Adventures on the Journey
iPhone 3G white 16GB
iPhone 3G black 16GB
iPhone 4GB
iPod 40GB white
AT&T Tilt 8925
Palm Treo 755P
Palm Treo 700P
Samsung A900
Nokia 1100b
My policy of getting rid of old electronic goodies before buying more has been laxly enforced. It’s time for another round of Craigslist/eBay postings. All but the iPhones will soon be sold. Jay Simon, does that answer any of your questions about how we like the iPhone?
On Saturday, I attended a housewarming party at a friends. He’s got a great house in Lake Washington and his party coincided with the Blue Angels air show. During the afternoon, a few of us helped him take a dip in the lake. The humor would not have been lost so suddenly if he hadn’t come up minus his iPhone, which went into the lake with him.
Between the cadre of tech geeks present, we had spare iPhones but this wretched soul had not synced his iPhone since January. I dove in and concluded that the bottom was about 20 feet deep and my lungs are only conditioned to free dives of 15 feet. So we formulated a plan. Jen and I drove home and fetched our SCUBA gear. Nelson fetched his tanks and BCD. We found a couple bricks to use as weights and went in. Nelson took a turn diving and then I did. After 10 minutes of swimming around face down and fins up, I found the phone.
There was much rejoicing but after 3 hours underwater, there was little hope of the phone working again. To prevent any further water damage I disassembled the iPhone and removed the battery. What surprised me was that I could find no evidence of the magic smoke having leaked out. That meant that either a component I couldn’t see had fried, Apple had some type of circuitry to prevent shorts, or we were just plain lucky.
Having the battery removed, the phone could now be safely “washed.” As we may remember from high school chemistry, pure water does not conduct electricity. It is the impurities in the water that allow water to conduct and wreak havoc on electronics. To stand any chance of recovery, the dirty water must be removed. Better still if I can also get as much of the lake sediment removed as well. Instead of distilled water, I prepared a bath of isopropyl alcohol and immersed the iPhone for a couple hours.
Why alcohol? Because even if I placed the phone in a ziplock full or rice, or my warming oven, it would take 3-6 days for the phone to completely dehydrate. Alcohol evaporates much, much faster. Isopropyl alcohol also acts as a water scavenger which further expedited the drying process. Finally, it is a mild solvent, which will help clean up any sediment that found its way in into the phone.
After a 2 hour bath in alcohol I removed the iPhone and set it out to dry. Exactly two days later I plugged it into my USB charging cable. The Apple logo came up but it failed to boot all the way. Suspecting that it couldn’t draw enough power via the 5v USB adapter, I plugged it into my iPod FireWire charging cable and it booted right up. Voila! A working iPhone.
The grand finale was soldering the battery contacts back onto the phone. After doing so, the battery still had plenty of charge left and the phone booted up off the battery. Our victim was able to sync his iPhone with his computer. Everything on the iPhone works (touch screen, applications, wifi, etc) except the phone radio. I dropped the SIM from my iPhone into it but got only a generic “call failed” error.
Interesting things learned: The iPhone has an immersion sensor at the bottom of the headphone plug. White is good, pink means it has been immersed. A USB cable does not supply sufficient current to power the iPhone when it doesn’t have a battery. A FireWire cable does. WiFi will not work on an iPhone without the battery. Alcohol worked well as a cleaner, solvent, and drier.
As I reported last month, I have been bicycling to work. Since I was out of shape and the ride is 9 miles each way, I started slowly and rode only two days a week. Since Jun 11, I have bicycle commuted 16 days and rode 288 miles. During that time I have cut my commute time from 50 minutes to 35. My legs aren’t yet strong enough that I get a good cardio workout but I’m making good progress. My one-way commute times are:
Each day I bicycle to work instead of driving costs 30 minutes of time. In exchange for that 30 minutes, I get my prescribed 70 minutes of exercise. It also saves about $4 in diesel fuel but that cost is offset by buying and maintaining my bike. Of course, there are fringe benefits to biking to work. After the initial weight spike as my leg muscles rejuvenated, I am losing a pound a week. Very soon I shall start riding 3 days a week.
