Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

Oddball Review: Belkin TuneBase FM with Hands-Free

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Belkin TuneBase FM

For the record, Saturday’s “cheer-yourself-up” day was a complete success. Apple and I had a fabulous time, got ourselves some of the things we’ve either needed or wanted (or both), and had some great meals and treats throughout the day. One of the items I picked up for both of us to use was the Belkin TuneBase FM with Hands-Free, an iPhone-centric vehicle adapter and FM transmitter that would allow us to play tunes on our iPhones through our car stereos.

Neither Apple’s Mazda nor my GTO has a stereo with MP3 capability or any sort of auxiliary input whatsoever, leaving us both in the lurch if we want to play anything other than regular compact discs. Without replacing the head unit itself, an FM transmitter is our only option that doesn’t involve soldering and wiring diagrams. I’ve been woefully unimpressed with essentially every FM transmitter device that I’ve ever tried, largely due to the fact that these things are all gimped by order of the FCC — an order that universally restricts their transmission power to almost unusable levels. Nevertheless, when you have cash in hand, you’re more apt to take risks and try things when it comes to products, and the Belkin TuneBase FM was no exception.

On Sunday, before we headed out to run a few errands, I decided to give the TuneBase FM a try in my GTO. The packaging was unwieldy, and as I started to unpack the device, I got the sneaking suspicion that Best Buy had sold us a previously-returned item at full retail price. There were small rips and tears in the ultrathin cardboard inserts, and Scotch tape had been used at strategic points to hold the whole mess together. Yet, everything seemed to be in place, including the protective plastic over the TuneBase’s LCD display screen. I decided to press on and evaluate the performance of the device on its own merits.

The merits, as it turned out, were few and far between. First of all, if you have a 2004-2006 Pontiac GTO with a manual transmission, you can stop considering this product right now. It completely interferes with the car’s shifter, making shifts to third tricky, fifth painful, and reverse nigh impossible. The large stalk that plugs into the cigarette lighter has the all-important LCD display screen and controls mounted on the end of it, and can’t be pivoted out of the way. The gooseneck design of the cradle means you can’t use the secondary power point in the GTO’s console, either, because the lid would be unable to shut.

Even if the ergonomics had been workable, the sound quality was worse than bad — it was pathetic. Even using the device’s maximum boost level, I still had to literally max-out the volume on my iPhone and then double the volume of my car stereo just to hear my music — and at that, it was muddy and distorted. Worse, what if I forget that I’ve jacked all these volume levels up and decide to switch to another radio station on my car’s head unit? My ears will explode and I’ll be heading to GM Parts House to order new speakers from Australia. Same thing with my iPhone — if I don’t lower the volume back down, the next time I plug in my headphones and cue up some tunes for a bike ride, I’ll be rendered deaf. Completely unacceptable. I’m not sure whether Belkin or the FCC deserve more of the blame on this, but I’m giving an equal portion to them both.

I also tried setting up the TuneBase FM in the Mazda, and it was no better. At least it didn’t interfere with that car’s shift lever, but the sound quality was still atrocious. I don’t think I’ve ever raised the Mazda’s stereo volume to the level required just to hear my iPhone output. When at first I accidentally forgot to plug the TuneBase’s audio cable into my phone’s headphone jack (a required step) and cued up the music, it blasted out of the phone’s built-in mono speaker — which actually sounded better than the sound produced by the TuneBase’s transmitter.

The TuneBase FM comes built-in with another feature that I had high hopes for, and which dashed those hopes in the end. The “ClearScan” mode purportedly takes the hassle out of tuning your FM transmitter to a clear frequency by automatically scanning for one, then locking onto it, with the press of a button. The problem was, it kept choosing a frequency that wasn’t clear. For whatever reason, it always selected a frequency that was about 200 Hz higher than the real clear spot, necessitating that I set the device manually anyhow. Worthless.

After all of this, there is one good thing I can say about the Belkin TuneBase FM: Best Buy accepted it for return with no restocking fee.

Oddball Verdict: You’re Better Off Installing a Record Player.

