I still think to myself, there’s gotta be alien technology in there. The touch screen and UI is responsive, intuitive and, well, fun! email - flick. calendar - spin. photos - stretch. On top of its phenomoninal interface, the phone gets great reception–I’ve been getting 3-4 bars within the Verizon dead zones at ZMO, Bakehouse, and Creamery buildings. Voicemail is stored directly on the iPhone, making it easy to retrieve and manage. Contacts and calendar sync up with our Exchange server, using of all things, iTunes as the conduit. Email with the Exchange server uses some pretty antiquated and insecure protocols, so I’m forwarding a copy of work email to gmail and pulling it from there. I can always use webmail via safari if I need to work directly with the Exchange server. As for attachments, Excel, Word, PDFs all render beautifully. I was able to view the PG DOR with no problem on the iPhone screen (seriously).

Here’s my wish list of things that will make it an even more productive office tool:

I’d like to see better Exchange server integration. While the current sync for contacts and events is good enough for me–I sync it with my laptop when I get in the office. The ability to push mail and sync wirelessly would be nice, and is something that is essential for some ZCoBbers I know.

I would like to be able to copy and paste between applications on the iPhone. I foresee a software update to enable this and perhaps spawning a new gesture to learn.

From third party developers, I’d like to see a good encrypted password keeper like SplashID.

As for bugs, I really haven’t experienced too much. Safari was crashing on me, and a simple reboot fixed it. More reports to come.

The movie. I’m not a big Walt Disney fan so I had low expectations. I had heard good things about the movie from friends but honestly I don’t trust my friends taste in movies to match my own.

There’s a distinct lack of technology present in Ratatouille.

I was laughing by 10 minutes in and continued to enjoy the movie all the way through to the sickly sweet ending. It’s great. The references to food, food prep, and the back of house of restaurants was fun in a strange way - it was like our little arcane world of food service was being opened up for everyone to see.

If you are in the food service or a foodie, go see it.

Menu: baked chicken marinated in buttermilk, garlic, rosemary; grilled corn on the cob; arugula salad tossed with Lincoln Log and raspberries; s’mores made with Bakehouse graham crackers and marshmellows.

Eric had scheduled some time with me to try and revive an old hard drive of his, salvage any content and copy it over to a new external drive. The old drive was a 20GB/FAT32/Windows 98 partition. When I hooked it up to the Drive Dock and connected it to my Mac, OS X wanted to initialize the drive. When I connected it to a PC, WinXP could see that there was a drive but claimed it was unable to assign a drive letter and therefore could not display the contents. Then I threw the Ubuntu 7.04 live disc into a Mac, booted, connected the drive dock and voila! Ubuntu, the diversity-celebrating software that it is, didn’t care about the drive’s format, manufacturer, creed, or gender, it just said “Welcome! Go forth, have fun.” We connected Eric’s new external drive and rescued the old data.

I’m a fan of Ubuntu (I’ll spare you a rant) and it’s situations like this that make me love it. Thanks for reading. You may now return to your normal operating system.