Since I have a launch day iPhone from 2006, I had never done a transfer of the contents of an iPhone before, so I researched a bit and realized that I had turned off the auto-backup feature of iTunes about a year ago. I reinstated it, and backed up my iPhone the night before.

I preordered my iPhone when they were first annouced, and it was delivered around 11am on Friday morning. I connected it to iTunes, which asked me if I wanted to set this up as a new phone, or restore it from the backup I had on the hard drive with my associated cell phone number. I told it to restore which it did, it transferred the phone number to the new phone almost immediately (my old iPhone now says “No Service”), and after about 30 minutes of backing up data, apps, music, SMS messages, and movies, I had my entire iPhone contents backed up to the new one. The only thing that was missing were my emails which I didn’t mind losing, and my voicemail password didn’t carry over, nor did my gmail password. Fixing my gmail password was simple since the iPhone asked for it immediately, but fixing my voicemail password was a little tricky. It asked me for my password the same way it would for email, but I didn’t know what it was. There was a little help “?” in the password field which sent me to AT&T’s voicemail system which reset my password immediately. The whole process took less than 60 seconds.

The first thing I wanted to do was try the compass to see how accurate it was. I realize that with all the other new features of the 3GS that the compass was probably the least favorite of some people, but since not many phones I know have one, I just wanted to play with it for a second. It was as accurate as I could tell, and if you go to maps and press the target icon twice, maps will show you which direction you’re facing.

Camera and video part 1

The second feature I wanted to try was the new camera. The new 3GS has a 3 megapixel camera which is a vast improvement over the nasty 1 megapixel camera the last iPhones had. The new camera also has an autofocus feature, and does video! I took my first video in portrait mode and tried to upload it to flickr. Flickr didn’t like the format of the video, so I posted it to youtube. Youtube properly pillarboxed the video by putting black bars on the side to fill the video out. I also posted the video to vimeo which told me I’d be in the encode queue for over an hour, and then it took almost 12 hours to encode a 14 second video. I think I’ll be sticking to youtube.

With my old iPhone now useless as a phone, I decided to wipe it to give to my daughter. The wipe procedure was going to take over and hour, so I went to Best Buy to get a windshield adapter for the iPhone since it’s now able to use GPS, and a new belt clip since my original one is starting to wear out. I found the Griffin Windowseat which works well if you keep the iPhone on the left side of the windshield. The problem with that is I also wanted to use the iPhone as my MP3 player, which means I would have to run the wire from the stereo in the middle of the car to the left side, over the steering column. I’m not very keen on this setup since it seems more work and mess than I want it to be, and if I need to plug the iPhone in to charge, that’s yet another cable to drape over the steering column.If I put the adapter in the middle, it’s designed in such a way that it takes up all the vertical space between my rear view mirror and the dashboard. I was hoping for something that would allow me to use it in the middle and not obstruct my view so much.
I got the Digital Lifestyle Outfitters HipCase since it’s the same one I bought with the original iPhone. It’s the same as before, but with a little patch of leather sewn into the back to compensate for the thinner 3G. It took some breaking in, but it’s working out very well.

Voice Control

With the original iPod still wiping, I decided to give Voice Control a try. This is exclusive to the iPhone 3GS, although I don’t see why you can’t use it in the 3G since third party apps deal with voice recognition just fine. This is great for driving, or when it would take you less time to find something embedded in your Contacts list than it would to say the person’s name.

What’s not in the video, is that the system will tell you if you have more than one person with the name you spoke in your Contacts list. For example, if you say “Call Bob”, it’ll tell you “There are multiple numbers with the name Bob”, and offer the suggestions. You can state the last name, and if there are multiple phone numbers for that person (home, cell), it’ll ask you which one you want to dial. Once you learn how to manage the Voice Control dialing this way, you can learn to say “Call Bob Johnson cell”. You can also dial by number (“call 1-973-555-1212″).
Voice Command will also control iTunes as you can see in the video. However, it’s tricky when it comes to artist’s names. For Jean-Michel Jarre, I had to pronounce it like a computer would read it: “Jeen Michele Jarray”. That worked.

