Twice now, I’ve gone into my iPhone expecting to show people music and seeing … nothing. When I get back home that night to synchronize, the sync goofs up, and all the disk space being used on the iPhone shows as “Other”. A new sync fails, of course, because I’m syncing a music library set larger than the spare space.

Restoring the iPhone and re-synchronizing it after the restore worked last time, and I expect that’s what I’ll do tonight. But man … this is frustrating. As Jeff said at lunch, “Ahh, the joys of a 1.0 product.”

A few minutes later: Now the amount of “Other” disk space is far smaller, on the order of the size of calendars and contacts, and the music can be re-sync’d. Perhaps my “let me not sync music twice, then pray” trick worked.

“Hey, do you want to see the iPhone? Geof’s got one.”

“Ooooooh, pretty!”

“I can tell you’re checked out of this meeting. Why don’t you just go ahead and leave?”

“You got an iPhone?! We need to get $co-worker in here … we were talking about them just last week.”

“Yeah, Geof claims that his Treo died. I don’t believe him.” [said as I walked out of a meeting to answer a call from my business manager ... tried not to flip my colleague the bird for pulling my leg]

“It’s just too much fun, isn’t it?”

“So, has that gotten you any babes yet?” [my boss]

Brian Lam’s iPhone review on Gizmodo has a lot of salient points: there are things that the iPhone doesn’t do that lots of other, 1/10th-the-cost phones do perform, and that the iPhone could have many of these with software updates. Therefore, he argues that people wait on buying an iPhone if they haven’t done so already until some of the updates have rolled out. That’s reasonable. I do think those rollouts will come, too—after all, the iPhone was announced with 11 apps originally, and now there are 12 in the initial production run. Looking at the home screen, the UI would easily accept four more apps without anything having to be swapped out, re-ordered, or anything. [One could argue that Apple could put any number of apps on the phone, but two things jump out at me: one, having to scroll the main UI would stink, and two, those apps would have to be small so as to not cripple the 4GB iPhone.]

But here’s what makes Lam’s review slam-worthy: the conclusion:

One more thing. What took you guys so long to review this? And where are the fanboys I know and love/hate?
Like you, I’ve coveted the idea of an Apple phone since it wasn’t any more real than a unicorn. And when it was delivered last Friday, almost seven months after the announcement at Macworld 2007, the hype and spin were so thick, there was no way anyone could write an objective review. Ten days after I camped, plunked down $600 for one, and signed the two year contract, I think I have the perspective to understand what it means to live with this phone. Many reviews abound, but I don’t think anyone has written about it from the perspective of ownership yet. That’s my take on the situation. My mind is clear; this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction.

Ten days? Really? I know that we’re living on InternetTime these days, but ten days is an eyelash blink. That’s what makes the “I want to defend the skeptical nature of this review” thing so laughable. Ten days isn’t enough time for anyone to evaluate it.

Face it: most everyone who’s bought one to this point is a gadget geek. [Check.] Whether or not the device truly has any lasting impact isn’t going to be known for some time yet—probably not even in 2007. Sure, you’re going to see brisk early sales for a device that’s this hyped—just like Hollywood blockbusters have an initial boomlet. But for an early adopter to argue that ten days gives him enough perspective … sorry, I don’t buy it.

[My initial feelings on the iPhone---with just three full days of ownership---are twofold: one, I really like using it, and two, I really like watching other people use it. But I really only care about the first in the long run; the second just strokes my considerable ego.]

Yesterday at dinner, Jason noted, “It’s surprising to me that none of us has an iPhone yet.” I think Amy and Jeff both looked right at me. “I thought about it,” I said, “but my Treo is doing okay, and I just couldn’t justify it.”

When my Treo started doing random weird shit this morning, I … changed my mind. Stifling the urge to eject it from my vehicle while cruising at 69 mph down US 72, I pulled into the AT&T store in Corinth, MS and purchased an iPhone. 4GB, if you must know, but that’s because I’m not a wicked crazy iPod user, and I really want to replace my Treo as a light Web/email device [I'm no Crackberry guy like Alex, who has plenty of reason to not be using his iPhone as a primary device for him] that also happens to be a phone. If it’s an iPod, too, well … bonus.

I activated it when I got to my folks’ house, and after I really got into it, I … flipped my lid.

I like it. Will it replace my iBook? No. Will it replace my Treo, for what I used it for? Absolutely. I can stop fighting with my Treo to make it play nice with my Mac—Contacts worked fine, but iCal never really seemed to behave—and let a native device work with a native device.

