Day: July 9, 2007

iPhone morning … in my apartment

So you know how last week I was saying how I didn’t buy an iPhone the night it came out? Well I also didn’t buy one that weekend … but in the end I did buy one yesterday (yes, that’s the distraction I was talking about in my July 7th entry!)

So what made me change my mind? A few things:

  • When I tried using EDGE again on one of my colleagues’ iPhones it wasn’t as slow as I remembered – I’m thinking maybe the local cell was a little swamped on the launch night
  • Actually, the thing about there being no rebate on the plan isn’t entirely true. Getting the same plan on a Blackberry or Samsung Blackjack is going to set you back an extra 20 bucks or so
  • Really the biggest thing though is that it’s just so wonderful to use.

So after my existing phone really did stop working properly this week I decided to give in finally to the hype and lay down some greenbacks. My initial impressions are:

  • The whole process of buying the phone and getting it working was exceptionally impressive. I was in the Apple store about 2 minutes, and then about 60 seconds worth of using iTunes (which fronts the iPhone activation process) once I got home was all I needed to do. About 15 minutes later my old phone stopped receiving calls and I was up and running.
  • All the ‘wow’ impressions of when you first use it still hold true. It’s so easy and fast to do so many things with the device that it’s a wonder something even half this good hasn’t been done before.
  • Certain things do feel a bit ‘version 1’ like the lack of cut & paste, the fact that iTunes went a bit weird for a while when I had read-only calendars it was trying to sync, and other small things here and there make me look forward to the first software update
  • Call quality I would say is poor (or maybe my last phone was just good) – I hope this is something they can fix up on a software update otherwise it’s going to annoy me

Only one thing worries me – I’m off to the UK on Friday for a week and as yet I haven’t found a way of turning off EDGE – I really don’t want a $200 roaming data charge when I get back to the US. I’m going to call up AT&T tomorrow and see what they have to say.

So yes, in the end, Steve’s reality distortion field had it’s day. I bet he’s laughing all the way to the turtle neck store…

July 7th – 2 years on

Yesterday was the 2nd anniversary of the July 7th London bombings. For those new to my blog, you probably don’t know that I was on one of the trains that was bombed, thankfully far enough away not to have been injured. I wrote about my original experiences after the day here and my experiences of the first anniversary here.

Last year I was definitely anxious on the anniversary day but I’m happy to say this year was very different. Apart from anything else the anniversary falling on a Saturday meant I wasn’t traveling to work at 8.50 am, and in fact there was no need for me to get a subway all day so I never even went near a train. In fact I was so distracted by other things that I didn’t even remember what day it was until I’d been up for about 4 hours!

I think I’m pretty much as over my experiences now as I will ever be. There’s certainly still some emotional scarring but I’m not sure I’ll ever lose that, and it’s a long way from stopping me doing anything I want to do in my day-to-day life.

Rachel North (another survivor of July 7th and frequent blogger on the subject) has just had a book, Out of the Tunnel, published on her experiences of the bombings and on other incidents in her life that have caused to her to live through Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I’m hoping to pick up a copy when I’m back in the UK in a week’s time.

The continuing attempted attacks within the UK are obviously a big worry, partly because there is no apparent way forward beyond just defense. At least when the IRA was bombing the UK there was some kind of hope that a truce could be found, which was indeed what eventually happened. With the terrorism of fanatical religion though there’s no clear road forward that I can see beyond educating our children about tolerance and the benefits of a plural society.

Finishing up, I think it’s good that this July 7th saw the worldwide mega-event of Live Earth. I think what Al Gore and the rest of his organisation are doing to promote the repair of some of the damage we’ve done to our environment is a wonderful thing (and for those that think it’s all a load of baloney please do spend 90 minutes of your life watching An Inconvenient Truth.) Maybe in years to come ‘July 7th’ will become synonymous with a day when humanity started to come together across national and racial divides to actually make the world we live in a better place. If it meant that we forgot about the events of July 7th 2005 I think that would be a sacrifice worth making.