolution Dockable case. It should arrive in 2 short days! Woo hoo! This timing works out pretty well since I should probably get around to requesting a warranty exchange for my peeling Incase Slider case and I just can’t let my iPhone go around case-less while I wait for a replacement.
Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. Safari is still crashy after the latest iPhone firmware update, despite the “Improved stability and performance of Safari” line in the release notes. I should know better than to expect that this major problem that has plagued my iPhones through every firmware version would be magically fixed in a single update. But I thought that maybe, just maybe, the iPhone software engineers at Apple had figured this one out. Cue wrong answer buzzer sound now.
I think there’s some other sensor in the iPhone that Apple has never disclosed. It senses when you’re looking something up on the internet with desperate urgency and then causes Safari to crash at the penultimate moment before you get to what you need. I should know, because that’s how it always works for me. Bastards.
You know, I just can’t praise NetShare enough. I’m really not trying to rub in the fact that I have it with the folks who missed the opportunity to buy it from the App Store – I swear. I am just regularly stunned by how useful it is. Yes, I know I could accomplish the same thing with a jailbroken app (I think it’s PDANet?), but I didn’t have a good experience jailbreaking one of my first-generation iPhones to make me hesitant enough to do it to my 3G. Regardless, I’m on the train heading home from work, no WiFi network in sight, and I’m able to browse the internet, check email, and blog on my MacBook Air through my iPhone’s data connection. Freaking brilliant.
There are rumors out there about AT&T officially announcing tethering for the iPhone, with the monthly rate for this feature at $30 at a minimum. And, this won’t be an unlimited plan with a cap of 5GB per month. I’m not the type of girl to steal cable (well, not anymore) and am not opposed to paying for a service I use. But I already get unlimited data with my iPhone’s data plan and pay $30 a month for that. I’ll just keep using NetShare (carefully enough to not set off any alerts at AT&T), thank you very much.
(To be clear, this isn’t my first experiencing with tethering. My first foray was with a Sony Clie NX70V PDA, a Bluetooth Memory Stick Adapter, and a Sony Ericsson T68i. God, that was ages ago!)
I left my iPhone at home today. I didn’t realize it until I got to the train station and felt the pocket where I usually keep it and found it to be devastatingly empty. I stopped, felt the pocket more thoroughly (which must have looked odd to the others waiting for the train since it’s the chest pocket under my left breast), and muttered a mild curse. I briefly considered going back home to get it, but then dismissed the idea since the next train wouldn’t leave for another 2 hours and I didn’t want to be quite that late for work. Though most of my co-workers, including my boss, have iPhones and would therefore be more sympathetic to my plight, I didn’t think it would be a good enough excuse to be late for work by several hours.
I think it happened because of a disruption in my normal coat-putting-on routine. Normally, my coat is hanging on the back of the chair at the island in the kitchen, and I put it on, put my iPhone in my pocket, pick up my backpack and keys and head out the door. After volleyball last night, my coat was in my gym bag, and when I took my coat out of it, I left it on our bed instead of bringing it downstairs to hang on the chair. So this morning, I had to run upstairs to get my coat, thus breaking the routine. When I came back downstairs, I grabbed my keys and backpack, completely forgetting about my iPhone.
So, here I am, iPhone-less. I had no book to read on the train (and I am reading some absolutely glorious trash at the moment), no music to listen to as I walked to the subway station, and no RSS feeds to catch up on while on the subway. I’d like to say that I learned an important lesson today about how overly-dependent I am on technology, but I’d be lying like a rug. I didn’t learn a damn thing this morning, except for the fact that I need to do something to make sure I don’t forget my iPhone again. Ever.
If you’ve been following my adventures with my iPhones over the past year, you’ve frequently heard me lament about some features I wish the iPhone had. Of course, I’m not alone in this, and I heard about a site that is aggregating all of the various desired enhancements in one place, and you can “vote” for the ones you want to increase the feature’s respective wish counter. Right now, copy and paste is the number one wishlist item – I did vote for that one, and a number of other ones as well. The site is PleaseFixtheiPhone.com. It’s a little repetitive – there doesn’t appear to be much moderation of the items submitted, so there are duplicates once you get beyond the first couple of pages. With a little clean-up, I think it could be a useful tool that the iPhone software engineers in Cupertino should really keep an eye on. Where is Scott Forestall’s email address when you need it?
