busy girl thoughts

After I activated my iPhone, my next issue is to find a good case or pouch to protect my iPhone from all the things I carry in my purse. Although PCWorld proved that iPhone screen is unscratchable, I don’t want the medal back to be scratched up by the keys. Most of the cases offered are targeted for male business users. Lots of black or brown leather with irremovable belt clips. A few vendors offer female-friendly designs by painting them over with hot pink. What is it with hot pinks? Do they have any female designers > 15 yrs old on board?

After browsing iLounge, macForum and tons of blogs, I narrowed down to iQase.com. I like the Side,  (watch YouTube) because it’s the easiest to remove. Ritz is good too cuz it doubles as a card holder, but because of the wrap-around, it’ll be hard to remove the phone as well. If I don’t remove the phone from the case when calls come in while I’m browsing, I’ll have to use the headset as the proximity sensor on iPhone is blocked by the case. Flip seems like the best compromise, but it’s out of stock.

While I was debating which ones to get, my boyfriend told me that tight skins or cases are not recommended for iPhone for fear of overheating. At this point, I thought maybe I don’t really like anything that’ll cover up the beautifully designed iPhone. After all, I just need something to separate the junks in my purse from the iPhone.

What about iPod socks? I thought. It’d be perfect. It’s cute, it comes in 6 different colors for under 30 bucks, and because iPhone is so slippery, I can easily squeeze it out of the sock for incoming calls. It turned out to be a nice solution. And I figured out if I put the iPhone in head down, I can easily access the home button and the slider easily by squeezing out the iPhone just a little bit. This way I don’t have to remove the phone completely in order to answer a call. Another good thing about the sock is that it’s so soft, I can feel the side and top button to adjust the volume, turn it on and off, and switch to vibrate mode without removing the phone as well.

After I found a good pouch for my iPhone, my coworker told me that he drops his cells all the time and need something to protect against that. The image of my scratched up old cell is conjured up immediately, and I just realize I’m a cell dropper myself. A few solutions I found online. There are clear rubber, silicone and arclic cases. But I don’t like hard cases as they are too bulky, and I don’t want silicone ones for fear of overheating. After some more research, I think I’ll get invisiSHIELD. Check out the stress test on youtubes: stress test, installation. It’s just 2 pieces of transparent film, one for the front and one for the back. It doesn’t cover up the beauty and yet provides superb protection from scratches and dropping. Mind you I haven’t got it yet, but I’ll post my review after I try it out. Oh by the way, don’t get inCase sports as it affect the screen sensitivity. See this test.

This is the funniest and cuttest youtube i’ve seen to date. Be patient and watch until the very end. That’s the best part.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno

Today I learned how to create javascripts in the Shell environment. Mike Chamber’s webpage is really helpful. In this article he mentioned this file”.bash_profile”, which I couldn’t find in my OS X terminal. After some researching I realized this is something we create: create a “.bash_profile” file under the root directory (for OS it’s User/YOUR USERNAME/), and whenever you open a terminal window, it’ll automatically execute the commands in the file. At first I used the text editor to write Mike Chamber’s modified .bash_profile, but I had to use the “Vi” editor in Shell to clean up some random symbols created by my texteditor. And voila, it worked!

From now on, I can directly execute javascript commands in my terminal. Here’s mozilla’s resource page on Rhino.

Steve Jobs said in the town hall meeting the day before the iPhone launch day, that we shall forever remember this historic moment and tell our grandkids all about it. On June 29, 2007, I arrived at the Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara and joined the line an hour and half before the store open time at 6pm. The real reason that I wanted to go was I heard Steve Woz was the first in line. Allegedly he arrived at 4am that day on his segway scooter, wearing the iPhone T-shirt that says "the line starts here". He helped keep order by passing out number cards to early arrivals. That was just too funny and I had to leave work early and go check him out. Besides, it was free gelato day from noon to 4pm to celebrate the iPhone launch, so most of my coworkers were nowhere to be found after noon. So I got there, saw Steve Woz, clad in that white T-shirt, obviously unshaven (he never had the clean look anyway). There were 4 segway scooters neatly aligned by the door (probaby his buddies’). I was gonna go home but my boyfriend begged me to wait in line so he could lay his hands on the phone that night. There weren’t as many people as I thought. I thought there’d be about 1000 but there were only 500. I wasn’t too concerned about waiting for 2 hours to get in (with my PSP, 2 hours would feel like 20 minutes), but I didn’t know how long it’d take them to process orders for 500 people. 3 -4 hours right? Most people in line were in their 20s and 30s, in T-shirts, faded jeans, pale and unshaven, with macbook or macbook pro on their laps. Quite a few of them were high school kids. I couldn’t help but wondering if they saved up months for this, or their parents spoil them rotten, or they waited in line for other people on commission. I didn’t see that many girls my age. The guy in front of me called his friend and said "I thought I got here early!" I almost laughed out loud. Later his girlfriend showed up for moral support. I complained to them that I didn’t know why my boyfriend couldn’t wait for 2 days, before I realized I was complaining to the wrong audience. The guy said, "what’s your point!" and everyone laughed. His girlfriend gave me a sympathetic look. After the store opened, I went back in (the line was so long we looped outside of the mall) to check out the store. I saw a guy walking out holding his iphone bags up high, and everyone cheered and clapped. At first I thought he was somebody but couldn’t recognize him at all. Later I realized that the crowd did that to everyone. There was a large crowd outside the store not interested in buying the phones, but just wanted to watch the geeks in line. They really had nothing better to do I guess, but I suppose we did look like a bunch of idiots waiting in such a long line, when we could’ve easily ordered on line. The line moved rather quickly, to my surprise, and in less than an hour we were in the store. While we were still outside the mall, his little sister went to Jamba Juice, and I was joking that we’d probably get our orders at the same time. And it turned out we did. She came back a couple of minutes before we finalized the orders. The way they sped things up was that the employees had cordless credit card processors, so they scanned your credit cards as soon as you step into the store, and they would send receipts to your email address (to save paper they said). My boyfriend shopped there before so they had his email add on file. It happened so quickly I didn’t even know when he was done. BTW, no employee discount on iphones, but accessories are ok. When we walked out, the store clerks lining up by the door applauded and cheered. I didn’t know if I was supposed to smile and showed that I was a proud iPhone owner, even though I’m not? But if I don’t smile i’d feel bad for the clerks. Anyway, although unnecessary, I’m glad I joined the party. It was fun to chat with fellow Apple fan boys in line, and the store order arrangement was really impressive. I won’t do any review for the iPhone, since my boyfriend won’t depart with it the whole weekend. I can tell you this, he absolutely loves it!