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?

“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.

What do you do when you should be doing something else (like scrubbing your apartment clean)? Besides the big ones like playing Civilization or World of Warcraft there are lots of other things I do to while away my copious spare time. I thought I’d share what I’m doing now.

• Desktop Tower Defense – My brother introduced me to this one a few weeks ago and this little flash game has eaten away several hours of my time since then. It’s pretty simple but I just keep going back for more.
• Reading other people’s blogs! – I can’t quite keep up with all the blogs in my reader. Try Google Reader if you’re not yet using an aggregator. Then you don’t have to stop by all the sites to see who’s updated! Some of my top reads are in the sidebar. Which I should update
• Reading and more reading – Most recently I’ve been reading different comic series. Runaways is the current read – and Joss Whedon is writing a few issues! Yay! I’m not caught up to the current issues yet, but they’re really quick reading, I’m sure I will be soon.
• Daydreaming about an iPhone – Ok, just kidding on this one. But I wouldn’t mind getting one, that’s for sure!
• Shopping! Ok, this one is true. All too often I go over to Amazon and buy more books. Being a member of Amazon Prime is DANGEROUS! Check out my wishlist below to see things I might buy someday. Though I really don’t know why you’d care. In fact, don’t check it out. It’s not there, avert your eyes!
• Reading web comics – If you’re not reading Order of the Stick or xkcd then you’re no kind of geek at all

I’m sure I waste time in other awesome ways (like writing this blog!) but that’s all I can think of right now. Here’s my wishlist. Like I said, don’t look.

Don’t look! It’s too terrible!

(And for those in readers, here’s the YouTube link).

Don’t do that to your iPhone, give it to me instead!

(via Engadget)