I’m feeling very conflicted about keeping my iphone 3G. Is it shiny? Yes. Does it make calls? Yes. Does it tether? sort of…

iPhone Tethering

The most important thing about getting a phone was that I would be able to get high speed internet anywhere I was. I was really looking forward to that functionality. So far I’ve had occasion to use it twice tethered with my laptop and both experiences were lack luster. I followed this guide and tried a few different things. I did manage to get all my apps to connect to the internet by setting my entire computer to use the SOCKS proxy settings required, so at least I could use all my apps with out reconfiguring every last one of them.

Problems with tethering

The biggest problem with tethering is that it depends on your iphone to maintain the right route to the internet, that is to say, it has to continually default to it’s 3G or edge connection for the proxy to function. This has not been my experience, every 5 minutes or so my iphone would default back to the wifi connection and I’d need to reload a page on the iphone to reset the route. That is a pain in the ass and a piece of functionality that is very easy to use in almost every other damn smart phone. Plus it kills the battery life.

So can I really justify paying for an expensive data plan when I could do what I want on any other smart phone for much cheaper? I have a little more than a week to decide whether or not I will take my phone back. What do you think?

I found a bug in time machine, at least on my machine anyway. For those of you that don’t know what time machine is it’s the backup software built in to OS X. With my recently acquired 1 terabyte HDD I thought I was all ready to start doing backups. I was wrong.

Time Machine messes up my computer

It’s sad but Time Machine appears to cause all my USB 2.0 ports to slowdown to 1 MB/s which is actually slower than my internet connection. That means transferring files is a CRAZY huge pain which is funny because that’s the only thing an external hdd can possibly be used for.

When I first discovered the problem I searched around Google a little bit but was so frustrated I decided to call Apple. Normally I just read the literature and fix my problems my self. But I was in a hurry and I couldn’t find anything quick and I was so mad at my computer that I just wanted to have it solved.

Calling Apple Support

While the guy on the support line was polite he couldn’t help me because I’d had my computer more than a year. His solution was to open up a support line for $45 or schedule an appointment with an “Apple Genius.” I grumbled never mind and hung up.

I got a survey in my email from Apple wondering how my tech support phone call went. I told them horrible and that I was dissatisfied; not because of the tech support rep but because of the policy.

Quickly, I forgot about the whole thing and just stopped using Time Machine (that seems to fix the problem).

A follow up phone call

To my surprise Apple called me yesterday about the survey. They saw that I was very dissatisfied and wanted to see what the problem was. I told them that I understood the policy that I can’t get support because my purchase is more than a year old but that it seemed to me that because I had never asked them for anything, not even a single phone call, that it would be nice to get the help I was looking for.

I’m a really low maintenance customer for just about everything, I do all my troubleshooting by myself or using “the google” and I don’t require much out of Apple other than that my computer work. Because of that I sort of feel like the one time I call, regardless of how long it’s been since I bought my product, I ought to get a little help.

“Steven” the apple guy that called me, told me he thought it was a good idea and that it might shape policy in the future (I know, I know, that’s like getting a winning banner ad on the internet; but still it made me feel good). He even went through the trouble of sending me some more literature on my problem.

Hey, awesome.

So kudos to Apple support, thanks for following up with an unsatisfied customer and making them satisfied. My next computer will be the same brand as the one Im typing this blog on

With blogs being all the rage that they are they attract a lot of attention from Spammers. Many new bloggers don’t really know how to spot a spammer so here are some of the things that I use.

What to lookout for

Watch out when a someone says says “I saw your site on google,” “I saw your site on technorati,” or “I found your site through a friend”. All of these statement are obviously false because I’m practically invisible on google and technorati and everyone knows that I don’t have friends, let alone friends that read my blog.

Other things spammers say with my response

• “WoW Gold for cheap” - Wow, I can find gold for cheap?!
• “Viagatrex [followed by anything]“ - Why wouldn’t I want someone to come tell me about new exciting drugs on my blog!
• “Exciting business opportunity…” - There’s only one Exciting business opportunity I’m interested in.
• “QSDVJssZDESXz!!1″ - No thanks, I’m trying to quit.

A lot of people that have upgraded to leopard have had problems with quicksilver which stays on the dock/launch bar despite having unchecked the “show quicksilver in dock” checkbox.

It’s easy to fix, just update quicksilver to the latest version, if blacktree’s website is still down you can get it off of softpedia: here

Volia, no more broken quicksilver in Leopard!

For a list of other applications that have issues with Leopard and possible fixes look at softpedia’s list of broken apps

The author MEH who has recently been featured has responded to my last post via e-mail. I was touched by her story and will now share the e-mail, un-edited except for the name, with all of you now. So touching…

Hello Dan,

One of my associates has reviewed my blog post and It has come to my attention that you may not have been serious about your recent offer of shares in an undisclosed “forture”… I feel I must explain and defend my rather scathing comments about your “offer”.

I, like many others, have suffered from a debilitating neurological disease from birth and as a result I have no sense of humour. I enjoy posting on forums and commenting on blogs but, more often than not, end up making myself look a little silly by taking everything at face value due to my humour deficiency.

All too often able-homoured people, like yourself, poke fun at our comments and single us out for ridicule. It is simply not possible for us to take these retorts with a pinch of salt as we cannot, to use a phrase which I find personally offensive, “See the funny side of it”. If the British government wake up and officially recognise our disability I will be handing this matter over to my solicitors and have you in court for discrimination!

