Nobody Knows Anything

We’ve been living in the rental house for a year now (yeah, the remodel will be done any minute now), so it’s probably time to check out how our experiment of dumping a cable connection is going.

Answer: it’s going really well. We’re not going back.

Turns out that we’re not alone, of course: a lot of people are saying farewell to cable.

Pre-move, we had DSL via Speakeasy for $145 a month, plus DirectTV for $95 a month, plus Netflix for $23 ($263 a month). We had lots of premium channels (HBO, Showtime), and we didn’t buy movies. We sometimes bought stuff via iTunes, for when our system broke down or recorded a poor copy of something.

When we moved, we cancelled Speakeasy (they couldn’t get us the speed we wanted) and picked up Comcast cable internet ($63…and roughly the same speed we had before *headdesk*). And we either watched shows via iTunes, Netflix DVDs, or Netflix on Demand. The kids in particular have taken to Netflix on Demand like a duck to your Sunday picnic. Over the past year we’ve spent $1453 on the iTunes TV store (wow, that looks amazing to write out like that), or $120 a month. Plus $23 for Netflix.

Which means we’re spending roughly $203 a month now. For shows without commercials, often in higher quality than the broadcast versions.

I think I’m going to change our Netflix subscription to be the one DVD + On Demand stuff, which is something like $10 a month.

True, we don’t get sports or 24 hour news stations, but we don’t care. We don’t have the movie channels (if we really need a movie, we’ll rent it from iTunes or wait for the DVD). Our house is right near the Santa Cruz mountains, which interfere with all broadcast stations, or I would get an antenna to cover local channels.

We recently had a small vacation and while staying in the hotel sacked out in bed to watch Food Network (oh, Bobby Flay, my daughter has missed you). Used to be we were annoyed by regular TV because we couldn’t pause or fast-forward over commercials, like we could with TiVo. Now we’ve found regular TV practically unwatchable. I don’t miss it at ALL.

Comcast keeps offering us deals where we can get a faster internet connection if we also pick up a cable subscription, and the combo will cost less than it’s costing now. Darin keeps responding, “How much for just the faster internet?”

Unless one of the kids suddenly develops a need to watch sports, we’re not going back.

…and then broke right back in.

Every single Apple blog I follow announced triumphantly that the one-stop-shopping for jailbreaking iOS 4.0 had arrived. Visit the webpage via Mobile Safari, move the slider, jailbreaking occurs. It’s all safe and legal and yadda yadda. (You know, because Apple had been taking a real hard line on jailbreakers, what with their sternly worded PR releases and all.) And I keep reading about how jailbreaking is the best thing since sliced bread because there’s So! Much! You! Can! Do! once you’re freed from the horrible, horrible confines of software that just works and looks pretty to boot.

I have to say that many of the customizations I’ve seen screenshots of look, frankly, horrible. I’m not a big fan of the new backgrounds that you can do via iOS 4.0 (I immediately uploaded this background, via Marco, because for some stupid reason Apple doesn’t include a black background as one of its defaults). But then I read about an app that lets you do lots more stuff with your texting (and I’m a 14 year old girl around my iPhone, I am all about the texting), and one that lets you blacklist phone numbers you’re tired of hearing from. Different sounds to indicate who a text is from! That could be awesome.

So I did it. I pushed the slider.

The install crashed.

So I pushed it again. And again. Because the jailbreak kept crashing. I had to check a couple of webpages to find out what the hell was going on, and after about 30 tries and at least that many webpages the answer came back: restore the software on the iPhone, retry the jailbreak.

Restoring the iPhone meant recopying all the applications and media files I have on it, so that was an extra 45 minutes or something, after having wasted about an hour on it so far. But what the hell. I wanna get different sounds for my texts.

I redid the jailbreak and this time it worked very quickly and installed the Cydia app. Apparently Cydia was getting slammed yesterday with jailbreakers, so I’m not surprised at the app’s slow performance. (No, really—no snark there.) I downloaded iBlacklist and BiteSMS.

Holy crap. Here’s my take on it, people: thousands of app settings, poorly explained and organized, are not equivalent to quality.

I played with BiteSMS for, I dunno, twenty minutes? Within five I was on their website, going through their forums, trying to figure out why I couldn’t, you know, WRITE A TEXT to somebody. I had to go to Apple’s SMS app to send a friend a text. BiteSMS never let me know when she responded. (I certainly didn’t get the cute QuickReply popup I wanted to check out.)

Then I played with iBlacklist and said, Well, this would be the coolest thing in the world, except it’s hard to understand and I have to spend a lot of time on various websites trying to figure out how X, Y, and Z work.

After another hour of playing with a few things, I said, “Screw this,” I hooked my iPhone up to my Mac, and I pushed the Restore button in iTunes. Restoring once is a pain in the ass. Restoring twice cured me of a need to try jailbreaking again for the foreseeable future.

This is why I have an iPhone. I want to download an app and have it work. I spent more time on webpages yesterday trying to figure out how to get stuff to work than I have the entire time I’ve had my iPhone. I don’t want to download MobileTerminal and figure out how to SSH stuff to my phone.

Should Apple let you have different SMS tones? Yes. And when they do, it will work seamlessly, and not with twenty different settings I have to read up on. Should they allow you to blacklist? Ohmygodyes. (Like I’m supposed to believe Steve doesn’t have blacklisting on his phone. Please.) But if these Cydia apps had to compete in the App Store they’d lose, because their UI sucks and I have to do too much work to get them moving.

I think I’m a pretty typical user. Jailbreaking was just too much work. Thanks for all the effort, guys, and if that’s what you really need from your phone, have at it. I’m glad I have a phone that works right the first time.

