If The News Is To Be Believed
I heard it reported that the CDMA iPhone for Verizon is coming early next year. While I have no great complaints about the AT&T service, I think the availability of the iPhone on Verizon will be dispositive. At least for me. I will probably opt for achange of carrier and a new iteration Apple's charming little device when that happens. Absent the change, I'll just keep chugging along with my already two-iterations-back unit.
There is something about a new cellie, isn't there?

The New iPhone
Helluva thing. The redesign is sleek and elegant. The feature set is decidedly improved. I'd love to have one. But I'm no where the end of my contract on the one I have. So: no. Maybe later.

File In "I Love Technology"
I just downloaded a free app for the iPhone - a WiFi based remote control for iTunes. So now I can control my iTunes from anywhere in my house. Why is this such a big deal? It all comes down to my need for talk radio. Rush is broadcast locally on a station that routinely gets a rotten signal in my house. And in my kitchen, despite the nice Bose Wave radio, it doesn't come in at all. So I moved my old iMac to the kitchen to use as an iTunes "server" and to sometimes web surf. But if I boot up the 'puter, the radio goes completely fuzzed out with interference. So then I can only run either FM stations or the computer signal through the AUX jack.
There are problems. Booting up the computer takes time and not a little effort to reach the start button given that the edge behind which said button lurks is the most distant from being easily reached. And the iMac takes up not a little space. Not a lot of space but not a little either. Yet there is a work-around. I have an Airport Express unit (about 2 inches square and and inch thick) which can serve iTunes from a remote machine to, say, a stereo in a different room. So I could leave my main machine booted up and running iTunes to send the signal to the little Airport box and save myself some kitchen space.
I can see you thinking, "But how will he control iTunes if he's in the kitchen and the iMac that's sending his radio is on a whole 'nother level?" Ha ha! Apple has thought of that already. The app store has a free Apple app called "Remote" that I mentioned at the opening of this post. I downloaded it, sync'd it to my iTunes (very easy) and started controlling my musical domain. Then the sticking point hit me. I don't see any controls to run iTunes radio on the remote. Bugger. But my Google Fu is strong. It turns out (and I did not know this) that you can make a playlist of radio stations! And once I did that, I had access to the stations I needed on the remote.
Tomorrow will be the set-up of the Airport Express and then the great experiment should be finished. I love technology that does what I want.

I Love Technology
I just downloaded a free app for my iPhone that takes dictation. That's right, I said "free." I tried it last night and it's not perfect (though spelling a name in a standard way for someone who uses a variant spelling really can't be faulted). But it works pretty darn well. I can talk to the phone and then have the text sent to an e-mail or a text message.
This stuff rocks so hard. Honestly, we live in magic times.

Magic times demand a Magic Mouse of course (see how I did that oh-so-seamless segue). I'm loving the Apple device in all sorts of major ways but I have found that it just drinks battery juice like a wino with a credit line at the liquor store. I use rechargeable batteries of course but I'm wondering if Apple might consider making a recarging cradle for this wonderful rodent as Logitech does for its MX Lazer mouse. Not a necessity, but it could make life just a wee bit more smooth.

Holy Cow!
The Apple "Magic Mouse" arrived today. Two words: A Mazing. Scrolling is like a whole 'nother world and the ability to zoom the screen by holding down the "option" key is just silly. This thing rocks. Hard. Like Metallica trying to prove they're a better band than Anthrax.
UPDATE: There is something of a learning curve in using a new mouse, tweaking the tracking settings for example, but even after this short time of using the new mouse, I have to say - this is brilliant. Guinness scientists must have invented this. Scrolling across the smooth top is going to become the new, albeit pricey, paradigm for mousing.

Trippin' With The Snow Lep
Pre-action report: Verizon is offering a "media manager" which streams iPhoto and iTunes to a FiOS DVR. I have a FiOS DVR. I've downloaded the software and later today I will hold my nose and do a tuckflip into the deep end on this one. If this can stream iTunes radio, I may have a solution for listening to my favorite AM station (Mark Levin - THANK ME!) after the signal punks down at twilight.
Technology. It can do amazing things.

Virtual Machine
Things might get interesting. Using VMWare Fusion, I just installed Windows XP on my iMac. The virtualization takes some getting used to - it's not a little strange to have a window running XP sitting on my desktop as all my other Mac-ish programs are running at the same time. But dang me if it's not a whole heap of fun!

