Nobody Knows Anything

In case you’re looking for interesting things around the Web this New Year’s (and who, of course, is not?).

• The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, who also has a new book by that name (which I haven’t read but sounds very interesting and very much the sort of thing I’ve started doing on my own anyhow right now). A regular gal—albeit one who clerked for a Supreme Court justice—decides to investigate the various bits of advice she’s found hither and yon on what makes for happiness and actually does them to see how well they work.

• Tiny Buddha by assorted authors. Yes, we’re back onto the happiness/zen/meditation track here, but hey: that’s what I’m interested in these days! Nice articles about the little things you can do in your every day life to improve your experience and the experiences of those around you.

• The Great Fitness Experiment by Charlotte Hilton Andersen. Ever read some fitness magazine’s recommended workout and thought, I wonder if that really works? Well, Charlotte doesn’t just wonder; she goes ahead and does it. One experiment per month, undertaken with hilarious and awe-inspiring intensity. She’s a witty, fun writer whose explorations into all things health and fitness will knock you upside the head. Also: she just had a baby. Ever wonder how to get your groove back after having a baby? Imagine you’re on the newest of four young tots. Yeah. It’s good stuff.

• Cookie Madness by Anna. Seriously, do I need to explain this one? Pictures + recipes + descriptions of COOKIES (and other tasty baked treats) = love. It’s Cookies. It’s Madness. Go.

• Bakerella by Bakerella (who’s probably a baker named Ella, natch). Usually when I think “crafty,” I think “manipulative and evil, and can you teach me how to do that?” When Bakerella does crafty, I think “gorgeous, amazing, and tasty, and can you teach me how to do that?” Oh, I want to be able to create the sorts of treasures you find here.

• Copenhagenize by Mikael. Mikael would like us to Copenhagenize the planet—that is, put everyone on a bicycle and get us out of our cars. They did it in Copenhagen (a city once devoted to its cars), so let’s get out there, folks! Since I feel this is an admirable goal (even as I still drive around in my 8 year old, 100k mile Honda Odyssey), I think everyone should read the inspiring tales of moving to better transportation.

• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs by Fake Steve (or Real Dan Lyons). I know, Fake Steve’s been around for years, with a prolonged hiatus during Real Steve’s medical issues. Now he’s back and when Fake Steve is on, he’s on. The whole crusade against AT&T’s annoyingly sucky service? Excellent, Smithers. His series of slams on Tiger Woods? Evil but hilarious. Whenever I see terrible retail layout (I’m looking at you, Borders) or seriously tacky bling (that would be you, teenagers), I hear Fake Steve’s snarky voice in my head.

  Darin, surprisingly, does not find Fake Steve as hilarious I do. I can’t imagine why.

We made a couple of changes to our life when we moved out of our house and into this rental house. For one thing, we moved from a 2800 square foot house without a garage to a 2200 sq. ft. house with a garage, so we took a hard look at many of the things we owned and either said, “Bye,” or “Into a box in the garage you go.” (All of our books? Packed away. ALL. Except the kids’, who have been insistent that their books needed to be liberated, and so they were.)

Another thing was that we got rid of was the satellite TV.

And despite going with Comcast for our internet connection, we didn’t pick up cable. We have no direct connection to the wide world of television out there. I suppose we might be able to get “over the air” broadcasts (are those still happening even?), but we haven’t tried.

One night back at our house I found Darin in the TV room watching some movie and I asked what it was. “I don’t even know,” he said. “It was just on.”

“That is a silly reason to watch something.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Did we need all of these movie channels? We rarely watched stuff off of them. Did we need the 100s of basic cable channels? Not much. We thought about how we were spending $90 a month on satellite—that’s $1080 a year!—on stuff we just never watched.

And things we did want to watch… Well, there was always iTunes. We’d gotten into the habit last year of just buying “Lost” on iTunes every week, because for some reason the ABC-HD feed in our area kept messing up the transmission. Or our satellite dish was pointed the wrong way, but only on Wednesday nights.

$1080 divided by $30 (avg. cost of iTunes subscription?) equals 36 shows a year. I would be amazed if all of us watched 36 separate series a year. Here’s what I’ll be watching:

• Lost: Final season. SOB.
• Dollhouse: The name “Joss Whedon” buys a lot. The logic gaps are sometimes infuriating and Eliza Dushku is not exactly right for this material. But it’s okay.
• Community: So far this has been hilarious. “Sharks, pencils, and Ben Affleck.” Good times.
• The Simpsons: Yes. Still.
• 30 Rock: When it’s good, it’s great, and when it’s not, it’s still okay.
• Chuck: Of course! Even if it’s on NBC!
• Dexter: A little Michael C. Hall covers up many storytelling weaknesses.