Camera part 2

After getting my old iPhone set up for my daughter (who was ecstatic), I decided to try taking some pictures outside. The indoor ones were ok, but I wanted to see how well the camera too pictures in sunlight. I found that turning the camera 90 degrees for both picture and video produces better results.

Once AT&T turns on tethering and MMS, the iPhone will be an almost perfect digital companion. I say ‘almost’ because I’d still like the ability to use an external Bluetooth keyboard with it, and some other minor issues, but this will make other cell phone manufacturers look at the iPhone and realize they have a lot of catching up to do in the smartphone arena. I’m very happy with the iPhone 3GS and I’m sure I’ll be using it for a very long time.

iChurn – This classic iPhone app will tell you exactly how many churns you need to make in order to finish making butter for that day.

Cheekcraft – Pick your side – Amish or Outworlder. Amish simply forgive their attackers, but Outworlders are armed with big boots and ice cream cones.

Zipper – Using the touchscreen, Amish can simulate zipping a virtual zipper.

CalcPower – Ever wonder how much energy your house consumes? Now you know! (hint: 0)

Clipper – Social media app that allows you to send out “clips” of what you’re doing at that moment.

SaveMySoul – Did you ever accidentally take a picture of an Amish person? Now you can blur their image and restore their soul to them.

Sundial – Using special reverse engineered technology, this will determine the position of the sun based on the shadow it casts and tell you what time it is.

Buggypedia – An encompassing wealth of information about the Amish.

Paperweight – Once you turn your Amish iPhone on, this app will brick your phone, turning it into a paperweight. Sorry, you can’t be using modern technology!

For two years I tried to find the right domain name. Some of you know how hard it was when I said “ooh, I got it”, only to find the domain was taken 10 years ago, or in one case, three days earlier.

Then came the time when I was desperate. I spent two weeks on and off trying everything I could. Yes, people have said that the name doesn’t matter, the content is what’s important. The problem I had with that is it almost felt like I had to register sdlkfjsldfjdl.com just to have SOMETHING unique.

While going through the list of domains that fell back into the internet gene pool the day before, the suffix “istry” caught my eye. It wasn’t geekistry itself, it was some other domain, but I checked on geekistry and lo and behold, it was available. I had bought something like six domains that week just to have another home I can shoehorn into, but geekistry seemed to fit much more than other domains I bought. I wanted the site to be memorable, and if things go well, be a place where readers (and viewers?) could come and find things that interest them. I liked the name more and more so I just registered it to be sure I had it, let it sit in my head for a day or so, and fell in love with it.

What will this site have? I can’t tell you everything . I have a bunch of ideas floating around in my head, but hopefully everything that I’ve envisioned will show up here. We’ll see.

Ok, I figured no big deal. I’ll just call Sprint, update my expiration date, and that’ll be the end of it.

Nope.

We’re currently on our way to my sister’s house and so I took the bill with me with my account number on this, thinking I could start calling on the road. However, the bill has no phone number on it. Instead, it asks you to dial *3 on your Sprint phone to get to the billing department. Hey, Sprint, I don’t have an actual Sprint phone. I remembered that when you try logging into EVDO and fail, it’ll give you a phone number to call for customer assistance. I called that.

The first thing you have to do when you log into the system is to put in your Sprint 10-digit phone number. I was doing this from the road so I didn’t have the phone number they gave me when I activated my EVDO device. It’s at home in a Sprint box, written on a sticky note. I waited on the line to see if it sent me to an operator but instead I got “it is required to put in your 10-digit Sprint phone number to continue”. Oh, that’s just great. So, for the heck of it, I pressed “0″ to see if I could get any further. I did.

Once I got a real person, I couldn’t understand a word he said. Let’s call him Mr. Mumbles (or MM for short). MM asked me for my 10-digit Sprint phone number. I said that I have an EVDO device and I don’t have an actual Sprint phone. He seemed to be frustrated with this and asked for my account number. I had that. Then I had to give him my Sprint account PIN number. That too, is on the sticky note. So I had to answer a secret question, to which he couldn’t understand how to spell the answer. I had to use Army codes (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.) to spell it out for him.

We got past that hurdle, and he had my account up. I told him that I just wanted to update the expiration date on the card. He can’t do that because the card had expired and is no longer in the system. Who wrote this system of theirs? Many other systems allow you to update the expiration date and continue service (Apple, Amazon). So I had to read him all the information from my credit card. Not a big deal, but that’s 30 seconds of my life I’ll never get back.

