So it’s that day again: An Apple iPhone launch day in Belgium! As you may or may not remember, I was first in line to get my iPhone 3G 2 yars ago. After letting the 3GS pass last year (on purpose ;-)), and with 2 years of raising Apple-awareness, would I be lucky enough to repeat the success??
I knew that getting an iPhone4 was going to be way hotter than getting the iPhone 3G back in the day. However, I didn’t want to camp there the day before. So here’s my journey.
To start off like the hosts of my favorite intrernet podcast…
First off, I must admit that I don’t use headphones on the iPhone very often and that I carry it in my pocket all the time without a protection case, which may be part of my problem…. But anyway, sitting at work I wanted to listen to something other than this one song I’m looping on YouTube for days now, so I took my iPhone and the earphones. Put them in, iPod app, hit play, song fires up oka…. wow wait what the hack is that strange sound I’m getting here?! Yeh, indeed it was the kind of sound you get when your headphone jack starts to die or isn’t fully plugged in. Basically right and left channels cancel each other out and the only thing left is the difference between them, which is usually some weird reverb’ish sound. Lead vocals are usually gone when that happens and the phase is totally screwed.
I was wondering because my iPhone and the earphones are barely half a year old. I started hitting the headphone jack to see if that’s the source of the problem. Bad idea: things got crazy at that point!! I got slammed with loud crack noises killing my ears and the iPhone went all crazy playing and pausing the player continuously till I stopped hitting the connector… WEIRD!! Damn, my iPhone broke!
So I went over to Patrick, a colleage of mine who works in the office next door, to tell him about what just happened as he’s a die-hard Apple user (like me :-)), who happens to own an iPod touch. We started trying his earphones on my iPhone… works. My earphones on his iPod touch… works. WEIRD! As we were running out of ideas, we started babbling about how there supposedly is an immersion indicator in that earphone connector on the iPod touch. Enough for me to take my iPhone out of the pocket and use Patrick’s desk lamp to see if my iPhone also has one. Since I’m visually impaired, Patrick took a look and… found that there was a ton of dust at the bottom of my iPhone’s headphone connector! Took that out with a paper clip, headphones back in and voila! My iPhone rocks perfectly again!! Well THANK YOU SIR! 🙂
Safari RSS vulnerability announced in Safari RSS
Read the full article here.
Yesss… I got an iPhone 3G!!
However, it was not an easy tactic to get it on day one here in Belgium… here’s my iPhone story:
It was pretty clear from the Beginning that there wouldn’t be lots of iPhones on launch day this 11th of July here in our tiny little country. So I called 2 Mobistar centres (the Belgian carrier selling the device) and one Apple Premium Reseller (APR’s are also allowed to sell iPhones) yesterday morning. The main info was horrible: only 10 to 15 devices per store! Good news was everyone would follow a first-come-first-serve guideline, so no reservations (even though some stores took reservations but I have no idea what happened to those). The Mobistar Employee from the Mobistar center in Liège told me “We even have one customer that said he’ll be here 2 hours before opening tomorrow”. OK now, information was retrieved…
There were only 2 ways to react: Either sit back and wait till there will be more devices (probably in the next couple of weeks), or be there as early as possible. I’ve been waiting for a “legal” iPhone for more than a year now so, damn you apple haters, I took the second option.
And so I woke up this morning at 5:45 AM to head to the nearest APR in Verviers: “Cipiyou“, hoping I’d be the first-in-line! It was about 6:30 AM when I arrived… and yesssss I was the first one to show up! From there on, the battle was kinda over. I’d just have to wait the 3,5 hours until the store opened at 10:00 AM. This has probably been one of my nerdiest days EVER:
(Photo taken with my old Sony Ericsson P910i)
The first customer other than me showed up at 9:15 (store opens at 10:00). Okay okay, that was like 2:45 of “lost” time but dammit, I wanted that iPhone TODAY! From 9:15 forward, there was a new customer every few minutes… the Mobistar center down the street opened at 9:30. At 9:45 the 25 people that waited in line and couldn’t get one of the 10 iPhones came to the APR, hoping to get one here. I found myself talking with #2 and #3 in line… damn it’s cool meeting people with the same interests. I knew some of the folks from “the” belgium-iPhone forum ( http://www.belgium-iphone.com ), I had a blast!!
As announced, they opened at 10:00, I was the first one to get a brand new white 16 GB iPhone 3G, it was EPIC! I heard afterwards that there had only been 2 16GB iPhones at the APR and 3 16GB ones at the Mobistar center, the rest were all 8GB. Btw, people want 16GB iPhones, Apple. Build more of those!!
Now let’s all wish a long life to my iPhone! 🙂
I absolutely don’t know where that problem comes from, but there seems to be a rendering issue under MacOS 10.5 Leopard with PNGs created using the GIMP. I stumbled upon this while I was working on a website design I created some time ago. I don’t know if this might be a feature of one of the involved tools but I don’t think so.
Since I switched GIMP and MacOS X versions simultaneously, I’ll mention the versions here to ensure the difference is reproducible. Although you may not see it (depending on your monitor), there is a subtle difference.
Okay, it’s been a while since my last blog entry. This was mainly because I was awfully busy, which I still am. I just thought this would be a nice occasion to give a sign of life on my blog.
Yesss, I did it! I held an iPhone in my hands! For most of you US people out there this must seem like a ridiculous euphoria given that the iPhone was announced nearly a year ago and released half a year ago. But hey, don’t forget the poor European folks I belong to! It has just been released in Germany and the UK as the two first European countries on November 9th. So on November 10th, I drove over to my neighbor country and went to a “T-Punkt” (the name of the T-Mobile shops in Germany) to finally personally take a look at that device I saw so many times on the net and on tv.
Raise the fooBar 