:sigh: I’d hoped that my new Mac this year was going to be a new desktop, not a new palmtop. [And don't make any mistake, folks ... this is a tiny computer that happens to make phone calls.] But hey … I wasn’t really happy with the Treo, and when it came time to replace it, I was going to replace it with an iPhone. That just came a whole lot sooner than it did.

Okay, time to stop blogging and go back to hanging out with my parents [the real reason for the trip today].

I have a new roommate. Said roommate has a nice Sony VAIO laptop—one of the models I recommend to people who don’t want to buy a Mac. [Hey, some folks don't want to try it. Their loss.] It runs Windows XP.

It took me 20 minutes and a restart just to hook him up to my WPA2 network. Hell, my TiVo only took two minutes to do that.

I think it’s time to look into setting up Electronic Funds Transfer to 1 Infinite Loop. It’ll be easier that way…

I’ve Googled about a bit and can’t seem to find a solution on this, which is surprising, given the age of the Mac, but:

My G4 iMac seems to eat keyboards.

A few weeks ago, I couldn’t roust the Mac from sleep because I couldn’t enter a password. A nine-character password that uses keys on both halves of the keyboard and four numeric characters yielded one character entry. Thinking the keyboard was just old and shot, I replaced it with a brand new Apple keyboard. Things were fine for a week or so, and then … the same thing happened.

Does anyone know what’s going on here?

With my old BitTorrent PC down for the count [hey, one of the two big drives is working, but it's loud, 95% of the data was on the drive that's dead, and I'll have to load up all those shows on some computer, and I don't have the time tonight], I’m testing running Xtorrent on my main Mac. Why? There was a Jeff Tweedy show I wanted to grab.

The early result tells me that I don’t want to run this on a machine that I’m also using—Xt doesn’t slag the mini, but the CPU levels are running pretty high, and I expect I’d get a bunch of spinning beachballs if I kept it up. But I do have Misty’s old iMac, and I bet it’d run it just fine. [In case you're curious, I purchased a license for Xt from my previous use of it: I bought both the multi-computer household license but also the lifetime upgrades. I believe in the software that much. Thanks to Alex for pointing me to it.]

If this goes well, I expect to have all my PCs as closet hangar queens by the end of the month.

I’ve been prevaricating about re-upping my .Mac account, but … well, today put me a lot closer. I went to forward an email from Jeremy to Bryan, and … poof! Nothing. In a panic, I Cmd-Space ADD, and … Address Book is virtually empty. “Oh, shit!” So I run into my bedroom, snag my Palm, and sync.

Bad move. All the data on my Palm? Gone.

“OH, SHIT!”

I’ll just sync with .Mac.

Nothing.

I then run for the iBook, Cmd-Space ADD, and … PHEW! Data, blessed data. File–>Backup Address Book immediately. I then sync with .Mac, which overwrites everything on the iBook [because .Mac thinks my mini is newer, since it's synced more recently]. After “wiping out” the iBook’s Address Book install, I then revert to the backup, then re-sync again. Now .Mac thinks the iBook is newer [it's been synced last], and then sync to the mini. The Palm is now syncing back up. I might have a contact or two lost—the last sync on my iBook was on Monday—but it’s saved my bacon.

Now I’m working to make sure that my additional backups of iCal and Address Book are automated and robust. The SuperDuper!-ing I’m doing every night won’t protect against data being deleted, and I need to protect against that, too. Now I must find a good solution for date-based backups of Address Book and iCal. You can never be too paranoid about backing up your data.

[Still don't know for 100% that I'll re-up with .Mac, but it's far more likely now.]

I’m gonna play with two timer apps the next month or so:

• FlexTime
• Meridian

If any of you have used ‘em, I’d love to hear your inputs.

• BOINC Manager just kept death-spiraling and causing regular CPU spikes when it should have been laying dormant, waiting for idle time. My CPU would go to 100% every three or four seconds. I’ll keep running BOINC at the office because I believe in it, but … damn.
• TiVo Desktop proved to be too much of a resource hog for as little utility as I got out of it. Maybe I’ll re-install it when TiVo Desktop for the Mac hits v2.0, but … probably not.

Uninstalling TiVo Desktop for the Mac proved a little confusing, but Google helped me to find out how: go to System Preferences, stop the process, bring up Finder, run a search, and trash everything. Darn non-disk-image apps.

I’ve heard enough good things about Growl, so I’m using it now. Yes, Alex was my final straw, but Brad hammered on it earlier this week with some email traffic we had.