Once that was done, I asked if that card can be used for autopay. He said no, that only happens if you call in to pay with that same card three times. How ridiculous is that? He has access to my account, why not just mark it for autopay? His solution was to log into the web site and only there can I set the card for autopay.

So, epic fail from Sprint for their customer service. Someone over there really needs to look at their computer system and find where items can be optimized.

Checking out the domains with my real name in them, they were all taken. Even if I tried different iterations of my name, they were all taken. However, I tried with Godaddy.com which doesn’t give you detailed information about the sites unless you do a little extra work. Since I’m on a Mac, I pulled up a terminal and did a “whois” on each of the names. Some of them expired in 2010, but one expired a week from when I first checked. Checking the site, there was no content, no forwarding, nothing at all. It was a dead link to a seemingly abandoned domain.

So my first reaction was to run out and ask the person who owned the domain if they wanted to transfer it. My immediate second thought was that people are probably not as nice and giving as I am and would probably ask for a ton of money had they known that someone wanted to buy it. Instead, I decided to be patient and wait for the domain to expire. It did. It wasn’t renewed.

However, it took a while to revert back to being available. I did some research and found that there are grace periods for when domains expire. If person A buys a domain from company Z, company Z can still hold it for about 30 days. Past that, it can be let go. To be honest, I didn’t read any ICANN documentation on this procedure, but it seems to be the consensus of how it worked.

Thirty days went by. Forty-five days. Longer. After a while, I decided that one of two things are going to happen: the domain’s going to expire on its own, or the people that own it are going to want to dump it, so I sent out a charming email to the registrars asking if they would be interested in transferring the name to me.

This is the response I got:

Dear Mike,

The domain name is no longer in active use. We would be willing to release the name to you for $995.00. Please let us know if this is acceptable and how you would like to proceed.

Thank you.

–
Best Regards,
Christine

Yes, you read that right….$995.

I used webmail to respond so I don’t have my actual response but it went something like this:

Christine,

That is a laughable amount for a web site that obviously has no true value. It’s a site for someone’s name, unless they themselves have a ton of money to blow on a business, it’s not going to sell for that much. I’ll be willing to give you $200 for it, but no more.

Mike

And I never heard from them again.

It had become a habit of checking the web site’s domain with whois every once in a while. Today, I checked it on a whim and I had to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. The name was released. I actually went “OMG!” out loud and quickly snagged it for myself, saving $969 in the process.

So, be patient when it comes to domains expiring. Emailing the person who owns the domain can always be tricky. Will the person be honest and give you the domain for a fair price, or snag it for another year out of spite? I got lucky. VERY lucky. I think my email told them that there’s no real demand for that name (and I was being truthful) so they probably decided to let it go. Or, maybe the domain actually expired under their noses. I really don’t know, nor do I care.

I will say this: if you have ANY reason to think you may need to register your real name for something in the future, just do it. Don’t wait. Don’t let someone snag it from under you. There are Godaddy.com codes above you can use to lessen the price if you want (disclaimer: this is not an ad for Godaddy.com. People that know me know how much trouble I went through to get this).

Now, if someone can get me starman.com, that would be great. I’ve been trying for at least 6 years. I called, and he won’t sell

Once DirecTV was installed, I cancelled Comcast TV (we still had the internet through them). The picture was vastly superior to Comcast’s analog crap. The only problem we really had was the weather. If a bad rain or snowstorm came through, we’d have no TV at all. It was especially bad on snow days when you can’t really go outside.

Over the years, digital cable and HDTV started taking over people’s homes. Also, DirecTV and TiVo had a falling out, which meant either going with DirecTV’s crappy DVR, or getting the superior TiVo Series 3 and going with Comcast again. I decided on going back to Comcast because we’d get a break on the bill for doing TV and internet, and I’ll get the TiVo Series 3 which wouldn’t work with DirecTV at all. Also, we wouldn’t have the weather problems.

We gave the Comcast/TiVo Series 3 combo a few months’ tryout and I couldn’t be happier. The picture quality is very impressive and the TiVo Series 3 does so much more than DirecTV’s DVR ever could. It even streams music from my iTunes collection with the Mac TiVo software. I was also able to download TV shows and movies from the TiVo to my Mac and watch them there, and even burn the HD content to a Blu-Ray disc.

