Shortly after taking that photo the Apple store closed to transform it into an iPhone 3G store. The first step was the erection of a large black velour curtain of mystery to shroud the store and prevent prying eyes from glimpsing the goodness being assembled inside. Other than the occasionally Apple employee emerging from the curtain to go home and sleep (lucky them) the velour curtain of mystery was the only thing to be seen until 8am graced the Pacific time zone.

Waiting in line
The 12 hours in line actually wasn’t so bad. Much to the horror of the Apple Store the Alderwood Mall Security and Administration announced that folding chairs, sleeping bags, tents, and in general having fun were forbidden on property. They seemed to think that even allowing us to be on the property after the malls 10pm closing time was a special treat and yes, could we ask for another cup of porridge sir?

Aside from having to choose between sitting on the cold outdoor concrete and standing all evening we had a blast. The Gear Live crew came out in force to film the event and do some product giveaways for some iPhone cases and accessories. The night passed relatively quickly bringing us to 8am with a line of 250+ excited people iWaiting for the iPhone 3G.

The curtain drops
The velour curtain of mystery dropped and the doors flung open to an Apple store filled with excited Apple employees clapping and cheering us on. Being first in line provided a larger thrill than I expected – leaving my heart racing as I walked through their gauntlet of proffered high-5’s, cheering iAcolytes, and my own sleep-starved imaginations addition of a glowing visage of his holiness Jobs floating in the middle of the store looking down upon his dedicated flock.

The thrill was unfortunately short lived – the internet had indicated prior to opening that system problems had been making the launch difficult for those in time zones ahead of PST. Those problems had far from been worked out by the time us on the west coast were blessed with the coming of 8am. Due to the glitches it was roughly 45 minutes from the time I entered the store until I had been able to successfully purchased my 16GB white iPhone 3G. Even after the purchase the in store activation failed completely leaving me with a sleek and sexy hunk of plastic, plaintively begging to be plugged into iTunes for activation.

Time passes, the 30 minute drive home ensues…

The first several hours home were bittersweet. On the up side I was home and able to shower and sit on comfortable furniture. On the down side I was iPhone-less. Due to a glitch (which has been dubbed the iPocalypse by our beloved main stream media) everyone transitioning from a 1st generation iPhone to an iPhone 3G had their 1st generation iPhone deactivated during the process, so due to the unavailability of the Apple activation server neither the old nor new iPhone would work as a phone leaving me (and 100’s of thousands of others) phone-less and unable to make or receive calls.

While catching back up on work mail remotely I was forced to repeatedly plug my pearly white new toy into my iMac to wait several minutes for the dreaded timeout dialog to inform me that no, I couldn’t use my new toy, and no I couldn’t have a pony either.

After begging use of a neighbors condo and phone line for a few conference calls my precious toy suddenly popped to life upon one of my connection attempts to iTunes. The server-gerbils must have finally gotten their second wind as my iPhone 3G activated, and the sync process begun to restore all of my settings, applications, and media.

Lunch with a friend ensues during the <1 hour sync…

Finally home, and with a working iPhone 3G in hand the process of playing with my precious new toy could begin. Although a little rough around the edges (more on that in a minute) the experience is overall very positive. The 3G antenna provides fast data – combining the stunning software functionality of the iPhone with WiFi like internet access anywhere in a major city makes for a highly functional and productive experience. The two big new software features – Microsoft Exchange support and the iTunes App Store – add significant functionality and usability for both business and consumer users of the iPhone alike.

Although highly subjective I would venture to say that the iPhone 3G feels faster than the first generation iPhone. I’m unaware of if the processor it utilizes is any faster, or if this is merely a psychosomatic effect, but many tasks seem to execute faster. On the flip side a few of the new features seem to have regressed performance – the contacts application now takes several seconds to load as opposed to the nearly instant launch on my old iPhone. Also in the subjective category the iPhone’s virtual keyboard seems improved, although I would be hard pressed to put my finger on exactly how. The keyboard just seems more accurate and easier to use with the new phone.

Another highly subjective trait of the iPhone 3G is it’s sleekness. While the iPhone 3G is actually a millimeter thicker than it’s 1st generation predecessor it feels significantly slimmer and more comfortable in the hand. Much like it’s big brother the Macbook Air the use of organically curving sides hides it’s true heft and girth from the users perception.

