my friend janelle graciously let me borrow her iphone for a few days before she sold it off. admittedly, i’ve always been anti-iphone more based on my impressions of it, rather than actually owning one (it’s a decent chunk of money to invest not knowing if you’ll be into it.). so now that i’ve spent a few days with it, here is what i like and hate about it, keeping in mind that for all intents and purposes, i really love me some palm treo action (with palm OS):

LIKES:
The App Store: The ability to download over the air apps is very cool. the fact that i can buy them if i need to and it gets cleared through a central agency is also a plus. from things i’ve read online, getting an app certified can be a pain in the ass, so i don’t know what kind of testing is done prior to allowing an app to stay, but it seems to work out ok. of course, as a palm user, i’m used to scrounging around the net to find apps, download them, try them out, see if they crash the device and uninstall as needed. you do the same thing with a jailbroken phone, but again, it’s done over the air. the one thing i didn’t like was that there wasn’t a lot of “try before you buy” in the apps that i wanted, but that could be because of my selections.

The Style: The thing just looks damn cool. I like the multi touch, a lot more than i expected.

Safari: This is really where the iphone shines in my opinion, at least in comparison to the treo and windows CE phones i’ve used. web integration is clearly key to the iphone, and it shows.

The Camera: Better resolution on my treo, but i use a 680, so probably anything would be better.

DISLIKES:
Keyboard: Janelle called my fingers stubby, but i just can’t get the hang of a nonphysical keyboard. also, the fact that it won’t go landscape is just stupid stupid stupid.

MMS: How in the hell has apple gotten away without this? Every freaking cell carrier shows how MMS is the shit, sending photos and video to your friends cell phones…unless you have an iphone. in which case it goes to your email. that’s just fucking stupid, and the fact that so many people bought the damn thing anyway just makes me hate the device even more. sure, you can jailbreak it and put swirlymms on it (which i did, and that works OK) but even then, your texts are integrated with each other anymore…you now have 2 texting programs, one for with pictures and one for without.

Calendar: The calendar on the iphone is a piece of garbage. it’s practically unsyncable with google calendar, and if you use something that does sync with it, multiple calendars are out. BIG minus.

Cut and Paste: Now granted, i shouldn’t have expected this from idiots who can’t figure out that typing in landscape mode is a necessity, but still. CUT AND PASTE? When did a Mac platform ever NOT have it?

To Do List: Doesn’t exist. Again, a huge WTF? moment for me. My old Nokia 3610 had a to do list on it. I couldn’t do jack crap with it because i only had a standard 0-9*# keyboard on it, but still it was there. Maybe people at apple just don’t have shit to do. Maybe that’s why none of the crap i hate about the iphone made it onto the platform, because they don’t think about to do lists.

anyway, i’ll be keeping the thing for another day or two, and if i change my mind on something, i’ll let you know…but i won’t be putting it on my to do list…because i can’t.

so i’m testing a little project to bring some more interesting content to the blinkinglinejournal. the original idea for the BLJ was to be a collaborative effort among 5 friends, writing articles and whatnot and sending them out via email. this was in 1997. the interweb has progressed a lot, i’ve not heard from some of the original BLJ crew in years, but i’ve always wanted this to be a more collaborative project. a lot of my friends and acquaintances have blogs, and most of them get the mention here from time to time, but what if i could find a way to instantly replicate their posts here without any extra effort? so i worked out a way to do that, and we’ll see how it all goes down. admittedly, i didn’t get permission for any of these, so if anyone on this list is offended for being here, feel free to send me an email, and i’ll promptly remove it. of course, if you aren’t here and want to be, feel free to send me an email to include you as well.

that some red pepper dispensers have flip caps now, instead of the traditional, screw off with the built in shaker top style lids? after a minor incident eating pizza last night and a somewhat painful reminder this morning, i do now.

so for the past three nights i’ve gotten a total of about 10 hours of sleep. the majority of them coming last night. not sure what has jacked me up so bad, but it’s starting to get on my nerves.

played racquetball yesterday with kate and won all three games. this is somewhat of a milestone, as last week when i beat her 2-1, she said it was a fluke. TAKE THAT!

trivia night tonight at bull mccabe’s. round 2 is all about literature.

i could really go for some breakfast…

so apparently kevin costner was in town this weekend filming Bull Durham 2: Crash Goes to Waterworld. Storms all night friday pretty much ruined any chance of seeing any fireworks, then took out power at the house until about 2 in the afternoon…in addition, i got a flat tire, learned that changing a tire on the PT cruiser is easy, and that the designers are geniuses at finding the most inconvenient location ever to conceal a spare tire, then learned that pretty much all four of my tires were in pretty sad shape. great looking tread, but the sidewalls were cracking…so a couple hundred bucks dropped there.

saturday night watched eagle and shark as the neighbors worked on building an ark.

and yesterday’s durham bulls game was rained out after the 6th inning…which is probably just as well, since they were sucking it up pretty hardcore anyway.

and now, i’m back at work. yay.

i’m thinking that there could be a relatively decent amount of interest in setting up a guerilla drive-in in durham, what with the demise of the starlite a ways back. if there’s anyone out there that might want to link up to discuss, shoot me an email

so since i started using bright kite, i’ve found i really like it. I’m impressed with it’s twitter integration as well. in addition, i’ve had a few people (hi kate!) say they don’t really care for the tweet digest everyday. so, i’ve opted to remove that option in twitter tools and move to a twitter badge in the sidebar, along with a brightkite plug in. it ain’t the prettiest right now, and i’ll eventually probably tweak it a bit.

after a monthlong hiatus, scott’s posting updates to journey to mt. moriah again: