Harman's Room

Last night, I was checking my email as I usually do before bed: in the bathroom, while on the toilet. Yes, it’s a very strange habit I’ve gotten in to. My dad often asks me while I’m home “what I could have possibly been doing in the bathroom for 20 minutes.” The answer is simple: urinating for one, checking my email, twitter, text messages and todo lists for nineteen.

And so I finished the one minute segment of the aforementioned ritual and stood up. I turned to my right as I always do. As I did and leaned over to flush, I really only tapped my iPhone on the doorframe, but it was accidental and unexpected enough for it to leave my hands, landing facedown for a brief moment on the inward-slanted toilet seat. Plop.

The toilet is flushing, and the unsanitary nature of reaching one’s ungloved hand into the toilet is not apparent to me in my panicked state. Having been said, even if it was apparent to me, I would have been just as quick to reach into this to grab my phone had it fallen into it. Let it be noted here that as I have already let you all into my bathroom for this story, I went “#1,” not “#2.” So in my hand went, and out my phone came. The backlight flickered and I quickly shut it off. I was shaking, thinking to myself “one second: $700.”

And at that point, all reason flies out the window. What do you do when a piece of technology gets wet? You have a few possible solutions, and none of them take less than a week, really. If you send it off to some company, it takes a while. You’re without your phone. If you put it in a bag of rice, or those little packets of desiccant that come in shoe-boxes, you’re supposed to wait a few weeks. If you’re reading this blog, you likely know me, and that means you know that I don’t even sleep through the night without using my phone. It’s a part of me like no other device has ever become. It is the digital extension of my analog self. So what did I do? Likely, all the wrong things.

1. Turn it off: good. Duh…
2. Towel: good. Get as much surface wetness off of it as I can.
3. Eject the Sim Card: this was good, too. Let’s remove the only other pieces of it to keep the water stuck to them from effecting the device. I dried them with dry sections of the same towel. After this, I start to lose my composure and subsequently try to do a few things which likely are terrible, terrible ideas.
4. The old NES Trick: some say that hair dryers are a good idea. My breath couldn’t have been too warm, but it did do one of the following (not sure which):
   • Remove water from the headphone jack, SIM slot and Dock Connector, OR
   • Push water further into the phone through those same ports. AND
   • Pushback partially-flushed toilet water onto my face near my mouth. Again: I lacked reason at this point. It was nearly 1am and I felt stupid as it was. Don’t remind me.
5. Compressed Air: this, in hindsight, was dumb. Likely did all of the pushing water in with very little of the cleaning out part.
6. Turned it back on: this is a huge no-no, but how else do I know if what I’m doing is working? ;)
7. Synced the phone with iTunes: okay, at this point, I had given up. The backlight was dead. The phone still worked, though! So I figured if I was going to need to replace the phone, I may as well back my data up, right?

Step seven above likely saved all of my data while simultaneously ensuring that my phone would never work again. So if I did it and the cell shorted, I’d have no data and a bad phone. If I didn’t, I might have a working phone in a few weeks, but I might not. And would have no data, or cell phone. Thanks to that backup I made last night at 1:11am, I now have an iPhone 3GS which looks, really, just like my 3G. It’s got all my apps, all my texts, pictures, everything. That’s all a very good thing. The $430 price tag for the replacement, which extended my service contract with AT&T for 2 years from this date, was okay, too. It’s better than the $650 I’d have paid for the “contractless” phone.

The funny thing with all of this was that I’ve owned a lot of cell phones…

• Nokia 5165 (one month, to see if I was responsible)
• Nokia 3360 (my first real cell phone)
• Motorola 120e (few months. Hated it)
• Motorola 730c (the c is for color; Amanda had one, and I wanted it. Loved this cell)
• LG vx6000 (everyone had this phone. I was late to the game, but loved it)
• Palm Treo (my bag got stolen with my cell phone in it. Charlie let me borrow this clunker. It had a stylus, hahaha)
• LG vx6000 (Courtney’s when she replaced it. She’s been through more cells than I have though)
• Danger Sidekick II (Data only. Casper made me jealous. It was great. TMo blew chunks)
• LG vx8300 (The best non-Apple phone I’ve ever had. Wonderful device, build quality, everything)
• iPhone (jailbroken and sold on eBay for $400)
• iPhone 3G (uhm, haven’t you been reading?!)

and now the iPhone 3GS. It took me that long to let a cell phone take a drink. After years of rowing, with my phone near water so much, and even in the boat sometimes, I’ve never gotten a phone more than a little wet. And so, at the request of Ted Reed I present to you a short list of Pro’s and Con’s of this situation:

