Tag Archives | iphone

Excuse the lack of blogging, my life is a mess

Written by on October 24, 2011
Filed Under Personal Reflections

Ever since I got back from my Rocky Mountain trip it’s been one thing after another.  To start off, I cried for 3 days straight after being forced to return home to New York because, you know, that’s where my job is, then cried some more when I had to go back to work.  Well… not crying actually… more like wailing and screeching in agony.

After that, I got the new iPhone 4S and upgraded all my Apple goodies to iOS 5, so I had to spend some time learning and tinkering around with all the new changes that were made.   I also had to take my mid-2010 MacBook Pro in because OS X Lion now causes it to freeze dead with the infamous beach ball of death almost every time I log in.  I was able to get around that for a while by using automatic login, but the freezes still occurred even during normal use.  Normally I’d say sod all and downgrade back to Snow Leopard, but I’ve gotten used to the changes now and also wanted to take advantage of using the new iCloud features.

So, I take it to the Apple Store.  I leave it there overnight, and they call in the morning to say it’s ready.  Except, they didn’t change a thing because they couldn’t duplicate the issue.  So what do I do?  I duplicate the issue, and they keep it overnight again.  They call in the morning again and still haven’t done anything yet because they needed my password (which I gave them already, Lord help me.)   So I try to call back, and literally, it takes me 7 hours to break through.  SEVEN HOURS of attempted calls, that fail either because of a busy signal or a call waiting period that eventually leads to the fricking store HANGING UP on me.  Finally I get through, they get the password, and keep it overnight one more time.

Next morning they call again and say it’s ready.  They did a reinstall and… of course it’s still freezing on login.  I show it to one tech, then show the issue to another tech at the Genius Bar (genius, LOL) who finally decides to have it sent to the repair center.  Turnaround 3-5 days, which is where I’m at now.  I’ve never been without my MacBook prior to this saga, so it feels like there’s an empty void in my life until I get it back again.

Also since my return,  I find out I have glaucoma, this after being told that I didn’t have glaucoma, whereas before that I was told I did have glaucoma.  Rage, despair, emptiness (while drowning my sorrows in pumpkin cheesecake) have ruled my existence since that awful news.  So now, in a desperate attempt to avoid taking those eye drops that have the side effects of possibly giving me a unibrow and making me impotent, I’m scheduled to do laser surgery to help open up the pathways in my eyeballs in an attempt to help reduce the pressure.  Will it work?  Pppfft, remember who we’re talking about here.

Ok, so, that happened.  And worse yet, the doctor who gives me the news does it while tutoring an intern who just finished her residency, an intern in fact who could easily have been Jessica Alba’s sister, only unbelievably hotter looking.  Sporting granny glasses too.  Oh my.

So, rather than take the opportunity to ask her out, I’m instead shell shocked by the news I’ll go blind unless I take eye drops for the rest of my %^&*ing life, unable to speak because I’m too busy trying to man up and keep myself from bawling my eyes out in front of this gorgeous looking girl.

Just to add insult to injury, my blog keeps going down at erratic times during the day.  I get in touch with my host, who tells me in geekology how perfect their servers are and what an idiot I am.  So… I’m tearing my hair out trying to figure out why suddenly my blog suddenly disappears like a ghost in Sixth Sense, and coming up with nothing.  I’m so exasperated by this that another  hosting service provider actually felt sorry for me and offered me one month free hosting on their servers to troubleshoot things.  In the meantime I need to find a more permanent host that, unlike the British dweeb nozzles I was hosting with before, might actually know a thing or two about WordPress.

Ok, so, that happened too.  Yep, it’s definitely good to be back.

On the upside, I do have an upcoming trip planned for Los Angeles next week to BlogWorld LA, all expenses paid thanks to being sponsored again by Murphy USA, and incredibly enough, I have plans to meet two very beautiful women for either pastries or dinner.  Yaaaay!

Wait did I say two women?  I meant one, as one already flaked out on me.  Wait, did I say one?  I meant I have no plans to meet anyone.  Ah well, at least I’ll see Grahman’s Theater, and the Hollywood sign.  That’s something, right?  You know, assuming I don’t get hit by a train, or my airplane doesn’t land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is.

