Day 17 Monaco and France

Wow, so much to catch up on. Saturday, I got online a bit while the kids swam in the pool, then it was off to the beach for the afternoon. The boys got their first topless sun bather exposure, and seemed quite pleased about it. Saturday evening the boys and I made friends with a nice Italian family camped next to us. They had 2 boys, Mario 15 and L-something 11 and a girl Valerie 13. They were down to compete in the Italian nationals for olympic wrestling. The daughter took 3rd in her age group. The kids all hit it off as soon as I threw out the Frisbee, and played for several hours. Michael and Mario talked about video games, Invader Zim cartoons on his iPod and the funny looking American money. Kids seem to just figure out how to communicate without us. I love it. They gave the boys some Teramesue (sp) dessert. I sat with the folks at common picnic table between the campers and talked about wrestling, my artwork (photos on the laptop) and music. Turns out my iTunes is full of the parents favorite music from their younger days too (they were in their 40's as well). They spoke very little english and I speak no Italian but we managed to have a very wonderful evening regardless.

The next day, Sunday we headed into Rome once more. I focused on kid friendly stuff. I let Michael do the Shuttle, Train and subway navigation. He took this job very seriously and did a wonderful job getting us all over Rome and back home. I was very proud of him. Our first stop was the Capuchin Crypts a very fantastic collection of skeletons of monks arranged in amazing decorations. Needless to say they loved it. Next we were off to the zoo which was another hit. I forget how much kids enjoy a zoo. We then walked down to the Trevi Fountain
and each tossed in a coin to ensure our return to Rome one day. Then it was on to the Pantheon and again there is just not words to describe the scale of the architecture. The boys thought a hole in the ceiling of a church was pretty cool. Since it was sprinkling rain, they got the whole effect. I must admit that it was seriously cool. Then it was back to camp where I cooked dinner.

Monday was a travel day, and we packed up and headed to Monaco. A long drive but one of the most beautiful I have ever driven, even on the highway. Driving for hours along the Mediterranean up the Italian and then French coast is stunning. Driving a large (by European standards) camping in Monaco however is not fun. I might ever suggest the most stressful driving I have done. The GPS apparently does not take into account either the width of the road or the grade. I wound up on switchback so tight I had to take two approaches. Cars park all along the road and I was squeezing between rock cliffs and parked cars with four inches of clearance on either side. Once we arrived at the camp ground we discovered it was closed, for good it appeared. So we had to find another spot. The next spot was only 40 kilometers away, but due to the roads and traffic, and my dependance on the $(%*(# GPS, it took three hours, and we arrived too late. We spent our first night free camping. Thats code for, finding a well lit parking lot, locking up, pulling the curtains and pretending your not in a train station parking lot. The boys slept fine (the same can not be said for me;-)

Tuesday I made the mistake of driving back into Monaco. I followed the P signs for Camper parking which there are exactly one of in all of Monaco. My camper it 3.5 meters tall, and the parking garage for campers turns out to be 3.4 meters. I asked a friendly polizia were I could park, and his response was "Not in Monaco." We winded our way down the coast until we found street parking, and took the train back to Monaco. The train was perfect and we should have taken in from where we camped. We are such beginners. We walked up to the Palace and over to the Aquarium. It was very nice and the kids enjoyed it a lot. Then it was down to the Marina for lunch. This is in the middle of Monaco Grand Prix race course. Very neat place to lunch. The drive to Nice for camping turned out to be yet another adventure. The GPS took us back up alleys and back roads that a motorcycle would find difficult. The road we were on narrowed and became lease travelled and more grassy until it finally petered out into a dead end. I had to walk back down to a hairpin turn, move the large rocks marking the edge, so I could back the camper over the edge to turn around. Then with Michael standing on the edge of the road guiding me, I backed down the 2000 yards, and then did four back and forth turns over the edge and we were once more headed back down the mountain. Did I mention the kids were fighting too. All in all a somewhat stressful afternoon, but a great day never the less.

Wednesday is a down day at a real camp ground just outside of Nice, France still on the Riviera. The boys asked for two nights, and I was ready to relax a bit myself. Having had a hot shower and coffee and a cresaunt I am feeling wonderfully refreshed and looking forward to the rest of the day by the pool.