Microsoft Exchange support
Exchange support is baked in to the iPhone 2.0 firmware. This feature is available to first generation iPhones and the iPhone 3G alike. After entering your email address, domain account, and password directly into your iPhone and accepting any domain policies (such as a PIN lock) from the Exchange Server you are set to go. Email, contacts, and calendar updates push to the iPhone from your Exchange Server as advertised keeping any business user in touch with their work. Full Microsoft Office support has also been added allowing the reading and review of all Microsoft Office formats including Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents.

The iTunes App store
The App Store provides the other killer feature – or is that features. While many have decried the iPhone previously for missing various functions those naysayers have been silenced through the ad-hoc addition of functionality. The App Store allows for the browsing, downloading, and updating of applications over WiFi or the cellular network and brings a host of more than 500 new applications to the iPhone. While many of these applications lack the polish of the Apple built applications a few do have that level of sophistication and as time goes on and the iPhone platform gains momentum the signal to noise ratio will surely get better and a plentitude of stunning and functional applications filling any hole left by the Cupertino designers.

Several of the highly polished apps that have impressed me are Twitterrific, Loopt, and Remote. I also downloaded a few games and was impressed by the general level of polish, however as a general rule I don’t engage in mobile gaming so I’m mostly ignoring them for now. I have a few loaded onto my iPhone should I ever find myself with a few spare moments to burn and no productive tasks I can accomplish (unlikely with an iPhone in hand).

Location based services
While the built in A-GPS service was far from my most anticipated feature of the iPhone 3G it’s instantly grown on me. I had thought of the GPS capabilities primarily in turns of mapping and turn by turn directions, however the iPhone 2.0 firmware and the iTunes App Store have proved me wrong: location based services can be so much more.

A rash of location based applications have sprung up, and to my surprise they are all amazingly useful. Loopt provides a service similar to Dodgeball or BrightKite allowing users to check in with their friends and see what’s up but it improves upon it’s predecessors by being entirely automatic. Users can set up contacts and determine what level of location awareness they want to grant to each of these contacts and then view the location of their friends on a Microsoft Virtual Earth powered map. By updating your location without having to search for a location or manually enter one in the use of Loopt can be quick and simple – open the app, check what’s up, and get on with your day.

Other less flashy uses of the location services on the iPhone 3G don’t fail to impress. Even something as simple as a weather location can be improved by automatically knowing where you are. After getting used to weather applications, restaurant review sites, and other miscellaneous applications starting up defaulted to showing me information contextually relevant to my current location I’m struck by how “dumb” the non-location aware web is. Somehow it now seems downright primitive to have to enter my zip code into a web form to view movie times.

The downside to the iPhone 3G
While the App Store, Exchange Support, and location based services are impressive the new iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 firmware still have their less rosy facets. The 2.0 firmware lacks the rock solid stability of the 1.1.4 firmware I had been using previously. My iPhone has randomly rebooted 4 times in the last two days – usually in association with one of the App store downloaded applications. Luckily this is likely just some growing pains with the new 2.0 firmware and hopefully a patch will be delivered soon which resolves the stability issues I’m seeing.

In addition to the crashes the iPhone 3G has a fraction of the battery life that the 1st generation iPhone had. This is undoubtedly the fault of the addition of 3G and GPS. I’ll have a more complete idea of how big the impact is after a few more days of usage, but I certainly have seen a reduction. Yesterday while out and about I was torturing my iPhone with 3G data and GPS usage tacking our groups progress through downtown and Greenlake using the Google Maps application. In less than 2 hours I had lost 60% of my battery life.

I’ll be the first to admit that using both the 3G and GPS radios simultaneously is likely the worst case scenario but it’s frustrating to see the battery drop so quickly given the stellar battery of the 1st generation iPhone. Luckily if it gets to be more of a problem than 3G is worth I can turn off the 3G radio and push mail to theoretically get the same or better battery life that I’m used to in exchange for losing out on the increased speed.

