Corey DeGrandchamp > Technology

Well, I currently own a first-generation iPhone, and I’ve been pretty happy with it, the EDGE network is alright for what I use it for, I never load full blown web pages like MySpace, everything has a WebApp now, and WebApps load amazingly fast even on the EDGE network, so the 3G speeds won’t really affect me anyhow… Besides, who’s ever anywhere without a Wi-Fi access point, really?

As for GPS, I’d LOVE to have that, but do you know what else I love? The Maps application that is already on my current iPhone, especailly the fact that it can give directions… I really don’t NEED something to tell me to “turn right in 15 feet”… I’m perfectly content with looking at my phone and seeing the next step in my route.

Now, all that stuff is amazing for people who are just now buying an iPhone, but I feel there is absolutley no need to upgrade, if it was free, or very very cheap, I would upgrade, but I’m not spending all that money over again for features I won’t use that often, really.

Now, about iPhone firmware 2.0, that’s where the really exciting things happen, You’ll forget all about GPS and 3G speeds with these new apps. You can already see there’s going to be a Twitter app, which excites me, and Jake Marsh is working on a MySpace app already. The possibilites of apps for the iPhone are really endless when you think about how it can integrate into your contacts, calendar, photos, camera, maps, and just everything.

I’ll be excited to see how things roll out in early July with the App Store.

So I haven’t been writing a whole lot recently, because I usually do so from my MacBook… However, a week or so ago, I was in my Microsoft Server class, and we were all packing up after the review for the final exam, and I smelled something… burning. I didn’t think much of it at first, but when I looked down, the power cord for my MacBook was smoking, and had a brown char on it! I immediately unplugged it from the wall, but the damage was done, you could see into the inside of the power adapter cord (see the photos below) and even see the wires inside.

Considering the fact that my MacBook is NOT under the one year warranty, and that I opted NOT to buy the AppleCare plan, my original idea was to scam Apple, and bring in my girlfriends newer MacBook (still under warranty) with my power adapter, and just hope that they would switch it out… I never thought the power adapters would have serial numbers (turns out they do… but I just found this out today, and had no influence on my choices) But to make a long story short(er) I just decided to give AppleCare a call, and see if there was anything they could possibly do for me.

After spending some time speaking to some female in an outsourced call center (probably India) I finally got to talk to somebody local… What it took to do this, was to simply REMAIN CALM with the first person, even if we could barely understand her, I answered all of her questions, and she said that its not under warranty, but she’ll transfer me anyhow!

Next I got to speak to a male, who was just as upset as I was that this had happened! He put me on hold for a while, to try to get a hold of a specialist who could further assist me. We ended up getting disconnected somewhere through the hold-time… But he promptly called me back, and said that he just needs a few more minutes to have me on hold, and I was fine with that. He then came back, and told me the name of a female on the other line, and he was transferring me to her.

The female came on the phone, and explained to me that she’s very sorry, and asked me some simple questions about how I used the adapter, and if I was harmed in any way. I answered everything truthfully, even telling her that I sometimes yanked the adapter out of the MacBook, and she said that its “best” to just grab it and unplug it instead. She continued on to tell me that I’d be getting a free updated (to avoid this fault) power adapter in the mail, in about 7-14 business days, and it would be no charge to me, but they did need my old one back.

TWO DAYS LATER , I woke up and there was a box from Apple of California on my doorstep, with a return shipping label attached, and instructions to place my old adapter in the box, call DHL, and tell them a day and time they could come pick up the bod from my doorstep.

And that was it, it took about 30 minutes on the phone, and a two day wait to get a brand new power adapter in the mail.

Below are the comparison pictures between the old (charred) and new adapter, notice the increased length of the “guard” over the wire at the top. Click them for larger, more detailed images.

Well, as of today, Evan Broder put me, and another [russian] person in charge of this plugin, which hasn’t been updated in a long time… maybe a year or more. After some tinkering with the Google Source page, fixing everything up there, removing all the old bug reports, I created a new website for it, if you’re somebody who uses a WordPress powered blog, but still have/had a LiveJournal, I highly suggest this plugin, it will automatically crosspost your entries to your LiveJournal, people who have friended you can even be forced to comment on your WordPress blog rather than your LiveJournal!

For more information please see the new website:

http://www.LJ-XP.com

Rating:

Well I want to start off by saying this is my first review of anything, I thought it would be good to do it on something I just recently discovered! So here it goes!

So I’ve never actually thought twitter could be useful, until today.

Having Twitter integrate so seamlessly into my blog works wonderfully! (See right hand column for what I’m talking about!)

I’ve also integrated Twitter into my Facebook account, via the application TwitterSync. I chose this application, because the standard “official” Twitter syncing application keeps updating your status as “is twittering:” followed by your real status update, which gets QUITE annoying, to ones self, and their friends.

I’ve tried using the MySpace application by the same name (different author) but it’s intentions are different, it takes your current MySpace status, and syncs it to Twitter, which isn’t my preference, I would rather go to Twitter, type in ONE status update, and have all my social networking sites update with the same status, until somebody codes a MySpace application that does what the Facebook one does, I think I’ll be leaving my MySpace status as blank for a while, it is to much of a pain to update it separately.

Overall, I really love the idea of Twitter, and it can be turned into quite a powerful tool, especially for bloggers like myself!

If anybody is curious, the Twitter updates I have on the right hand side of my blog, is direct code from Twitter, it is NOT a plugin or widget for Wordpress (what my blog is powered by) which makes it even more exciting!