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Wunder Radio Ist Wunderbar

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I discovered a really cool iPhone application on Friday. It’s called Wunder Radio, and it allows you to stream tens of thousands of radio stations from all over the world right to your phone — even over the cellular network.

There’s a little something for everyone here. For example, I can now listen to our afternoon local talk show guy no matter where I am, or the Detroit-based news radio station I used to listen to on the way to school every morning over a decade ago. You can pull up Japanese radio stations that are actually in Japan, or stations from a huge array of other countries (yep, Thailand included). There’s content ranging from music, sports and talk radio to police scanners, weather radio and air traffic control. I’ve often wished someone would create an FM radio tuner device for the iPhone, but now I no longer care!

The content itself isn’t the only cool part; for some reason, it’s fun to hear commercials from other regions. Or other nations!

The Wunder Radio app (which is also available for Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices) is essentially the mobile extension of RadioTime, a website where you can stream all of these same stations directly to your PC, if you’re so inclined. If you’re into radio, check it out.

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Apple (Computer) is Starting to Piss Me Off

Today comes news that Apple has started blanket-rejecting third-party eBook reader apps, claiming that because those apps can be used to read illegally obtained copyrighted content, they will no longer be published in the App Store. So what happens to eReader, Stanza, et al? I use both to read PDB eBooks that I have hand-built from my own written works.

Rumor has it that Apple is about to launch a 6″-8″ tablet-sized device which could compete with Amazon’s Kindle eBook device. This could be Apple’s way of clearing out the competition in the eBook space before launching their own solution. If that’s the case, it’s extremely distasteful and takes my opinion of Apple Computer down a huge, huge notch.

Edit: I should mention that the eBook reader ban rumor is apparently false. The reader app that touched off this firestorm was rejected because it allowed iPhone-to-iPhone sharing of eBooks, which could have potentially been a copyright violation.


And I Thought Last Week Was Bad.

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What is it, Thursday already? It’s been nothing short of a ridiculous week from start to finish. I’ve worked until after 11:00 p.m. every day thus far. One night I went to bed with a headache severe enough to blur my vision. Tonight I paced back and forth in my office for nearly an hour, hashing through the apocalypse running through my brain. Tomorrow I’m expecting a sidework client to review the completed work I sent him last night, but assuming he doesn’t drop a bombshell on me, I might actually be looking at a fairly quiet Friday night…and even a quiet weekend.

This particular client doesn’t have a habit of dropping bombshells — quite the opposite, actually — so I think I’m safe. Probably.

Most of this week’s frustration, however, came from a project with a somewhat tight deadline that I signed on for, and which progressively became more and more difficult to deliver on as further and more detailed requirements streamed in. It recently reached the point at which I had to take a serious look at the way things were going and be brutally honest with myself: Did I have any hope of meeting the requirements given the time and resources I have available to me? I spent literally hours hashing this question out, trying to find a formula that would produce an answer of “Yes,” but in the end, I could not.

I still don’t know where that project is going to go from here, but I couldn’t continue to watch it spiral further and further out of control (if it was ever within control, a thing of which I am doubtful). I did some research, analyzed the situation as I saw it and wrote up an honest report for the client. Not much else I could do, in good conscience. Now I guess we see how it pans out.

The current state of my various jobs, however, seems to suggest that I’ll have some time to recover some sanity this weekend. I have another acupuncture appointment on Saturday afternoon, but other than that, I’m hoping to not make any plans. The only thing I might do is go see the new Transformers 2 movie, although in that case, I’d want to first watch the Blu-ray disc of the first film which has been gracing my countertop for the last month and a half. We rented it from Netflix, you see. It’s been weeks, I think, since I had time to watch anything from Netflix. (In the interim, Apple has been going crazy renting Korean shows, so more power to her — at least somebody’s using the service.)