Bonjour

Day 12 (Roma)

What would be the point if we couldn't poke fun at ourselves along life's little journey? You may recall that my previous entry was somewhat lengthy. Which was written in an Internet cafe, better known as a bar! Long story short, we had a wonderfully romantic evening, just the two of us. The waiter set up a table with candles in a private back patio and brought us wine and couse couse (spelling not right) and well it was just lovely. Once we switched off the laptops we moved up front to be a bit more social (translate anyway you like and you will probably be close to my consumption level). Around 1 AM we, mostly me, stumbled back up the hill to the camp grounds. A perfect end to a perfect day in the fantastic city of Florence.

The next day we broke camp and headed for the hot springs at Saturnia, a short stop on the way to Rome. I was very sick.... Did I mention the RV is a standard, which translates into I am the only driver. I made it 4 km to the first gas station before feeling the need to look for my keys in the grass beside the camper... It is both a blessing and a curse to have a bed in the back of your car. I laid down for a few minutes mustering my strength and willing my stomach to return to its normal location south of my throat. I got back behind the wheel and we were off. About 20 more kilometers that is, before I skidded into a road side stop, while Windy held the shopping bag, like a feed sack from my ears. For those that have known me since childhood you will recall the one thing I am absolutely NOT good at is tossing cookies. I am loud, and I really apply myself.

Another 30 km and I pulled off the highway stopping for a third plastic bag, yes the one with the hole in it. While I can't recall feeling worse, I had to laugh just a bit at the repeat of a similar scene 20 years earlier, while traveling with Mom, Lee and the boys. He did have a valid excuse, which is more than I can say. I found a parking place and Windy fixed the boys lunch while I napped. I slept for an hour, got a Dramamine down, and returned to the wheel once more.

We pulled into the hot springs about 4 pm, and everyone suited up for a dip in the water. They were very very neat, and the kids loved them. Windy had taken the boys on ahead. By the time I arrived at the baths Windy was holding up her wrist and pointing to it was a very unhappy look on her face. I thought something might be wrong with the sulphur springs but other people were sitting around soaking quit contentedly. As I got closer I could make out what she was saying. Her Tiffany's bracelet had gone from gleaming silver to bluish black. It was at this point we learned Sulphur and Silver are not friends. Both our puzzle rings met the same demise. Being optimistic, I sort of like mine this color.

We drove on into the camp grounds in Rome. Actually we stayed at Castle Fusano which is on the coast. Not right on the beach but very near and pretty cool as well.

Friday was Windy's last full day so we headed into Rome using the transit. We caught a shuttle from the camp grounds to the train station, then the train to the subway line B, then a switch to line A and a few stops later we popped out at the Vatican. We walked to the Basilica and took the tour, wow. It is more amazing than words can describe. The kids really enjoyed it too. Then we had lunch from one of those street vendor carts and headed over to the Vatican Museum (Sistine Chapel). There is a lot of amazing stuff to see, but all I kept thinking about was the Sistine, and didn't really fully appreciate the lead up as much as I could have. But let me tell you when you walk into the Chapel it is a physical experience. I did not cry but I would be lying to say I wasn't close. Like so much art you see in real life, the books and video's simply can not do them the justice they deserve. I was left in awe.

After leaving the Vatican we hoofed it all over town. I am really proud of the boys, they are doing a great job keeping up and we are putting some miles on those sneakers. I have discovered the trick to a tired boy is Gelatto (Italian ice cream). A few scoops of this wonder drug and the legs are as good as new. We say so much stuff we didn't have time to put names to all of it. It was more fun to look up, than down at a guide. We finished the day with the Colosseum and a bit of shopping.

Windy's cooked a wonderful chicken dinner complete with rice, corn and bread, then packed for the trip home today. The boys and I took her to breakfast and then the shuttle. She was sad to go, but happy to have covered as much ground as she did.

Updated pictures found at http://gallery.mac.com/mike.nicholson#100212

Day 10 (and all the previous ones too)

Sorry the wifi has been a bit more challenging and expensive than we expected. Windy and I are sitting on the Arno river in Florence this evening, sipping wine, eating Couscous and very much enjoying out evening. We found a perfect little place called the High Bar, that has free internet and a wonderful waiter that speaks english. We have left the kids at camp for a adult evening out. Yes once you hit forty apparently a romantic evening includes connectivity..... But I digress, or need too.

