Digital Brainwaves

Wired magazine tells “the untold story” about the creation and release of the iPhone:

The demo was not going well.
Again.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting.

Interesting read, go have a look.

As I was getting ready to drive to Buffalo to pick up Yvonne and her sister Saturday, I had an interesting realization.

It doesn’t matter what I get for Christmas.

I noticed that I was less interested in what would be under the tree and more interested in seeing both my family and my fiancée’s family to hang out. This is something your elders try to beat into you, and you sometimes pay lip service to, but I actually got it this year, and it’s feeling like a really awesome Christmas.

What?

Oh, yeah, fiancée.

Didn’t I tell you about that?

Alas, the weather, it did not cooperate, and Yvonne and I spent our Thanksgiving here in Rochester.  We’ll meet up with friends tomorrow after I get out of work, and the family will join us for a visit on Saturday.

It’s all good, I still got to have turkey today.  It was cold cuts, but it counts.

This could prove interesting, and not in a good way…

The weather in western New York is not expected to be pretty tomorrow, so my original plans to visit the folks may be in jeopardy:

.A WEAK STORM SYSTEM OVER OHIO WILL TRACK ACROSS NORTHERN
PENNSYLVANIA ON THANKSGIVING MORNING THEN WILL MAKE ITS WAY TO THE
NEW ENGLAND COAST BY EVENING. THIS WILL RESULT IN MORE WIDESPREAD
RAIN ACROSS WESTERN AND NORTH CENTRAL NEW YORK OVERNIGHT...WITH
COLDER AIR ACROSS ONTARIO FILTERING TO THE SOUTH IN THE PROCESS.
THIS WILL GRADUALLY CHANGE THE RAIN TO A MIX OF SLEET AND SNOW AS
THE WEE HOURS OF THURSDAY UNFOLD. THERE MAY EVEN BE A PERIOD OF
FREEZING RAIN OVER HIGHER ELEVATIONS EAST OF LAKE ONTARIO DURING
THE CHANGEOVER. AREAS NEAR LAKE ONTARIO SUCH AS NIAGARA AND
ORLEANS COUNTIES AS WELL AS THE NORTH COUNTRY WILL SEE THIS
CHANGEOVER EARLIEST... WHILE THE SOUTHERN TIER WILL BE THE LAST.

IT NOW APPEARS THAT THE HEAVIEST PRECIPITATION WILL BE TAPERING
OFF BEFORE THE CHANGEOVER TO SNOW...SO TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS SHOULD
ONLY BE IN THE 1 TO 3 INCH RANGE...BUT THE COMBINATION OF MIXED
PRECIPITATION CAN RESULT IN VERY SLIPPERY DRIVING CONDITIONS
DURING THANKSGIVING DAY. SNOW WILL DIMINISH TO SNOW SHOWERS BY
AFTERNOON BUT TEMPERATURES WILL FALL BELOW FREEZING BY DARK. THIS
WILL BE THE FIRST BOUT OF WINTER DRIVING CONDITIONS OF THE SEASON
FOR MOST OF THE REGION...SO EXERCISE CAUTION IN YOUR HOLIDAY
TRAVELS.

They’ll be visiting here anyway on Saturday, so I’ll still get my turkey, but it does throw off my schedule.

All told, though, if the roads are crappy, it’s better we stay home anyway.

Lately, I’ve been getting errors on my laptop that my hard drive is full, and virtual memory is running low.  I’m thinking, after over two years, it’s time clean things out, back everything up, and start fresh again.

A little after the last time I started over on this computer, I got a spare hard drive for the machine for a project that never went anywhere. Shortly thereafter, I put the drive in an external case, which connects to my computer via USB 2.0. Convenient place to put backup data, no?  I thought so too.  But then I had a thought today.

The drive in the external case is, ostensibly, identical to the drive in my notebook. The easiest way to make sure everything that needs to be backed up is backed up is for the original to be the backup.

Sometime later this week, I’ll pull the drive from this machine and swap it with the drive that’s currently in the external casing, and install the OS on this new drive. Time for a fresh start on my computer again.

Ultimately, I’d like to make a fresh start on new hardware… and not PC hardware.  But that’ll take some investment.

I think I’ve discovered what it feels like to be both proud and disappointed at the same time.

Tonight, my office held a charity poker tournament, with the buy-ins for the tournament going to fund breast cancer research. 90 players, at 9 tables. Each table basically held its own tournament, and the winners at each table went on to play the final table.

The first player out, in last place, win a copy of Poker for Dummies.

The final player, winning the tournament, won the set of custom poker chips used to play the final table.

Everyone else gets… well, the satisfaction of knowing their buy-ins went to a good cause.

I finished…

Continue reading ‘Pride and Disappointment’ »

I was all set to try to write a Veterans Day piece, but Bruce “McQ” McQuain outdoes anything I’d write over at Q and O:

Most of the time, when you hear tributes to vets, they’re filled with the stories of those who’ve fought and suffered in combat and we see pictures showing the battle-weary combat vets which pointedly make the argument about the sacrifices veterans have made and continue to make.

They’ve fought in such places as Saipan and Guadalcanal in the Pacific, Normandy and St. Mere Eglise in Europe or Pork Chop Hill and the Chosin Reservoir in Korea or the I Drang Valley, Hue and the Ashau Valley in Vietnam. Now new names such as Fallujah, Najaf and Anbar are added to those which tell the tale of all who have paid the price for our freedom over the centuries and deserve the acclaim we give them. They’ve faced circumstances that we hope our children will never have to face and many have paid the full and ultimate price with their service

However, not all sacrifices are made on the field of battle. While infantry, armor and artillery are the combat arms - the tip of the spear - they, better than anyone, know how important the team that makes up the rest of the spear are to their success on the battlefield.

Have a read of the whole thing.

I’m in Le Roy, NY at the moment, soon to be checking in on some friends and their band, and should have some pictures available on Flickr tomorrow afternoon. In the mean time, being the day before Veteran’s Day, today is the 232nd anniversary of the formation of the United States Marine Corps. Be sure to salute a Marine this weekend.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, lighting at the bar wasn’t very good for photos, and I didn’t get anything worth posting. No pictures this time, sorry.

It was pretty tame in the grand scheme of things, but apologies all the same if i set off any content filters at work with the title.

Yvonne has been having trouble charging her cell phone battery lately.

It won’t always keep a charge in it after reporting itself as fully charged, and sometimes appears to drain while the phone is off. She didn’t want to have to pay Bell (her Canadian cell carrier) for a new battery, so she was opting to just live with it.

The other day, I took the battery off the phone to see what model it was, then looked back at the battery itself.

“Hey, Yvonne? Is the battery supposed to bulge in the back like that?”

———

Her new battery arrived in the mail yesterday.

Also, while it’s still the 7th, I’d like to send out a huge happy birthday to my friend Amanda from high school.  She probably doesn’t read this blog, but I hope she had an awesome day all the same.

Have a happy!