See you in a bit, and geek on for me!

Rogers officially has released the iPhone 4 date which is this Friday like we all assumed it would be. Now how do I fenagel myself on is the question!

A note on pricing reveals that there is a good chance that it is the same as the US but I assume with a 3 year contract like the US. This is from the iPhoneinCanada blog.

NOW… The reason my doubt arises is due to the lack of information from Apple or Rogers at this point. In an article written by iphoneincanada.ca I learned that Rogers has release an internal memo to its employees that indeed the iPhone is coming and to “be prepared” but no official outside word as of yet. At this point in the game in the US AT&T had released official information, had a quick way to check eligibility, had confirmed a price and setup a pre-order process. None of these have happened here in Canada. Not that I really am concerned personally with the other Canadian carriers but it hasn’t happened with any of them.

I work for a company that deals with Rogers and so I get a employee plan through them. I contacted my corporate rep this week (ok, this is the 3rd time in the past month I have emailed her – I feel guilty) and she told me that from what she heard they are only getting 50 iPhones for their ~30 store operation. That’s freekin’ nuts! This is where my assumption of a long wait comes in. I know that Apple has had some throughput problems but a release date with no phones is pretty ridiculous and leaves a sting.

Doesn’t mean I won’t get one, just have to wait extra long. Wish me luck :)

Geek on!

Let’s see if this is what the press conference is about today. It can be followed here:

1. ISmashPhone
2. Gizmodo
3. Engadget
4. GDGT
5. cnet
6. ZDnet

Let’s hope that Apple doesn’t dig themselves a larger PR proverbial whole today. To be honest I am not that scared of the technical problem, I am more scared of a company that denies there is one. With bated breath!

Geek on!

Update – forgot to mention what time!

07:00AM – Hawaii
10:00AM – Pacific
11:00AM – Mountain
12:00PM – Central
01:00PM – Eastern
06:00PM – London
07:00PM – Paris
09:00PM – Moscow
02:00AM – Tokyo (July 17th)

Whoa Marcus – backup the story a little there! This is what happened to my Blackberry Bold 9000

Yesterday I had just arrived at work and was looking through a few things when I got a call on my cell from one of my colleagues. I pick up the phone and try to answer without luck. The small ‘hourglass’ which is actually a spinning dial on the Bold was going like crazy – and so I couldn’t do a thing! I missed the call and decided to sit the phone on my desk and let it figure itself out. After 10 minutes passed by I got fed up and tried a myriad of reboot attempts to be finally done with a battery pull. Gave it a standard 15 seconds and then put the battery back in.

Now at this point normally the phone’s red LED comes on, it loads up for 5 minutes and everything is cool. This time – NO RED LIGHT :(

No matter what I did I could not get the phone to start up. I tried to take the battery back out and replace it, tried a buddy’s battery, tried plugging it in to the USB on my computer, tried plugging it into the wall, tried resting it on the cradle and all with or without the battery. Nothing! I am thinking dead phone now. This sucks – my Bold couldn’t get me another few weeks until I can get my hands on a new phone (still kinda hoping for an iPhone 4).

Looked at a bunch of articles online and there really wasn’t much out there if even the red LED didn’t come on. It pointed to a dead phone for most people. A couple did mention that they took the battery out of their unit, left it unplugged and didn’t touch it over night and when the plugged it in the next morning it worked.

In the end I had nothing to lose so I gave it a try and sure enough, the BOLD IS BACK!

Remember this if you have a Blackberry. I can only assume that even when you pull the battery there is some residual power left in some of the components and until that is gone it could remain frozen.

Good luck with your problem if you are having one!

What am I getting at with my gadgets? Yesterday while watching the game I was at the cottage up north with some friends and we caught the game via satellite. Since putting that thing up 10 years ago I have seen the dish cut out only 2 times and that was in VERY bad weather. Wouldn’t you know it in the cover of the blazing sun the satellite cut out in the 105th minute. “Please stand by while we establish a satellite signal”. AHHHHH! WTF is that?

Just lucky enough though to have my satellite radio with me. Slammed the XM on the home dock and tuned into ESPN to listen to the game. Well commented and for the 15 minutes that I was without video I was saved. Great to have it there for the music but even nicer to not have missed anything in the big match.

Now I get a chance to relax from sports for a while. I am a huge Montreal Canadiens fan and when the Euro or World Cup is on I am completely into that as well. We have fun as a family with it but it’s far to stressing for a passtime :)

What sucked? Not being in a sports bar downtown to watch the game where it wouldn’t have cut out.

What was awesome? Forgot about the game in 15 minutes because I was at the cottage and on the boat by then having a blast with friends and family :)

Geek on!

