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I am definitely loving the new Genius feature of iTunes. It works pretty well - I just pick a song that I wanna listen to, and then it’ll pick songs that it thinks are similar to it.

I guess it’s like normal shuffle, but it sticks to similar genres and styles. So if I pick a “Christian” song, iTunes tends to pick 24 mostly other Christian songs. And if I pick a Playjerise song, I end up with some Missy and some Brooke too. Quite cool.

The only qualm so far is that iTunes decided that when I chose This Is Home by Switchfoot, it thought Better The Devil You Know by Kylie was an appropriate companion.

Spent this morning updating to iPhone 2.1. Mainly because it was there, and cos the jailbreaking people were quick off the mark to get this update hacked.

I had to laugh at one of the listed updates being “improved signal strength”.

“Surely they can’t update signal capability from the software,” thinks James.

But here I am down at church, where last Sunday night, and every Sunday night before that, I’ve barely had 1 bar of 3G coverage. And now, 3 bars and higher, consistently.

Awesome! Thanks, Apple :)

Having a bit of a nerdy night sitting on Debbie’s couch. Just as an aside, she’s cooking dinner, so it’s almost heaven. :)

I recently moved my email address across to be hosted by Google Apps. Basically, I can take advantage of Gmail’s pretty good spam filtering, but also their free hosting and IMAP compatibility. IMAP is quite cool - kinda like exchange, but without the “push” side of things. It two-way synchronises email on my iPhone and my computer. So now I am moving my email back to Mail.app (after realising that it’s better then Entourage - no one is allowed to say “I told you so.”), and setting it up for IMAP.

Then on the iPhone front, I updated it to the new software now that the jailbreak software has updated as well. But since doing that, it wouldn’t sync with iTunes - everytime it was plugged in, it just pops up the “restore from a backup” or “set up as a new iPhone”. I looked around on forums and it seems to be a pretty sporadic error that a few people get when they’ve updated - even if not jailbroken.

Turns out the fix is quite easy. Seeing as I’ve already restored it from a backup, and the data is already on my iPhone… I can just now “set up as a new iPhone”, and it doesn’t really affect anything at all… except that it obviously makes the iPhone and iTunes happier to talk! So that’s what I’d be doing right now, except that the iPhone’s battery is dead.

I can smell a very yummy dinner… and can only hope that good smell means that it’s very close to being ready.

Had a bit of an interesting day. As is usual for Wednesdays, I didn’t even get my work computer out until after lunch - rock into work, have a coffee with a couple of people, endure the 2 hour mobile sales meeting, and by that time, it’s usually 11:30. So there’s some time to say hi to a few city people that I haven’t seen for a while.

The arvo then consisted of some serious planning for Friday. We have finally received an engagement document that we need to present to our team of account executives about our new job direction and stuff for this fin year. And because these guys are all pretty new, I have started to work on a schedule of wireless data training that I’d like to roll out over the next few weeks. It will be a whole new thing for me I think… but I am looking forward to it all.

I’m round at Debbie’s tonight… had some very nice beef with hokkien noodles for dinner, and now Debbie is having lots of fun playing games on my iPhone. I’m looking forward to having a go at jailbreaking my iPhone when I get home actually. There’s already some apps out there that assist the phone in becoming a tethered modem - quite cool.

The app I wrote about a few posts ago has finally become available. I was quite excited as I checked the app store on leaving the office.

As I sat down on Mum and Dad’s couch this evening, I opened it, punched in my details, and was getting quite excited about how amazingly simple, elegant and quick it was.

I typed in my blog address, and the admin username and password. And voila, that was all that needed to be done for a self-hosting WordPress blog. Amazing. Once open, there was a list of my latest 30 posts, and I could just click on one to read it, and then simply tapping on the text brought up the keyboard for me to edit.

All was going brilliantly… it was very impressive indeed! However, as soon as I tried to save any edits, the app just crashed. Sad. It does auto-save all your progress though, which adds to the impressiveness… but that is fairly useless when I can’t actually save anything that I type.

I’m sure an update will arrive very soon.

Monday morning; and I’m back in the city. Just for a very short visit though.

On Friday evening, I bought myself a gorgeous iPhone on Optus. My goodness is it elegant. Better than I ever could have imagined I think. I only had to wait until about 11:30am on Saturday morning for my number to port across - which is pretty impressive considering the huge amount of mobile network activity across all carriers on Friday. Boy, did the iPhone launch cause some awesome systems failures in Telstra - worse than I’ve ever seen before in my 4 years of working there.