I’ve also continued to enjoy my iPhone 3GS, what little time I’ve had to use it. The few calls I’ve placed or taken have sounded phenomenal, and I haven’t even bothered to look at the signal strength indicator because I never worry about it dropping a call. Slowly but surely, as well, the apps I use that were broken by the OS 3.0 upgrade (eReader chief among them) are being fixed. Now I can finally read my eBooks again. I still haven’t had an opportunity to take much in the way of interesting photos or video with it, although I did set myself up with a YouTube account so I can upload whatever I shoot directly to their service. I tested this feature once and it worked pretty well then.

Having spent next to no time on any of my own pursuits in well over a week, and only insignificantly more before then, there’s a lot of stuff stacking up around the house that needs doing. Apple’s laptop (which used to be my laptop, actually) needs a serious dose of reformatting; I’ve never seen anything run so slow. I’ve got Netflix to catch up on, a story I want to get back to, and even some minor modifications to make to this site. It’s fortunate that I’ve been feeling energized by some unknown force these last few days, otherwise I shudder to think how I might have (or not have) gotten through the week.

One last warning: I’m probably going to be switching web hosts again soon (possibly very soon) due to some email issues, so yeah, you’ve been warned.

That’s all for today, I guess. Somehow, it’s already midnight.

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One Insane Week

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Only on rare occasions do I look forward to the dawn of a new Monday. However, I’m going to take the arrival of tomorrow morning as official closure on this week from hell that we just got done wrapping up. It was hell not only for me, but for essentially my entire family as well; partially for the same reasons, and partially for different reasons altogether. The end result for all involved, one way or another, was exhaustion. At least, I’m happy to say, this weekend got progressively better, finally ending on a high note.

It all begin at the beginning of last week, when I learned that my great uncle had passed away. I belong to a very small family, so the loss of even one of its members — particularly one as cherished as “Tex,” the only great uncle I ever had the opportunity to get to know — is always keenly felt. As hard to take as losing him was, the experience was nothing short of a nightmare for my mom, grandmother and the rest of Tex’s family, as his final days were a flurry of emergency medical response and hospital bureaucracy that put some of the worst aspects of the U.S. health care industry in the spotlight. In the end, though, the family can at least rest assured that Tex is now at peace, and no longer suffering the mind-robbing effects of Alzheimer’s Disease as he had been for the last several years.

I’m the only child of two only children, so that should tell you all you need to know about just how small my family is. Not having any actual aunts or uncles, it was my mom’s uncle Tex who filled that role for me, and we always had a great time together. As early as the mid-1980s, he and I would go out shopping at the record store and have lunch together at one of my favorite restaurants, where we would talk and laugh and snark about countless things — like that time at Bill Knapps in 1987 when the “Happy Birthday” song got stuck on an endless loop, and we giggled about it for the rest of the afternoon.

Visiting the video arcade at the former Wonderland Mall was another of my favorite “Uncle Tex” activities, and for my birthday one year, he gave me a suede leather pouch filled with quarters. I still have it. Although most of the quarters have been spent, I saved a few of the originals, whose dates indicate they were minted in the early ’80s.

Into the 1990s, I became enchanted with Tex’s stories of World War II, particularly the Battle of the Bulge and all the other lore he used to tell me about. Sometimes he would tell stories I’d heard before — like the tale of the briefcase-bomb assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, since chronicled in the film Valkyrie — but I always listened with rapt attention, because they were always just as good the second or third time around. When my wife and I recently started watching the Band of Brothers miniseries on HBO, I found myself telling her further details about some of E Company’s actions — especially the tale of General McAuliffe’s famous “Nuts!” reply to the German call for his surrender, one of Tex’s favorite war stories. My wife finally asked me how I knew so much of this stuff, and I had to stop myself and realize that it was all because of my Uncle Tex, and the further reading that he inspired me to do on my own.

Like every member of my small family, Tex was an incredibly generous and caring person, someone whom you knew always had your back. It’s a different world now — almost every last one of the places we went or things we did no longer exist to be enjoyed by future generations — but I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have had the times with him that I did. Although they are times that won’t be repeated, neither will they be forgotten.