Pro’s

• Faster processor, new battery, etc.
• Better camera which takes video; has a compass
• Newer, non-scratched body and screen. I popped it in my case immediately
• Battery Percentage Indicator (sorry, this is just a huge plus for me)
• 16GB of storage as versus 8GB. This means more Phish to bring around with me
• Video Tweets when Tweetie 2 comes out

Cons

• $430. This is the biggest one for me: Sonnovabitch
• Extended my contract by 14 mos
• I could have gone to bed earlier and woken up later today
• I may not be eligible for upgrade pricing come the iPhone 4G or whatever it’ll be called
• I really didn’t need any of the pros listed above, if my phone still worked

And finally, the best thing to come of all this. A Google search sent me to an Apple Support page which detailed a man who dropped his iPhone in a river while saving a drowning kitten (his story is not nearly as heroic as mine). He later asks how to remove a grain of rice from the SIM card slot. The answer is priceless:

Flush it out with river water?
;)

If you “Browse” your music like me (it’s the primary way I find… anything… in iTunes) then you were in for a rude awakening today when you booted up iTunes 9… The Browse Bar is now a “Browse Column” and appears on the left, only showing Artists at first. Not only can you customize this, but you can make it the way it used to be, too–and even better, if you want!

It’s easy. Go to View >> Column Browser >> On Top.

You can also turn on and off other options. I just added in Groupings, which I am now using essentially like Genres. I should get back to fixing those up according to what Wikipedia says or something. If only I had time to play in iTunes anymore…

I have a Google Document which outlines how much music I listen to. I update it quite often, actually. Why? I’m a nerdy CompSci major who likes statistics, and likes music. I’ve been making a conscious effort lately to listen to music which I have neglected for, in some cases, years. I amass more music than I can listen to and far too often don’t listen to it the way I should, or as quickly as I should.

Last night, I updated my stats again. I have now listened to over 75% of my music library for the first time, maybe ever. When you have 11k+ songs, it’s a big deal. The task is daunting, though. iTunes says I have over 8.25 days of music which has 0 plays. I try my best to listen to all music three times, just to be sure I know if it’s worth hearing again or not. That means 24.75 days of music before this is all done. This is going to take a while…

There, I said it. I don’t like everything Apple’s ever done, and this is a very notable example. The Apple Genius which Steve Jobs touted as so great during its Let’s Rock event just a few weeks ago is a nice feature for iTunes, but nothing they should have used every new device to demo for quite a few reasons.

iTunes Music Store Only

If you lack any AC/DC, or The Beatles (no one has them, right?) then I guess your library will sound just fine. But if you like local bands, or in general don’t purchase all your music through iTunes, you’re never going to see any information for some of your songs. But that doesn’t mean you stole music at all. I have plenty of discs I physically own but which aren’t available for purchase on iTunes, therefore you couldn’t possibly want to listen to them. So this begs the question, how is Apple doing this Genius thing? Are they listening to tracks and making keywords and rankings for certain songs in a variety of categories like Pandora? Or do they have software which analyzes sound? Because if it’s the latter, there’s just no excuse. Oh, and even better, try finding songs that sound like “Back in Black” by AC/DC and iTunes will tell you to Update Genius, and not alert you that it won’t ever find anything for that song because it’s not in iTunes. Lame.

Horrible Settings

And by horrible, I mean there hardly are any. You can refresh your playlist. You can change the number of songs you have (not to a number, or a duration, but one of four preset and poorly chosen numbers) or you can burn the playlist to a disc, and since you cannot limit the genius to a duration of 74 or 80 minutes, you likely won’t be able to fit it all on one CD. Have fun! This is really the flaw of the system, a complete and total lack of settings. How hard would it have been to create a combination of Smart Genius Playlists (which would obviously require a better name. Let me have a playlist of 20 songs which aren’t live that sound like this song! Let me have 80 minutes of songs sounding like a given track which are all rated four or five stars. Let me have a playlist of tracks I’ve listened to more than 10 times which I’ve never skipped that sound like a given song. Let me decide that no matter how much a song may sound just like another, I don’t want it on this playlist. Give me 100 songs that sound alike and let me decide which ones go on the mix. Please! Lamer.

Not Very Bright.

Though this happens more on my iPhone which only has about 800 songs, my 12000 song library produces results like this too. It’s hard to tout a service as one which helps you to discover new music when some of the nice information it tells you is that Aerosmith sounds like Aerosmith (sounds like Aerosmith, actually–they made this mix two times, plus it was based off “Sweet Emotion”) and three songs by The Who appear on this playlist as well. Sometimes the songs they give you are off the same album. Really, Apple? I had no idea that an artist will sound like himself at the same point in time in his career. Damned impressive. Lamest.

I know it’s a first release but for something they think is cool enough to put on older iPods (classics at least will be getting a little brainier [but not much--see above]) it sure needs some of the traditional Apple polish. I look forward to some more options and features in the future.