Yep, I’m just full of optimism these days.  I never should have left Colorado.

Comments { 12 }

I love my iPad, and why social networks should all burn in hell

Written by on September 19, 2011
Filed Under Mobile Technology

It’s been a long, long, long week after getting my preeeeccciiioouss new iPad, downloading apps, sifting through it all and going through the settings to get it prepared for my Rocky Mountain road trip.  Not only that, I also went back through my iPhone as well and did some major housecleaning, and *ahem*, my MacBook too.  Yes I am a Macaddict, and I don’t care who knows.

Panorama at Captree State Park using AutoStitch, an iPhone app

The end result was to change everything about how I push my content to my blog and social networks, testing apps like Instagram, apps for photo editing and adding special effects, and finally apps to do some form of offline blogging.

A sephia colored photo of Robert Moses, edited on my iPad using PhotoForge2

It occurred to me that all these apps had one thing in common: they all had sharing functions that allowed me to share photos and other content I created to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, even Foursquare, but no sharing function whatsoever to easily push the same content to the place I really wanted it to go:  MY &#@$($ING BLOG.

A closed Italian food stand, edited using ColorRange on my iPhone

It’s a conspiracy against bloggers I tell ya:  a systematic effort to ensure that social networks can all profit from the content I GIVE THEM.  And why not?  It’s the only way I can maximize my reach after all, even if it means I am in essence sending people AWAY from my site, and not TO it.  That’s why this last week has been an exercise in massive frustration on how I could somehow turn all that around.  How can I seed social networks with my content, and yet at the same time still give people a reason to come to my site, so I can continue to expand my readerships and metrics at least to the point where brands don’t roll around the floor laughing to tears when I tell them how much traffic my blog gets?  Aye, there’s the rub.

A paddler at Captree, filtered using Dynalight HD on the iPad

Since I want a large part of my blogging to involve the photography I do, I’ve had to establish a workflow that would make it easy for me to push my work everywhere on teh internetz, while still giving me plenty of time to enjoy my travels, and I think I’ve acheived that somewhat.  The first step was getting an Eye-fi card with direct mode, allowing me the pleasure of wirelessly transferring photos I take with my Canon s95 straight to my iPhone.  With the impending arrival of Apple’s iCloud, the photos will also show up on my iPad and my MacBook once I come across a WiFi network.  All my photo content will then be synced across all my devices, including my camera.  I can then use any of my Apple gadgets to edit, add special effects or filter these photos before uploading them to Flickr, which I decided to use as my central repository for my online photo collection.  With the use of an app called FlickStackr, I can upload these photos in an optimized and resized format, then use its sharing function to disemminate these photos on Twitter, Facebook, etc..  I can also use Blogsy to quickly showcase these same photos on my blog as well.

At least that’s how I think I’ll be doing it.  I figured I would use my iPhone for these tasks when I’m moving around, then my iPad when I’ve had a chance to sit down and take a breath (or when I’m dining somewhere), and finally my MacBook when I’m all settled in at the hotel.

I also have the option of emailing photos to Flickr instead, which is set up to automatically publish the same photo to my blog.  I’m not sure this is the route I want to take though, as I don’t have much flexibility in how I can resize photos or format the post, but it is an option.  It also has the advantage of forcing people to come to my blog to see the photo, rather than seeing it consumed on other social networks.  The only downside is that it doesn’t populate Twitter’s new user gallery of photos (they don’t see my blog as a photo service, the filthy scum suckers.)  Although… I could use Instagram for that instead.

In fact I’m starting to understand why Instagram is so popular now.  When they say it’s easy to share, they are NOT lying.  I can easily share each photo to Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook at the same time without breaking a sweat, whereas with other apps, you can usually only do these one after the other, and often their sharing is limited to Twitter or Facebook only.  Notice though, there’s no option by Instagram to share photos to my blog.  Of course.

I guess I could either round up all the Instagram photos I’ve taken for the day and compile them into one post, but I guess this is still something I need to experiment around with.

In any event, at least the worst of it is out of the way, and I can finally look forward to a very hi-tech (and hopefully equally rewarding) road trip.  Assuming I don’t get hit by a train this week.