We had a very stressful departure from Frankfurt, due to my own failure to read and understand the rental agreements. We had to provide a cash deposit of 1200 euro ($1980.00) which I was assuming I could just put on the old American express card. They don't take AMX, and all of our Visa cards were debit cards. So I walked down to the local German bank and asked to withdraw the funds from savings.....I might as well have been speaking another language, ok I was but he still, the man said the ATM was the only way to get cash from a card. The ATM would not allow access to the savings, so it was dialing for dollars. After about 4 cards all with different limits for foreign cash withdrawals, I had the required funds. And we were off.

As we were leaving the little town with the RV rental place, we found a grocery store and stopped to stock up. Europeans shop a day at a time, so the large cartful of food was an odd thing and cause a big backup when trying to checkout. It wasn't until the end that we discovered they didn't take credit cards, and we needed more cash (Euros). I left Windy and the kids hostage and ran to the bank. It was under the railroad tracks and over the bridge, I kid you not. I found another ATM and dialed for Euro's once more and got lucky on the third card. And we were off.

About 10 minutes into the exit from the Frankfurt area we discovered the battery on the GPS was dead, and the charger I brought only worked when the device was powered off. My stress level was pretty high at this point.... I hit the road south and we were off. Fifteen minutes later Lufthansa called me to say they had found Windy's luggage and so we hung a U'ey and headed back to the airport. It was a huge relief to Windy to have her clothes, and since I was on the wrong road south probably a good thing for me too. But I did take my first RV damage as I scraped the mirror on the parking ticket booth at the airport. It would not be my last.

We headed over to Wurtzburg, where we camped the first night. A very pleasant campground on the river. As I was backing into the site, I heard a horrible noise, which turned out to be some low hanging tree branches. Damage two had now occurred and I was starting to freak out a little. Windy was wonderful, ensuring the kids were quiet while Dad melted down. Being very concerned about the tree damage, since the RV guys had repeatedly warned me specifically about this, I attempted to climb the back and check it out. The plastic I stepped on gave way and damage number three occurred. I parked in the open field, drank a beer and called it a day.

We drove down to Brunnen the next day without event. The camp grounds are incredible and the lake is very beautiful. We took a down day to let the kids play in the lake and throw rocks, play frisby and take long walks. The next day we visited the castles around Fussen, and Fussen its self. We very much enjoyed the area and highly recommend it.

Then it was off to Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Italy. We have climbed the leaning tower of Pisa and the Duomo in Florence. Visited the Uffuzi art gallery and walked the streets of Florence. It has been everything we hoped for and then some. We are off to Rome tomorrow morning.

It is a small world after all. Windy and I were walking down the street here in Florence tonight and bumped into a lady I worked with a Cingular (Sue Mahaffey) and her family. What are the chances that not only someone I know would be here at the same time, but that our paths would cross. Just too crazy.

Europe 2008 - Day 0

Wow, and we are off. Our friend Robert played chauffeur and dropped us at the Atlanta airport where we boarded a plane for Frankfurt Germany, via Londons Heathrow airport. We had a 3 hour layover in London and then on to Frankfurt. We arrived in Frankfurt around 5 pm local time, but pparently two of our bags had a different plan, and they are off somewhere on their own holiday. The two checked bags are all the camping gear (pots, pans, flashlights, etc) and the other just happens to be ALL of Windy's clothing. I have to say, she has been a really good sport about it. Lufthansa has been very nice, and provided 200 Euros to buy some replacement clothes. We are not exactly sure if thats a loan or courtesy, more on that later. The boys are far more excited than I expected them to be. Did I mention that they are touching, pulling, poking, and fiddling with absolutely everything they get within reach of. For those family vacation veterans, this may ring a bell. But the end of the three airport, customs, and security checks, I am pretty sure several hundred strangers are convinced we are the worst parents on the planet, having issued so many stern threats to behave. Trust me when I say they all seem to have fallen on deaf ears (grin).

After checking into the Intercontinental Hotel (Yea Windy) we headed out for dinner. Our hotel in on the Rhine river with a spectacular view of the river and city (see the photo gallery). We walked over the bridge and past the museum to a river boat reasurant where we had dinner. It was very good, as we were all hungry. We finished the warm summer evening with a long walk back through the city to the hotel.

http://gallery.mac.com/mike.nicholson#100212

At&t iPhone Support SUCKS

My horrible horrible experience with AT&T support services once more. This was the reason I left their home service and if it were not for their lock on Apple, I would leave their cellular service too. God are they bad. I so wish I had recorded it. It was so bad that I started recording the Apple call out of fear I would have the same experience, and miss a YouTube million hit service call.

I called to ask for help diagnosing a problem with dropped calls that started 2 weeks ago.

I was transfered from Diane Hawkins, because I landed with the wrong billing group by dialing 611 using my cell phone, and no amount of pleading with her that this was not a billing issue mattered, I had to be transfered to the right billing system group.

Michelle Watkins in the right billing group, asked for my cell phone number, as that doesn't seem to follow the call around internally. She confirmed all of my info again, put me on hold asked what the problem was and put me on hold. Then transfered me to Renee Pearlson.

Renee listened to my problem and realized I need to talk to a technician, the request I made initially with Diane and then again with Michelle, and put me on hold. Then transfered me to Larry Vols. Larry was excited to help me.

Larry's apparently was tipped off to what my problem was before he got on the phone, because he knew exactly what the problem was, sees it all the time apparently. His absolute first question was how many songs do you have on your iPhone. I was caught off guard and struck dumb for a minute. Now I am a reasonable man, really I am, so I think to my self, song are all different sizes, and I have even created a single 200MB song, so size is not his question. Why would the number of songs matter about the single strength dropping out and my phone dropping calls. My brain was really squirming on this question. So in Jesus answer style I answered the question with a question. This was going to be fun.

"Why Larry is there a limit that effects signal strength?" asks Mike

"What size of iPhone do you have sir" asked Larry. Now I am a bit embarrassed that I have the smaller one. Its probably just a male penis envy thing, but I really didn't want to tell Larry I had the little one.

"Larry, why would the size of my iPhone's memory have anything to do with signal strength?" I asked becoming a little defensive I am sure.

"Well sir, just like computers things start to slow down when you start using more than 50% of available memory!" Larry boasted as if he had some super inside computer knowledge that us mere mortals could not access, but surely could understand base on his delivery. I just didn't have the heart to tell him that was only true with really crappy OS's like Windows after installing the AT&T dsl malware.

"So Larry, your telling me that fully half of the memory in my iPhone needs to remain free to maintain a usable signal strength?" I questioned in astonishment.

"Yes sir, just like computer" he kept saying "anything over that and the signal strength is compromised" Larry said confidently.

"I am running at 90% memory utilization while rendering video on my Mac, and have no trouble with my internet access at the same time on MY computer" I said in response.

"Thats your local network, this is the cell signal it different' Said Larry

"Ok Larry if you are going to stand by this statement that I can expect to see degraded performance with my iPhone if I fill the available Gigabytes of memory over half way I will need you to back this claim up. Please email me that statement if you would." I was starting to get tired it had been 25 minutes and I was losing patients.

"Sir I can't email you that information" - Larry said defiantly.

"Ok than I want a manager on the phone now, please get a manager on this call now, thank you." - a tired Mike

"Yes sir just a second" Larry returned shortly with a female sounding voice with an odd name Axel. I didn't even have enough fight in me to poke at that one.

"Yes sir how may I help you?" - Axel asked in a pleasant tone.

"Well Larry here is making some fantastic claims about the iPhone that I think Apple would be very excited to hear about. Apparently those iPhone can only use half the memory without causing problems with signal strength, and I need someone to send that statement to me in writing" - I stated my case

"Yes that is correct, we will have to put you on hold and read the manual" - Axel

"Fine do what you have to but I need that statement" - Mike

After a full 10 minutes on hold Alex and Larry came back on line.

"Sir lets try a different approach, how much free memory do you have left on your phone" - Axel asked me.

"What, why are you asking me this and how is it different. Ok listen, Larry was either right or wrong. Which was it. Is Larry making stuff up or are you sending my manual pages in email to support his claims?" I was now a full blown asshole customer

"Sir, we can not locate the information at this time. How would you like to proceed" - Axel

I took a a breath, and asked he to check for maintenance in the area of my home, and she confirm there was none. I asked her if she could see my dropped calls and she could and even had a list by day of the exact time the calls were aborted abnormally, but that was all she could tell. I found this amazing once more but it was late, had been on the phone for and hour and I was not going to make any progress, so I cut my loses and swore to leave AT&T as soon as I could unlock my phone and cancel my strangle hold contract.

Counter Code

Dumbing down of the SA a dangerous cycle

Risk aversion is growing out of control with the SA caught in the fulcrum between cost of build resilient architectures on one end and the cost of maintaining skills and knowledge at the other.

