Andy Rankin

Now that has to be one of the most used blog post titles ever, right?  At least it doesn’t have “iPhone” in it.

Yes, football season starts soon.  I’m a huge Washington Redskins fan and have been ever since I can remember.  I have found over the past few years that my interest in pre-season has dropped to almost nothing.  So, I don’t yet know much about the team yet.

The fact that the season starts soon means one thing: I need to call and get cable hooked up in the new house.

(I just previewed this post.  It’s a pretty long one - about diapers.  That’s not good.  Here’s the summary: Diapers.com provided us with good customer service.)

I have two kids.  Only one is in diapers but we still seem to go through a lot of them.  Buying them at the store is a pain.  Also, we like the Seventh Generation diapers (maybe some other day I can blog about disposable diapers, the environment, and controversial topics like that) which aren’t always easy to find in stores.  So, we buy them from Diapers.com.

First of all - they’re fast.  They must have a warehouse across the street from us or something because the diapers are generally delivered about 45 seconds after we order them (okay, that’s an exaggeration - and I must admin I’m not the one who orders the diapers but my wife is constantly saying how quickly they get delivered).

Last week we got a delivery and started using the new diapers right away.  Something was wrong with these - they didn’t seem as absorbent as the previous diapers had been.  In fact some of them seemed like they didn’t absorb anything.  Not good.  We were wondering if Seventh Generation had decided to replace the super absorbent carcinogenic material with something more benign (that doesn’t absorb anything) and just didn’t mention it - or maybe we got a bad batch of diapers?  (That’s a joke, I don’t think there are any cancer causing materials in the Seventh Generation diapers.)

We weren’t sure who to call - Diapers.com or Seventh Generation.  My wife asked Diapers.com what was up.  They weren’t aware of any changes to the diapers but instead of having us jump through a bunch of hoops to figure out what the problem was they just sent us another batch of them.  The arrived about 3 minutes later.

We haven’t tried them out yet so we don’t know if our problem has been solved but it sure was nice that Diapers.com was willing to try something quick and easy to hopefully provide a quick and easy solution.

Wow, did you really read this far?

Tags: diapers

(I know, this is becoming an iPhone blog. Sorry.)

I splurged and got the 16GB iPhone instead of the 8GB. Still, 16GB isn’t that big. Everytime I plug my phone into my computer it triggers a backup. That’s cool - it’s probably good for me to back up my phone.

It takes forever! I have no idea what it’s doing. I don’t have much on my phone yet. Even if I did I can’t figure out why it takes so long to back up. Is it doing the backup over the Edge network to a computer running on a 300 baud modem? It looks like it’s plugged into a modern computer with a USB cable.

Tags: iPhone

The iPhone is a multi-media wonder.  In fact, my kid suggested the other day that I had switched to the iPhone from my old CrapBerry Pearl because, “your new phone has a TV in it!”  I can watch movies, listen to music, look at photos - it’s quite amazing.

That is until someone sends me a picture message.   You know, the cute pictures of the kids that my wife sends me from her primitive cell phone.  When I get those on my iPhone I actually get a text message instead.  The text message has a link to www.viewmymessage.com, which should actually be calledds www.nochanceyouwilleverviewyourmessage.com.  First of all, when I try to go there right now this is what I get (and has been like this for at least 2 days).

The other day, when the web site was “working”, I got to a screen where I had to enter a message ID (something like m1bgdg3jp) and a password (which was something easy to remember like salt1opus).  This is really easy to do on an iPhone… oh wait, no it’s not because there’s no copy/paste on the iPhone (and really even if there was it would still be a huge pain since there’s an ID and a password - two things to copy/paste).  After I manged to get both things entered right I was treated to a tiny little thumbnail version of the image.  No way to enlarge it.

This is some kind of a crazy joke, right?  First of all, why not just support MMS like every other phone manufactured in the last 4-5 years?  If you can’t do that, no big deal because we’re talking about the all mighty iPhone - it can do anything!  Heck, I can buy, download, and watch a friggin’ movie on this thing.  So, send me a TXT with a link, that’s fine.  How about a link directly to the stupid picture?  Give me a high resolution version of it too so I can have some fun pinching and pulling it on my screen to make it bigger or smaller.

