Anxiously Awaiting

You know who I’m talking about. The insane person in tight, odd looking pants riding a bicycle on the road that you are tempted to get your friend to push over as you fly by them at insane speeds.

In the interest of personal fitness–and not to mention saving approximately 1 gallon of gas a week, I bought an Orbea Onix road bike last month. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to ride it much with my recent sickness and flights to miscellaneous parts of the US for work. Nevertheless, I love my bike.

Before you slap your forehead while shaking your head vigorously and exclaiming, “He’s going to kill himself the crazy fool!” let me explain that I have a helmet and I do not ride on busy roads that don’t have a bike lane. This means that roughly 75% of my commute to work in the mornings is on sidewalks, which just so happens to be illegal in GA since bicycles are legally recognized as vehicles. If I am stopped by a bored cop I’ll take the ticket, because there’s no way I’m riding in the road on Brekinridge. I drive pretty crazy fast on that road and I get passed like I’m standing still.

So far, the ride to work is relatively fast–less than 10 minutes on a good day–as long as there is a car in front of me at red lights. Apparently I don’t weigh enough to set off the sensors. The ride isn’t terribly tough either. I spend most of my time in a low gear riding at about 15-25 mph on the main sections of road that I take. My bike is incredibly fast, even with a 200 lb. dood riding it.

In the interest of protecting myself and my cycling/motorbiking fellows, please do me a favor: watch out for cyclists. Don’t worry. I’m no green crusading destroy all SUV’s hippie, and I had the same disdain for “That Guy” as you before I became one of them, but as gas prices soar to over $4.00 a gallon I hope you realize that the mpg rating on my Onix is, well, infinity. Please do me a favor and curb your impatience, watch for hand signals, and don’t honk at me. I already know I’m good looking.

As I sit here with my Mac dock lit up like a Christmas tree and enjoying total and smooth functionality of OSX, I look across the table at my poor little Microsoft standard issue Dell running Vista Ultimate and frown. The little guy is equipped exactly like my Mac, with 4GB of RAM (although only 3.5GB registers in the Vista Process Explorer), a 2.20 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, and a Nvidia 6800 GS, yet it has to work so hard to provide me with a decent OS experience. To my Dell’s credit, it does have to deal with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the many background processes that come along with it–but nevertheless I am highly disappointed with Vista’s memory management, overall responsiveness and user experience. At this point I’m probing the Microsoft ranks to find out what it takes to downgrade to good old Windows XP. Below are screen shots of my Mac’s system profiler and Vista’s ctrl+shift+delete magic. I will say that I am impressed that the Dell is as responsive as it is with less than 100MB of RAM available–were this XP it would be in a hard lock.

So according to last post I got an iPhone–affectionately referred to as my ipwn. This is also apparently ironic because of my new job in Micro$ofts Premium Mobile Experience (PMX) group. Sweet. Irony is fun. My relationship with my ipwn has been mildly rocky, and as with all Apple products I own, they infuriate me by announcing a new one not long after I get mine–the UMTS iPhone is due out in July. Meh. Back to the topic at hand: the top five things jduv loves/hates about his ipwn.

Love (from least to most awesome):

The Camera and Photos application. One thing Apple definitely did right was in their design of most of the applications on the iPhone. The photo application is loads of fun to show off, and even play with when you are bored. The camera isn’t half bad either.

Landscape view. Turn your ipwn on it’s side and it landscapes the current application you are using–in most cases. How cool is that? Now if they could only make it work for the SMS application so I have bigger buttons to type with.

The sleek design. Face it. The iPhone is down right sexy. From it’s sleek aluminum design to it’s uber cool but mildly annoying touch based interface.

The Maps application. This little guy has saved my butt many a time–for I am known to get lost often. It will even use GSM tower triangulation to figure out where you are–haha take that GPS.

The Phone application. Calling someone is as easy as poking their name in the phone app. You can’t get any simpler than that. Plus it’s pretty. It’s also easy to accidentally call someone, so I have to make sure the phone is locked before it goes into my pocket.

Hate (From least to most annoying)

Edge is slow as hell. Being a former Danger employee I have been spoiled by the backend transcoading that the Danger Service provides for interweb surfing. This makes for an impatient jduv when surfing facebook on his ipwn. Fortunately the UMTS version of the iPhone will fix this issue–if you want to spend the cash to upgrade and deal with even crappier battery life.

Audio Quality. Sometimes it’s hard to hear people, but hopefully its a speaker issue and a decent bluetooth headset will fix this problem. The AT&T network doesn’t help either =/.

Battery life. My old HTC 3125 would go for around 2 days without a charge. If I turn on wi-fi then I can guarantee a dead battery in less than 8 hours. Okay, so that is to be expected since wi-fi chip sets are power hogs, but my battery life still maxes out at 1.5 days on strict edge browsing and a talk time of less than two hours. Pathetic.

Dropped calls. This irritates me. It has only happened two times, but both during key points in a conversation I was having with the lady and with full radio service. Not good. Of course this could be easily blamed on AT&T (strike two guys…).

Random lockups. Nothing is more encouraging when your in a hurry than a nice hard lock followed by a pretty blue screen. Oh, we aren’t talking about Windoze. So far deh ipwn has locked up completely at least 2 times, and most times it’s Safari’s fault. The radio has also died once or twice, requiring a phone reboot to get it to work again. Looks like Apple’s “it just works” mojo isn’t exactly working for this product in some aspects.

So the conclusion is, I like my ipwn, but it’s a love/hate relationship. There are things it does that it does better than any other product in the market, but it’s full of shortcomings as well. I must say that I don’t have a problem with the touch keyboard–I thought that would be at the top of my “hate” list. I have gotten used to it and I’m pretty darn fast on the little sucker. I do, however, hate the little text suggest box. It never guesses correctly when your texts are mainly in l33tsp34k.

Lastly, for whatever it’s worth, utoob is good fun when you forgot your laptop, are bored in a meeting, and on corporate wi-fi. =D