Having worked in the IT industry now since 1987 I have noticed a very disturbing trend.  American corporate IT management is unknowingly cutting off their proverbial noses to spite their faces.  

Another way to say that might be;  Because of managements fear of systems administrators making stupid mistakes they are demanding SA's have less and less access to the systems, in hopes of preventing outages and downtime.  It is this keeping SA's at arms length that is also dumbing down their skill sets and exacerbating the problem, which in turn lends credence to management that in fact the SA's are not competent.

Customer Management seeking to solve this problem is turning more and more often to their equipment providers for the answers.  And why not, surely the vendor would know more about their gear than anyone else....  Unfortunately this is an understandable misconception.  

Some examples of this.  A major telecom IT manager demanded that the vendor write shutdown scripts that would automate every aspect of stopping the customers applications and jobs, and bring the system down gracefully, after several shutdowns were incorrectly executed causing corruption.  

In a more striking case, the SA's lack of training and experience with cluster software, ultimately lead to the complete removal of the software in favor of a non-automated manual failover with only basic services.  Management explaining that the software was simply too complicated to use.  This cost the vendor several million dollars, but also costs the customer in several ways as well.  The time to discover the failure and manually shift resources.  The confidence their customers (the business typically) lose in IT's ability to support their applications, etc.

When working with teams that regularly test such things as clustering failover, backups and restores and are overall allowed to maintain their gear through reboots and patching, I have discovered strong knowledgeable teams. They know their gear and what to do in a critical situation and are more competent in general.

Lack of familiarity causes fear, that's just good old human nature.  The SA's fear of their gear begins to occur when they are not allowed to become familiar with it, not allowed to work with it.  They are not getting the training and even if trained they are not allowed to exercise their craft to build the skills needed.  So when the shit hits the fan, they are not able to take appropriate actions and wind up making the situation worse and only confirming the managements expectations of them.  This often times results in an attack on the vendors service personnel or vendor in general.  

And as this vicious cycle continues, corporate America is looking overseas for the expertise they want and need and have failed to cultivate locally.  

Call to Arms: IT Manager, this is a two way street, you have to take some risk and push back on upper management to get architectures that allow for regular scheduled maintenance and keep your folks trained, and in turn you will sleep at night knowing you have the best of the best on the job, and they do not require your hand holding at every step to restore complex environments to production.

 

 

Hobby with a purpose - maybe

Ok, So I've been think about how I can turn something I enjoy doing into a value add for my employer as well.  

One of my hobbies is video production.  In my case meaning everything from shooting the footage to editing the clips, label design and packaging.  Cradle to grave to to speak.

Given I like to play around on the Mac, I have been thinking about putting together a magazine style show for Support Services Delivery.  Something that would be watched within the corporate network only, but on a voluntary basis.  It has to be interesting enough to warrant people taking 15 to 20 minutes a week to watch it.

I am thinking it would be a great avenue to our organization to "get the word out" about things that are interesting to us, the feet on the street.

I am thinking it need to NOT turn into a head quarters looking effort, but rather a field look.  Thats not to say it can't be polished but it needs to speak to the intended audience, the field or perhaps the delivery organization.

Possible sections I am considering:

• Work Smarter - section on tips and tricks such as email filters
• Rants - Funny rants about frustration things
• iWork Cribs - Video tours of home office setups
• Ride-A-Long - Video ridealongs with engineers doing services
• Interviews - Fast paced interviews (NOT long winded)
• Tech Update - Maybe, some new tech coming out we would be interested in
• Commercials - stupid or funny commercials
• User submits - Interesting websites, tools, books or magazines

That could be fun, but a lot of work as well.  I think once you get it laid out with the sections and graphics it would flow pretty well and be reproducible.

I think at first this would have to all be done on my personal time, as this is not what I am paid to do.  Thus the hobby aspect until there is established value add then we will see if there are possible next steps.

But for now I have no content, so this is just dreaming out loud.

Apple Router a bust Airport Extreme N AEBS

I really wanted this work.  I love the user interface of OSX, and am falling in love with my iPhone, so changing out my old router for shiny new Apple Airport Extreme Base Station seemed like a logical next step.  The main reason was the parental controls which allowed me to set schedules of when the kiddies could surf the web.  No more sneaking out of bed at night to play online games (or anything else.)

This is the first product I am returning to Apple.  

