3G

I woke up yesterday and my iPhone was dead. It's happened at least once before...usually the push mail hangs up or something, and runs the battery down trying to get the new mail it thinks is out there. That had happened once back in Midland, on the Edge network.

The funny thing is I had thought that previous night (two nights ago as I write this) when I went to bed "hope that doesn't happen again." And it did. Uh-oh, is that "the Secret" looming it's ugly head? Meh.

But I didn't panic. Actually I don't panic much anymore. That's another story.

Didn't panic...just figured that it lost all its juice overnight, no big deal, I'd recharge it that morning. Well when I plugged it in and came back to check it, there was no green, the battery indicator was staying red. So I thought, well, the battery's not taking a charge. I tried it out in other places, and no luck.

So I made an apple store appointment to replace it with the new 3G iPhone, which I planned on getting a little further down the road, but since it was on the radar, I thought, go ahead. I'll wait a few weeks more on the iMac purchase. Then I thought, well, let's make sure that it's a real problem, and so I made a Genius Bar appointment for that day (my iPhone appointment was for today, which was not yesterday, at least yesterday it wasn't today). :)

Went to the Genius Bar at the apple store in the Domain at about 3:45. The Domain is a sort of retail/urban utopian trial concept or something. There are high end stores with apartments above and around them. In reality it looks like a movie set, a sort of excluded from reality slice of life. I saw those apartments online, and they were like $1500 for 300 or so square feet. Very LA I thought. Also very SIMON management, and that's another story, but suffice to say SIMON malls are very "Godly" for lack of a specific term, as we found out they don't usually let Hot Topics in their malls carry music or scary Living Dead Doll type things. I'm serious. An interesting inversion of Capitalism, really, sort of like the irony of a Republican administration moving to partially socialize banks. Welcome to Bizarro World, the world is a cube!

I don't know if this concept is catching on or not (the Domain stuff, not socialism and banking, that remains to be seen, it's usually a scary thing for Joe Six-Pack Plumber when progressives suggest degrees of socialism, ignorance being fear, but I don't know how it works when conservatives are planning it...can you tell I'm spending too much time in politics?)...but I do know if you can hear the canned music from below in your apartment, well, I'd jump out the window and land splat in front of something high end. I'm too susceptible to music I can't control, it messes with my mind (5 years at Bealls with their mush for music mostly--I'd learn the cycle--and had to listen to mind numbing country tunes about wife murderers escaping prison with the help of horny bloodhounds while the Dixie Chicks were banned for suggesting what we've all come to know, even those who pretend it's not so!). Whew.

Any-how, it's nice to have an apple store because they're better than AT&T at the service thing. And I have 2 choices in Austin, but the Domain is literally just down the street. The Genius Bar is where you go up and the apple-store-proclaimed geniuses sit with you and go over your device's problem. Well, it turns out that mine was a bug, it was charging, just not showing it. The Genius guy said he'd seen it once. I should have known--he just reset it and all was well--and I should have done that myself, but this bug wasn't on my radar (I do keep up with some of the news on the iPhone, never saw anything about this).

But I have to admit an ulterior motive: I had already decided to upgrade. In fact, I made the genius bar appointment mostly to see what I might have to do in case I wanted to keep the classic iPhone and use it mostly like the iPod touch (it still works, the apps and stuff, with a WiFi connection, just no phone capabilities). I also made that appointment because it got me there earlier (a genius bar appointment was available for yesterday, the iPhone purchase appointment was for today, don't ask me how that works).

So I upgraded, as I'm sure I had decided to the moment I thought the battery was gone, and as I had planned to eventually anyhow. Thus I'm up to date with the apple iPhone technology, and we'll see how the 3G network acts. It wasn't showing up at the Border's that's at the Domain, but maybe it's not strong in North Austin. Doesn't really matter, most of what I use in that realm I use here at home, and since everything connects to my wireless network now, I'm good to go.