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Goodies and Gadgets

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We’re back from our trip to Vero Beach feeling both refreshed and happy to be home. We got a chance to enjoy essentially all of the activities that we’d hoped to while away — lying on the beach, the cool waters of the Atlantic, miniature golf, sleeping in, reading (and in my case, writing), watching movies, and exploring. The weather was about 50/50 thunderstorms and bright sun, which dictated our timetable for us, but allowed us to do a nice mix of indoor and outdoor stuff.

The only bad thing was the food; we didn’t have much luck with the new restaurants we tried, finding nothing to write home about. We did find a Carrabba’s on our way home, though. Next time perhaps we’ll stop there. Yes — we’re chain restaurant fans. In our defense, I’ll say that Apple provides all the home cooking we’ll need — so when we’re out, we like something consistent and predictable.

Anyway, I’m back to work this week, and in addition to my main job, I’ve got two side jobs that are ramping up. I’m doing about 60-90 minutes of work on each one during the weekday evenings, and devoting several more hours to them on the weekend. Neither one looks like a huge, overwhelming job, so this is working out perfectly. I hope there won’t be any snags.

By now, you’re probably wondering where the “goodies and gadgets” are. The first arrived on Sunday, when, after several days of discussion and debate, I decided to trade in my dust-gathering Playstation Portable (PSP) for a Nintendo DS. The DS is technologically behind the PSP by a wide margin, but the PSP’s hardware superiority actually worked against it in my eyes. The reason being that most PSP games that I’ve seen are visually dumbed-down versions of things you could play on your bigger consoles, like the PS2 or PS3. I don’t want that in a handheld. I rarely have my PSP with me, so the portability isn’t anywhere near the biggest selling point. Unique games are. And the PSP just doesn’t have any that I care about. It’s all just slimmed-down versions of console games that I could walk into the other room and play on a much bigger screen with much nicer graphics.

The Nintendo DS, on the other hand, has only the performance equivalence of an old N64. This forces DS game developers to be more creative and yields unique and eclectic games like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Dementium: The Ward, and stuff like that. Interactive novels, point-and-click games, auto mechanic sims, and other stuff is all available on the DS, and there’s nothing else like it on any other system I know (barring some overlap with the Wii). Not only that, but the DS adds additional senses to the experience, with its touch-screen and voice-recognizing microphone.

And, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t encouraged by the fact that Apple herself said she’d enjoy playing the DS too, which is a pretty cool thing for a gamer husband to hear his non-gamer wife say.

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Kool-Aid, Apple Flavor

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It was one year ago that I bought my first piece of Apple technology (Apple as in “Computer,” although they have since excised that word from their name): the iPhone. Three months later, the iPhone 3G landed, making us all feel like gits (although in retrospect, the AT&T mandatory data plan on the original iPhone is a much better value!).

Now, I’m gearing up to take another sip of that famous Apple Kool-Aid, because I’m almost certain that we’re just a matter of three months away from iPhone Revision 3.

There’s been no official announcement, of course. Apple, being savvy marketers if nothing else, wouldn’t dare say “There will be a new iPhone this summer,” because it would mean the immediate crash of existing iPhone sales while everyone waits for the new unit. But all signs point to a summer (possibly June) 2009 release of “iPhone 3.0.” For instance:

  • June is now recognized internally as the anniversary of Apple’s iPhone “product cycle,” as admitted by Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller. The last iPhone hardware revision was issued in June of 2008.
  • In June 2009, the first adopters of the original iPhone come off their two-year AT&T contracts.
  • This week, AT&T introduced the option to purchase “unsubsidized” iPhone 3Gs, which is seen by some as a hint that they are attempting to hasten sales of the unit’s remaining stocks.
  • Also this week, iPhone OS 3.0 beta was released to developers, similar to the way iPhone OS 2.0 was previewed in March of 2008, just before the iPhone 3G release (the iPhone 3G was not announced at the iPhone OS 2.0 preview event, either).

Speaking of iPhone OS 3.0, I followed along with the developer preview as it unfolded this past Tuesday. Suffice it to say, this is a pretty big update for the device — and it finally adds a host of features and capabilities that should have been there since day one.