Comments { 18 }

Geo-Dating: Will My Traveling Check-ins Lead to Love?

Written by on July 19, 2011
Filed Under Romance and Relationships

I’ve never been a fan of online dating.  Scratch that, I would like to hunt down and burn to death every creator and purveyor of all dating sites as a service to humanity, as well as justice for unleashing a plague onto the world that could only be rivaled by the advent of Myspace (and later Facebook.)

Yet just when I’m about to close the book on internet dating forever and ever, amen, OKCupid updated their mobile apps to offer several features that drew my interest:

  •  Broadcasts. This allows you to let your best matches know that you’re free now and suggest activities. You can even include photos. Other users can browse your Broadcasts — and vice-versa — and reply to those they find interesting.
  •  Locals. This shows you matches nearby (this is handy, considering OKCupid only lets you search for matches within a 25- to 500-mile radius). One can then indicate that they would like to meet those locals, and chosen folks will get a notification.
  •  Notifications. OKCupid will let you know when a good match is nearby.

Hmmmm.

Considering that this fall I will embark on another massive road trip around the Rocky mountains,  maybe these features could actually come in handy.  Specifically the broadcasting feature that would let potential matches know when I’m nearby and whether they’d like to meet up for coffee, sightseeing, or just want to laugh at me, the ugly looking tourist from out of town.

It’s an intriguing experiment, and the way I figure it, if I can’t meet ANYONE nice using OKCupid’s location based features after 2,500 miles of traveling, well then, I can pretty much write off online dating forever.

 

Comments { 0 }

WordPress for iOS = FAIL

Written by on April 15, 2011
Filed Under Tumblelog

This WordPress iPhone “app” (and I use the term charitably) simply fails to do all the things I desperately want it do from my iPhone: easily embed images from Flickr uploads, videos from Youtube uploads, upload and post audio files, choose post formats, set featured images, etc., etc. And why does it always default to the comment screen? Seriously?  I use BlogPress instead, and while it’s not 100% perfect, it’s still leaps and bounds better than WP’s native app. Come on WordPress devs, you can do better than this.

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I think I’m relying too much on GPS

Written by on March 22, 2011
Filed Under Travelogues

Been sick with a stomach flu ever since I got back from Texas, so I haven’t been able to catch up on blogging or do much of anything else for the past few days. Finally catching up now, little by little.

I was thinking about how my iPhone handled things during my trip down in Texas, and as much as it was aces for nearly most of the time spent there, there was a day where the GPS just could not seem to maintain a lock to save its own life. As a GPS tracking device, my precious iPhone was starting to falter in its accuracy.

It started happening in Austin where I would get a GPS lock, only to lose it 10 seconds later, only to regain it another 10 seconds later, and the net result was causing my Navigon app to go completely haywire, telling me to drive into walls or off exits that didn’t exist. Good grief.

To say I was displeased would be an understatement. I ready to go in kill-murder-destroy mode here. I thought maybe solar flares could be to blame, which I know can disrupt vehicle tracking, but I did some research into the MacRumors forum, and it seems this has been an issue experienced by owners of the new Verizon iPhone in particular. For the first time I realized it doesn’t actually use the same chip the AT&T phone does, and rather than having a dedicated processor, this GPS instead shares processing power with the iPhone’s CPU. At least that was my understanding of how it’s set up in the Verizon version.

Some people were thinking this was having am impact on the GPS accuracy of the Verizon iPhone, but fortunately it may just be a matter of updating the software code, something I’m hoping they do in the next iOS update.

In the meantime, I compared the GPS fleet tracking thingie in my car rental to see if it was having problems too, and I noticed occasional glitches as well, but it was still more usable than the iPhone was at the moment. Then a thought occurred to me, and I went to check my Wi-Fi settings and noticed I had it turned off. I went to turn it back on again and… nearly picture perfect GPS accuracy ever since. Go figure.

Thank God I figured it out before I began my major drive from Austin to Dallas, or I would have had a major canary. I was sure my iPhone was defective or broke on me or something, but thankfully it seems to be one of the quirks that hasn’t been worked out yet since Apple released the Verizon iPhone.

At least I hope that’s what it is.

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