I-Wanted an I-Phone
For Christmas, I received an I-Phone.
It was perhaps the second most wanted Christmas gift of all time....a very cool combo of tool and toy. The most desired gift of all time was a blue Schwinn banana-set bike with those handlebars that looked like chrome antlers in 1969. I was ready to lock horns all over town. My dad says now that he feared I was going to die if I didn't get this exact bike. Kids, take note on the strategy...act as if you will perish unless you receive that gift! With the gift of salvation, this is truly true.
I was so excited...I remember taking the bike out Christmas Day in my jammies in the West Virginia snow to ride. The bike was cool. Kind of both a toy and tool, too--like the I-Phone. It is interesting how a bike to a kid signifies freedom and travel, a loosening of dependence on the parents. The bike was not only functional...it had style. These Smartphones' likewise give us information mobility (and the I-Phone does it best). It is also interesting that Apple realizes that anything with an "I" is a highly effective marketing strategy. Beyond just functional and fun; it is individual empowerment and/or narcissism. I am trying to submit the I-Phone, as a quasi-member of my being and body, to godly ends.
I type on the I-Phone now at an altitude hard to reckon. We are in-flight...the requisite baby is now wailing several rows back. To be up-front, the I-Phone has been in my possession and my use for months...after intense discussion and negotiations, Lina and I agreed to front me the device. I needed the tools...or at least that is my official story, as my Palm PDA is a relic. My Palm Tungsten E, once King of Tech Hill, has become the PDA equivalent of the family dog who is both old and blind. I am keeping Palmie around for sentimental reasons...plus it has
calendar information that I need to transfer over item by item to the I-Phone. So, it is on life support. My ultimate goal was to get one true Smartphone, not an ailing PDA and a "Not So Smart" Smartphone like I had previously. One device.
I had tried desperately to sync the data from the Palm to the I-Phone using Microsoft Outlook...alas, I discovered that my desktop's version of MS Outlook is too old and my laptop's version of MS Outlook is too new to make a connection through the Palm OS.
After much too many hours trying to find a crack in the evil Microsoft Software Fortress, it became clear to me that my data was being held for ransom by the "Gates" Devil's Island approach that forces people to buy their way off the prison colony. And, it is not that I only tried once halfheartedly then gave up. I tried every probable escape route.
The only inexpensive escape plan I could find was a third party fix from the software equivalent of human trafficker. In legal monopolies like Microsoft, only the unsavory can exist. If the firm is legit, it won't be long until the legal equivalent of the mob's Icepick Tony comes to stick something long and sharp in their ear like Stalin had done to Trotsky. Or, I could have bought an in-between version of MS Outlook for the one task of transferring data, then it would died like a Drone in the Beehive after seeing the Queen for intimacies. 150 dollars for that? Forget it!
So, like the beaten prisoner Dustin Hoffman plays in the film Papillion, I have resigned myself to counting the days when the sentence of entering the data manually comes to an end and I can discard Palmie (and) take a sense of small victory that I refused the purchase the bridge version of MS Outlook. I will hold my head high when strolling off the Island.
Buying the I-Phone early also required that I break my contract with Verizon 6 months prematurely and that cost us a 100 bucks. That is where Lina and I agreed would be the Christmas gift. We loathe wasting money. Verizon wasn't exactly sympathetic when I let them know that their rep had either intentionally lied or unintentionally gave me incorrect information a about the capabilities of my previous cell phone when purchased. He told me that I could purchase third-party software that would transfer data via MS Outlook from my Palmie to the new phone...an LG Env2. It was, in the words of Yogi Berra, "Deja vu all over again."
"Pound sand" is what the Verizon customer rep basically nicely said later. She did offer me $ 50 dollars for a new Verizon device but based on the lame phones that Verizon was offering at the time, it was like US Airways offering a $ 200 voucher to travel with them again after they screwed-up your recent flight. The line at check-in for US Airways in L.A. yesterday dwarfed their competitors...and based on my prior experience with this carrier, it is not because they are carrying more passengers. Be wary about their low fares...they are low for a reason. Incompetence.
To tie this all together, here are several observations:
- It is possible for me to compose one of my blogs on my I-Phone, at 12,000 feet, with intermittent screams from a baby, with a little red-headed girl who keeps brushing my elbow as she perpetually goes up and down the aisle with a clinical case of happy feet.
