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19
Today on Weekly Dragnet
The Big Actor
It’s Friday August 1st, 2008. Day 1 of MINI Takes The States 2008! The day started with waking up kinda early and getting on the phone with my MINI dealer of choice to try and schedule a last minute Oil change and fluids check on MINI before we headed out on the 300+ mile trip to Los Angeles (just to be safe). We got to the dealer at around 9:30am and they hooked me up right way and we were out within the hour, with the usual 15% discount :)
From the Dealer we headed toward the infamous Interstate 5. Some of you may know of I5, some of you may have heard stories of I5, and still some of you may have even had some alone time with I5. Either way, it is I5! It’s long and it’s boring; in fact it’s about 90% of the trip from the Bay Area down to Los Angeles. By the way from now on Los Angeles will now be known as LA because it’s shorter to type. Moving on. We made it down to LA in pretty good time, with a few stops to eat / drink / stretch.
We got down to the hotel around 3ish that afternoon. We stayed at the Hilton, not one of their better properties I would say, but alright. We were forced to use valet parking, which I’m not a huge fan of, but whatever. That night there was going to be an “Owners Only” party at Jillian’s at the City Walk in Universal City. The idea was to gather up everyone that already owned a MINI and let them hang out and chat. It was a good time! The entry into the event was cool too, you had to have your MINI key to get in; talk about step $30,000 cover charge! :) Upon finishing up the Owners party, we were left to get a little lost in LA heading back to our hotel to attempt to get some sleep before the big first day of MTTS!
Day one was to start with a meeting at the UCLA parking lot at 9:00am. After a slight problem with the waking up process (oops) and a wakeup consisting of a light smack to the face (completely accidental I’m sure) ;) we made it to the parking lot around 9:30 (not too bad). Let me just say WOW, there were MINIs as far as the eye could see, with every possible color / modification combination you could think/dream of! It was like MINI Heaven. After walking around for 30 min or so gawking at all the wonderful MINIs, we had to get ready to rally to the Rose Bowl!
After a beautiful drive and a looooong line of MINIs (with a short stop at the top of a mountain to get a special surprise) we had arrived at the Rose Bowl. Since we were starving from missing breakfast at the UCLA parking lot, food was priority one! We grabbed some food from the vendors then grabbed our official MTTS goodie bag. Throughout the day we checked out all the vendors (some multiple times) and met a ton of cool people. We met Fireball Tim (he had the matte black police MINI there; soo cool!), DB and Todd from White Roof Radio (got a limited edition motoring badge), and a few other MINI people. After all that fun and excitement, we decided to retire a little early and check out some of the LA area while we were there and pickup where we left off on Sunday.
And like that, it was Sunday! We managed to get up on time this time and got checked out of the hotel. After getting some beloved Starbucks, we were off to the Rose Bowl for the last time. First thing that morning was the MINI costume contest! We were more than ready for this since we already had a costume ready for the Halloween costume contest that NEVER happened the year previous! We got MINI all dressed up and sure enough HE WON A PRIZE!!! After the costumes, we went back to the vendors and made more purchases. Today was different however, everything was on sale!! We picked up some JCW scuttles for Valerie’s MINI and some assorted MTTS swag, all at crazy sale prices. After going back and forth between the stores and MINI 3-4 more times, it was time for the last rally of the event. This one took us high into the mountains then back down and around to the Rose Bowl. Another beautiful route. Waiting for us when we got back was a nice MINI USA BBQ. After filling up on some hamburgers, we took one last go around at the booths, said our goodbyes and headed out to get back on the road to go home.
That’s it right? well, no. About an eighth of a mile outside the Rose Bowl after leaving we almost got slammed by a SUV that wasn’t paying attention. But all was ok after some swerving maneuvers. We decided to take a detour through some of LA and Beverly Hills, then off to I5 to go home!
This should have been a simple task, but about half way back to the Bay Area, they decided to put all of I5 North under construction until 10am the next day. This caused us to do some fast maneuvering via Garmin GPS and iPhone GPS to find an alternate route through what smelled like potato fields, and through some parts of the state where no one should live. After all this, we got back to the bay in a lighting quick 7 hours.
MTTS was so amazing! We already want to go back, but are forced to wait until MTTS 2010! :)
Cya guys there!