Final thoughts
While Apple and AT&T faltered with a very rough launch with activation server failures the iPhone 3G hardware combined with the iPhone 2.0 software make for a very big change to the mobile market as a whole. Apples vision of the iPhone being the personal computer of tomorrow is starting to show through the smoke and mirrors. The iTunes App Store will allow developers freedom to create amazing new experiences, and the well implemented support for Microsoft Exchange will help the iPhone venture into the enterprise and tap the booming market for business-oriented smartphones.

A special thanks to Brian and Brien for indulging my geeky little psychosis and watching Skype for the night.

While their earbuds are amazingly comfortable and sound great they have severe build quality issues which results in frequent failure. After repairing the headphone sheath as described in the review and then replacing them entirely when they stopped working I have had to replace them two more times directly through the V-Moda warranty program for a total of three replacements in under 9 months.

The first time I replaced them through RMA I was a little irked that the process took almost two weeks. This time around V-Moda has gone silent once I shipped the defective earbuds back to them. UPS has proof that they were delivered and signed for, however V-Moda initially couldn’t find them (and wanted the tracking number again), and now refuses to even respond to emails regarding the warranty program.

It’s sad really – the Vibe Duo’s are the most comfortable, and among the best sounding headphones I’ve ever used. When they work I sing praises to my fellow man about the glory that is the Vibe Duo, but since in the last 9 months since I bought my first pair I’ve been through 3 pairs, and without their delicious sound for more than 6 weeks I can’t honestly recommend anyone purchase them if they in the slightest value reliability or customer service.

I’ve filed an official complaint with the Better Business Bureau to see if that might get me traction on getting my promised replacement pair. The full text of the complaint is below for public record.

Complainant Information
About 3 weeks ago my Vibe Duo earbuds stopped working and I contacted the company asking for a replacement pair. They sent a form letter with a ticket number (Ticket ID: ZWL-207849) and asked that I mail the broken earbuds to their mailing address. (V-Moda, 6464 sunset blvd. suite 500, hollywood ca 90028)

I sent the earbuds back via UPS (tracking number: -tracking number redacted-) and then didn’t hear anything back for 2 weeks. UPS confirms that the package was delivered 2 weeks prior, 2 days after shipment.

I re-contacted them asking for status and they took 3 days to respond and their response was that they needed the tracking number. I sent an email providing the tracking number and have not heard back from them. I have sent them two additional emails asking for status updates and to complete the RMA with no response. Each of my last 3 emails has included all of my contact information as well as the tracking number.

Resolution Sought: I would like the RMA to be completed and to receive the replacement earbuds for the ones sent their way (at their instruction).
Date Problem Started: 05/28/2008
Date of Transaction: 05/28/2008
Amount in Dispute: $110.00
Invoice Number: ZWL-207849
Complaint Type: Refund Promised
Product or Service: V-Moda offers “high end” earbuds.

Update: Mere hours after the posting of this article V-Moda got back to me with status on the warranty replacement and the happy news that they would be shipping the replacement Duos right away. The communication did not mention if the Better Business Bureau or this article had any influence on their response but the timing certainly is suspicious. The note included an apology stating that they had moved offices which had caused delays. While finally getting contact is nice V-Moda’s inability to properly set expectations was inexcusable.

Good customer service does not always mean instant resolution on an issue, but it always means rapidly responding to contact and setting expectations properly. After 9 days of sending mails to V-Moda with no response any customer is going to be frustrated – a frustration which could have simply been avoided with a quick email on day one stating that they had received the communication and would have an official response within two weeks.

In conclusion I can no longer heartily recommend the Vibe Duos to iPhone owners seeking headsets. Don’t get me wrong – I love my Vibe Duos, they sound great and are super comfortable but after 3 failures and such abysmal customer service I’m left with both a sour taste in my mouth and a sadness in my heart that if history is any indication my replacement Duos won’t last longer than 3-4 months .

Getting on the flight was also an interesting experience. I’m not sure if this is normal for international flights but they had a long line of customs agents lining the hallway to the plane as I entered and were pulling every other passenger or so off to ask them conversational questions about their trip and duration. I suspect given the way the conversation happened that they were looking for nervousness or other signs of illicit activity.

While Northwest Airlines is no British Airways or Virgin it does manage to impress with a few amenities. Most notably is the inclusion of standard united states AC power outlets for each seat enabling laptop usage during the entire 12 hour flight without the use of additional batteries or proprietary charging adapters.