-Palm was once the undisputed leader in Smartphones (and before that, in PDA technology). It stopped innovating and instead got complacent. As I work with the I-Phone, I see a lot of Palm ideas in it that were allowed to grow. Palm had great seeds to work with. I guess that is what makes Apple a great company. They take the fruit of other companies work...fruit that the companies do not see. In one way it does not seem right that Apple does so. But, the best way to keep the competition at bay is not through lawsuits for patent infringement (which is hard to prove, especially when you didn't maximize your ideas' potentiality). Instead, it is to continuously to improve.
Surely, one of the best examples of human fully is to think that products and services cannot be improved upon...that they have reached their Platonic Ideal. Success begets prosperity, prosperity begets complacency, complacency begets death. The Palm Pre is half-baked (an in premature?) and Palm's Pixie is a lightweight in more ways than one...come on, they should be embarrassed to release that...on the Sprint hit or miss network no less. Time will tell if Palm will be able to recover from its wounds. My guess is that they are fatal.
- Big companies, if they can, will screw you like feudal overlords. Microsoft and Verizon got big because they offered a good product at a good price. Now, they want to squeeze out dollars in their own "Cash or Your Cajones" stimulus program. Even when the consumer has a solid case to not get squeezed: Their one-sized monolithic grip fits all. At least their gluttony for profit keeps them returning to the table of innovation.
I would seem to have the animus for me to become the spokesman for Apple and ATT...rather than that laid back comedian now doing the spots. Some rage might ignite a simmering pot of flammable resentment. But, Verizon and Microsoft are both my foes but they are not aligned in this grievance officially..it just turns out that they are co-conspirators who share a common enemy of Apple and I am just a collateral causality. Plus, there is honor among thieves, and all cell phone companies have thieving qualities. Verizon and Microsoft could find a better version of an irate customer, better spoken, better looking, better physical assets.
- Early Christmas presents are both good and bad. I was able to relegate Palmie to PDA Emeritus sooner in October but it did make Christmas Day giftless. It is more blessed to give than receive but I have to admit that I felt an ache because I thought I had no presents to open.
As it turned out, despite our mutual agreement to not buy each other presents (instead we agreed to purchase a Blu-Ray DVD player to replace our old DVD player that makes weird noises like an old man trying to get up out of bed in the morning, plus it does not play Blu-Ray, have wi-fi access, etc), I decided to buy Lina the Pixar DVD of "UP" (and a Joyce Meyer book).
As long as Pixar continues to crank out touching animated movies yearly by Christmas, I have one secure present to give Lina that she will like and make her think that I am wonderful gift-giver (she is on to me now as I bought her the Pixar collection last year for Christmas). Lina purchased for me two magazines with the offer to get subscriptions. I declined. I don't want to waste time reading interesting yet irrelevant (to me) massive essays from the New Yorker. I would rather work on this blog in my spare time to hone my craft. Usually, my blogs take 30 minutes to write...today's was longer. A bonus!
- I really feared the task on entering the data from the Palm to the I-Phone. Lina made a great suggestion to just do it monthly rather than trying to do it all at once. That made perfect sense and breaks down the sheer drudgery of it all.
Here is a theological reflection on the last point. Sometimes we can get overwhelmed by the scope of a problem. The enormity of the task causes us to delay and dawdle. Or, we can try and find a quick-fix. Once it became clear to me that the interaction among the Palm OS and the old and new versions of MS Outlook were not compatible after the first or second attempt, I should have cut my losses. Instead, I spent at least a half a day still trying to find a way around the barriers Microsoft had built. Microsoft, despite it software deficiencies in many aspects, has an primary motivation to monetize all actions and updates. It dedicates enormous resources to keep customers coming back for more like a dealer does to a crackhead.
It has turned out to be not really that hard to update the data between the devices. The fact that I was able to avoid getting baited by Microsoft is reward enough for this work. Sometimes God wants us to work through a problem, big or small progressively because we often learn more rather than watch God do stuff like a magician. Sometimes, He does a miracle and all we need to do is step back (or forward as in River Jordan) and watch it happen.
This idea of "Step-by-Step" (or, "How To Make My New Year's Resolutions Stick") will be expounded upon in future blogs this week.