So last night we called DirecTV and cancelled. They tried to offer me free stuff but I told them that without the TiVo Series 3, I’m not sticking with DirecTV at all anymore. Its a shame because DirecTV was very good for its time, but I question whether it’s practical anymore. I know they don’t have exactly the same channel lineup as cable does, but I’m gaining much more with Comcast. Also, content is on the web now. If I really feel the need to watch it, there are legal ways of doing so.

So, adios, DirecTV. It was a great decade with you.

For those that can’t make it to the conference, there’s the internet which allows people to chat about what’s been announced. Some people talk about it in chat rooms, but with new social networking tools like Twitter and Plurk, it’s easy to put a thought “out there” and have people comment back.

Twitter’s been having serious problems lately. They can’t stay online for a significant amount of time without becoming slow, asking users to throttle back, or just plain crashing. It’s sad because Twitter’s a great application which I believe is going to go the way of Wordstar someday if they don’t keep up.

Plurk came onto the scene a few weeks ago after Leo Laporte mentioned it on TWiT. The big difference internally between Plurk and Twitter is that Plurk, according to their web site, was designed from the ground up to scale. This means that as more people use it, the system grows to accommodate them. Plurk has had its hiccups and is relatively new so there aren’t as many users on it, but in a little over a week I have 1/3 of my followers on Plurk and the system has managed to keep up with everyone else with large followings.

During the WWDC keynote, Twitter died. Earlier in the day they asked users to throttle down to 10 requests/hour. They already asked users to throttle back to 20 requests/hour two weeks ago and the system hasn’t recovered from that and nobody’s been able to go back to the normal 30 requests/hour without getting the dreaded “limit exceeded” error.

While people were getting errors on Twitter, Plurk ran like a champ. It had a few little sluggish periods, but with something as big as a WWDC keynote where Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 2 (minus a lull during the period of web-apps-ported-to-the-iPhone demos), it worked. People started conversations in Plurk and friends commented on them like tiny IRC chat rooms. It was glorious to see a new system take on the WWDC and survive.

In the meantime, Twitter has $13 million and still hasn’t fixed their system.

2. Tell everyone on Twitter to move to Plurk.

3. Decide what you’re going to do with your time now that there’s no wait between responses.

4. Work on that karma!

5. Beg the Plurk developers for an API.

6. Convince yourself that a headless dog is a good mascot.

7. Be one with the timeline.

8. Come up with a neat pun with “plurk” in it (eg: “plurkinator”).

9. Trade in the birds you bought when you became a twitter fan for a headless dog.

10. Apologize to all the people on Twitter you called a “jerk”.

11. Start thinking in the third person.

12. Buy a T-shirt that says “Plurk me” (this step written by Sara Streeter)

“plurk is hard it has instructions” – irina slutsky via Twitter

The name

The name still kind of bothers me. I’d like to say it’s growing on me, but it’s not. Twitter is such a cute name and it doesn’t sound like something a bunch of teenagers came up with while getting high on model glue. Plurk is one of those names that sounds like was just random and silly. However, it does lend itself to being used as a verb which does tend to happen a lot in the web 2.0 world, so kudos for that.

Timeline

The first thing you notice with Plurk is that the timeline moves horizontally from right-to-left, not the more accepted left-to-right. I believe they made the timeline the way they did because in order to read a timeline left-to-right, you have to start reading the messages with the text inside the timeline. As cute as the timeline is, I still like the simple vertically-scrolling timeline we all know and love. I don’t follow a lot of people, but I can’t imagine a horizontally scrolling timeline filled vertically with followers would be easy to manage after a while. How far back does this timeline go?

Encapsulated conversations

One of the great things about Plurk is that the conversation doesn’t spill out into the public timeline. With Twitter, responses to individuals are seen by all. This is both a shortcoming of the Twitter web interface and the third party apps that don’t even try to round up conversations. Plurk does what Pownce does and keeps all the responses to a message self-contained. I applaud this feature. This morning, @banannie (banannie on Plurk) noticed the “plurk page” option from the conversation’s menu. Click it, and the conversation shows up on its own page. So far as I know you can’t have more than one level of a conversation.

