I was watching some videos on YouTube of some great guitarists and afterward I called up some George Lynch video. Uh, yeah, he just kicks total ass. I got Rhaluka a cool Mr. Scary t-shirt and here's a pic of her wearing it in Romania.
Talking about cool music, I just discovered some really great groups last week that I'm currently O.D.ing on. If you like metal you should really check this stuff out if you haven't heard it yet. They're all available on iTunes to listen to.
Porcupine Tree - "Shallow" (Deadwing), "Way Out Of Here" (Fear of a Blank Planet)
Primal Fear - "Chainbreaker" (Primal Fear), "Revolution" (Black Sun), "Tears of Rage" (Primal Fear). You will totally think you're listening to Judas Priest!
One big reason why I love all these songs is because they remind me of classic metal but are completely new and updated. Also, wow, the cover art for these albums is just awesome. And if you're wondering how I found all this stuff, you can thank Pandora - an eerily kickass internet radio site that actually learns what you like and soon enough pretty much plays all the stuff you like even though you've never heard it before. Try it out.
Yep, it had to happen. I was going to hold off and get the iPhone (aka JesusPhone) a while after its debut. You know, let some software updates happen and get the bugs out.
No way in hell. I'm a caffeine-saturated technogeek after all.
The Friday it was released I didn't even think I'd get one but a co-worker came back from the Apple store with two 8gb units (one for eBay, LOL) and after I saw JUST THE BLACK BAG I went on a 30-second acid trip, hopped in my wheeled conveyance and drove directly to the same store and waited in line that wrapped around the block. I HAD TO HAVE IT. Only 15 minutes later I walked out with two of the World's Most Awesome piece of electronics.
I have a Blackberry Pearl (1gb microSD memory) and was completely nuts over that phone especially since it's connected to our Exchange server and syncs up all my contacts and calendar wirelessly in realtime. If I email someone from the Pearl, that email appears on my work PC in Outlook's Sent Items folder. If someone sends me a meeting invite, it appears on my Pearl immediately so I don't even need to be around my work system to get that data. I never have to plug the USB cable into the Pearl to sync up, only for power. It was the perfect phone and wonderfully small. Problems? No processor power for games, web pages are a hassle to navigate, no wifi and is usually slow switching programs. Forget watching videos. And playing mp3's is through a badly designed app.
So enter the iPhone. I'm a definite Exchange lover at this point and really want to get syncing of my calendar and contacts straightened out if I can. The big win is that I have my iPhone pulling my Exchange email down so I get internal work emails no matter where I am (every 15 minutes it pulls). So I'm 1/3 of the way to almost Blackberry functionality in that department.
In every other imaginable department the iPhone blows the Pearl down pretty hard. It's as if the iPhone pulled down the Pearl's pants and clamped a massive lobster claw down there for a few minutes and things turned purple and fell off and rolled out the pants leg. I have never spent as much time with my Pearl as I do my iPhone - it's so much a computer without having to sit in front of one. There are lots of in-depth reviews out there and I know what all the shortcomings are in this device but it's a v1.0 PHONE coming from a company that has never made a phone in its entire 30 year existence. But they really hit it out of the park with this one and I'm really excited to see what comes with the software updates via iTunes.
The battery life is really very impressive. I can watch hours of movies, YouTube videos, music, internet browsing, etc. and the battery is as eerily longlasting as a GameBoy SP. The phone itself is really durable, especially the glass screen which is usually the first thing to get jacked up on a phone (my iPod screen got jacked by a key the first day):
But really, the biggest innovation of this phone is the UI. At its core, the iPhone is the Macintosh OS X operating system and the UI sensibility is total Mac - very smooth and fluid. The things I thought were great on the PocketPC back in 2001 are smashed into the next dimension with the iPhone. The race is on to copy the iPhone now but I'm very doubtful that anyone can pull it off. Look out there and find any iPod knockoffs that are even close to Apple's design aesthetic - nothing. The Zune is a pale shadow of the iPod; an ass-brown wannabe. If you've seen any videos of the new Microsoft Touch phone you'll see they were trying to copy the iPhone interface but as a seperate "layer" - what a complete joke. A waste of engineering time and money.
Come to JesusPhone. You know you want to. It's insanely great.