And themes suck. I’m sorry, themes are just the ugliest thing in the world. Android can keep those.

I ran another marathon yesterday. Once again, I ran it with Nina.

We finished. I have photographic proof.

That’s about the most cogent thing I have to say about the San Francisco Marathon right now. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal can speak more effectively?

The Race Even Marathoners Fear

Every year, marathons in New York and Chicago draw some 40,000 participants each.

But not the San Francisco Marathon. The race, which takes place July 25, attracted fewer than 7,000 runners last year, and open slots for the upcoming event remain plentiful. The reason: San Francisco’s famous hills, which draw tourists from around the world, are a bear for runners to traverse. “To put it tactfully, this course is not for the casual runner,” says Jenny Schmitt, spokeswoman for the San Francisco Marathon.

The San Francisco Marathon’s low profile frustrates its fans. This year, the race’s organizers have hired new publicists to try to raise its profile. Many runners loath to do the full race have been drawn to a half-marathon option added about a decade ago, and more recently a second half-marathon alternative route has been put in place.

Going the whole distance in San Francisco has put off some first-time marathoners who don’t want to risk falling short of the finish line. And many seasoned runners don’t want to waste their energies on a race that offers no hope of setting a personal record.

Personal record? PERSONAL RECORD? I took up belief in a spiritual being so I could pray to someone to put me out of my misery. We finished with a time of 5:40, or 40 minutes longer than we did Seattle. I suspected I hadn’t trained enough for this, and wow, did this marathon prove me right.

At mile 21 or 22 (when the women running next to us were cracking me up by thanking every cop and every Hell’s Angel—noIamtotallynotkidding—who were in charge of stopping traffic to let us run by with “Thank you! You rock! I love you!”), we came to a short but definite downhill and I said to Nina, “You know you’re in a bad spot when running downhill doesn’t feel good.”

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a gorgeous marathon. You go through many, many, many beautiful and scenic areas of San Francisco, including an out-and-back across the Golden Gate Bridge. You go through Fisherman’s Wharf. You make a large loop around AT&T Park. It’s really some excellent sightseeing.

We actually did the first half (around the Embarcadero, across the bridge, then up through Sea Cliff and over to Golden Gate Park) in two and a half hours, which was exactly our pace for the Seattle marathon. We had really high hopes for doing San Francisco with much the same time.

Then we ran west through Golden Gate Park, followed by east through Golden Gate Park, and I kid you not: it was uphill both ways. By the time we made it out of the Park and into the Haight-Ashbury, I was done for.

Most popular line Nina and I used during the race: “This is the last hill! I’m absolutely sure of it!”

I’m completely sore today (even hobbling a little bit), in a way I wasn’t after our 20 mile run a few weeks ago or even the Seattle Marathon, so I’m guessing it was the hills. I have to do a lot more hill training. Let’s put it this way: I’ve been telling myself I need to do more hill training, and now I just had the school bully slap me across the face a few times with a loud “HA HA.” I’m not feeling as psyched about running as I have in the past: I’m actually suffering post-race blues.

Nina says we have to run another marathon or we’ll never run a long race again. I don’t think today is the day to decide about that.

• New blog post: Twitter Updates for 1969-12-30 http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/2010/07/twitter-updates-for-1969-12-30-5.html ->
• New blog post: Twitter Updates for 1969-12-30 http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/2010/07/twitter-updates-for-1969-12-30-6.html ->
• New blog post: Twitter Updates for 1969-12-30 http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/2010/07/twitter-updates-for-1969-12-30-7.html ->
• New blog post: Twitter Updates for 1969-12-30 http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/2010/07/twitter-updates-for-1969-12-30-8.html ->
• New blog post: Twitter Updates for 1969-12-30 http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/2010/07/twitter-updates-for-1969-12-30-9.html ->
• New blog post: Twitter Updates for 1969-12-30 http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/2010/07/twitter-updates-for-1969-12-30-10.html ->
• New blog post: Twitter Updates for 1969-12-30 http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/2010/07/twitter-updates-for-1969-12-30-11.html ->

• @donmelton Mais oui. Ask D what he said when I pointed this story out to him. in reply to donmelton ->

• Are movies now legally required to come in a 3-D edition? ->
• @ToniMcGeeCausey You think they haven't? MUAHAHAHA in reply to ToniMcGeeCausey ->
• @Gartenberg "No, c'mon, you can tell me, please please please, I'll be your best friend…" in reply to Gartenberg ->

• It's really a waste of my time, energy, and breath telling these boys to calm down, isn't it? ->

• @moryan Reading your last two tweets back-to-back has given me visions of a Doctor Who/Mad Men crossover #brainexplosion in reply to moryan ->
• @donmelton Y'all passing this article around the office? http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/jul/14/apple-twitter-forstall in reply to donmelton ->

• @wonkybutt No, it was the last epoch, wasn't it? in reply to wonkybutt ->
• Sometimes I am not at all upset about not having dated very much in my life: http://myveryworstdate.com/ ->
• Wants to buy silk bedding for when she moves back into her house, but has neither the $, time, nor minions to care for it. ->
• @pborenstein I've been reading just the opposite, but the washing-by-hand-with-baby-shampoo-and-line-drying is enough to cure my curiosity. in reply to pborenstein ->

• I enjoy that the Twitter Tools update on my blog put the date as "1969-12-30". While I'm sure that was a fine day, it wasn't yesterday. ->
• The funniest thing I've read for a while: "World War II is a completely unbelievable TV Show" http://squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html ->