OS 3.0 will be a free update for all existing first-gen and 3G iPhones, and a $10 paid upgrade for iPod Touch owners. Here’s what it includes:

  • Copy and paste support
  • MMS (picture messages) — iPhone 3G only
  • Stereo Bluetooth via A2DP — iPhone 3G & iPod Touch Rev.2 only
  • Push notification
  • 1,000 new APIs for app development
  • Support for hardware accessory connections
  • Turn-by-turn GPS directions
  • Peer-to-peer connectivity between iPhones
  • Device-wide search feature (called “Spotlight”)
  • Notes can now be synced to your computer
  • Landscape keyboard now works in all apps
  • Support for in-app purchases and subscriptions

We’re still missing video recording and Adobe Flash support, but this is a great start toward filling in the embarrassing gaps in the iPhone’s “basic functionality” portfolio. Even more interesting, though, are all of the new developer APIs and the belated arrival of push notification, which open up a lot of new ways the device can be expanded through third-party software. Since I bought my iPhone, free OS updates and a handful of applications have turned it into a vastly more versatile device. I’m looking forward to more of that!

I’m not the only one who’s excited about the possibility of a new iPhone hardware revision. My wife Apple is excited too, because as soon as the new phone lands, she gets my old one. I was doing a little research today into the total cost of our AT&T bill, assuming we had one first-gen iPhone and one to-be-announced iPhone 3.0. The pricing is a bit overwrought and a bit of a mess, and I still think the fact that AT&T stopped including 200 free SMS messages with the mandatory iPhone data plan was an extremely cheap-ass maneuver. But when I consider the value I get from my phone — and that Apple would get from having one of her own — it becomes clearly worth it to me. Especially since we weren’t paying that much less when Apple had a phone on Verizon that didn’t do a damn thing besides make calls.

The fact that I like the iPhone so much is a bit weird; after all, I’ve historically believed that Macs were too limiting and hand-holding for my taste as a computer enthusiast. And yet I’m not gravitating to Symbian or Android mobile devices; instead I went right for the iPhone. I guess I’m getting to a point in my life when having maximum tinker ability in a device just doesn’t matter anymore, because I’m busy enough that I just need stuff to work the way it’s supposed to and be done with it. Never thought I’d see it. But I did just turn 29, so I can use that as a catch-all excuse. ;)

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It’s Not Just a Phone, It’s a Bookshelf

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As part of my continuing preparations for our upcoming trip to Thailand, I’ve been filling my Amazon Wish List with books that I want to read during my travels. Reading is something I always re-acquaint myself with whenever I’m on the road. Although I like reading and can get sucked into a book for hours on end, when I’m at home, I have a hard time pulling myself away from my family, my work, and my technological toys to spend much time reading.

Not too long ago, though, I re-discovered how much easier it is for me to fall asleep if I spend the last part of my day reading. Because I don’t want to disturb Apple by leaving a light on, I started to think outside the box — maybe I could read stories on my iPhone? After all, the iPhone is capable of opening Word documents, PDFs and such. I found an iPhone application called Air Sharing which lets the phone act as a “wireless thumb drive,” onto which you can simply drag and drop your documents and files. For some weeks now, I’ve been using this as a way to read stories in Word format before dozing off at night.

However, Air Sharing isn’t built with book reading in mind — the text is very small, it keeps rotating the damn screen orientation every time I try to read while lying on my side, and the black text on the glaring white screen is hard on my eyes in otherwise total darkness (even though I turn the screen’s brightness all the way down).

Enter eReader Pro. eReader Pro is another downloadable application from the iPhone App Store, and is the answer to about a dozen questions I’ve been asking for a long time. On top of all that, it’s free.

eReader is, as you might guess, an eBook reader for the iPhone — the premier eBook reader, in my opinion. Unlike the competing application known as Stanza, eReader is capable of reading protected PDB-format eBooks that you can buy from various stores online. eReader themselves, in fact, were acquired by FictionWise.com and have their own massive online library of books you can purchase, including — and this is where I get really giddy — a library of over 600 Star Trek pocket novels, ever my subject of choice.

