Free Candy For Everyone

One of my annoyances about the iPhone was that despite carefully entering many birthdays into my address book on my Mac, those birthdays weren’t showing up on the calendar on my iPhone. Turns out it was user error, not lack of a feature! A more Mac-savvy friend of mine pointed out that I had to actually turn on the birthday calendar in iCal.

I checked the little “Show Birthdays calendar” box, re-synced my iPhone and now all the birthdays are showing up on my calendar. Thank you Apple! Yet another awesome convenience, ready to go. I guess I’m a fan-girl now. How did this happen?

Based on the Nano? So says this article. More iPhones good! The more they shrinkify things for the cheap models, the more they can fit on the uber-iPhone model I intend to buy at some point.

No, I didn’t buy an iPhone. Yet. But my brother did and he wrote up a short post about it. I saw him yesterday and he let me play with his new toy for a little. We were out to dinner at a nice restaurant (Oliveto) and we crudely busted it out at the dinner table. The host was walking by while I was playing with it and spent about 5 minutes staring over my shoulder. We looked up a baseball score on the internet and looked at photos. It is so cool. I want one! But not yet. I’m waiting to see how the dust settles.

I don’t watch commercials unless I want to. Not since I got my first Hello, hello. All I could think while watching it was “Wow, this must have cost a lot in licensing.” I’m sure someone has a list of what all those movies are, so I’m not gonna take the time to watch it frame by frame to identify them all. Hey, if anyone knows where to find that list, point me at it! There were a few I probably couldn’t figure out.

And have I mentioned how awesome I think it looks? Yeah, if not, it looks super sweet. Though why is the hard drive so small? I’d want it to be an iPod replacement, even better, a VIDEO iPod. But with a max of 8 gigs, that’s just not feasible. Guess I’ll be waiting until version two.

My small love of Apple has ended. It’s a little thing, but I feel like a chump. I fell for their “Free Engraving!” scam. I bought an iPod nano a few weeks ago. I had been waiting and waiting because I knew Apple was overdue for an announcement, but I figured, “Hey, it’s not like they’re gonna announce tomorrow and I can’t wait forever.”

So I ordered a 4 GB nano. And ooh, engraving was free! So I got it engraved. Hey, why not? I’ll tell you why not! You can’t return it if it’s been engraved. Well, they announced the new iPods yesterday. And now I’m just stuck with my 4 GB iPod even though an 8GB one costs what I paid for mine!

I shouldn’t be as frustrated as I am. They have a 14 day return policy and I got my iPod … 18 days ago. Ha! So that wouldn’t have helped. But the fact that I had it engraved makes it worse. Somehow. Anyway. Do not accept that “free” custom engraving, because then you have less options and cannot return it. It’s just a chump ploy to screw chumpy-chumps like you and me. Don’t do it!

Reason number two why I’m a chump? Because I still haven’t given up on Comcast. They came out this weekend and “fixed” my problem. I had internet! For all of … an afternoon! But then it got intermittent again. And now it’s worse. I usually manage to get some connectivity in the late evening, but now I’m without internet at all (except for my friendly neighborhood wireless, of course). Sad. Very sad.