I guess over the 15 years I've been setting up networks, and working with routers, this is the first device I've come across that is NOT accessible from a browser.  You have to run an Apple application to login or even view it.  This set off alarm bells for me, but hey if the user interface and functionality are up to Apples standards then I will live with it.  They were not.

My first disappointment came when I figured out that I could not assign a mac address to my WAN port.  I won't go into all the reasons I do this, but its a pretty standard feature on most routers today, but missing on the AEBS.

Next was the lack of a ARP table.  There is no way to display the ARP table, to see the mac addresses of the network devices communicating over the network.  This seems like a basic function again.

Now for the real meat and potatoes.  I fell for the Apple marketing and the ease of parental control for setting schedules for the kids iMacs.  I failed to read the small print in the screens title: The Access Control feature it turns out is ONLY FOR WIRELESS users.  I spent hours working to figure out why I could not control access to my kids Macs, which are wired connections, since they are not mobile machines and enjoy the higher bandwidth of Gigabit.

The other real problem I had was you could just click on the machine you wanted to add.  You have to go to the machine, determine the mac address and then manually type it into the routers setup.  Very clumsy and unnecessary.

Ok the last complaint:  Support, the fact that I got to a live body puts Apple way ahead of the competition in my book.  The benefit ended there however.  The first guy as will most, was a script reader, and didn't know the first thing about routers.  The second guy thought he was Radia Perlman herself, and was to busy being condescending to actually point out that the router did not support Access Control for wired connections.

 

I am boxing it up now.

  

Useless fun graphic hack

Updated the carrier graphic:

Like an arranged marriage - fondness grows over time

Time for an update.  More and more hacks are beginning to appear that can be implemented by meare mortals such as myself.  These are allowing me more flexibility with the device as a Blackberry replacement.

I thought I would start by recapping my positions from previous posts.

From posting 7/4/07:

1) Battery - Still very poor if you use WiFi, Bluetooth and the cell radios. See previous post.  In other words its a great battery for an iPod.

2) Keyboard - Still sucks, but learning some things that are making it suck less.  Point in case, the period key no longer requires three key strokes, if you press the 123 key, then slide up to the period and release.  Its a single stroke, which is a great improvement.  

3) Alerts - I have replaced the standard alerts with much longer and louder sound files and this has resolved my issue for the most part.  I still miss the repeated alerts until acknowledged.

4) Bluetooth - Still a huge disappointment.  Discovered that even when paired with a headset, if you attempt to answer an incoming call with the slider bar, the iPhone ear hole is the selected as the audio device, and not the bluetooth headset.  The work around is to use the answer button on the headset.  

5) Email - Holding my breath until I get landscape.

6) iChat - Lots of websites offering web 2.0 apps, but they are just not a real workable solution.  Still waiting....Apple.

7) 3rd Party apps - A huge boom in the applications (ajax) on the web.  Still no on phone apps though.

From posting 7/19/07

1) Email - Attachments still suck

2) Camera - Still sucks due to light metering

3) Battery - no change

4) Calendar - Missed appointments have been resolved with better alert sounds (hacked)

5) Accessories - disappointed for stated reasons.

So what do I think after almost a month.  I am very much enjoying the iPhone.  I find I am hitting the laptop less and less and am able to get a lot done on the phone.  The WiFi coupled with the browser is the first real handheld solution I've found to my liking.  If I could switch back to my Blackberry 8290 tomorrow, I would decline.  

iPhone 19 days after purchase

I would not return it for a refund.  Though I keep asking myself why exactly. 

1) Email - I have now learned that while I am writing an email I can not link a picture from my picture folder.  If you want to send a photo you can send exactly one, and you have to start out in the photo albums to do so.  Nor can you save a photo some else emails you.  No saving ANY attachments, so don't delete those emails until you reread them on a desk top somewhere else later.

2) Camera - Ok I took my iPhone with me to Alaska and yes it worked far more places than I expected it to, roaming I believe, but never the less it worked.  They don't sell the iPhone in the Alaska market for this reason I am told.  I was a typical tourist snapping away like crazy and sending daily updates out.  But I quickly discovered another major flaw/limitation.  The camera has very poor light metering.  Most of the pictures taken are far to dark and iPhoto on my Mac had limited success brightening them.  I found that if I pointed the camera down to a darker area, swung up quickly and snapped one off, it somethings seemed to help catch the image before the metering application could adjust for the brighter light.  Come on Apple give us a little credit and let us have some tiny amount of control over our device.  Please let us adjust the f-stop or ISO film speed or something....