It was perhaps the second most wanted Christmas gift of all time....a very cool combo of tool and toy. The most desired gift of all time was a blue Schwinn banana-set bike with those handlebars that looked like chrome antlers in 1969. I was ready to lock horns all over town. My dad says now that he feared I was going to die if I didn't get this exact bike. Kids, take note on the strategy...act as if you will perish unless you receive that gift! With the gift of salvation, this is truly true.
I was so excited...I remember taking the bike out Christmas Day in my jammies in the West Virginia snow to ride. The bike was cool. Kind of both a toy and tool, too--like the I-Phone. It is interesting how a bike to a kid signifies freedom and travel, a loosening of dependence on the parents. The bike was not only functional...it had style. These Smartphones' likewise give us information mobility (and the I-Phone does it best). It is also interesting that Apple realizes that anything with an "I" is a highly effective marketing strategy. Beyond just functional and fun; it is individual empowerment and/or narcissism. I am trying to submit the I-Phone, as a quasi-member of my being and body, to godly ends.
I type on the I-Phone now at an altitude hard to reckon. We are in-flight...the requisite baby is now wailing several rows back. To be up-front, the I-Phone has been in my possession and my use for months...after intense discussion and negotiations, Lina and I agreed to front me the device. I needed the tools...or at least that is my official story, as my Palm PDA is a relic. My Palm Tungsten E, once King of Tech Hill, has become the PDA equivalent of the family dog who is both old and blind. I am keeping Palmie around for sentimental reasons...plus it has
calendar information that I need to transfer over item by item to the I-Phone. So, it is on life support. My ultimate goal was to get one true Smartphone, not an ailing PDA and a "Not So Smart" Smartphone like I had previously. One device.
I had tried desperately to sync the data from the Palm to the I-Phone using Microsoft Outlook...alas, I discovered that my desktop's version of MS Outlook is too old and my laptop's version of MS Outlook is too new to make a connection through the Palm OS.
After much too many hours trying to find a crack in the evil Microsoft Software Fortress, it became clear to me that my data was being held for ransom by the "Gates" Devil's Island approach that forces people to buy their way off the prison colony. And, it is not that I only tried once halfheartedly then gave up. I tried every probable escape route.
The only inexpensive escape plan I could find was a third party fix from the software equivalent of human trafficker. In legal monopolies like Microsoft, only the unsavory can exist. If the firm is legit, it won't be long until the legal equivalent of the mob's Icepick Tony comes to stick something long and sharp in their ear like Stalin had done to Trotsky. Or, I could have bought an in-between version of MS Outlook for the one task of transferring data, then it would died like a Drone in the Beehive after seeing the Queen for intimacies. 150 dollars for that? Forget it!
So, like the beaten prisoner Dustin Hoffman plays in the film Papillion, I have resigned myself to counting the days when the sentence of entering the data manually comes to an end and I can discard Palmie (and) take a sense of small victory that I refused the purchase the bridge version of MS Outlook. I will hold my head high when strolling off the Island.
Buying the I-Phone early also required that I break my contract with Verizon 6 months prematurely and that cost us a 100 bucks. That is where Lina and I agreed would be the Christmas gift. We loathe wasting money. Verizon wasn't exactly sympathetic when I let them know that their rep had either intentionally lied or unintentionally gave me incorrect information a about the capabilities of my previous cell phone when purchased. He told me that I could purchase third-party software that would transfer data via MS Outlook from my Palmie to the new phone...an LG Env2. It was, in the words of Yogi Berra, "Deja vu all over again."
"Pound sand" is what the Verizon customer rep basically nicely said later. She did offer me $ 50 dollars for a new Verizon device but based on the lame phones that Verizon was offering at the time, it was like US Airways offering a $ 200 voucher to travel with them again after they screwed-up your recent flight. The line at check-in for US Airways in L.A. yesterday dwarfed their competitors...and based on my prior experience with this carrier, it is not because they are carrying more passengers. Be wary about their low fares...they are low for a reason. Incompetence.
To tie this all together, here are several observations:
- It is possible for me to compose one of my blogs on my I-Phone, at 12,000 feet, with intermittent screams from a baby, with a little red-headed girl who keeps brushing my elbow as she perpetually goes up and down the aisle with a clinical case of happy feet.
