FoxBoom!

I’ve mapped Liverton Business Park. Narf!

As the obnoxious bag it came in tells me, I’ve “got it”. But rather than “it” being something as pedestrian as, say, syphilis or a Segway, it’s an iPhone.

A quick note for O2 staff: it’s a little worrying when you respond to “I’d like to buy an iPhone please” with “A what?”. And whilst I appreciate you taking the time to share your sales script with me, I’m afraid there really isn’t a polite way of saying “dude, I’ve been obsessing over this thing on the Internet for months — just take my fucking card and let me pay”, so I apologise if I came off a little short.

But now I have it! And so far, I think one of the smallest design considerations has impressed me the most; when I got home, I had a moment of dread when I realised the activation process would probably need to know my O2 account details (at least an account reference or something) to transfer my existing number, and I had no idea where all that paperwork was. I figured I’d go through the process up until that point, then try to find what I needed. But — joy to Apple’s work-out-of-the-box mentality! — when I chose to move my existing number to the iPhone, it asked for that number, then SMSed a PIN to it to prove I own it. When I entered that same PIN back in, that was proof enough and the iPhone was activated.

Whew!

In a nutshell, it’s awesome. I still need to figure out a cool way of using my del.icio.us bookmarks on it, since I don’t use Safari and thus syncing with its bookmarks is not useful. Gmail works beautifully without any fucking around, and the built-in calendar is kinda redundant when Google Calendar works so well and puts my events on the web too. Google Reader formats itself well for the iPhone, but it’s a tad confusing.

Everything else works as well as everyone else has already said. I get on very well with the keyboard and the camera is great as a portable (but then, I have a Canon 20D in tow for anything that matters). And with mad props to the BBC News team, my first SMS message was “my shoe is beef”.

Dudes. My Xbox Live gamertag is “FoxBoom”, and my Windows Live ID is jon@foxboom.com, which is remarkably similar to my e-mail address.

Sorry to everyone who added the old account.

It can be emo time now please?

Mondo thanks to Mike for the photo!

Apple couldn’t fix my .Mac Sync problem, so I had to manually copy/paste all my contacts off the web and back into my local address book. I’m fucking majorly pissed off, but that’s the way things roll at Apple Support. I hope I never have to phone those bastards again.

But anyway! The web address book doesn’t expose my contacts’ birthdays, which means I’ve lost all of them. If you don’t get a card off me next year, I’m sorry. If you want to get a card next year, you’ve got to fill in the blank for me.

So I logged into myOpenID to leave a comment on LiveJournal, and for the first time I noticed that support for Information Card has been added.

An “Information Card” is a chunk of information which represents an identity. You could have an Information Card with your name and e-mail address for forum posting, a separate card with your credit card details for shopping, and one with a pseudonym for sharing photos of your ass. Whenever a web applications needs to know who you are, a dialog pops up with all your cards in, and you choose how you want to be identified. No username, no password. If you want the sordid technical details, I’d suggest you start in the MSDN.

Information Cards have been implemented in the .NET Framework 3/Windows Vista as CardSpace, and is available for Mac OS X/Firefox as Digital Me.

And hey, it works!

1. Install an Information Card manager if you need one, and create a card.
2. Log into myOpenID the old-fashioned way.
3. Click “Account Settings”, then “Authentication Settings”, then “Add an Information Card”.
4. Your Information Card manager should pop up, and ask which card you want to use to log into myOpenID. Pick one!
5. Et voila, you’re done. If you sign out of the site, then go back to the “sign in” page, you’ll see the old username/password fields, plus a “Sign in with an Information Card” link. Click it, and your Information Card selector will pop up again. Just confirm who you are, and you’re in.

Of course, this isn’t limited to just myOpenID. Well, I mean, it kinda is right now because this is the first implementation I’ve actually seen, but — hey! If Information Cards take off then we’ll see the end of phishing attacks and forgotten passwords, then we can get on with worrying about other stuff instead.

I love video showreels. Actually, I think I just love surrealism, which one often gets in bucketloads in showreels. “Do You See (What I Just Said)?” is an awesome, awesome piece of writing and compositing.