More On The Mothership
Talking Apple again folks. Not that there's anything new with that.
Last night I was on the phone with a good friend whose family was a PC family of long-standing. He used to work for the feds and needed a PC for the Citrix VPN software to get him into his government computer system when he worked from home and his wife had started out on PCs which led her to become, essentially, a PC bigot. That, now, is moot. He retired which obviated the necessity of his using a PC so he got a MacBook. That he's a musician only made the choice easier as he explicitly mentioned how great the bundled software, and GarageBand specifically, is.
Now the family has an iMac to the mix and it seems his wife is over her Applephobia. Even his mother in law has migrated from a PC to a Mac. Pretty sure an iMac as well but I can't say that to an absolute certainty.
This is, of course, anecdotal but at the same time, it demonstrates what can happen when Apple has a chance to worm its way (get it- Apple, worm? these are the jokes, folks) into the regular computing expereince of daily users. I'm not opposed to PCs as much as I like my Macs. From what I've heard Windows 7 has done a good job of cleaning up the mess that MS made with Vista. But the experience is still seems to me not as seamless as it is with the Mac platform.
And I've ordered a Magic Mouse from Amazon. I actually save money by ordering from Amazon which has a nominally higher price but doesn't charge me tax. I think it'll be fun to use. I only wish I'd bought Apple stock back in April and doubled my investment through today.
I may have to update this post. I haven't yet been able to really identify the crux of the matter. Anecdotal evidence will do that to you.

Hole Lee Cow!
New hardware from the Apple Mothership. New iMac (did I buy too soon? of course) and something I just might have to get - a multi-touch capable "Magic Mouse." No more cleaning of a scroll ball ever. Nice. And multi-touch capable! Dang Steve, that rocks.
And a 27 inch iMac with more than 1080p definition? More than HD? Build a TV tuner into that bad boy and ... forget I said that. I didn't say that. You didn't read that.

Taking Rash Action
Keep in mind that in my life, the following is "rash action."
My desk has been covered with computers for the last couple of days. I've had a friend's old Dell on which I've been trying to get a decent version of the the Windows OS installed. It has been, to put it mildly, resistant. So i came to the conclusion that I may as well bag that effort. But then I conceived of turning it into a "Hackintosh" instead. Well, I did some internet surfing and after finding the specs of the Dell, and what I'd need to do to turn this caterpillar into a butterfly, I realized that it was absurd. Basically, the only thing I could use would have been the case. Not, I hasten to assure you, an elegant result.
So I am abandoning all efforts with the frackin' Dell. I'll pull the WiFi card and then see if anyone wants it for parts. I will be, finally, glad to be rid of it. There's a point at which one is throwing good time after bad (just as with money but let's not talk politics now) and I've decided to end this black hole into which I've poured too much time already.
So what is the rash action? That's a Mac thing. I've been using a wireless Mighty Mouse for quite a while now. It's a wonderful mouse, the best mouse I've ever used actually. But the little scroll ball atop the oblong ice cream scoop has a really, really bad habit of getting crudded up and it's not like the old under-the-mouse ball. It's not designed to be removed. My "scroll down" (as in moving a web page up to read more) has not been right for, well, I can't put a date on it but, as Staind sez, "It's been a while."
Today the Bluetooth started acting way too flaky for my taste. And two malfunctions lead to one ticked off mouser. Yeah - me. So I opted for rash action. As I learned from my genius brother, if something's broken, you may as well try to fix it. It's not like you can do any more damage and you just might fix it. Though I figured (properly as it turns out) that new batteries might firm up the Bluetooth connection, it was the perfect excuse to rip the mouse open and physically clean the scroll ball.
Rash? Perhaps. But the fact is the mouse is now working better than it has in a long time. It's all back together. The scrolling is not as smooth as new but it works. And there was a disgusting little ball of fluff on one of the scroll shafts. My rash action paid off. I'll now be able to clean this bad boy anytime I want without freaking. So I've got that going for me.
UPDATE: After pulling a couple of things out of the old Dell (the WiFi card which I bought for it when I thought it was going to be used and the DVD drive for a friend whose machine is limited to a CD-ROM drive), I figured I'd see what eBay had to say about the "value" of the box. Pfft. They appear to sell for about $20. I'm not missing a zero, that's -$20.00- Not even worth messin' with.