Aside from the availability of power (sweet, sweet power) the Airbus plane I’m on features a small screen embedded into the back of every seat. Coupled with a wired remote control in the armrest this screen is theoretically supposed to offer on-demand movies, in-flight information, games, and a variety of ways to part from one’s money. However the particular linux-powered system in my (rather the row of seats I am currently occupying) seems to have some problems as after three hard resets they still can’t get movies working. The attendant offered me 5,000 air miles for my trouble, but as I fly about once a year it wasn’t really worth the trouble of filling out the paperwork to claim them. Poor me.

*** time passes ****

I’m currently hurtling above the Atlantic ocean near Greenland at approximately 580MPH. As such the flight has been blessedly uneventful. The food service is average at best, but not so bad when I factor the fact that it’s being served to me 36,995 feet in the air while hurtling along at nearly the speed of sound.

I’ve been struck by how many male flight attendants there are on this flight. In my past experiences most flight crews have been predominately female – a stark departure from this 2:1 male to female ratio I’m seeing for this one. I wonder if that’s because this is an international flight, because this is a Northwest flight, or if I’m just lucky to get some decent eye candy on the 10 hour leg of my journey.

*** more time passes ***

While whisking along through the air I decided to flip through my download of Little Brother, Cory Doctorow’s latest book. It’s actually a fairly creepy book to read given how close it smacks to the truth. The subject of the book is a kid, barely 17, who is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is detailed and questioned for potential involvement in a terrorist act. Having just been questioned needlessly by customs while leaving the country I’m suddenly even more aware at how the United States government has become just a little too Orwellian of late, all in the name of protection.

*** even more time passes ***

Well, Little Brother is done, and an excellent book. Bravo to Cory for writing in a language that the up and coming generation can understand bringing light to an issue that often adults find confusing. I highly recommended reading it – wether from a free download from Cory’s website or by purchasing it from your local retailer (and thus supporting Cory).

On a less related note I’m very glad that this plane has AC outlets. I’m already more than 8 hours into this flight and think that without the digital comfort provided by my laptop in the form of books, movies, and music I would have gone stir crazy by now. As is I think I’m on the verge of stir crazy just based on the fact that I’ve essentially been sitting in the same cramped and uncomfortable seat for 8 hours straight without standing up now. I can’t wait for the flight to land (less than 2 hours now) so I can stretch my legs and get some circulation going again.

*** time passes, but not much ***

Although walking about is discouraged I finally couldn’t take it any more. I managed to do a few laps around the plane (and hit the frighteningly small bathroom). It wasn’t much, but after 8 hours I’m not too picky when it comes to stretching my legs.

I’m now struck by the prevailing fact that I’m further from my home (or my birthplace) than I’ve ever been before. In the grand scheme of things it’s pretty trivial to be 4,037 miles away from Seattle (if the in-seat entertainment unit is to be trusted) given how man is on the verge of exploring the universe and expanding our horizons on a cosmic scale, but it’s still a big deal for me.

I’m very interested to see what my personal take on Europe is going to be. Somehow it now seems strange to only have a single viewpoint on life, to have only seen the American way. From what I’ve heard the rest of the world is a very different place – I’m eager to see how different (and how the same) it really is from the reality I’ve known my whole life.

*** 700 miles remaining to Amsterdam ***

As I’m sure my mother could attest I’m not so good at sitting still. I’m not so good at traveling either. I guess combining the two is one of those little personal tests one must go through to experience the world. Weird thing is that if my 101 goals are to be believed then I’ll be doing this all over to visit Japan, and then a miniature version of this to see the east coast of the United States.

Side note: I wonder what kind of coffee will greet me at the Amsterdam International Airport. Regardless of type, quality, or concentration I can assure you that immediately upon landing coffee will be consumed.

*** 48 minutes remaining to touchdown ***

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Now? Soon? Are we there yet?

Further side note: The iProduct is ubiquitous. Of the approximately 30 people I can see from my vantage here in the bowels of a giant plane I can count no less than 18 of them using the signature white earbuds. Sadly I myself am in this lot while I wait for my Vibe Duo’s to come back (yet again) from Vibe after their last failure.