Built-in karma

@dossy created this amazing tool for Twitter called Twitter Karma. It shows you all the people you’re following, and who’s following you back so you can see if you’re following more people that are following you. Plurk has a built-in karma level which gives you a real-time status of how much of a selfish jerk you’re being .

Mobile Plurk

Plurk does have a rather nifty mobile interface. Just go to http://www.plurk.com/m and see a nice mobile-friendly timeline.

Real-time updates. Sorta.

Plurk’s main web site shows in your browser title and in the timeline that there are updates, but it doesn’t actually refresh the browser itself, you have to click on the link to see the updates. This is good and bad because on one hand, the browser can’t tell if you’re actually looking at the timeline when updates come in but at the same time, maybe I just want automatic refreshes. This could tax their system as they become more popular. I’d like to see this as an option.

No API, so no Pluhrl.

Currently, there’s no API for Plurk, so don’t expect a Twhirl-type app for Plurk anytime soon. There’s also no SMS, but there was a post on their blog this morning that said “Carrier Is Coming. That is all”. Is SMS coming? Let’s hope so.

Verbs

One thing that bugs me about Plurk is the use of a dropdown menu to select verbs for your messages. For example, instead of typing “I think my Chevy is cool”, you select a menu of verbs such as “thinks, says, feels, was, asks” to preface your note. I find this to be extremely annoying because I just want to type. The list isn’t large, but it’s still an extra action I have to do to create a message. There’s a “freeform” option which I now use which allows me to type without the use of a verb.

@ and d

You can send public notes to users using the @ symbol like Twitter does, but to send a private note, you have to use another menu to tell the system who will be able to see the note. I tried using the “d” method of sending a private message like Twitter does and it didn’t work, the message was public.

Cliques

One of the absolute worst terms you can use to group people together is the word “clique”. The name suggests people that don’t want to bother with people outside their group. They need to use a new name for this feature.

Friend/follower

With Plurk, you can choose to simply follow a user, or friend them, or both. I don’t understand why clicking “add as a friend” automatically sets the option to follow. It’s one extra step I shouldn’t have to do.

Other miscellaneous items

• You can edit messages!
• It’s not as simple as it should be
• Too many drop-down menus
• I like the use of RSS
• I like that you can embed pictures
• What’s with the headless mascot?
• Stars are given out to people that got the most plurk users via invites. How about Twitter users that used word of mouth?
• The use of “user” in the URL for a user (eg: http://www.plurk.com/user/starman)
• Using the scroll wheel to navigate the timeline is cool.
• No search

I think that Plurk has a lot of promise. If they can focus on simplicity, get an API, support SMS, and get rid of the name “clique”, I think that they can become a serious contender to Twitter and Pownce. I like how Plurk is trying to expand on Twitter, but they have to understand the power of simplicity. Ask me in a month if I still like the name.

You can find me on Plurk as starman.

When I started working on my “better Twitter”, one of the coolest ideas I had was to marry GPS with your message, so that you can say “I’m having a beer” and you could also geotag your location to show which bar you were at. This was the idea that motivated me into working on the project until I had one sobering moment:

Saying where you are might be cool, but it’s also saying where you’re NOT.

Maybe I have a streak of paranoia in me, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be the one responsible for creating a system that allowed others to track people. Dare I use the word “stalk”?

A system like that would be excellent for finding friends, which is actually what Brightkite does now. If you’re at Yankee Stadium, you can see if someone on your friends list is also there. You would also be able to perhaps meet up with people that you may have only seen on Twitter or Seesmic.

I decided to create some tips for people that may help in at least minimizing any fear they may have.

• Only allow trusted friends to see where you are.
• Keep your list of trusted friends small.
• Don’t broadcast your location on Twitter.
• Make sure that the system will be able to delete where you’ve been if you request it.
• If you feel the need to talk about your day, mention it while on your way back.
• Don’t mark someone as a trusted friend if you haven’t actually spoken to them.

I’d also like to suggest that the system offering such information about a person’s location should log the IP address of any computer used to access that information.

I can see in the very near future that people will be sending their positions on a regular basis, I’m just hoping that anyone looking at that information will do so responsibly.