Now, Mac mavens … I need an IRC client. I am sad that Panic doesn’t have one; I will buy their IRC client as soon as they make it. Does anyone have a recommendation? I need to pick something in the next week or so, because I have to run an IRC chat.

The amount of storage space on my desk is soon to be above 1TB: 80GB main + 500GB [Seagate ST3500841A-RK via Newer Technology miniStack v2 over Firewire] on Scotty, my Mac mini, and 6GB primary + 12GB secondary + 80GB NAS [Maxtor Personal Storage 3100 via Linksys NSLU2] + 250 GB [Maxtor 7Y250M0 via Kingwin TL-35CS over USB] + 250GB [another Maxtor 7Y250M0 via another Kingwin TL-35CS over USB] on Doublewide, my aging P3 that does nothing but BitTorrent these days. I wasn’t intending on this [stupid me, the two Maxtor 250's are SATA, and the miniStack only goes up to ATA/133 ... d'oh!], but it’s a fortunate happenstance.

I’m using the 500GB in the miniStack as a backup HD right now; I don’t have the stock HD even half-full yet, and while I could easily fill it soon, I’m going to try to rein myself in until I can get a second massive HD to go into the other miniStack I bought in March. [See also the Maxtor goof.] If I can catch another deal on a 500GB, I’ll do it; otherwise, I’ll go with something in the 160-400 range and have the 500GB back them both up. Not ideal, but getting there.

Based on all the reading I’ve done, I’m using SuperDuper! to back up my Mac. It happily hummed away last night, doing the initial backup in about two hours. It will run nightlies at 0330 [because that's one time where I'm in bed 99.999% of the time].

As for the 500GB+ attached to the PC: well, that’s not totally true. I’ve only got one of the HDs in the enclosure right this second. I’ll do the other in the next couple of days. The 80GB-via-NAS has largely been serving as my BitTorrent storage [just as soon as I decided that there wasn't anything on the PC that I'd miss if either HD in it failed; really, it's a BT box and nothing more], but I’m slowly transitioning to the first 250 I’ve put in there. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do with the second; perhaps RAID, perhaps just more BT storage. [I burn CD-Rs anyway, because I seed until my ratio for the torrent is at least 3.0, then delete.]

I upgraded the RAM in my G4 mini today [to 1GB; I had 512MB], and … awesome. It’s all snappy and happy now. It reminds me of why I want to get my parents’ computer some more RAM: maxing out the RAM just makes for a more enjoyable computing experience.

I didn’t want to muck with opening up the Mac mini myself, so I went to Mac Resource in Huntsville. After waiting for the service tech to finish what he was working on, I handed him my box and he had it back to me in about five minutes. One of the other techs told me that they’d actually broken the first case that they’d opened. Now, I know that lots of folks on the Internet have said that they’ve opened it with no issues, but … maybe I’m just a little risk-averse.

I ended up not paying anything for the job, as I swapped the labor [$45, their 15-minute service-time minimum] for them keeping the used RAM for re-sale. Could I have made a little more money in the transaction by putting the RAM up on eBay? Probably, but it’s not worth the hassle to do that. Everyone I interacted with at Mac Resource was nice and competent, so I’ll use them again when I need more expertise than Misty and I can put together.

I won’t spare you with much text about John Gruber going as a professional Weblogger with his Daring Fireball. I’ll tell you that, simply, my interactions with John and with Alex King were what largely convinced me to buy a Mac [and now I own two]: that these two guys, whom I respect, were passionate enough about their platforms convinced me.

I wish I were kidding, but I’m not. But that should tell you that John’s got an important voice … it’s seen me spend $1700+ on Cupertino hardware in the last year.

[Now if I can only get John's mail server to recognize my incoming mail ... I re-upped my membership some time ago, but I've never heard from him; I bought another original DF shirt, and now I want to buy the other ones. John, this is a public plea for help!]

Like any self-respecting geek who uses a Mac, I use Quicksilver. I’m not a power user of it, but I do use it a few times a day. Some Quicksilver fanatics will complain when they find that I mostly use it as an app launcher, but they also have to understand that I don’t solely use Macs and have my aging Treo 600 as the glue of my computing life. The Treo, along with Tasks, stitches together my experience across platforms.

Quicksilver, however, is the glue of my Mac experience. If I need to know something, I’ve hit Cmd-Space before I can even think very much. It just works. I love the present tagline: “Just Show People the Results”. That’s what it does. Explaining more wouldn’t help; just take a little time and work with it.

As always, YMMV.