*** the second leg ***

I’m currently on the second (and much shorter) leg of my journey. Nate and I made it to Amsterdam and got a chance to stretch our legs and wander about the Amsterdam airport for a few hours. Now that we have boarded our final leg we have less than one hour remaining until we land in Germany.

I’m busy cramming Learn German 101 podcasts trying to brush up my vocabulary to a meager minimum to allow me to get by. Yes – I realize that on the plane to Germany is likely not the best time to be learning German, but really when it comes right down to it I think this falls into the ‘better late than never’ category.

I’m quite looking forward to landing and getting checked in to our hotel. We will be landing at roughly 2pm local time and have the rest of the day free. After a quick shower I’m hoping to get out into Berlin with my camera and get in a little tourist time before the HP PSG event starts and I get sucked into work related stuff.

HP has graciously loaned me one of their new HP Mini-Note 2133 ultra-portable PC’s for my trip to Berlin. Now that it has joined my Macbook Pro and EeePC 900 on the desk things are starting to get a little out of hand.

A few initial thoughts twittered on setup to be included in my upcoming HP 2133 vs. EeePC 900 Battle Royale:

• HP 2133 has a much nicer keyboard
• HP 2133 has a cleaner design
• HP 2133 has a faster processor (1.6Ghz vs. 900Mhz)
• HP 2133 has more RAM (2GB vs. 1GB)
• EeePC 900 has more USB 2.0 ports (3 vs. 2)
• EeePC 900 is slimmer and lighter
• EeePC 900 is cheaper ($550 vs. $729-819)
• EeePC 900 is easier to dual boot with Ubuntu

My new EeePC
I picked up one of Asus’s delightfully tiny new netbooks, the EeePC. A netbook is a new category of sub-notebook device with low end specs designed primarily for browsing the web. The EeePC clocks in at a measly 900Mz, but at 9″ and under 3 lbs it’s easy to forgive it’s specs in lieu of it’s ultimate portability. So far I’m finding it an ideal email machine for use at meetings at work, and as a great bedroom/couch machine for keeping an eye on the tubes while relaxing or watching movies.

Being entirely solid state (the EeePC 900 series comes with 12GB of flash memory rather than a hard drive with spinning platters) it’s shock resistant, and gets surprisingly good performance for it’s diminutive specs. Due to the random access nature of flash memory the EeePC boots quickly and gets great battery life (3 hours of real use). While solid state drive (SSD) technology is still not competitive in price or storage capacity to typical hard drive (HDD) technology I can see the potential and am starting to get excited about the predictions that in 2011 or so SSD will all but completely replace HDD technology in notebooks and desktops.

While the EeePC 900 I picked up came pre-loaded with Windows XP I’ve done some experimentation with putting Ubuntu on it. As with my typical annual cycle I attempt to put some variant of Linux on my computers to see how the OS X/Windows competition is doing. This time however I was surprised – the latest Hardy Heron (8.04) release of Ubuntu is slick, polished, and works ‘out of the box’ on all the hardware I had laying around. While Ubuntu might be getting attention as a decent desktop alternative where I think it really shines is on a low end PC like the EeePC – it’s limited feature set and lean architecture work perfectly on a device with CPU and memory constraints.

Movies
Being a 3 day weekend I took the opportunity to see a couple of movies with Brien and Brian. We saw both Indiana Jones 4: The Crystal Skull, and Iron Man. Both movies were excellent (if not over the top) and fun movies to see while on holiday. I was never the hardcore fan of the Indy series that Brien was, and much to his horror I actually liked the newest one best from the series. It captured the fun essence of the earlier flicks while maintaining a fresh and modern feel even while being set in not so modern times.

Iron man also kept a modern feel, although it did so with a very modern setting. Having never read the comic book I assume I missed out on a lot of the back story, but still found the story presented in the movie touching and engaging. Having grown up idolizing gadget superhero (Hello, Inspector Gadget) it’s nice to see a modern take on a technological super-hero. Final note on the movie: I need a flying metal suit, that looks fun!

Lensbabied sneaker opus
Last but not least, a quick shot I took with my Lensbaby 2G while out on a photo walk on Saturday. I’ve been using my 18mm and 50mm primes a lot and decided to take the Lensbaby out and go for a stroll. I’m certainly glad I did as one of the resulting shots is a clear winner in my odd little abstract world.