Anyway, all was good. The battery seemed to diminish qute quickly, but I was connected to wifi for several hours, so I shouldn’t complain.

But Saturday night, something started to go a little bad. It looked like my iPhone was taking ages to charge. After leaving it for a while, it seemed as though it just wasn’t charging over 10% before stopping charging. It’d then start charging again when it was almost empty. That was sad. And then last night, it just seems to not be charging at all… even though it has the little lightning bolt icon.

So here I am at the Apple Store, hoping that I will find my hero, and they will fix, or give me a new iPhone :)

Oh yeah… that camp that I’m running.

It’s awesome really. Things started off tough for me. It seemed to just take me quite a while to “be there” as far as mindset goes. It was a very though Saturday night and Sunday morning. But Sunday over lunch, I began thinking program, and started to feel like things were ok, and started to find my place and feel content.

What was cool was that as Sunday went on, I began to realise that the team of leaders this year is nothing short of awesome. I think I’d unknowingly “outsourced” more activities to them to run than ever before, and in the lead up to this week, I realised that and I think that might’ve made me a bit more anxious than previous years. But like I said, as Sunday went on, I realised these guys are fantastic, and they’ve taken the activities and really run with them. So much so that I was not at all worried about not being there this morning… it’s well and truly under control.

…just because I can.

It’s so lovely up here. Everything you expected from all the hype. A billion staff around asking if you’d like help. More iPods, Macbooks and iMacs than you can poke a stick at.

So gorgeous.

Time to stop lusting and go back to work.

Hooray for the new Apple Store!

I arrived at work this morning to find the big blue covers taken off the front of the store. But all was still black except for that bright white Apple logo.

But then as I left work this evening, the lights were all on! You could see inside all three levels and it looked might pretty. Strangely, there was no one queued up outside yet - I thought there would be by now. But I am very sure that sometime tomorrow I will start to see people queued up all ready to camp out in the cold overnight for the Thursday evening opening.

I will be looking forward to Friday though - my next desk neighbour and I will be taking some time to wander across the road and distract ourselves :)

Mmm… not bad… much what I expected. Would’ve liked unlimited data though.

• There will be two plans available: a $79 cap with 1GB data and $300 worth of calls; and a $99 cap with 3GB of data and $400 worth of calls
• Both plans include Visual Voicemail
• 30c flagfall; 35c per 30 seconds talk, 25c SMS messages
• The iPhone is only available on a 24 month contract - you can’t purchase it outright
• The 8GB model will cost $220, the 16GB $330
• Only the 16GB is available in white
• Optus won’t be selling accessories - they will be sold through the Apple store

[Gizmodo]

Wonder what Voda will come out with…

It was well worth me getting up at 3am this morning.

Yay for the iPhone 3G!

My first few thoughts were that if you’re a Windows Mobile handset manufacturer, then you should be seriously scared (especially considering the Blackberry Bold is just around the corner too). This iPhone is everything a PDA should be, and has seriously pushed the envelope of mobile data technology. It’s more than I ever expected I think.

Second thought was that Apple seem to have gone out hard against RIM and Blackberry! (Which may very well be why there’s no Telstra link on Apple Australia’s iPhone site.) Not just through their “Enterprise” features… but through MobileMe. MobileMe goes way over and above what Blackberry have ever been able to provide to a non-email-server user.

I was sitting at my computer quite in awe at MobileMe. I’ve never been a huge fan of .Mac, never needed it really. But all of a sudden, this has broken through to be something extremely amazing; something that’s always been limted to corporates. It hasn’t been available to consumers at this extent. All of a sudden, everyone has dual sync emails, calendar, contacts… not just Blackberry corporates who have a $6000 server next to their Exchange server.

So yes, damn straight I want an iPhone 3G.

It doesn’t look like Telstra’s on board; which for mine, is sad. They have the best 3G coverage - no matter how you feel about them, that’s pretty undisputed. But, my guess is that they feel it would entrench far too much on Blackberry (who seem to be getting very close to Telstra with this new HSDPA Blackberry only just around the corner), and very possibly, the lack of Bigpond/Telstra branding on the handset may be against Sol’s directive for mobile handsets. That’s just a huge guess on my part though.

So Voda or Optus? My choice will be down to price - if one of them brings out an unlimited data plan, I’ll be there queuing up at the store with the rest of ‘em.