This afternoon I conducted a test, and purchased two novels in the Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Mission Gamma series. You can buy them right from your phone, download them directly to your eReader Pro “bookshelf,” and open them right up. To verify that you’re the legal purchaser of the book, you enter your credit card number one time and you’re good to go. The best part? These two books I bought are long out of print, and on Amazon’s used book marketplace, the cheapest price you can find them for is upwards of $30 apiece. My total cost for both? Less than $14. Score.

Besides the great library at your fingertips, the eReader Pro application itself is full of options for an optimal reading experience. You can invert the screen colors for night reading (and let me tell you, the white text on a black background is far easier on the eyes in ambient darkness). You can set as many bookmarks as you want, write notes to yourself, highlight passages, look up words in a dictionary (requires a purchased dictionary to be downloaded to your phone), and jump to any chapter in the book. The app even automatically remembers the last page of each book you were reading.

All of this would be great by itself, but I went a step further and researched a means by which I could create my own PDB-formatted eBooks for reading on my phone. I found a free piece of software that lets me create an eBook from any Word document in about ten seconds — I’ve already tried converting some old stories I wrote, and it works beautifully. I love it!

The only thing I wish the eReader Pro application would do is let me categorize my books, so that I could, for example, just see Star Trek novels, or just see stuff I’ve written myself. As it is, all of the books on my phone go into a single list, which I can sort either by title, author, or publication date.

The eReader Pro iPhone App (it also works on iPod Touch devices, by the way) has been around for over six months now, so the only thing I feel bad about is the fact that I didn’t discover it until now! Of course, it’s now easy for me to see why so many people are calling the iPhone (and iPod) the ultimate eBook reading device. It’s just another way in which the iPhone proves itself to be more than just a phone — and worth the purchase price several times over.

And hey, now I don’t have to cart four heavy, unwieldy omnibus editions onto the plane with me.

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Still Breathing!

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I was going to title this post “I’m Doing Science and I’m Still Alive,” after a line from the end credits song for Portal. But I didn’t, because a cursory Google search revealed that a ton of other like-minded nerds did the same thing — months ago, in fact — so it’s already passé. I know better than to beat a dead pop culture horse.

But hey, welcome to Oddball. I’m still here, and in a functioning mental capacity to boot, lest you think otherwise. No, I haven’t been busy, though that’s usually my excuse when I don’t post for a while. In fact, quite the opposite: I’ve been enjoying my job, learning lots of new stuff that used to vex me. In the off hours, I’m spending lots of time playing video games, hanging out with Apple, going to some new places and watching my favorite movies. It’s great, it’s reduced my stress level significantly, and no — I’m not a bit sorry.

In a couple of weeks we’ll be flying out to Thailand again. This time will be a bit different from last year’s trip, in particular because we’ll be staying at the new home Apple’s parents built. It’s in a very nice, quiet area not too far from their old house; we visited the place a few times last year before it was completed, basically just to check the property, water the plants and soforth. Their old house is in a very busy (read: noisy) industrial part of town, so this will be pretty cool.

We’re actually not sure how long we’ll be staying. A lot of that is going to depend on some of the stuff we’re planning to do there, which I won’t get into. Our tickets have us coming home in a month, but it might wind up being longer — we’re sorta flying by wire here, actually. So I’m planning to make sure we have everything we need to be comfortable for a longer period of time, like cellular phones and our own DSL connection at the house. These sorts of services are affordable and require no contracts in Thailand, so there’s no great barrier to entry.

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Power’s Out…

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A big thunderstorm hit just after Apple got home from work. A few minutes later our power went out, and it’s still out. Sustained outages are actually pretty unusual around here, but we broke out the candles, took cold showers and are headed to bed. I’m able to post this thanks to my iPhone, and the AT&T EDGE network, which is still working just fine.

We haven’t had a real power failure since the ‘04 hurricanes. It’s kind of cool, being surrounded by darkness — there are no lights visible anywhere outside our windows. I always did get geeked over blackouts when I was a kid, just so long as they ended by the time it stopped being fun!

Hopefully everything will be back to normal tomorrow.

Edit @ 11:30pm: It’s back on now. :)

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