Darin also watches Mad Men (which I personally can’t stand), The Office, and Big Bang Theory (which I’ve enjoyed the few times I’ve seen, but I have a hard time loving sitcoms, despite having three of them in my above list).

I want to watch National Parks (which Nina said KQED is streaming? Let’s get that computer hooked up to the TV, people just discovered iTunes is carrying this one!).

We find series, by the way, following the advice of our most trusted TV critics: Alan Sepinwall (who as every “Chuck” fan knows, is DA MAN) and Ken Tucker (whose in-print stuff for EW is better than his blog, but never mind that). See? Critics are worthwhile, people.

So far it’s worked out great: we have stuff on the Apple TV we want to watch, we can store the old shows (or watch them on the computer, or on our iPhones, or whatever without too much hassle), and we don’t have the lure of just anything being on. Darin has been reading The Lord of the Rings to the kids, and as soon as they finished “The Fellowship of the Ring” we rented the movie. Simple.

What we’re missing out on: Food Network shows. My daughter misses her daily dose of Bobby Flay. Perhaps Food Network will figure out a way to deal with this.

Even if we do end up paying more than $1080 a year—I’m going to try to mark the various series subscriptions in Quicken to keep track of how much we end up spending—on the whole this system is a much better TV experience than watching cable/satellite. No commercials to fast-forward through! No endless promos for other shows! No teasers ruining the entire show before we see it!

Now if Darin would just hook up our DVD player so I could restart the Netflix subscription, that’d be good. Of course, what he really wants to do is get a PS3 “so we can watch Blu-ray disks.” Uh huh. I am the kind of “stupid wife” who “believes that.” My friend Otto also recommends hooking up a Mac mini, so as to use Hulu on the TV. But we don’t have a Mac mini. Maybe the kids will sacrifice their iMac for the cause…. HAHAHAHA. Just kidding.

Since sitting in front of the TV and just watching what’s on is not my idea of a good time, this setup is working perfectly for me. If I want to sit around and stare at a screen for hours to waste time…I’ll use my iPhone to play games, thanks.

We also gave up our home phone in the move. Yes, it’s true: Darin and I no longer share a phone. But everyone knows that to contact him you call his cell phone, and having the answering machine at home mostly served as a vehicle for frustration for me (since he never listened to messages). Now I get everything on my phone and it’s much easier for me to stay on top of calls I need to return and messages I need to deal with.

Dang. We really are living in the future.

Otto pinged me the other day and said, “You’ve had your iPhone for 8 days and there’s no post yet?”

Well, he has a good point there. So without further ado: my new iPhone!

The iPhone really is better than sliced bread. It’s better than sex. It’s better than chocolate. It does everything you want or need it to:

The iPhone makes coffee for you!

The iPhone will help you hash out story ideas, and sometimes even takes over the writing for you!

The iPhone will play with your kids and read them stories, while you dash out to the store to pick up a few staples!

Who wouldn’t want one of these things?

But seriously folks.

I like my iPhone, I really do. I look forward to getting calls on it in a way I never did with my v60. I even look forward to missing calls because the voicemail is really much, much easier to use than old cell voicemail. (Pause for a moment of Homer-esque shuddering.) I don’t actually think the iPhone is better than sliced bread or sex or even chocolate sex, but it is better than my old phone. Syncing contacts: a snap. Uploading photos to have a really cool (and sharp-looking) wallet of photos of the kids: the only hard part is picking out which photos of the kids. I haven’t uploaded any videos to it because, well, I don’t have any videos. (Although I am thinking about getting the Ninth Doctor episodes of Doctor Who to check out while the kids are swimming.)

I haven’t had a problem with the Edge network yet. Sure, if I were on my Macbook and it took that long to get my mail, I’d probably be annoyed. But this is my phone, not my business machine. I’m not expecting to surf the web at top speeds. I’ve used the web browser to do such crazy things as a)look stuff up when I’m in Barnes and Noble and wondering, What was the name of that author again? and b)play iPhoneSudoku.

Do I recommend getting one? Hell yeah! If nothing else, baby needs a college fund! (Actually, two college funds. I think both of them are going to give college a shot.)

Do I say you have to have one? We don’t keep Kool-Aid frozen pops in this house, sorry.

The coffee is excellent, however.

Friday afternoon I told Darin I wanted to go to the mall and see the iPhone hysteria first-hand. But then Simon got sick, so that plan was cancelled.