Jul
22
So the iPhone 3G came out, the 2.0 firmware was released to all iPhone 1.0 users, we are all happy and content now, right? Well, kind of. The 2.0 firmware is a major step forward for the iPhone platform, this is true, however we aren’t quite to that “perfect device” status yet. The single greatest feature of the new firmware update, at least in my opinion, is the introduction of the app store. Those of you that had a hacked firmware running on your original iPhone know how great apps are on the phone. Those of you who didn’t, well now is your chance to find out what everyone was raving about. I am very happy with the app store, so much so that I don’t miss the Installer.app all that much. Hold that, that isn’t completely true. There is one MAJOR feature I do miss from the Installer.app, the ability to have apps that would customize just about every single little part of the phone you can think of. From Changing the carrier logo, to changing system message display text. This is completely missing in the app store, maybe it’s on the way, maybe it’s not, no one knows. I did jailbreak my 2.0 firmware to see if I could get back some of the customization, but I found little benefit and it actually made the phone even more unstable than it already was, plus it wouldn’t let me update some of my purchased apps. Needless to say, back to factory 2.0 I went. I can understand that Apple wouldn’t want this fine grain tweaking of the OS for security and stability reasons, that I get. However, here is the solution; create a packaging method that enables the OS to handle theme packages. These bundled up theme packages could then be created with a plugin to Xcode or even a simple stand alone theme creator for the non techie, to be sold and installed through the app store. Lets face it, the phone is amazing, but when you’re flipping through pages of icons, nothing says “this is my phone.” Below are 2 screen shots, one from my old hacked 1.1.4 firmware and one from my newly installed from the factory 2.0 firmware. The new one is simply boring. I am hoping that eventually Apple will do the right thing, and let there be some forms of customization, because after all, like all the features the iPhone is missing, other phones have had those features for YEARS!
WHERE THE HELL IS MMS!!!!????
So, as you may or may not know, I have just zero cell phone signal in my house. Since this is my only phone line, this poses a pretty large problem. “You can get a landline phone though” no, no I can’t. I refuse. So what does that leave me with? Well, VOIP of course. My goal would be to have the VOIP work on my iPhone when I am at home, and as soon as I leave it goes back to regular cell usage. With the announcement of official third party apps on the iPhone, I was hopeful we would get a Skype or something similar. I was also afraid that AT&T would further screw their customers by forcing apple to block VOIP apps. Well, it looks like VOIP apps are a go. So far there is one, Truphone. This is a native VOIP app on the iPhone. As of this writing it only makes outgoing calls, so it doesn’t solve my problem 100% but its half way there for sure. Once the Apple backend servers are up that allow apps to “run in the background” I am sure this will change. It also has the nice feature where when you make outgoing calls it uses your cell phone number as the callerID so the person you are calling knows it’s you. There is one downside, you do pay per min on the VOIP calls on top of your normal cell phone minutes. It is pretty cheap, but still. Ideally (if they were smart) AT&T should make an iPhone VOIP app that I could use at home, much like the similar t-mobile service. Unfortunately, AT&T is almost sure to screw up and miss the boat / do everything wrong, so I don’t have high hopes.
Anyway, if you are looking for some hot VOIP action on your iPhone right away, this is your only option. But, it definitely does work. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, the call sound quality is soooo much better than cell.
Price:FREE!
Link: Truphone
Jul
16
Day 1: The Mobile Me switch over didn’t happen quite as smoothly as every would have hoped. Although this kind of thing is sort of expected with a massive service change over of this magnitude. It was scheduled to take about 8 hours, but took more like 48 to be up and running enough to be able to use it. This doesn’t really affect my overall feeling of the new service, just something to mention.
Switching User Name: The first step (for me anyway) was to switch my main Identity (formerly .Mac) name to one that I was using as an email only account. This would convert my email only account to an individual account and leave me with just the one name. I attempted to get ahold of Apple twice during the upgrades to get this taken care of, but as you would expect they were far too busy trying to get the service going to be able to help me with this account problem. So I waited until most of the system issues were solved and tried again. After speaking with one of their reps on chat, I had the account name switched over and setup with very little pain (with the exception of the 16 security questions he asked that I couldn’t remember the answers to) but hey, thats their job and it’s good they do it.
New Features: With the switch to Mobile me, us old .Mac users were buried in new features and a completely reworked system that was actually going to be useful now. Among some of the new features are:
- Fancy new web interface
- Bigger iDisk. 20GB
- Better integration with iPhone
- “Push” email and calendar
- New email addresses of course @me.com
Although I don’t really use it, the web interface is really nice and usable, it feels very much like a desktop app. The bigger iDisk is nice, still not quite big enough, but much more usable at 20GB than it was at 10GB. The push email and calendar are great, mailing and calendaring are much more seamless between the iPhone and your desktop now. It seems that a lot of people really don’t like the “@me.com” but I am in the other camp, I really like it. I started using my new @me.com address 3 or 4 days before the launch of Mobile me and have completely switched to it being my main email address.
Overall: To sum it up I would say that I paid the $99 for .Mac and found it to be kinda useful, with the “free” upgrade to Mobile Me, I would say it was money well spent. If you never had .Mac and are thinking about getting Mobile Me for the first time, I would say definitely check it out. Apple has a nice long 60 day trial to really see if it fits your lifestyle and workflow.
If you need to sync your data across multiple machines constantly and always have your data where you are, this could definitely be the solution for you.
Apple’s 60 Day Trial of Mobile Me
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