The article also points out that the iPhone is far from dominant with only 2.2% of the total US cellphone market, although if you ask me that’s a pretty impressive feat having not been on the market a full year and costing $500. I find it interesting that the iPhone beats out all Windows Mobile phones (none of which even show up in the top 25), and is rapidly gaining on RIM’s Blackberry devices.

My first impressions are mostly positive. The PS3 obviously has a bit more horsepower under the hood than the Xbox 360 and sports a cleaner and more modern UI to boot. Unfortunately Sony seems to have made a few odd user experience choices, but overall I’m highly impressed. I have yet to toy with the PSP Remote Play functionality but I plan to dive deep into that in the coming weeks to see just what my new toy is capable of.

As far as games go I’ll likely still do the majority of my gaming on the Xbox 360 platform, but the Sony Store has a few interesting downloadable games – most notably is PixelJunk Monsters. Monsters is based on Element Tower Defense (which I’ve been addicted to before) but sports high def graphics, open gameplay levels, and even more addictive-like-crack gameplay. I lost a good 3 hours to it this afternoon and will likely spend much of the next few weeks trying to master each of its 20 levels – not too shabby for an under $10 purchase (console not included obviously).

My life is now complete: I have an electronic yodeling pickle on it’s way to my home as I type this. Thanks Shiny Shiny!

That day has finally come – my Lutron smart dimmers arrived, have been installed, and are now hooked into my Logitech Harmony home theater automation remote with great results. With a little help from Brien the dimmers are installed, and the wiring is now again safely hidden away behind nice looking wall plates.

The Lutron Maestro IR smart dimmer intelligently fades the lights up and down to preset levels at the touch of a button on my Harmony remote. With the track lights dimmed properly and pointed away from the TV screen it bathes my movie goers in soft warm light while avoiding distracting reflections on the TV.

Next up: painting the living room a darker color to help reduce light bounce around the room. The question has become deep midnight blue, or rich royal red?

I’m a week late with the post, but better late than never. My adult lighting project has finally made a major splash on my living room. The new track lighting offers beautiful even lighting for the seating area without casting reflections on the TV screen thus bringing my home theater one step further to completion (thanks Brien!).

Sadly it’s still not 100% complete – I’m still waiting on Seattle Lighting to deliver on the Lutron Maestro programmable dimmer switch that I ordered. Without the dimmer switch the lighting is somewhat unusable as the full on setting is almost blindingly bright. Once the dimmer switch arrives I can hook it in to the rest of my home theater automation and allow the lights in the house to dim when I go into movie mode with my Logitech Harmony programmable remote.

While on the topic I have a mixed review of Seattle lighting – they have an amazing selection and access to some equipment nobody else in Seattle can get, but on the flip side they have horrible customer service. I placed my order in late December and was told that my whole order would take 2 weeks (3 tops) to arrive. Nearly 3 months late the bulk had arrived, and now over three months later the last dimmer switch is still pending. I wouldn’t have minded so much, but they did a terrible job of managing my expectations – constantly telling me it would be ‘just a few more days’ every time I called in for status updates.

Oh yeah – and the transformer they sold me was bad. Good for them that they replaced it quickly, and not really their fault; but with bad taste in my mouth from the weeks of getting jerked around by their customer service it was really the arsenic and ass icing on the cake.

The entire user experience is re-envisioned to be more flashy – much more fun to use. The fact that the AppleTV can now independently sync podcasts, buy music and TV shows on the iTunes media store, and rent movies makes for a most delectable icing on an already moist and delicious media cake.

For some strange reason I decided upon Hairspray as test of the new HD rental service. The rental experience was a breeze – two clicks of the remote (plus a one-time password entry) and the HD movie was playing with surprisingly good quality within two minutes.

I went into Hairspray with low expectations and came away impressed. The movie is fun, engaging, and oddly thought provoking. Don’t get me wrong – it’s completely campy and over the top, but really well executed. The music and choreography is well thought out and the cinematographer did a great job of showcasing some of the dance moves without distracting the viewer with too much camera movement.

