Posts

I’m not surprised to read that Google acquired GrandCentral. GrandCentral provides a single phone number that will reach you anywhere, and a single voice mail box to go with it. I haven’t used GrandCentral, but I did use a similar service from CallWave right up until my iPhone was activated. (I wonder who’s going to buy them?) I think that companies like these represent one front on the assault on telcos and their customer-hostile policies. The first front is voice over IP. I have Time-Warner digital phone instead of a regular phone line. It saves me quite a bit of money on my phone bill, and the service is just as good as the rotten service I used to get from BellSouth. ...

eMusic Radio is a cool tool that enables you to listen to Internet radio and view the eMusic downloads associated with whatever’s playing on the radio at the same time.

I bought the iPhone on Friday evening, eagerly awaiting activation. On Saturday I called activation support and was told to keep waiting. On Sunday, I called activation support and was told to keep waiting but make sure my iPhone was connected to iTunes at all times. This morning I called, and the tech support person asked me a few questions. Then she said my account showed that AT&T needs more information from me, but she didn’t know what, and that there was another line I needed to call to take care of the problem. She also told me that line has a one hour wait. I called the other number, chose “iPhone Activation Status” and entered the order number I received via email, and then was told there would be a long wait. A few seconds later a support person connected, she asked me to confirm two numbers from the iPhone’s box, and the phone was activated a few minutes later. I have no idea what information they needed from me, since they already had the identification numbers associated with the phone. ...

In addition to not being evil, Google also ought to try to avoid being completely lame. Is it evil to point out to the health care industry that you can sell them ads that may help thwart Michael Moore’s criticism? I don’t know, but it’s certainly not behavior to aspire to.

Apparently the secret to getting your iPhone activated as soon as possible is to leave it plugged into your computer and connected to iTunes until activation is complete. A support person from AT&T told me that the their system works by going through a queue and pinging every unactivated phone in turn to activate them. If the system can’t see your phone, you lose your place in the queue and have to wait for the next time. ...

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. ...

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.

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. ...