I’m standing in line with 200 others to get my new iPhone 3G. My plan for just waltzing in and buying one a week after release with no wait was optimistic. I estimate that this store had 200 phones in stock today. I have been regularly checking inventory since the release and I know they have sold out of inventory every single day since release.
Friday began at 4AM. By mid-morning, not a single boat had caught a fish and we hadn’t gotten a nibble. The four of us headed back with empty coolers and dampened spirits. But as everyone knows, a bad day fishing is still better than the worst day ____ing. At the docks, the warden shared that nobody was catching Salmon. That made us feel better about getting skunked.
On my way home, I stopped by the Alderwood Mall Apple Store. A couple Geniuses and I agreed that a bug in the latest version of Apple’s iPhone SDK (beta 8) caused my iPhone some irreparable harm. I walked out with a brand new iPhone and a $0 invoice. It’s nice to have a single vendor that builds the hardware, OS, and SDK. It is even nicer when that vendor stands behind it.
As I resumed homeward on I-5, a great song started playing on the radio. I cranked up the volume and sang along. Loudly. As I popped up over a hill the loveliest of images appeared. The day was sunny and bright without even a hint of haze. Which means that despite being 50 miles away, Mr. Rainier appeared so large and imposing that I paused to gaze at her majesty. It warms a part of my soul to be near the mountains.
On Monday, we caught fish. See the photo at right.
I have long disliked GoDaddy because using their web site to purchase a domain name is an atrocious experience. It makes me feel dirty and used, like GoDaddy cares more about my credit card info than me. Years ago, I transferred all the domains I manage to eNom and I’ve been quite pleased. My distaste for GoDaddy has been personal until today. It was recently discovered that GoDaddy allows employees to compete with their clients in domain name auctions. Rather than detail the problems with GoDaddy as a registrar, allow me to refer you to NoDaddy.
I have SSH access to many hundreds of servers and am regularly needing to log into new systems. My SSH key is available via ssh-agent thanks to the ssh-agent script I wrote. To make good use of ssh-agent, my SSH public key needs to be installed on the remote servers. I have had to do this often so today I polished up a shell script that automates the installation of your ssh key on remote servers. It is now fit for mass consumption.
As part of my “get into a shape” project, I rode my Schwinn World Avenue One to work today. I spent a fair bit of time route planning and drove numerous routes with the Jetta during the last month. I found several good choices, all about the same distance, 10 miles. This morning I hopped on my bike and rode off into the 47° drizzling grey morning. I arrived at work in almost exactly the time I expected, 40 minutes. I based my math on an average speed of 15mph and was quite pleased at realizing my goal.
The sense of accomplishment was not to last. I had fallen prey to the greatest of cyclist delusions. When a cyclist happens to be catching a small but favorable wind, the typical response is something like, “wow, I’m feeling particularly vigorous today.” During all my exploratory drives in the Jetta and during the ride into downtown this morning, I had failed to notice the elevation changes. It turns out that riding into town is pretty much downhill the entire way. The ride home was painful. And slower. Much slower.
Freud’s psychiatry has never held much appeal to me. When I read Freud, I labor my way through because I simply don’t see the world the way he does. I suspect that a substantial portion of mentally healthy humans feel similarly and look elsewhere for psychiatry that is insightful and meshes with their life experience.
Viktor Frankl is one such psychiatrist. I recently read Man’s Search for Meaning. Like the hundreds of other reviewers on Amazon and Audible.com, I enjoyed the book and his perspective. Viktor shares a tremendous amount of insight into humanity that would be difficult to come by without his incredibly vast amount of life experience. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the essence of humanity.
I’ve finally bought a Kill-A-Watt. Of course, I’ve been running around plugging stuff into it to see how much juice various items use.