Despair, Inc. is currently offering free shipping within the US. However, in the fine print…

International customers- fear not! - Though we’re not extending this particular promotion to those living outside the United States, we’ve nevertheless engineered- with the help of the Federal Reserve and the profligate deficit spending of the US Government - an exciting discount opportunity! For the foreseeable future, we’ve arranged for your foreign currencies to be greatly inflated in purchasing power against the US Dollar! [Despair, Inc. Wailing List]

Oh man, and now I just had to go renew foxboom.com.

Money is the root of all evil. I get paid in two weeks.

I just pulled my account on gothscene.com too. “eviltears” sent me a message and I could only read half of it, and I couldn’t even reply without a paid account.

Man, and I even had to pay the gas bill today. Why does everyone want money off me? How the hell I am going to afford TEH IPHONE???

Dudes, .Mac has eaten my address book and calendars, and is currently chomping through my incoming e-mail.

My new e-mail address is jon@foxboom.com, which points at GMail. I’ve shifted my appointments and reminders to Google Calendar, and I already keep my bookmarks on del.icio.us.

I’m pretty pissed at spending £69/$140 a year to backup my Really Important Stuff, to then have it totally fail. I’m even MORE pissed that my support tickets have been totally ignored.

The main point of all this is that my e-mail address has changed to jon@foxboom.com. Rar.

Dude! I just watched Terminus, and it’s beautiful. I love film with fucking texture, the audio is perfect and the composition is amazing.

And — woah! It was directed by Trevor Cawood, who’s probably more famous for the Citroen “Runner” ad. So yeah, you can probably imagine the production values are astronomical.

I don’t like my library getting all shuffled up and having random tracks plucked out, but these lyrics from Squidbillies sung out to me today and were too beautiful to keep to myself…

My dreams are all dead and buried,
Sometimes I wish the sun would just explode,
When God comes and calls me to His kingdom,
I’ll take all you sons of bitches when I go.

I’ve also totally caved, and will probably pick up an iPhone next month after I get paid. I’ll make it my little birthday/Christmas gift to myself, AND NOW IT’S JUSTIFIED SO I CAN’T GO BACK.

I’m also totally pissed off that .Mac Sync hasn’t worked at all since I upgraded to Leopard. I’ve raised two tickets a couple of days ago with the support team, but I haven’t heard anything back. Y’know, Apple make some great hardware and some brilliant software, but their customer support really stinks.

To claim back some space in my bedroom, I’ve started moving my CDs and DVDs out of their original boxes and into a flight case. To find them again, I’ve cataloged them in Delicious Library.

Now I just wish more of my books had barcodes so I could get them in quicker…

Today, I have been mostly buying groceries, cold and flu medication, and LipoBind.

It’s clinically proven! It’s a certified medical device product! But most of all, the science on the website seems totally plausible.

I’m 12st 8lbs right now, which gives me a BMI of 25.3, which ain’t great. Let’s give it six months and see what happens.

This is my favourite “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” sketch, like, ever.

I promised I’d write something about Leopard, but honestly… it’s just like 10.4, except:

• It’s faster.
• Some bits look nicer.
• Some bits look worse.

The “faster” bit is great, and was totally worth paying for the upgrade. Finder is a hundred(-ish) times faster, Spotlight is a billion (-ish) times faster, Dashboard is a gazillion (-ish) times faster. Everything opens faster. Quick Look is fast. Spaces is fast.

If you’ll forgive me for being blunt, it’s fast.

And on the whole, it looks nicer too. It’s nice that all the classic/stainless steel/whatever window styles have been consolidated into just one style. Stacks look great. The big new help search pointer… thing… looks great. The new Finder sidebar is so much more usable than the old one.

Some bits, though, do look awful. The new Dock looks cheap (though is easily fixed). The new window titlebar buttons are too garish, and the new folder icons… just don’t look right.

But hey, these are minor things. The only killers for me right now are:

• .Mac sync is currently fucked.
• Drop-down controls in Firefox are fucked.

In a nutshell, it’s a superb upgrade. And some guy I said hi to on Gaydar just clicked the “I don’t like you” button, which has nothing at all to do with Leopard but has killed my mood.

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” - Buddha.