This is what I get for last hour or so:
It is so frustrasting when something taken for granted suddenly disappears ... and at the same time quite scary how dependent we became on it.
Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope for GMails early return
There is great site 10 minute mail - which does exactly what it says. Provides you an email address that lives for 10 minutes and then evaporates. For this 10 minutes, you can read any email sent to it on the web page - and eventually renew it for another 10 minutes. Great way how to beat spammers and other email address collecting sites ...
Here is how it looks like.
This is what I got trying to track my recent purchase from Apple Store ...
That may not be the most useless error message ever seen on Web but it comes pretty close ... One would expect a bit more professional treatment from such big company ...
Why does a company that puts so much emphasis on user experience and perception (like Apple) pick business partners (such as this one - or one certain Canadian wireless provider company running the GSM network) that suck so much that it ruins this perception ? Are the other companies even worse ? Hard to imagine ...
A gem from Merlin's twitter feed. I found it being both hilariously funny as well as wildly applicable :D
There's nothing wrong with me that couldn't be fixed by a little exercise, some discipline, and a weekend at the Dog Psychology Center.
Merlin Mann
Phone
The sound of the iPhone is much clearer and generally better than my old RAZR.
What I really like is a built-in microphone in headphones that allows making and answering calls without holding phone next to your ear. Second is handling of the incoming call while listening to podcast or music: it fades aways and after finishing the call, it slowly fades back in. Very nicely done.
But the best phone feature is seamless integration with my address book, which thanks to synchronization that works very well always the same as address book on my Mac. It offers classic "wheel search", list of recent calls, list of favorites and dial keyboard. What is really awesome is the easy to add or update information: for example, you receive a call from a friend that just got a new phone. After hanging up, with single click on the recent entry you can assign the just received number to an existing contact. And it is always that single address card you use - with address (that you can show in Google map with another click) or email addresses that you can fire up with single click..
This Sunday, as every first Sunday in month we had regular Bytown Mac User Group meeting at usual place - Patty Bolands Pub at the Market. It was great meeting because we had many newcomers - both to the group as well as to the platform, including very fresh Mac switch - a happy owner of 24 hours old Macbook Pro.
The presentations were very suited for the audience of newcomers, especially Katheryne's demo on customizing the Mac. She was kind enough to send the links to the talk (the mailing list). I think that the links are very useful for wider audience than just the ByMUG folks, so I will repost them here ... withour her permission, but in here very own words :-)
continued from here
Email
My email information was transferred from Touch as part of the activation process and started to work right away. Very good and functional user interface.
I also found the mobile Google page (http://www.google.com/m) to be very useful - it adds easy access to small screen optimized versions of the Calendar and Reader. I use Reader a lot, the best feature being that articles I read on ANY device (MBP, Linux desktop, iPhone or even some of the many VM's I am using)
will be marked as read ...
There more than enough reviews and opinions on the coolest gadget in the telephony space so what is point o adding another one ? I was originally quite anti-iPhone anti-Rogers for - IMHO - pretty strong reasons, so it is interesting to review them and see how they survived the reality check.
That maybe not be the strongest reason ... but am going to do that anyway.
Activation
I have ordered the phone by calling the 1-888-ROGERS1 and as I mentioned, the shopping experience was for a change a great one ... That was Tuesday morning and to my big surprise, the phone was delivered n Thursday afternoon.
The http://www.techscreencast.com/ - lots of great content about operating systems, tools, technologies, languages and generally "stuff that matters"(TM).
Recommended ...
I was holding off for over two weeks, decided not go with that outrageous iPhone voice/data racket. Even trying to encourage people to wait in a hope the demand will be weak and Rogers will bend and lower the rates.
Only, it was not. I mean demand. iPhones seems to be selling better than beaver tales on Dow's Lake during sub minus twenty sunny skating Saturday. Especially the 16 GB ones.