I've had my iPhone for a few weeks now and am thus far incredibly impressed with the device.  Even though it has its major flaws the phone makes you feel like you're finally in the 21st century.

First I'll tick off my biggest annoyance  1) battery life  2) no MMS 3) no way to toggle Push settings via a timer 4) Apple is slow at approving application updates

I came from using a Treo 650 and the Treo would last for several days of heavy use before needing to be recharged.  By heavy use I mean hours of talk time, EDGE data downloading, etc.  With my iPhone I am finding I have to charge it twice a day.  It's a small sacrifice to make but I am sure that if I travel I'll need to bring one of those battery quickchargers (since my Macbook itself doesn't hold a charge too long, and

The most phone I've had with my iPhone thus far is using the 'Remote' iPhone app to control the music playlist at Thad's wedding.  Thad put me in charge of downloading wedding songs from iTunes and organizing them into a playlist.  He suggested I use 'Remote' to control the list during the wedding reception.

I hadn't yet used 'Remote' so I dug into it.  I found out that 'Remote' only worked on a wifi connection.  So I brought one of my old Linksys WRT54GS wireless routers to the wedding.  We had horrible luck with the A/V equipment at the wedding--but the router itself worked quite well.  I set up a 'wedding' wifi connection and had a laptop and my iPhone connect to it.

'Remote' was great fun to use, but it seemed incredibly finicky.  When it worked it worked flawlessly, but oftentimes it just wouldn't find the iTunes library even thougg I had a perfect wifi signal.  The highlight of my DJ'ing was when I got to start a Red Light Green Light game with the girls on stage dancing to Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl.

On a side note, I hit a few buttons on my Treo today just for kicks and I saw that my Treo still has a 54% battery charge.  The Treo has been unplugged for maybe 3 weeks now.  I am sure if it had its cell antenna on it would have only lasted a week or so, but it's still impressive that it's holding such a charge on stand-by.  I was loyal to Palm/Handspring for years and I do hope that they make a comeback.

With the iPhone it seems as though I have to charge my phone twice a day in order to ensure that I'll be able to talk on the phone later.  I am travelling next week and am going to be looking at rapid backup chargers to ensure that I'll have juice whenever I need it.

Yesterday an installer from ATT came out to hook me up with U-Verse at my house.  U-Verse is ATT's Fiber-to-the-Node solution for triple play network access (Phone/TV/Internet).  Newer houses actually have fiber to the home--in my case I have fiber to the telephone pole and then 1000 feet of normal twisted pair to my house.

I haven't had a chance to dig into the service too much thus far, but I am thus far impressed with the TV picture quality, channel availability, pricing and Internet connection.  I have more premium HD channels than I had with Cox, and the DVR also has a much slicker interface.

I trust the all-digital strategy more than the limited bandwidth of cable providers.  ATT hasn't invested as much in their consumer fiber infrastructure as Verizon, but they definitely seem to be aggresively attacking the cable barons.  All in all competition is good.

Yesterday was an exciting day for fans of the Mozilla's Firefox web browser.  By varying accounts the latest version of the Firefox browser was downloaded perhaps 5 million times on its first day of release.

Web browsers have come a long way since the early days of WorldWideWeb and Mosaic and their like.  Gone are the days when you had to optimize multiple layers of embedded tables in order to get Netscape to render your page in a decent amount of time.

The release of IE8 this year is going to further mix up the playing field for browsers.  Hopefully IE8 will behave quite well so that we won't have to manage CSS for both IE6, IE7 and IE8.  Safari has also been making inroads recently, both on Mac marketshare and on its Windows version..

Will IE's market share dip below 50%?  Only time will tell...

I got to the office today and decided I needed some music to listen to while I worked. Yesterday Andy had mentioned to me that he had the new Weezer album shared on his iTunes library. Well, I decided to give it a listen. Unfortunately, the iTunes DRM would not let me even preview his tracks. Woe is iTunes.

I had been thinking about Amazon.com (since their site was down for several hours yesterday) so I decided to give their MP3 download service a whirl. The album was $8.99 for 256kbps MP3s, DRM-free. Downloading from Amazon requires their MP3 Downloader application which is now available for Windows, OS X and Linux.

Unfortunately, the application crashed after downloading a few tracks. This may be Vista's fault, who knows. I had clicked on 'Listen to Selected' which opened the track in Winamp (my default MP3 player).

After the downloader crashed I went back to my web browser and clicked on the link to download the album again. If I had already navigated away from the page I assume there would have been another spot in my order history for me to download it again... I hope.

Would I download from Amazon Music in the future? Sure. I haven't quite decided where I stand on DRM and digital possessions. I've honestly bought more DVD-Audio discs in the past year than I have regular albums over the past 5 years.

I spent today visiting my grandmother in Muskogee, Oklahoma.  Muskogee happens to be most recently famous for electing a 19 year old mayor.  Hey, at least the job is unpaid!

While driving the backroads from Oklahoma City to Muskogee I got a call from Thad who's been fighting the good fight abroad.  I found the voice quality on the call I had with Thad to be quite impressive.  Here I was, in the middle of rural Oklahoma (the roads don't even appear on my GPS in my Acura at decent zoom levels) talking with Thad in London like he was right next to me.  Sometimes the 21st century is amazing.

I twittered about that experience.  I'm a recent twitter user, although I've been paying attention to it's growth in certain circles ever since SXSW.  Twitter is interesting--very shallow and glitchy, but definitely a social phenomenon.  In some ways it reminds me of lightweight communication a la ICQ.  I often miss ICQ.  It seems as though everything after ICQ was a step in the wrong direction.

"Back in those days, everything was simpler and more confused."  ~Jim Morrison