Look what I got. I looked up all of the stores that would be selling the iPhone in my area, and guessed at which one would have the shortest line. When I got to the store at about 4:30, there were only 7 or 8 people in line. The store was closed from 4:30 to 6, and then they opened the door and let an initial group of about five people in. (There was actually a real policeman working the door at the store.) Then they let people in as the members of the first group left. When I was checking out, the point of sale system for AT&T Wireless crashed hard (supposedly nationwide), but then the system came back up and we made it out with the iPhone.

I’m still waiting on activation to complete, but I love the iPhone already. The display is ridiculously nice, at least judging by the “waiting to activate” screen.

Update: I’m still waiting for the phone to activate (five or six hours after the process started). I’m getting this message.

Surely Flickr users will be chronicling the hysteria. There’s no iPhone category on the camera finder. yet. I’m going out to hunt around for iPhones in a little bit.

Jason Kottke says Facebook is the new AOL. I agree.

As I was telling a coworker the other day, why build something for Facebook when I can build it for the Web as a whole? There are reasons to do so, but I’ll be sticking with the Web.

Throughout my life, everyone I’ve admired (conservative and liberal alike) has held Brown v Board of Education as one of the truly good things the government has ever accomplished. Today the Supreme Court threw it on the ground and stomped the hell out of it, ostensibly in service of upholding its intent. Not a happy day for me.

A group of Wall Street Journal reporters failed to show up for work yesterday in protest of the pending acquisition of the paper by Rupert Murdoch.

Steve Yegge ported Ruby on Rails to JavaScript, line by line, over six months. Wow.

He has a post recapping his Foo Camp presentation here. Here’s one thing he mentions:

I hope you’re beginning to see, at least faintly, why I love working at Google. It’s because the code base is clean. And anything that takes more than a week of effort requires a design document, with specific sections that have to be filled out, and with feedback from primary and secondary reviewers of your choice. The net result is that for any significant piece of code at Google, you can find almost a whole book about it internally, and a well-written one at that.

Anyone seen an example of one of these documents? I’d love to incorporate such a process into my own work. In most cases, design documents are something that nobody uses. Are Google’s friendlier than most? What’s the scoop?

In attempt to justify to myself not only the cost of the iPhone but also the hassle of obtaining one on Friday if possible, I have put together a list of reasons why I am the perfect iPhone customer:

• My primary use for my mobile phone is making and receiving calls, but I don’t make that many calls. I’m not a heavy cell phone user. I don’t see the lack of voice dialing and the lack of useful speed dial bothering me. They’re not really features I depend on (or in the case of voice dialing, even use).
• I am already a ATT Wireless (formerly Cingular) customer. So even though their network sucks, it’s not like I’ll feel like I’m missing out on something.
• The voice mail on the iPhone is purported to be light years better than regular voice mail. That is a killer feature for me. I hate most existing voice mail interfaces so badly that I can barely stand to use them. I am very much looking forward to voice mail with a decent user interface. (I use Callwave for voice mail now, so my voice mail just goes to my email inbox.)
• The number one feature I’d like on a new mobile phone is the ability to read email. I use Gmail for everything these days, so the iPhone is probably the perfect device to provide access to it.
• The number two feature I’d like is a real web browser. Every review says the iPhone’s web browser is excellent. My current phone’s web browser is non-existent. That’s a win.
• The iPhone offers Wifi support. I am usually at home or in my office, both of which have Wifi that I have access to. So I’d probably be using the iPhone on those networks most of the time. On the other hand, those are also environments where I have access to a computer, so I’m not sure how much I’d need the iPhone in those situations.
• Perhaps the big liability of the phone is that it has the virtual keyboard, but I’ve never had a phone with a real keyboard, so again, the iPhone won’t suffer by comparison. I have certainly never come to enjoy entering text with the phone keypad on the phones that I’ve had.

Laura Lemay says she’s not buying an iPhone. She already has a smart phone she paid a lot for, she’s very much used to its keyboard, and she’s wary of first generation Apple products. Makes sense to me.

I have never owned a smart phone, some of the iPhone’s features look killer to me, and I never buy first generation anything, so I’m going to give it a shot. Besides, my birthday is coming up.

Walter Dellinger deflates the “strict constructionist” judicial philosophy in one elegant paragraph:

Senators especially like it when a nominee says a judge’s role is just to be an “umpire.” But broad constitutional phrases are different from sports rules, so a judge would be like an umpire only if the game—instead of having a strike zone and a set number of balls, strikes, and outs—provided instead that “each batter shall have a fair chance to hit the ball” and “each team shall have a reasonably equal opportunity to score runs.” Key language of the Constitution is that broad, meaning that men and women appointed to the bench must necessarily exercise judgment. Which is, of course, why they are called judges, and not umpires.

The early verdict on the iPhone seems to be: believe the hype. It got a blessing from Walt Mossberg, which is the most coveted positive review in the world of computers and gadgets.

Update: Valleywag attempts to add up a consensus.

What happens when a satirical press release gets picked up in the media as real news?