Rinsefirst

If your viewing this site on your iphone, it might actually look good now…

Just thought you would like to know

There are 10 days until the wedding. 10 days until I’m Mr. Justin Gehring. 10 days until I move out most likely for good. 10 days until I become responsible for not one, but two lives.

So on a deep level here (as deep as I get that is), what does this all really mean?

I have no clue.

Despite all my logic, all my planning, all my knowledge, all my experiences, all my observations. I have to admit, I’m scared shitless when it comes to the possibility of outcomes that could happen as a result of this one event. But that’s just it….

I’m doing this because despite all the possibilities, one thing holds true. That I want her to be a part of all of them. I want her to be there when JR makes it’s first million. I want her to be there when my first child is born. I want her to be the one that pushes me to be better. I want her to be the one that actually gets past my logic sometimes. I want her to figure out what’s bothering me. And most importantly, I want her happiness to come before mine (as much as is possible with me).

So why am I writing this? Is it to calm myself down? Is it be a sappy romantic?

Nope.

It’s non of these.

I’m writing this because sometime in the future, I will be fighting with Amber. I will be more frustrated than I ever have before. I may even ask myself, “why in the world did I marry this girl.” And when that happens, I tend to look to my past… And just maybe, I will look back to the posts surrounding my wedding day, and maybe that will be enough to remind me that it’s not the fight that’s happening that matters. All that matters is that she’s the one you want to fight with (so go make up already, your probably wrong anyway!)

Continuing what has turned into a series of posts based on my experience with the iPhone… I thought I would talk about what I’ve been doing for the last hour or two while I was waiting for something else to downloaded.

I was updating my contact list.

I mentioned in a previous post that my iphone was able to copy my t-mobile sim card contacts from my previous phone, and import them in on the iphone. That was great. It meant at least for the last 3 days that I was able to know who was calling me without having to guess in the dark at the number. Caller ID is a lifeline for me when you need to know if it’s business or pleasure.

There was a problem though… My old sim card only contain 15 character names, and phone numbers. To make matters worse, I had made some custom modifications that allowed me to find types of people easier (For example, I prefixed all my clients with the letters BIZ).

For a lot of people, I also had multiple entries (home and mobile) because i didn’t like using my cell phones multi-phone number system (that and prior to my previous phone, my sim card had been in a nokia, where they didn’t have the multiple number feature).

Hey wow, there’s something worth mentioning… My sim card was an original Voicestream sim card (before t-mobile). The contacts had survived I believe 3 phones (Nokia 3390, Something In Between (didn’t have it long), Samsung E-315). It had been put in various other phones as well (Amber’s various modles for example). And in a computer card. The card has over 5 years worth of contact entries, and for the most part, covered anyone and everyone that ever seemed to call me (including places like Dell, Macys, Fridays, and Petco)

In any case, I made the decision to sync with my Google account, and start updating/properly formatting all of my contacts… At the moment I have roughly 127 contacts to weed through, and about 200 more to make sure get in there (new additions from the wedding invite list). Needless to say, by the time I’m done, by iphone (and Google) will know just about everyone I care to know, and then some (I store numbers I don’t want to answer as well).

All in all, it’s pretty crazy to see how our lives change from the point of view of a contact list… Our addresses, our phone numbers, our last names… These mundane details are at the essence of major changes in our lives. For example:

A good number of people had a last name change to be made in my phone… Why? They got Married.

A good number of people had address changes… Why? They graduated from highschool and went to college OR they graduated from college and moved into someplace else (*or back home*).

A good number of people had email address changes… No significant thing there.

All in all, I’m tempted to have the girl watching our guestbook hold my iphone for the night, and get photos of everyone to make sure my addressbook is as complete as possible… Odds are I wont… but we shall see.

Off to the top secret mission I’m working on (ok so it’s not that topic secret, but it’s dang cool). I’m sure I’ll have more on that later.

So this new iPhone toy is driving me mad.