I tweeted a while ago that the hardest thing to get used to in PEI was having not to dial the area code for all my phone calls. That’s just mandatory in the big cities in Canada now. It was nice to only have to remember 7 digits!

Little tired to be thinking deeply about what I feel of this or that right now. Hotel living seems all fine and dandy when you are on vacation but when I am away from the family I don’t sleep well at all. Two nights of feeling like a bag of crapola, one good night and then one where I just tossed around needlessly. I can’t win it would seem.

Home  I am and happy for it too. I flew into Montreal this morning at 11:30am just before a huge storm hit. The rain went up my pants; I swear. The landing was still bumpy with the captain on and off the throttle like it was a well pump handle and the flaps at 30 degrees but I held down my pretzels and water just fine. I may have ripped the underside of my seat however due to the vice grip I had on it.

Tonight, supper with dad for his birthday – Happy Birthday dad (yesterday) and then up north to the cottage with friends and family. Can’t wait.

Oh and I have to mention that the Dutch are in the World Cup final. Something I have yet to see in my life.

So here goes…

Hup Holland Hup
Laat de leeuw niet in z’n hempie staan
Hup Holland Hup
Trek het beestje geen pantoffels aan
Hup Holland Hup
Laat je uit ‘t veld niet slaan
Want de leeuw op voetbalschoenen
Durft de hele wereld aan

Go Holland!!!

Geek on!

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The most difficult thing to stream has always been live content. There are services for it that work quite well like uSream and others but for a major event things have been difficult to keep up.

You can really appreciate in the case how far we have come with these services when you look at world cup coverage. In Canada our coverage is given by the CBC. Amazingly enough they have broadcast all the games on the internet as well. The quality is quite simply amazing. If you have a good enough internet connection you will get an HD stream!

Perhaps this is a tip off to the CBC but to be honest it just makes me happy that we live in a time that you can see a game even if you are not in front of a TV.

I also caught someone watching the game on their cell phone but I think that was a Rogers service. When that can come for free as well then we have really turned a leaf!

Geek on!

One of the most common things I am looking for are color code when I am making visual changes to my website. I don’t like to keep things the same forever and so I change themes on occasion. Rarely do the themes look 100% the way I want out of the box and so small changes such as background color are the first things I look at.

Some themes you are lucky enough to have a choice of background color but with most you will have to make a change in the CSS (style sheets). This can be done from the Appearance/Editor option in your WordPress admin panel.

But this little web tool that I am about to share with you isn’t for people who blogging on WordPress, it’s for ANY web admin.

The tool? Just go to http://www.colorpicker.com/!

There you can use the slider and pin point tool to choose your color and shade. The wonderful result is an RGB (red, green, blue) value, a HSB (hue, saturation, brightness value and of course the web color code at the top #000000.

Happy web design :)

You’ve probably already seen the notice in your dashboards, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet:

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/

3.0 is faster, stabler, and more secure, so you can focus on what matters (your audience) and let the rest fade to the background.

Custom post types, MU merge, menu editor, Twenty Ten theme, over 1,200 bug fixes… there’s so much to enjoy in this new release, we’re really proud of it. It’s the best WordPress yet, and available for a limited time for only free ninety nine. ;)

Tell your friends, help them upgrade, write new themes that use the new features, spread the good word.

Love,
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://wordpress.org

Find and good. But every time that upgrade my WordPress installation I am a little weary that my site will take a hit and poof an error will cause it to be inaccessible. Tie that in with this being a major upgrade and I was quite cautious. First I was wondering why yesterday after receiving the email I didn’t see the update option in my dashboard. Some of you may have noticed the same issue and I believe that the option didn’t propagate as fast as his email did. I thought about that for a second and left it alone because that meant that a ton of other people would jump off that bridge ahead of me. Then I can look over and see if there are any dead souls at the bottom before I took the leap. Woke up this morning and didn’t hear any horror stories so I did a backup. DO THE BACKUP because you never know.

I have done many version upgrades using the auto-upgrade tool when it pops up in my dashboard and have been impressed with how fast and how easy it is. The upgrade has never given me an error but this is a major version upgrade. Once my backup was complete I was willing to give it a shot and like with the past 10 auto updates I have done it went off without a hitch. Even with all of my extensions enabled it didn’t even hiccup, but follow the experts advise and disable them before upgrading. This will make sure that you see the UI updates and allow you to choose that over your plug-in if you so desire.

So the blog is at 3.0 “yay!” and here is what we get:

I hope you enjoy your upgrade and it goes as well as mine did.

Geek on!