Marianne Schultz

the musings of a geeky girl

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everythingiCafe: the show “Sniffling, cranky Marianne”

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Chris and I recorded episode 65 of the everythingicafe.com iPhone and iPad podcast and it’s available for download through iTunes now. My seasonal allergies made a surprise appearance this week after several weeks of a blissful hiatus, prompting the title of this week’s episode.

We talked about Apple’s Q3 financial results, which were pretty damn good overall even if Wall Street wasn’t entirely happy with them. We also talked about the latest iPhone 5 (or 6 if you want to get technical) and iPad mini rumors, plus new rumors about an impending iPod touch redesign. When we recorded this episode, Mountain Lion was set to be released on the next day so we also talked about our plans on updating to Apple’s new operating system for the Mac.

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An apology to my Twitter followers

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If you follow me on Twitter and happened to be catching up on your timeline on Saturday evening, you probably caught a grand total of 192 tweets from my account made within the span of a couple of minutes. I wanted to take a moment to apologize and explain what happened.

Some of you may know me from my first blog, macgirl.net. I started that site in 2007 and switched over to this site a little over a year ago. Transferring the content from macgirl.net has been on my to-do list for a while and I finally decided to get started on it over the weekend by using a Blogger import tool. Once you start that tool, it runs all on its own and copies the content of each post on the old blog and creates a new post for each one on the new blog.

But I forgot about one key setting before I hit that Start Import button: the WP to Twitter plug-in that automatically tweets every new post on my site.

I didn’t realize what happened until my iPhone started buzzing from several push notification alerts for Twitter mentions and direct messages. Once I started reading them, I realized the extent of my mistake. And I panicked.

I hurriedly disabled the auto-tweet plug-in but the damage was already done. I then went to post an apology on Twitter but kept getting an error that I had exceeded my daily limit of tweets and to try again in a few hours. $#$@%^$%%^!!!!!

So I started replying to comments and sending apologies via direct message, which did work, thankfully. And then I went back and painstakingly deleted all 192 errant tweets one by one.

So that’s what happened. Sorry to all of my Twitter followers for inundating you with tweets about my old blog posts! I’m done with the import so it won’t happen again.

[frame]If you’re not familiar with my old site and are looking for a little blast from the past from a geeky girl, here are a few of my favorite posts from macgirl.net:

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everythingiCafe: the show “Love of Vampires”

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Chris Meinck and I recorded episode 64 of the everythingiCafe.com podcast earlier this week and it’s now available through iTunes. If you like our show, please do subscribe! (I’d recommend Downcast if you’re looking for an app to manage your podcast subscriptions on the iPhone or iPad, by the way.)

Chris and I talked about iPhone 5 (or 6, if you want to get technical about the number of iPhone generations to date) rumors, more 7-inch iPad rumors, and some news about iOS 6. We also revisited our respective predictions of the date of the new iPhone’s release. Chris’s guess is September 28 while mine is October 5. Hopefully we’ll learn who’s right sooner rather than later.

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everythingiCafe: the show “Skeuomorphism”

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Chris and I recorded episode 61 of the everythingiCafe.com podcast a few days ago and it’s now available for your listening pleasure through iTunes. We talked about Apple’s new Podcasts app, rumors about NFC in the next iPhone model, and more rumors about a smaller dock connector in that new iPhone, and more.

Chris’s Teh Awesome was iHandy’s Flashlight app for the iPhone that helped him out a lot during an electrical outage last week. My Teh Awesome was the new Launch Center Pro app by App Cubby. Launch Center Pro is a utility app that lets you create shortcuts to complete actions in other apps. For example, you can create shortcuts to immediately dial a FaceTime call with a selected contact, do a Google search in Safari, and much more. As I said in the podcast, I think it’s more of a pro user app that has a lot of potential but takes time to set up. If you want more information about Launch Center Pro, check out Chris’s review and my post about it at AppShopper.

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Five years ago

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Image courtesy of AP

Five years ago today, I left work soon after lunch and went to a local AT&T store to get a brand new iPhone, Apple’s first entry in the smartphone market. (I didn’t work in the technology journalism industry then and I wasn’t entirely truthful with my boss at that time about my reason for leaving early – I knew getting in line to buy a cell phone was not going to be acceptable). I was so excited to get my hands on it and immediately found it to be an improvement compared to the Treo 680 I had at that time.

Here’s a portion of what I posted about my purchase experience on my old blog on July 1, 2007 (I think I’ve since toned down my fangirl exuberance, at least a little):

By George, I’ve got it! My iPhone, that is. I waited in line for 2 hours at a local AT&T store (I thought an AT&T store would be less crazy than a local Apple store, and from what I’ve read, I was right) and picked up one of the last 8GB models they had. Luckily, I had no problems whatsoever activating it – within 3 minutes of plugging it into my Mac (I had downloaded iTunes 7.3 before I went to the store so I would be prepared to sync it immediately later), the SIM card in my Treo was deactivated and my iPhone was active. Syncing did take a long time the first time around, though I’m not sure exactly how much time since I left it alone after a few minutes and went to grab some dinner.

The iPhone is simply amazing and I absolutely love it so far. I’m getting some good use in and am working on my Treo 680 v. iPhone review each day. Already, I know that there a few things I miss from my Treo. One thing is searching for contacts via the keyboard – on the iPhone, you can only search by scrolling through all names directly or by using the alphabet shortcut visible on the right side. Another thing is to-do items. However, rumor has it that to-do’s may be in a software update when Leopard is released (along with an associated application on the Mac for Notes syncing). If this is the case, it looks like I’m going to be upgrading to Leopard sooner after it’s released rather than later.

Looking back at that post on my old site also reminds me that I’ve been blogging for more than five years now. It’s been an eventful five years, especially for Apple fans.

I don’t want to wax too nostalgic about a device that has changed so much for me but if you’re an iPhone owner, you probably already know what this is like. I’m definitely looking forward to the next five years of the iPhone and innovation in general in the consumer technology space.

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