Geeky Ramblings

I like this …

It’s a fun political ad … I really like the ending.

This post is being written with the Wordpress app for iPhone.

As expected, it’s pretty awkward to use, but functional.

• Documentation is non-existent … but that’s coming, according to the announcement post.
• Decent integration with the camera & photo roll, although there doesn’t appear to be a way to position the pictures.
• Can’t see a way to do trackbacks or even enter URL’s.
• It’s not clear if the text is entered in HTML or just plain text.

It’s going to take some getting used to … but I’m pretty sure this isn’t the next ‘killer app’.

FWIW: This post was originally entered on the iPhone, but edited in regular Wordpress.

What a pain … Discover card has issued Ginny and I new cards with new account numbers.

A few weeks ago I got an email from Discover indicating that we were getting a new account number …

As part of a recent systems upgrade, you will be issued a new Discover Card with a new account number.

At first I thought it was just another phishing scam … but they had all the relevant information correct (last 4 digits of the card number and my full name).

For the past two weeks my daily Quicken download was failing on the Discover account … so I guess it’s legit.

Well, today the new cards came and, as promised, a new account number.  Now I get to go through the hassles of changing credit card number with those vendors I have recurring charges with.  What a pain.

This begs the question … why would they need to issue a new account number?  According to another website I found Discover is doing this to “millions” of their customers.  This smells very very fishy.  Another site I found mentioned a “security update”.  Bill Roper ran into the same thing … except he found someone doing fraudulent charges on his old account.

Methinks that Discover had a security breach recently … and aren’t owning up to it.

I can’t wait for this iPhone application …

It’s not available on the iTunes App Store yet … so I’ll just have to cool my jets for a bit.

Ok, I got both iPhones upgraded to the 2.0 version of the iPhone OS.

Initially, I had some trepidation about upgrading a day early … and my feeling seemed to be valid when a co-worker tried to upgrade his phone and had a bunch of problems.  He kept getting an “Unknown error (6)” message.  I don’t know if he actually got his upgraded.

Regardless, I decided to throw caution to the wind and upgrade my phone anyways.  Luckily, it worked without a single hitch.

When I got home from work, I proceeded to upgrade Ginny’s phone.  This, of course, is where I ran into problems.

I started the upgrade process by first upgrading her iTunes to 7.7.  That worked without any problems.  Then I proceeded to upgrade her phone.

Initially it was going OK … then I got an “Unknown error (10)” message.  Figuring that I would just restore the phone to it’s previous OS version, I tried the restore option … but when I did this  I got an “Unknow error (20)” message.  Tried a few more times and got the same message.  This is not good.

I Googled around a bit and found a thread in the Apple support forum that said that, if I pressed Option (shift in Windows context) and clicked the restore button, I could ‘Recover’ to the 2.0 firmware.  Luckily this worked.

About 20 minutes later I had Ginny’s iPhone working fine.

Five minutes after that, I we were both playing with the “Phone Saber” application.

Well, I jumped the gun a bit and installed the iPhone 2.0 update.

Overall, I’m not super impressed … the incremental functionality improvements are rather limited.

Some of the applications look cool, but I’ve only played with a few of them.

What I’m really disappointed in is the lack of base functionality enhancements … things like ..

• No voice dial
• No stereo bluetooth
• No Google Calendar integration
• No Jabber / XMPP chat application (there were rumors about this)
• No cut & paste in the editor

(more…)

It really sucks to be suck … especially on a holiday.

Yesterday I stayed home from work because I wasn’t feeling good. At one point during the day I had a fever of 100.1.

Today I’m feeling better, but not 100%.

Originally, Ginny and I were planning on going to my folks house for the 4th of July, but I don’t want to risk getting anyone else sick.

So today I’m just going to relax and take it easy. Maybe try to get together with my folks on Sunday.