I Wanted To Say Something Today
And then thought better of it. The blogosphere might be better off if reflection led to silence sometimes. I can point you to no examples but as a window into the soul, a quiet time can be the gently waving grass in the wind shadow of a tree in a furious storm.
But what the hell, you don't come here to read nothing (Well... Ed.) Shut UP Ed! Instead of quiet reflection, I offer some randomness that trickles like a stalactite-forming drip through the dark caverns of my mind.
1. Add to the stuff I like sambal oelek. Link goes to a Wikiped page on sambal generically. My father in law introduced me to this spicy delight and it was a home-coming on the hottening up front. I have always liked the hot peppers and other types of chemical warfare like wasabi and horseradish but sambal has that wonderful bloom of heat that acts like a taser on each taste bud. Give it a moment to let the initial edge of heat die down and every little papilla is just firing on all levels. Wonderful.
2. Michael Jackson. I'm glad my blogging partner did the main post on that one. I recognize his talent but I own and will not own any of his music. Billy Beck did a nice job of recognizing the good in the music. I will always be more partial to "Human Nature" and "Smooth Criminal" than the other big hits. It may be a blessing to him that his sad freakish life is now over.
3. Farrah. I hope she did not die in pain as her cancer is of a pretty vicious type. But otherwise, she made no dent in my world. Beautiful? Yes, absolutely. The iconic poster which meant so much to others always impressed me not with the obvious (the pokies) but that incandescent smile! I like good teeth and that picture is just dental perfection. Yeah, I know. Consider it a personal failing of mine.
Besides, I was always a Kate Jackson fan.
4. Have you seen the LED on the new Apple wireless keyboard? It's the most elegant thing I've seen in all LED light-dom. The green LED is not sitting exposed but is actually beneath the aluminum skin of the keyboard. The aluminum is then laser-pierced to let the ight through. Here is a 40X picture on Flickr. Better than I can take for sure.
The elegance of it is that when the light is off (on only when powering up and down), you basically can not even tell where it is unless you get the keyboard at an angle where the slight color change of the metal shows. And the laser drilling is at a slight angle so that the light shines toward the user as the keyboard is on, say, a desktop. Just very cool. If you have a friend with one of these, get a demo of it.
5. Wimbledon. I used to care about tennis. I was a huge Bjorn Borg fan (I was assimilated, ar! ar! ar!) back in the day but now ... I'm sorry where was I? Oh yeah. Just. Don't. Care. Anymore. I am, however, looking forward to the Tour de France and hoping that Lance doesn't embarass himself. Not that he would as he has a very good team around him and he is riding under probably the greatest team director in TdF history, Johan Bruyneel. Versus network's coverage of the race really should be recognized for its excellence in providing video and commentators who know whereof they speak. This year I'm going to try to only watch the evening recaps instead of the early morning live coverage.
OK. I have driveled. You go now. No trouble. Have a wonderful Sunday, please.

C'mon C'mon C'mon!
Downloading the new iPhone OS reminds me of the impatience of modren life. A 230 MB download that will take about two minutes (somewhat less actually) and I'm sitting here twitching like the bathroom is already occupied.
Damned silly git.
It makes about as much sense as standing by the microwave when some peculiar item of advanced foodishness is cooking via the application of radiation in a minuscule fraction of the time it would otherwise take and I'm standing beside the counter doing the same pee-dance saying, "C'mon! C'mon! Cook already." Patience is a virtue. I should be more virtuous.

And So It Goes
One final post on the great iMac Migration, I promise. The good news is that the "migration assistant" finished its strange little dance and there is much new (actually old) on Corvinus. However, since I've moved from the PowerPC-based iMac to the Intel-based iMac, there will be a number of programs that will have to be updated. I do not want to spend the money to buy Photoshop though - $670 from Amazon. That's the cost of a whole new Windows computer.
But then, that's not really the point. The point is that as much as the migration moved, I have a whole shipload of data yet to get from the old onto the new. Ring out, ring in, yeah, yeah. At least Apple has a method, albeit rather a kluge in my estimation for using the iPod itself to move the iTiunes music library from on to another. And I do want Corvinus with his massive storage capacity, to be the iTunes base machine. The short of the long of it is that I'm going to have a nice, long desk session moving data and digging out passwords to get all the things I want'n'need running properly on Corvinus. Luckily for you though - this is the last I'll waste your time on it.

iMac Update
I've had a couple of people ask me about the iMac which caused the posting pause yesterday so I post briefly, not that I think this is of great general interest but ... what the heck, eh?
First, I watched a DVD on it last evening ("Carnivale" to be specific) and it is spec ... wait for it ... TACULAR. The 24" screen is bright (brighter than my PPC iMac) and crisp and huge. This would make a great TV if it weren't for all the fun computing doodadery contained within.
But the set up was interrupted. I couldn't get the "migration assistant" (which transfers all kinds of info from one's existing machine onto a new one) to operate properly over the wifi network. The cure for that is to tether the two together with a firewire cable but the firewire cables I have don't have the proper plug for the new iMac (which is named "Corvinus" for reasons of interest probably only to me). Not really a problem. I've just ordered a couple of adapters from Amazon and I'll retun the one I don't need. Those should be here either today or tomorrow and then I'll finish the Great iMac Swap Out. Yay.
As a side note, the wired mouse feels strange and too light after using a battery-filled wireless mouse for so long. Not bad per se but strange.