Yours,
Sgt. Censored (Mrs)

I feel for your plight, I really do. I would even petition the British government to wake up and “recognise” your disability except that you would then take me to court for discrimination.

On the other hand, I don’t live in England so it shouldn’t be a problem, aw what the heck; I WILL petition the british government to recognize your horrible ailment!

May you too, be able to enjoy the laugh track of your own life MEH. I wish you better humour in the future.

You can not tell me that this doesn’t look like Justin. Maybe the eye color is off but it’s pretty much his spitting image.

Speaking of dopplegangers, I sort of hate all the sites they have these days to make “avatars.” “Using advanced asp, java, flash or whatever you can make your own avatar!” I’ve actually had the technology to make my own avatar for years, its called mspaint. You’re not limited to a set of different character traits, instead you can make whatever you want! I’m not the only one either just search flickr. There are some real gems.

If only we would all have awesome icons such as this one pictured below.

---

What a wonderful world it would be.

This evening’s festivities involved a short drive from Sherwin Williams to my house. The exact route is shown here on google maps.

Gary and I were talking about the car market in Provo and Gary and I conducted an experiment on the way home from Sherwin Williams we counted every car dealership we found.

We counted 12 in a mile and a half route (less as the crow flies).

There are 12 car dealerships in one direction of my house. I know for a fact there are more the other way and the funny thing is that this isn’t even the part of town you think of as where all the car dealerships are. If someone tells me they’re at a car dealership I assume they are up on University Pkwy on the other side of town.

Reader question, why does utah have so many car dealerships?

We’re all familiar with the famous words of Ben Parker.

With great power comes great responsibility!

When remembering these words I can’t help but think of Google, the “do no evil company.”

Ben Parker enjoys his “damn paper for once”

They do have a great responsibility but imagine all the fun they could have if they stopped taking their responsibility seriously. It would be even better than Emo Parker trying to act cool in a jazz club (seriously, wtf was that all about?)Google could do all kinds of things to make the internet more interesting. You ask how they will accomplish that? It’s simple, Google rewards different behavior and all of the sudden everyone wants to do whatever it is that google rewards!

I apologize again for doing everything in list format lately but here goes

Introducing: How Google can make the Internet more interesting

Reward the use of animated gifs.

Imagine, instantly all the SEOs would rush to put animated gifs all over their sites. It would throw the internet back to it’s hayday, circa 1995, when that kind of thing was totally acceptable, nay, totally tubular.

Reward the use of embedded midis

Now days kids all have to have their lastFM and their pandora or yahoo music, or even their “itunes” so they can enjoy music while they surf the web. If embedded audio became hip again then we wouldn’t need silly music players anymore because each and every website would have it’s own unique soundtrack! Recently gthing did a post about how to find good music but if Google would just reward embedded audio we would all find more of it every day just by surfing the web!
An added bonus could be if their were multiple pieces of audio that would load simultaneously. Then you could discover all kinds of music at the same time

Reward contrast

If Google’s algorithm looked at how contrasted the colors on a page were we would get all kinds of web design gems! Most pages would be black and white strict with no gray but other pages would venture out into other contrasts, strict red and green combined with flashing text and embedded audio! Wouldn’t that be awesome!?

Come to think of it Google doesn’t have to do anything to inundate the internet with insanity. Myspace already did it. (Warning:The previous link may cause bleeding from unexpected orifices

That’s right folks. Check your feed reader have you noticed anything strange? No body is updating their blogs! I’m not the only one with nothing to report but all across the blogosphere the latest entries are getting older and older.

The only people on my feed that have updated anything latley are the loggers (ie the people that just tell you what they did the previous day) as for regular style blog entries, with their sass and frass, have decreased almost 74%! (see Pacman graph for details.)

I have a few theories as to why this is happening.

People are too busy seeing the Transformers movie to blog

Would be bloggers are enjoying the “swimming hole” and “good ‘ol fashion fun” rather than writing their salty entries.

Generally being outside rather than nestled into the security of an internet connection

Worst case senario: everyone got girlfriends and don’t care about the internet anymore.

When I chose my cellphone number over a year ago I was going for something that was close to my brothers phone number. Little did I know that the former phone proprietor had a similar namesake to my own. It wasn’t long will I was taking calls for his booty calls, young women that I spent 20 minutes on the phone with trying to figure out how in the world I knew them. Finally, it dawned on me that I didn’t know who these people were.

The booty calls stopped (when I stopped providing the booty) and I lived in peace for a while.

Then another kind of call started coming, blockbuster, once a week would call me and tell me they were going to start charging me for my overdue movies. Turns out Tom never changed his phone number on his blockbuster account. Then today I got a completly different kind of call.

Check it via my chat logs(or logz if you’re “GaNgStA”

Ronin 10:28: DUDE!
ok, you know how I’ve been getting phone calls for this Tom dude for the last year and a half?
they’ve mostly died down

Jon - 10:29: yeah
Ronin- 10:29: but this is the call I just got:
-: Hi Tom?
Me:- Nope, this is Dan
-: oh..I was trying to call this number ###-####
Me: Yeah, thats my number but that’s not me. Who were you looking for?
-: Tom ***** from Vizad
Me: Wait…from Vizad?
The guy that had my phone before was at VIZAD!?

After tracking Tom for a while, I finally know where he is. Now the game is on!