Featuring fantastic performances by John Travolta, Christopher Walken (it had been so long since I’d seen the Weapon of Choice music video I’d almost forgot how good a dancer he is), and new to film actress Nikki Blonsky who leads the film with confidence and flair.

For the record: John Travola in drag is just plain wrong, but wrong in the kind of way that I can get behind. Travolta in drag for President 08!

Yes I’m OK. Yes I was a little numb for a while. And surprisingly I’m actually more pro-Taser than I was before this whole thing started. It’s effective at dropping you for sure, but really doesn’t leave lasting harm, and assuming you don’t have any weird medical problems it’s surprisingly safe from what I’ve read.

Oh yeah – and you can get the file here if you really want it. A longer version with far more details including what lead up to this will be posted to Gear Live in the next couple of days.

Update: The Gear Live video (which is over 7 minutes long and has a lot more lead up, comedy, and wonderfulness) has gone live. check it out, or better yet give it a digg.

The new lighting will arrive in 2-3 weeks and consists of track lighting over the couch, decorative accent lighting for near the screen, and Lutron Maestro home automation switches to let my Logitech Harmony programmable uber-remote control the lighting for home theater macro’s.

Best part of it is this light, the Lightstik. The base is electrified (very weak current – you can’t feel it with your fingers) and the LED sticks just sit in there. The moment they make contact with the base unit they light up.

On the plus side I picked up an Airport Extreme to replace my slowly dying Linksys Gigabit-N router. The Airport Extreme has blown my socks off – not only is it drop dead simple to configure, but my Macbook Pro Lanshark connects at 300Mbps and gets 21MB/sec actual throughput at 1.4ms latency. Impressive!

While at the Leopard launch last night Mike picked up an 8Gb 3rd generation iPod Nano for his daughter. While over at their house this morning I was amused to see he was having trouble registering the Nano. Every time he tries to sign in with his Apple ID he gets the puzzling error “This person record requires harvesting.” (click the image above for a full sized view).

While I’m sure it has a valid technical meaning it’s a strange message to show to an end user. It almost makes me wonder – what kind of harvesting is Apple talking about here, a kidney or a crop?

The launch event itself was an interesting experience. Apple really does know how to work a crowd, and the energy and passion it’s employees (retail and engineering alike) bring to work with them makes for a really positive experience for Apple’s customers.

Leopard itself is a neat little upgrade. The upgrade itself actually works really well – I didn’t lose any of my documents, settings, or preferences. Aside from Quicksilver being stuck in my dock (not the menubar where it really belongs) everything works flawlessly on Lanshark – Photoshop even stayed fully activated. Leopard is nothing revolutionary, but it really does add a lot of polish to OS X and makes for a worthwhile upgrade.

For the first time ever I actually kind of like the Finder. Quicklook (the ability to preview just about any document without the overhead of opening it’s parent application) is handy and makes confirmation that you have the document you are looking for brain dead simple. Spotlight is vastly improved featuring much faster searches, operators, and network search abilities.

Aside from the Leopard launch I was also thrilled to find out my Gmail account finally got IMAP enabled. The IMAP implementation is well done, and it makes Gmail’s iPhone experience as slick as their browser experience. Being able to have Mail.app cache my gmail account is handy as well for having my webmail searchable via the OS just like the rest of my personal knowledge store.

The final great thing to enter my life yesterday was Puzzle Quest for the DS. Puzzle Quest is a fun little RPG/Puzzler game that a couple of friends had suggested and it’s quite fun. It offers quick-in, quick-out gameplay – a fun addition to my go bag.

The traffic I faced last night was in stark contrast to my ride in to work this morning. Some asshat scheduled an early morning meeting on a Friday so I was driving in at 7:10 – with practically no traffic. There is something weird about driving at 60mph in the dark on a freeway I rarely get to accelerate past 20 on – it felt forbidden and exhilarating.

Leopard launches tonight. Excitement!

I am pleased to announce that I am typing this post up from my shiny new workstation. I’ve decided to pretty much go all mobile again so it was time to trade my Marbles the Macbook in for it’s daddy, a nicely equiped 15″ Macbook Pro. I’ve dubbed my new aluminum friend Lanshark – a name inspired by my beloved pit bull Skype (the one and only real land shark.