Saturday afternoon we did make it to the mall, because I needed to get a dress for the party that night. While I was off shopping for dress, shoes, and makeup, Darin did such things as go to the Apple store and discover the 8 gig models were already sold out.

Saturday night we went to the big iPhone party up at the Exploratorium, which totally rocked but did not have the party favor I was hoping for. Most of the Apple employees there had iPhones, and 99% of them had gone to their local Apple dealer to buy one. Just in case you’re wondering if the employees believe in the product. And no, they did not serve Kool-Aid at the party.

Sunday morning Darin checked the iPhone website and headed down to Oakridge to get me one. It turned out that Oakridge was totally sold out on Saturday, but for some reason the website didn’t update.

Sunday afternoon all the stores in California had red dots.

I ordered my iPhone from the online store. I’m hoping the estimates for when it will ship are just a wee bit off.

(And I haven’t spotted one in the wild yet, but I keep checking every time I see someone on the phone.)

I want one. NOW.

Stupidly, apparently I accepted a class action suit settlement with Verizon a while back… and they decided that their contract extension kicks in NOW. As of TODAY. So my contract isn’t up until 2009. (I wonder how much it costs to buy out of it.)

I saw this quote on CE Murphy’s blog — “The new Apple iPhone is, to quote rob_donoghue, basically made entirely out of sex.” — and repeated it to a few friends of mine. To which one of them responded: “which I like putting up to my face, but that’s not about making phone calls.”

I am so ahead of him in the line to get one of these things.

Come to think of it, my Verizon contract will probably end before I can get my hands on one of these things, so maybe I should just sit tight.

Oh, I want one, NOW.

I own an iPod. Darin got me a very nice 15 gig one for my birthday in 2004. Once we finally figured out how to use the iTrip play-through-the-radio attachment, it became a permanent fixture in my car.

I have an iPod Shuffle. Last year Steve* gave every Apple employee one as a thank you for a great year. Darin said, “Are you going to use that? Because if you’re not we should give it as a gift to someone.” I tried it out, and it’s become a permanent part of my exercise habit. Have tunes, will do boring cardio workout at gym.

My brother-in-law has worked on iPod for years. Darin worked on the iPod before it came out. My running bud, Rob, worked on iPod for four years, up until a few weeks ago. (And he never told me about the video iPod, the bastard.)

I know plenty about iPod. I know who’s working on iPod (though none of them will tell me what they’re working on — Darin and Mitch don’t even tell one another what they’re working on, and they’re brothers). It’s old hat to me, right?

I have an iPod Nano in my hands, and I can’t stop playing with it. It’s so small. It’s so cute. Look at the screen! It’s so thin and tiny — and yet can fit so much music, so many podcasts!

I want to go running right now, just so I can try it out.

Apple is amazing at creating plug-and-play electronic crack. So why haven’t they taken over the world? Jeez. It’s so frustrating sometimes.

§

Darin knew way ahead of time about the MacBook announcement at MacWorld. And didn’t tell me about it.

My friend Otto IM’d me: “So Darin knew and didn’t tell you? Divorce!”

Me: “No, no. A fully tricked-out MacBook, that’s what.”

Apple was nowhere near this controlled when I worked there. It seemed like everyone had the Mercury News on speed-dial. These days, Darin tells me about something, he gets fired. (I’ve decided it’s better to hold off on knowing and get the MacBook eventually, instead of collecting unemployment.) It’s better for the company, obviously. I’m just amazed they’ve managed such a veil of secrecy.

What’s hilarious is, whenever Darin and his brothers — only one of whom works on iPod — discuss the iPod, iTunes, or downloading, in the middle of whatever it is they’re saying they’ll throw in, “Don’t steal music.” I wonder if they have hypnotic programming sessions where everyone learns to say that.

* Seriously, if you’ve got to ask “Steve who?”…

Hey Steve — I was just at Costco with my kids. We went to the kids’ software aisle. Okay, not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, what with the grunting and the pointing and the shrieking (and that’s just the other shoppers there—bah-dum-bum-bum).

There was a lot of software there, most of which my daughter wanted and most of which we couldn’t get because it runs under Windows only. Yeah, I’m a Mac owner; I’m used to that.

I wasn’t quite expecting it with the Pixar software, dude.

Could you look into this? Find out why a couple of the Pixar titles are available on Windows only? I hear you have some pull with the Pixar people, so maybe you can get them to expand their damn software line to include Macintosh, eh?

Sincerely,

A Mom. And Mac Owner.