Walt's Corner

We adopted this little dog over the weekend; it’s a mix between Terrier and a rat (Chihuahua). One of our goals for the new house is to get a dog and cat (the cat is for me). We’re half way to that goal now.

When we returned home for the day a couple days ago, we saw that Dolli had pulled one of Carol’s shirts out of the dirty clothes and was laying on it. I told Carol that the dog probably missed her, and simply wanted something that had her scent, and would remind the dog of her during our absence.

Yesterday, Dolli had pulled out a pair of my underwear from the dirty clothes and had been laying on that. I don’t know what to say. To top things off, the underwear was wrapped around Dolli’s leg, and Dolli managed to make it past Carol when Carol opened the door. So there’s Dolli, running down the street into a neighbor’s yard, dragging behind her a pair of my drawers.

When I first saw this headline, I thought to myself, “It’s high time someone looked into these arrangements!” But the truth is it’s these types of arrangements that inspire change and advancement in technology. It’s a love/hate relationship. This exclusive arrangement is what enticed at&t to give Apple what they needed to re-invent the cell phone.

The fact of the matter is, without an exclusive arrangement between Apple and at&t, we would almost certainly not have the iPhone that we have today. If Apple would have been blocked from making such an arrangement, at&t would have never let Apple have the type of control needed in order to produce the jesus-phone.

I can go ahead and cry that I’m stuck with at&t for 2 years, but truth be told, I’ve had nothing but good service with my iPhone itself. I knew coming in that I would not have MMS, but that is coming around the corner. I knew coming in that I would have to pay a little bit more than equivalent data plans, yet I still chose to get an iPhone. I think requiring a new 2-year contract for my son, so that he could use my original, unsubsidized iPhone is a pure stupidity. At&t blames Apple for this because of the way the iPhone is activated.

So yes, exclusivity arrangements are evil, and I’ll be the first one to jump ship to another carrier once I can, but I do understand why it was necessary to have this type of arrangement.

Usually I’m throwing stories into the whiner category about someone whining about something. Today, I’m whining. This is an appeal to iPhone app developers. When you create a paid version of a program you have previously offered for free, feel free to grab my settings from the previous version I have already installed.

iPhone app developers have this tendency to create a quality, useful application and give it to us for free. In the words of Gene Simmons, that’s cool! But then they get all greedy, and think they need to be reimbursed for this app that has grown so widely popular, and release an “ad-supported” upgrade. No problems yet, except for the ads I’m now putting up with. Still, I can understand. It’s a funny thing humans do – expect to get paid for their labors. I hold no grudge. Soon after, people like me complain about the ads and wish there were a paid version. I’d much rather pay for an app than watch some intrusive (regardless of how small, intrusive is intrusive) ads. Such was the case with Twitterfon, The Weather Channel, and AOL IM; all applications that I use.

When the once-free app is paid for, the problem manifests itself. Now the user has to enter all the settings for the second time. The latest offender was The Weather Channel Max. I’ve been using The weather channel for all my weather needs, and I have many. Being an avid biker (of the Harley kind, not Schwinn) with my HOG Chapter, I need to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow – not only here, but where I plan on riding to and most spaces in between, with hourly trends.

Needless to say, I have accumulated quite a few locations within The Weather Channel. A simple tap shows me the next location I need to know about. Today I upgraded to The Weather Channel Max, and now I have to through the mundane process of inputting all the locations I frequently travel to. This is a smartphone, right? What’s so hard about checking the current settings to see if there just might be a previously free version’s setting file already in place, and *gasp* USE IT!

Of course there might be some other problems involved as I’m no app developer. Maybe iPhone has everything so sandboxed in that one app can’t cross over into another apps setting file, even if said app is a logical upgrade to the other. I don’tknow. It would be nice though.

We made the jump and bought ourselves a house. A couple weeks ago Carol and I went out to look at some houses. Not to buy just yet, but to get a feel for the market; see how much houses were going for, what the floor plans looked like, etc.

We ended up looking at 4 different houses before we saw the one we both thought was perfect. 2 weeks later we closed on it.

We moved in on Saturday, unpacked on Sunday, and took last night off from settling in.

The area is still under construction, and there is no cable yet available. I picked up a nice amplified HDTV antenna yesterday from Walmart for about $40 and we can receive everything but PBS now. We enjoyed watching 24 last night, even better than watching it on our cable in HD at the apartment! No picture stalls or pixelation like we would regularly see on our Time Warner HD channel bearing the same call sign.

More house updates to follow. Stay tuned.

Now that I’ve had a chance to review Apple’s iPhone event from yesterday, compliments of iTunes, I have mixed feelings regarding the implementation of copy/paste.

I love the fact that I’ll have it, but why the inconsistent calling of it? In Mail I doubletap the word. In Safari I have to press and hold.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’m thinking about what others will say down the road from criticizers to new iPhone users.