-Palm was once the undisputed leader in Smartphones (and before that, in PDA technology). It stopped innovating and instead got complacent. As I work with the I-Phone, I see a lot of Palm ideas in it that were allowed to grow. Palm had great seeds to work with. I guess that is what makes Apple a great company. They take the fruit of other companies work...fruit that the companies do not see. In one way it does not seem right that Apple does so. But, the best way to keep the competition at bay is not through lawsuits for patent infringement (which is hard to prove, especially when you didn't maximize your ideas' potentiality). Instead, it is to continuously to improve.
Surely, one of the best examples of human fully is to think that products and services cannot be improved upon...that they have reached their Platonic Ideal. Success begets prosperity, prosperity begets complacency, complacency begets death. The Palm Pre is half-baked (an in premature?) and Palm's Pixie is a lightweight in more ways than one...come on, they should be embarrassed to release that...on the Sprint hit or miss network no less. Time will tell if Palm will be able to recover from its wounds. My guess is that they are fatal.
- Big companies, if they can, will screw you like feudal overlords. Microsoft and Verizon got big because they offered a good product at a good price. Now, they want to squeeze out dollars in their own "Cash or Your Cajones" stimulus program. Even when the consumer has a solid case to not get squeezed: Their one-sized monolithic grip fits all. At least their gluttony for profit keeps them returning to the table of innovation.
I would seem to have the animus for me to become the spokesman for Apple and ATT...rather than that laid back comedian now doing the spots. Some rage might ignite a simmering pot of flammable resentment. But, Verizon and Microsoft are both my foes but they are not aligned in this grievance officially..it just turns out that they are co-conspirators who share a common enemy of Apple and I am just a collateral causality. Plus, there is honor among thieves, and all cell phone companies have thieving qualities. Verizon and Microsoft could find a better version of an irate customer, better spoken, better looking, better physical assets.
- Early Christmas presents are both good and bad. I was able to relegate Palmie to PDA Emeritus sooner in October but it did make Christmas Day giftless. It is more blessed to give than receive but I have to admit that I felt an ache because I thought I had no presents to open.
As it turned out, despite our mutual agreement to not buy each other presents (instead we agreed to purchase a Blu-Ray DVD player to replace our old DVD player that makes weird noises like an old man trying to get up out of bed in the morning, plus it does not play Blu-Ray, have wi-fi access, etc), I decided to buy Lina the Pixar DVD of "UP" (and a Joyce Meyer book).
As long as Pixar continues to crank out touching animated movies yearly by Christmas, I have one secure present to give Lina that she will like and make her think that I am wonderful gift-giver (she is on to me now as I bought her the Pixar collection last year for Christmas). Lina purchased for me two magazines with the offer to get subscriptions. I declined. I don't want to waste time reading interesting yet irrelevant (to me) massive essays from the New Yorker. I would rather work on this blog in my spare time to hone my craft. Usually, my blogs take 30 minutes to write...today's was longer. A bonus!
- I really feared the task on entering the data from the Palm to the I-Phone. Lina made a great suggestion to just do it monthly rather than trying to do it all at once. That made perfect sense and breaks down the sheer drudgery of it all.
Here is a theological reflection on the last point. Sometimes we can get overwhelmed by the scope of a problem. The enormity of the task causes us to delay and dawdle. Or, we can try and find a quick-fix. Once it became clear to me that the interaction among the Palm OS and the old and new versions of MS Outlook were not compatible after the first or second attempt, I should have cut my losses. Instead, I spent at least a half a day still trying to find a way around the barriers Microsoft had built. Microsoft, despite it software deficiencies in many aspects, has an primary motivation to monetize all actions and updates. It dedicates enormous resources to keep customers coming back for more like a dealer does to a crackhead.
It has turned out to be not really that hard to update the data between the devices. The fact that I was able to avoid getting baited by Microsoft is reward enough for this work. Sometimes God wants us to work through a problem, big or small progressively because we often learn more rather than watch God do stuff like a magician. Sometimes, He does a miracle and all we need to do is step back (or forward as in River Jordan) and watch it happen.
This idea of "Step-by-Step" (or, "How To Make My New Year's Resolutions Stick") will be expounded upon in future blogs this week.
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