Activation is the scary part of the iPhone process. Tales abound of yesterday's long waits and crushing failures. Unfortunately, my story is no different.

I got my iPhone home at about 12:30 P.M. today. When I connected it to my MacBook (named Caladan for reasons that anybody familiar with my computer naming scheme should understand), iTunes started right up and registered it. Alas, the phone made a little "sad tweet" and informed me that it had no service and the service was required for activation. Hm.

Well, even though my crappy Motorola L2 has 5 bars everywhere in …

My iPhone 3G experience started this morning at about 5:50 AM, when I left my dorm to get an iPhone 3G. I hiked over to the Montclair Transcenter and picked up the 6:30 OmniTrans Route 66 bus heading Eastward. At about 7:05, I stepped off the bus, thinking I was there. Unfortunately, I was at another bus stop in front of a Best Buy with a gas station next to it – about a mile and a half shy of the Victoria Gardens Mall, where the Apple and AT&T stores were. A half-hour of hiking later, and …

I've just purchased an iPhone 3G. I'll now make a few posts about my ordering experience.

Everybody in my RSS feed list is doing it. So why shouldn't I?

(no, it's not the exact same line. close enough)

% history 1 |awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head -n 20
140 cd
67 sudo
59 vim
52 mplayer
51 svn
47 rm
43 ls
33 eix
29 xsnap
29 wmiir
24 mv
22 cp
15 ps
15 killall
14 ssh
12 xset
12 history
11 man
11 evince
10 sed

Since this summer, I've been using a pair of Sennheiser HD280 Pros. Let me just say that they're excellent headphones, and they provide better attenuation than most noise cancellation headphones without murdering the sound quality the way active noise canceling headphones do. This is a great feature when North is having a party, or just when my roommate is listening to music on his speakers. However, like all closed-back headphones, they're a bit constricting, and there are some minor audio artifacts caused by the hard backing.

So, last week, I picked up a pair of Grado SR60's. They …

If you haven't seen the recent Microsoft Interoperability announcement, I suggest you read it. It's been Slashdotted, so I figure there's a decent chance that everybody on the Internet has seen it already. This is, of course, an extension of the Microsoft Office Binary Formats release of a few days ago, and I'm equally leery about it. There are some interesting comments on the Office Binary formats on the web, including these by Jeff Licquia, and those he links to by Joel Spolsky.

On the one hand, this is an amazing opportunity for F/OSS developers and pretty much everybody …