So far I have it doing the following for me:

• Geotagging and automatically uploading photos to my smug account
• Getting my email
• Providing me hours of training material in video form
• Making my contacts easier to use than ever.
• Making Facebook, Wordpress, Twitter, and Itunes easier to use than ever.
• Providing me pointless sound effects to improve my nerd factor.
• Handling all my voice calling needs
• And probably a half dozen other things (I think I have close to 20+ apps installed at this point)

In any case, this thing breeds innovation in me… I think I have a list of apps I would love to build for this thing (or at least try). So as a programmer, I quickly went and downloaded the SDK…

That went great until I discovered I needed to dev on a mac.

So I transfered the SDK to what I still consider to be a rather nice power pc quad style running 10.4.

Thought that would do it for me, except I guess I need Mac OS X 10.5 and an intel processor.

Sadly, that leaves me with no solution that I can find in my house… Amber has a solution for me though: Go and buy her a mac (that I can then use to do whatever it is I want to do). Seems a bit excessive, especially since she wants a laptop, and the most I’d probably be willing to pay for to do my dev work on would be a mac mini (If it’s not going to be my primary, why worry about it).

So my question is this: Anyone know of a place that provides remote desktop style mac hosting that I could use for dev work that has a month to month plan in the 10 to 20 dollar range :-)? That would be ideal. I know MediaTemple is beta testing something but they dont have a price listed :-(.

It probably isn’t all that important… Afterall.. when the heck am I going to find the time to develope an app for the iphone… I’ve got a million other things to do… Not to mention getting married.

So I as mentioned in my previous post, I got an iPhone last night. Amber called me and told me she would be off work from 4:30 to 7:00, and I thought, “just enough time to head to the mall, and get one.”

Well I was partially right. We got there, and I believe just before I got there a shipment of 16G black iphones had arrived (exactly what I was looking for). A line had begun to form (we were 5th). I then realized in my rush to get there that I had completely forgotten to bring my account number for t-mobile. John, owing me a few computer favors, logged into my t-mobile account and got the account number for me (which was a good thing).

We waited in line for about 30 minutes, and then had the guy rush us through the process… All and all, it went fairly well.

But let me say, I’m about as impressed as I thought I wouldn’t be (say what?). Here’s the list of problems I really hope Apple takes care of between now and the next firmware update.

• There’s something wrong with the Bluetooth profile that won’t allow it to pair with my car. It’s possible it’s my car, and I’m going to try patching it, but supposidly, apple fixed this in the 1.1.0 firmware, and then broke it again in the 2.0.
• There’s something wrong with the GPS that when the 3G is turned on, it behaves incorrectly. There are easy enough fixes for it, but man is it annoying when it geotags a photo to Massachutes.
• Can’t turn any mp3 into a ringtone… I don’t care about DRM, they should undo this.
• Can’t sync calendar with Google Calendar… This has to be coming right? Or at least an App to do so.
• I really feel there should be a thumb gesture to simulate the home button… When I’m in thumb only mode, that button is not the easiest in the word to get to with my thumb.
• And lastly, and this one I knew going into it: you can’t tether… which is just stupid.

On the upside, I’m happy with quite a few things:

• I was very happy I was able to stick my t-mobile sim card in it, and copy the contacts from the sim card to the iphone. Worked perfectly… Now I just need to go through and rename them all because they were perfectly formatted for my old cell phone, not my new one.
• I am so-so with the camera, but love smugshot. Expect to see “recently taken photos” added to rinsefirst in the near future. The only problem is the geotaggings ability to place me correctly on a map.
• I love the app store, and have already downloaded:
  A Bible
  A lightsabre
  World 9
  Smugshot
  Wordpress
  AIM
  Remote
  Tap Tap Revenge
  Wordpress (which I used to update last night)
• I also love youtube… I swear they built this thing around playing youtube videos… They look o-so-pretty. I can watch my Numa Video where ever now.

So yeah, back to work I go… way to much to do.

I got an iphone. Need I say more?