When Apple announced their Up-to-Date Program that offers recent purchasers of Apple hardware the Leopard update for $10 – normally priced at $129, or included with any new Mac. I worked a little financial magic, confirmed the sale of Marbles for a reasonable price and dropped down to the Apple Store to pick it up.

A few first thoughts on Lanshark:

• Even though Lanshark has virtually the same processor as Marbles did the extra Video RAM and faster FSB make the computer feel noticeably faster.
• I can’t even begin to put into words how much I love the backlit keyboard. I really missed it when I traded in my G4 Powerbook for the Macbook and I’m 100% glad to have it back.
• The Macbook Pro is one sleek design masterpiece. My Thinkpad T61 at work is roughly the same speed and specs as Lanshark, but both the industrial design and the hardware integration are years behind it’s shiny competitor.
• The design of the packaging has improved a lot – my Powerbook came in a box roughly twice the size of the Macbook Pro, while both notebooks have nearly identical dimensions.

And now back to your regularly scheduled Portal playing action.

The Seattle Times writes about a new study that finds people love their Roombas. The headline would make one think they enjoyed the functionality the robotic vacuum offers, but as the study found a far more anthropomorphic relationship present in many owners who go so far as to name their Roombas and worry about them while they were in the shop for repairs.

I’m all for robots and find this to be a step in the right direction. Until recently a lot of people have feared the idea of household robots, and the jobs they would take but apparently the public opinion is shifting for the better. As the personal robotics market evolves over the next few years it will be interesting to watch how the public opinion changes as they see more and more household tasks made simple through technology.

I just got done blogging the rollout out their new Starbucks WiFi Music Store here in Seattle and I’m aquiver with coffee as a result. This morning I happened to stop into the Starbucks for a latte when I remembered that the new partnership for free iTunes access at Starbucks retail locations was lighting up in Seattle this morning so I whipped out my iPhone to check it out. The new Starbucks review is a good sister article to they soon to be posted in-depth review I did of the new iTunes WiFi Music Store.

Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me in the morning so I had to come back to review it over lunch about 90 minutes later. Between the quad shot earlier, and a triple over lunch I’m completely wired. *Bzzzt* *Bzzzt* *Bzzzt* *Bzzzzzzt*

Luckily I don’t have anything left on my to-do list for today so I’m pretty much free to lay on my couch watching movies with Skype. Finally getting a long weekend is really helping me feel a lot more relaxed from all the activity at work recently. Now for the rest of The Matrix Revolutions and then perhaps a little Lord of the Rings to continue on with the epic feel.

The WiFi music store lets users purchase songs on-the-go using any WiFi hotspot which essentially puts the entire multi-million track library of iTunes in your pocket – perfect for a quick impulse buy from time to time. It would be perfect for the impulse-heavy consumer like me – if it worked on my iPhone!

I’m having store authorization problems so I can’t actually buy anything right now. It’s rejecting my credentials to the point of locking my account, when I know I’m entering them correctly. I even verified my credentials on a desktop just to make sure I wasn’t having a senior moment.

I wrote up up a more detailed report of my WiFi Music Store experience for Gear Live if you want to know more. For now I’ll have to sulk about with my existing library while on-the-go and be content with the other features released today.

I just posted a couple of great articles to Gear Live on the Apple iPhone. First up is a bit of commentary and a link to the usability study performed by Computerworld which pits Apple’s iPhone, the HTC Touch, and the Nokia N95 against each other in a usability battle royale. Obviously the iPhone scores high marks, but there are some other interesting insights to be garnered from the review relating to how it differs from it’s main competitors in the touch-based phone world.

Next up I posted my in-depth review of the Vaja iVolution Top SP Holster case (featured in the image above) which is my current favorite iPhone accessory. It’s both stylish and protective – a great combination for a sexy device like the iPhone. You can check out the full review here.

“Vaja iVolution Top SP Holster for the iPhone” by sparktography

The re-launch of my Gear Live writing career starts with an in-depth review of the V-Moda Vibe Duos. There are a lot more exciting things coming to the site (including a fantastic new site design launching soon) so bookmark Gear Live and stay tuned for more announcements! If you just want to see the posts I’ve written you can always look at the filtered view of my posts on Gear Live.