I have finally succumbed and have bought an iPhone. After the initial euphoria at having rejoined Jobs’ reality distortion zone I have started playing with some of the applications.

Some of my new favourites now that I have an always on connection include twinkle (a localised twitted client), linkedin, facebook, face melter (an awesome little application that lets you mess with photos), shazam (never wonder what that song that is playing is again!) and of course wordpress.

I still don’t think that the iPhone is quite ready for the enterprise but it I’d close. I think that they just need to fix up the global search and the mail application (starting with collapsible mail folders!) and they would have my vote.

Also spent a bit of time activating the phone to my developer certificates. When I get some more time I hope to actually start writing some applications!

Oh yeah!

Instructional video from upcoming startup howcast.com

This is pretty damn bad. I didn’t think cheesy acting could plumb new lows but this has to take the cake.

I’ve joined up to do the Naked DSL trial with iiNet. The upgrade process itself is pretty simple but do expect a long period where you do not have any internet! My ADSL2+ service went down on Monday morning and I have been told to expect 10-15 days of no service until the Naked DSL comes into effect.

Why do I do it then I hear you asking? Well at the moment I am paying $69.95 for the service, $34.95 for the phone line rental and $9.95 for the VOIP service. Now with Naked DSL I just pay the one fee of $89.95 for a 30GB peak and 60GB offpeak quota. No more phone rental and the VOIP is included. That is a saving of $24.90 per month or $298.80 per year or $597.60 for the life of the contract. I get a bit obsessed with numbers I think.

Once it is in place I am sure it will be fine, but not having any internet now is really really annoying. Especially if it is going to take a couple of weeks to get it activated.

I love this shit.. check out this post by Mary Jo Foley of zdnet titled “It’s payback time: If the Vista team could write ad copy …”. She claims:

Even typically staunch Mac backers are admitting that Apple’s new Leopard operating system is not perfect. It might even be as problem-prone (if not more so) as Windows Vista. Could Leopard go so far as to drive some switchers into Vista’s arms?

She quotes one issue where time machine is losing data for a particular brand of drive and states that it will drive droves of mac users straight into Vista’s tentacled grip.

I don’t know which planet she is coming from. Granted I don’t know many people who have had the balls to switch on Vista on their personal systems let alone run them loose on the corporate network but two of my colleagues have had Vista thrust onto them thanks to new laptop refreshes - and have had nothing but problems. Corrupt file systems, cannot remove “optional” installs like Symantec (which is so far embedded into the machine that it will try to reboot itself from the bios), folder structures that unlink themselves from the parent, disappearing menus and occasions where the Outlook just loses all of its menu bars.

Compare that to the problems that I have had with Leopard. Ok, I had to disable the application enhancer when I upgraded my laptop - but that was it. Everything runs fine even my Cisco VPN software which was the first thing that broke under Tiger. I find that applications are snappier and I even like Time Machine. People have had problems where the icons for the dock bar are not sticking but I find that a minor annoyance relative to what Vista did to my colleagues machines.

I consider myself reasonably savvy when it comes to windows/mac operating systems but even I wouldn’t care to try tackling Vista after seeing what they have been through. However I will recommend that people that I know give Leopard a go. Not sure if I could name any of the 300+ features that they tout but certainly the ones that I use every day I would highly recommend to people thinking of doing the upgrade.

The NY Times Magazine has a slideshow online of the real people behind the avatars that you seen on World of Warcraft, Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies. Start the slideshow here

My favourite is

Nature continues to amaze me. Take a look at the following video of a particular species of shrimp that can create a collapsing bubble, also known as a cavitation bubble, that is able to stun and even kill small fish by snapping one of its claws. One of the side effects of this bubble is that as it collapses it reaches the surface temperature of the Sun. The light is of lower intensity than the light produced by typical sonoluminescence and is not visible to the naked eye.

Wikipedia article located here.

I’ve always been fascinated as to how cockroaches always seem to elude my best attempts to exterminate them from my old apartment - nothing seemed to work, traps, insecticide bombs, sonic gadgets.. anyway, HowStuffWorks.com has an article about the science behind cockroaches. Some of my favourite quotes are

..much of their nervous system activity takes place in nerve ganglia located throughout their bodies. This is one of the reasons why a headless roach can live for more than a week..
..Using its metathoracic legs, a roach can move about 50 body lengths in a second. A human moving that quickly would be running about 200 miles per hour..
..A German cockroach and her young can produce 300,000 more roaches in one year..