There are so many ways to make this experience better.  There have to be people at Apple and AT&T who are mortally embarrassed that it works this way.

Tags: iPhone

I never used an iPhone Version 1 (don’t get me stared on Apple’s poor approach to version naming anything having to do with an iPod - enough with Gen this and Gen that - why can’t they be creative and give each new version of something a clever name or just stick with something simple like V1, V2, V3, etc.?) so I don’t have much to compare it to but there are times when my 3G seems a bit slow.

But I get it, there’s a tiny little processor in there so what can I expect?  What really bugs me though is how clunky the phone can be when you turn it and it goes into landscape mode.  I have to assume that the mechanical device that determines the orientation of the phone recognizes this change immediately but sometimes it takes Safari forever to bother flipping on its side.  What gives?

Tags: iPhone

I’ll admit that one reason I decided to try and blog some more was because WordPress released an iPhone app and in order to try it I needed to blog.

Well here I am blogging from my iPhone. It’s pretty cool. But, even though I’m getting better at typing on this thing I think my iPhone powered blog posts will tend to be short.

It seems you can also post photos from the iPhone… We’ll see how well that works.

Tags: iPhone

Wow, I’m really keeping up with my blog!  What’s this, five days in a row with a new post?  I can’t believe that I’ve managed to sit down five days in a row and post something.  Either that or I wrote five things on Wednesday evening (instead of taking out the garbage - that’s one of the most confusing things about moving - trash day is now Thursday and not Friday) and scheduled them to publish in the future.

Tags: general

We’ve all heard stories about people tweeting about a product or service and then having the company who provides said product or service reach out to them based on their comments.

(Okay, maybe I’m assuming something about my non-existant audience - maybe we haven’t all heard of this.  Well, it happens.  People post a comment on Twitter complaining about this product or that service and suddenly some tech support guy direct messages you with an offer of help.  It happens all the time (apparently).  Whether or not it’s a good idea for companies to seek out and respond to these things is a topic for another post.)

It certainly seems cool that companies are starting to monitor Twitter (and the blogosphere) and are reacting to things.  For my experiment I’m going to tweet (and blog) more about specific products or services that I particularly like or have had specific problems with.  I want to see how long it takes for someone to reach out to me.  I’ve already tried tweeting about Jiffy Lube and a couple of other brands but so far I haven’t caught anyone’s attention.

It has already happened to me in a round about way.  One of my employees tweeted about our switch from ClickTime to Harvest for time tracking and someone over at ClickTime reached out to me to ask what was up.

So, if you care, look for my tweets about U-Haul (they are terrible, through and through) or Rental Works (great!) or ADT (lame).

Okay, so the battery life stinks.  I’ll deal with it.

I do think the iPhone interface is pretty cool.  It took me a day or two to get the hang of it.  I still catch myself searching for some kind of default/standard “menu” option within each application - but even that I’m getting used to.

What I really like is how some developers are doing creative things with the interface.  I’ve seen some cool screens that adjust on the fly as you rotate the phone (not in the clunky way that Safari flops from portrait to landscape and back - smoooooth).  While probably not really practical, I’ve enjoyed some of the apps that use shaking as an input mechanism.  I’ve even found some apps where pinching to shrink/grow what’s on the screen is really useful (why are all the demos of that technique limited to viewing images?).

Tags: iPhone

I’m a dork so I got an iPhone.  My cell phone history goes something like this:

1. Some brick-sized clunker from Sprint a million years ago.
2. A StarTAC from Verizon.  That phone was awesome.  I had about four of them (one got run over by my truck, one was dropped in the Chesapeake Bay, etc.).
3. A couple of different Treos on Verizon - always PalmOS and not Windows.
4. A CrapBerry Pearl on Verizon.  I really wanted to like this phone but I hated it (still do).
5. iPhone 3G on AT&T

So far I like the iPhone.  The AT&T network is as bad as I had feared.  It’s bad.

There are several things I particularly like and several that I don’t like about the iPhone.  Maybe I’ll share them with you.

Before I got the iPhone I had heard the complaints about the poor battery life.  I really didn’t think it would be a problem for me but now that I’ve had the phone for a couple of weeks I have to say that it’s a major flaw.  I’d much rather have a device that’s slightly larger with twice the battery life.

Tags: iPhone