Blogopause
Just a note to the readers that there'll be a brief cessation of posting as I spend the day setting up my new iMac (the reflective glass screen is very disconcerting if you sit, bleary-eyed and rumpled in the morning - eek! Is that me?) and working on the Deck Farm™. Yes, the plants have arrived and now action is urgent.
I'll take pictures.

Fun With The iPhone
I managed to do something today that I've been wanting to do for a while. The ringtone I've always wanted for my phone is the "red phone" from James Coburn's Derek Flint movies. Now that I have an iPhone, and since I grabbed an mp3 of the sound a while back, I've made that a ringtone for myself.
It means probably nothing to anyone else but it amuses me to no end. And it was dead easy. One can take any clip from a song and with a little futzing, make a ringtone out of it without having to cough up a greenback or two to the good folks (peace be unto them!) at Apple.
I may use the opening bass line to Queen's "Under Pressure" for my next ringtone.

Apple Does It Again
The new iPod Shuffle. Just go watch the video. Jaw-droppingly astounding tech.

Kinda Cheeses Me Off
I learned a word today in the crossword puzzle. That ticks me off because I figure I should already know any word (apart from foreign words and proper names and some specific cultural references, like anything pop music-y in about the last ten years) appearing in a crossword puzzle.
What was the word? Estival. Go look it up.
UPDATE: OK then. I'll use it in a sentence. "The weather here is ridiculously estival."
UPDATE UPDATE: This is to note my screwup and acknowledge that I've edited this post. I originally wrote down the word as "estivial" but the X-word actually had it as "estival." So I changed the word in the body of my post (as the point was not that I learned a wrong word but learned a word, period.) I stand, sit and lie down (both prone and supine) corrected.

And in other business, further adventures in XP land. Well, not really. I'm waiting on the delivery of memory modules which are slated to arrive on Tuesday. I will give Dell credit on making a minitower that opens easily but such a design feature is about as easy as designing a knob on a car radio. But I will say that ease of access is a good thing.
So. Memory comes. Install it. Boot up to see if i can get the system to run better than it did before. See if I can get a service pack installed. If not, I do another back up, reinstall XP and restore files. It'll be interesting to see how it works as I've never done that on the Windows side.
On the other hand (I will run out of hands pretty soon), the USB drive to which I backed up the XP system runs cleanly off the Dell. My iMac does not deliver sufficient power through a single USB port to run the 320 GB drive (it runs the 80 GB drive I've been backing up to though). So to back up my system in the future, I'm going to have to get a "Y" cable that'll pull power from two USB slots. (sigh) Not a huge problem but ... (sigh).
I'm thinking that a new iMac would let me run a Windows OS in Boot Camp. Not that I really want to run Windows but I'd like to be conversant on both (major) sides of the OSes. It might be fun to try a beta version of Windows 7 on my Mac.
Tomorrow there will be tea blogging.

Holy ... OK Then: Wow!
Apple has just released the new iMac line. Beautiful stuff. Single sheet aluminum body, speed, memory and drive size bumps all around. One can now get a 24 inch iMac with a 2.66 GHz processor and a 640 GB hard drive for $1500. That is one hell of a machine for a price unseen previously.
And that's even mentioning all the built-in doodads like the iSight camera and the way-cool application suite that comes with the latest iteration of OS X.
Sweet.

Apple's New iPod Nano Ad
I'm going to assume that you must have seen the new ad for Apple's new video iPod Nano. If not, you can follow the link. I won't get into the device itself save to say that it's another remarkable product - to get a tiny, tiny screen of dense resolution is something although it's squatty looks don't exactly goose up the geek lust. At this point, it's the ad I'm interested in. The video of the song playing is Feist's "1 2 3 4" which is on uToob so ...


I like it. It's wonderfully alive with the colorfully clad cast and the song is just enough of an ear worm that it makes a great choice for an ad. Apple's media people are no dummies (says the guy who was turned on to The Fratellis when Apple used "Flathead" in an iPod ad). The lyrics are not exactly overwhelming but that's not a big deal really. Feist has one of those voices that's not classical but has real character. She is interesting to listen to even if the words are not exactly "An die Fruede." And the choral swelling of the "Oh-oh-oh" works just perfectly right. Excellent songwriting.
As the blog has amply demonstrated over time with my fealty to Emm Gryner, I like whiny Canadian chick singer-songwriters. I think it started with Joni Mitchell. And Feist is right there. I wish her great success even though I'm not in any hurry to buy her disc.
What struck me, finally, after actually watching the video is how well Apple chose not just the song but the viddy as well. The appearing of the subsequent Nanos under the first picks up the way the music video has a raft of people appear from behind Feist. Watch the viddy and watch the ad. It's evident. Took me a while to recognize it though.