Free Candy For Everyone

Ok, so I’m not talking about stopping reading or anything. I love reading, books are one of my big passions. But books are piling up on every surface of my home. I have several overflowing bookshelves. They just get more and more full, since I can’t seem to stop buying books. And at some point, I’ll have to get rid of some of them or be unable to walk around.

My family tends to be early adopters of technology. I’ve had a TiVo since 2000. Just about everyone in the family got an iPhone within the first month of release. And my uncle bought and Amazon Kindle as soon as it came out. What’s a Kindle, you ask? It’s an electronic book reader. But those aren’t books! you say. I know, but they’re getting pretty darn close.

The screen is actually rather book-like. Reading it doesn’t seem like as much of a strain as you might expect. It’s light and small, and I’m getting sick of bringing 15 pounds of books with me when I go on extended vacations. I’m not sure if I’m ready to buy this first generation reader, but it seems pretty cool. You can go to Amazon and buy books straight from your Kindle and download them right away. You can link several Kindles to the same account and share books with you family.

Some books seem a bit pricey to me, given that they’re in digital format. $10 for a book when you don’t “get” anything? But I’m reading “The Golden Compass” right now, and it’s only $3.19 on Kindle, that’s pretty awesome. Check it out: The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials).

In any event, I’m not quite ready to dive in. My brother just picked one up as well, and I might have to borrow his and try to read a book with it, see how I like it. I’ll let you know how it goes!

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?

Let this be a lesson to us all! After I went on and on about how awesome my Mac was, it promptly fell ill. About a week and a half ago I was just sitting on my couch, playing a game on my computer. All was well, though the fan was whirring at hyper-speed. Then there was a horrible “grrgrrgrrcrrcrrcrr” crunchy noise.

The machine was still going, nothing seemed broken. I just sat there looking at it. I continued playing for a minute or two thinking, “Did I just imagine that horrid noise? Yes, I must have imagined it.” But then I decided it was probably real and I cautiously tipped my laptop. The noise crrrrr’d out again. I exited the game and shut the whole thing down. Once everything stopped moving I carefully rotated the laptop around. I heard a small something moving around in there.

My guess was that something had broken free and had been hitting the fan. I figured it would be best to not turn her on again. I made an appointment at the Apple Store and brought her in last week. The guy at the “Genius Bar” was actually pretty bad. He was all “For us to look at this you’d need to leave this with us.” Um, yeah, ok. “For a week even!” Yeah, um, ok. There’s something BROKEN INSIDE OF IT! Take it! Finally, they did.

I got it back today and the replaced the internal fans. Guess it was a good thing I brought her in, after all. No charge, under warranty. Everything seems to be working right now, so I’ll just maintain cautious optimism.

Learn your lesson well! Be careful in your praise! Don’t let your gadgets know how much you love them lest they decide to test your devotion!

“Macs are so cool” - a refrain I’ve found myself repeating several times over the last few days. I keep learning new and awesome things about my MacBook Pro. As I mentioned, I bought an iPhone this weekend. I brought it home and activated it. But all my phone numbers were still on my old cell phone. Oh noes!

Bluetooth to the rescue. My brother was over and he promptly loaded up my old phone, connected it to my Mac via Bluetooth and copied all my numbers over to my computer. That is so cool. Address Book was all loaded up with my phone numbers, I plugged in my phone and it synced right up. Yay, I love my Mac.

Then today I was IMing a friend using Adium and my brother asked why I hadn’t changed their names to the real names. I told him it’s because I don’t use this machine for chatting all that often. Then he lead me back to Address Book where, it turns out, if you put people’s IM info in their entries, it’ll immediately update the display names in Adium. Macs are so cool.

There are a million of these small simple convenience features on the Mac that surprise me all the time. I’m never surprised by my Windows machine - well, never pleasantly surprised, that is! There are things I’ll continue to use Windows for, of course. I use it at work, there are still more games for Windows, and I’m just more comfortable with all the ins and outs of the system. But Macs, oh Macs are so pretty. What a pretty pretty machine.

For those following my twitter feed this isn’t news, but I bought an iPhone this weekend. I’d been wanting one (along with everyone else!) since they first came out. But I didn’t really need one or anything. I’d been thinking about getting some sort of Smart Phone for a while now, and figured I’d pick up an iPhone eventually. Just wasn’t sure when.

I made a trip to the mall this weekend and thought to myself “If they have an iPhone in stock, I’ll buy one.” My bad, because apparently there aren’t any stock issues. They’re pretty easy to pick up right now. So they had the phones. I shopped and pondered and still wasn’t sure if I was going to buy one. But I went back to the Apple store and finally made the decision.

I walked up to one of the employees and said “I want an iPhone.” The guy looked at me and said, “Yeah, me too.” Um, hmm. So I asked, “Do you have any in stock?” knowing they did, but to make my point. He said, “yes, we do” and so I continued, “I want an iPhone.” Ohhh! Ok, so he tried to talk to me about the phone, “Have you ever had a smart phone? Do you want a demo of its features? Do you have any questions?” Um, “I want an iPhone.” Finally he got me my phone and I rushed on home to activate it.

I loaded up iTunes on my MacBook and tried to activate. I got some message “Activations are not available at this time.” Argh! My brother has an iPhone and he said he’d at the same problem. He told me to reboot the phone and iTunes. I did that several times until eventually it worked! iPhone activated simply and easily.

I’ve loaded it up with all my contacts, filled it with music, put some pictures on it, and done some texting. Used Safari to read email and browse the web. It’s just a beautiful device. Amazing. I’m eager for software updates that might enable more applications - it needs more fun-ness. I want some games! I’m traveling to Boston later this month and I’ll try out the video playback feature then. Maybe throw on a movie or some episodes of a tv show. Pretty darn nifty.