3) Battery Update - While flying the 7.5 hours from Atlanta to Anchorage I discovered just what a drain, BlueTooth, Wifi, and Cell radio have on the device.  I was able to watch two full length feature movies 3.5 hours, and listen to music the remaining 4 hours and still had a bit of battery left.  So be warned keep that WiFi and BlueTooth off when not needed, what a pain.

4) Calendar - I have switched over to Apples Calendar application for better integration with the iPhone.  I am now missing appointments do to lack of reasonable alerting tones and vibration (repeating etc).  There is also no way to do updates over the air, so a change on one device, say your desk top will not show up on the phone until you sync them with the special iPod cable.  

5) Accessories - Wow another HUGE disappointment.  Just about every trinket I have purchased of the past 4 years for my numerous iPods fail to work with the iPhone.  Even the brand new ones.  The external microphone, a pretty simple device fails with a nice message that its not compatible.  The Nike shoe insert that lets me track my runs while I listen to motivational music.... fails.  My Apple photo adapter that lets you dump digital camera pictures onto the device, busted.  Even the simple music dock for my Onkyo stereo causes a warning to be displayed on the iPhone every time its connected, to switch into airplane mode.  Thankfully is still plays.  Come on Mr Jobs, I know you want to make a bunch more money selling us all new accessories but really this SUCK!

iPhone leaving a lot to be desired

1) Battery - Moving off a RIM device (who make battery life a religion) I find that I can not make it through one day of normal phone use without a stop off at the local filling station (Car charger, wall socket or laptop.)  The Battery life may be better than Apple expected but remains significantly inadequate.

2) Keyboard - We all know that as humans tactile feedback is the only real workable solution.  I am getting better at the virtual keyboard but find it very displeasing.  I do not foresee ever achieving the same speeds I could reach on the Blackberry 8700c.

3) Alerts - Sound is repeatedly touted as great on the iPhone.  I would suggest these people are comparing it to an iPod nano which has NO SOUND other than headphones.  The speaker phone is completely useless other than for holding up beside ones face.  But the bigger concern and show stopping failure for most business users is the lack of ability to assign tones to message alerts.  The only setting currently available are a few select ring tones for incoming calls only.  There is NO way to set a SMS alert tone or new email or even change for different email accounts as new email arrives.  So your business email account and your personal will get the same weak beep and 0.25 second vibrate.  Which is either on or off all the time.  Which means every spam message now buzzes your phone on the night stand.

4) Bluetooth - Where do I start...  My 8 different cell phones over the past four years have had better bluetooth support than the iPhone.  I was very unhappy when RIM came out with very limited bluetooth support, reportedly due to congressional security needs on the hill.  But the fact that a cutting edge Apple device targeted at the 20-30 somethings hipsters doesn't contain stereo headphone support is simply beyond belief.  Did I mention there is no linking syncing, or any other bluetooth support either?  It's the most basic of of bluetooth features... talk for cell only.

  

5) Email - The application needing landscape support more than any other is email.  The others (Movies, Browser, iPod) are good, don't get me wrong.  But seriously reading email is one of the biggest tasks I have to do on an daily bases and have landscape should have been a requirement out of the gate.  For now we are stuck pinching the screen to set a font big enough to read then slipping the screen back and forth to read each line...  Just miserable.

6) iChat - Missing in action is a fundamental communications tool, iChat or something other than SMS, which sucks beyond belief.  SMS is limited to 160 characters and 200 messages for most plans PER MONTH.  Sorry folks Apple tried to sell us on the fact this was a good thing and it's NOT.  AT&T needs to give up the SMS revenue stream and let Apple put the damn application out there. 

7) 3rd Party Application Support - AJAX?  For the love of God.  Most of these short comings in other consumer products have been quickly addressed and resolved by geeks in closets hammering away in the night, and making the world a better experience.  But not the iPhone.  We get to sit in the dark while Apple and Mr Jobs decide our fate.  What will they address and what will that ignore.  What new applications will be made available and at what cost are all at Apples discretion.  

Warning to Steve Jobs; You rocked the world with the MAC, and OSX, and have a strong initial push into the rest of our consumer electronic greedy little pockets.  You are teetering though and I hope you realize it.  Play this one wrong and we all run screaming back to the Gates borg, and RIM world of real usable productivity devices and systems.

SET THE IPHONE FREE