Andy Gapin

Such a great show last night. Musically, at least. I keep saying it, but there’s just a ton of great music out there right now. It finally got to the point where I impulse bought a new iPod last night. My 3.5 year old 60GB one just wasn’t cutting it anymore. It still works like brand new–I don’t know how, I don’t treat it very well–but I need more space!

For the past year or so, it’s been an hour long process every time I want to add music to it because I have to sit there and really think about what music I can take off and be okay not having on me at any given time. It’s really hard! And yeah, I know you’re thinking “who the hell needs that much music?” Well, I don’t know what I’m going to want to listen to later on! It could be anything! At any given time, I can really only have less than 25% of my music on me. And with all of the new stuff I’ve been trying to listen to lately,  it’s hard to find space to keep adding things while keeping all of the old stuff as well. Sure, there is plenty of music that I have that I’ll never want to listen to and can be fine without, but that only takes me down to maybe 160GB which is still more than the 120GB worth of space on the new iPod–seriously, Apple, why did you get rid of the 160GB model?

This has been helped a little lately by SimplifyMedia. It streams my entire music collection over the internet so I can access anything from my iPhone or from my computer at work. On a computer, it’s not too bad, but my collection is so big that my iPhone has a lot of trouble handling it to the point where the app is barely worth messing with at all. That part was a little disappointing.

Whatever, I like music and it’s only getting worse as I decided lately that I need to get more into jazz, classical, and hip hop. Three genres that I really enjoy, but have a very limited amount of. I’ve been trying to beef up in these areas, but that just makes finding the space for it even harder. And as for finding time to listen to everything, that’s just impossible!

My life is so hard.

But anyway, here’s what I played on the radio show last night. Like I said, great show.

Source: 90.3 The Core

Last.fm had a hardware failure over the weekend so they were a bit late generating the weekly snapshots, but here it is. Maybe one day I’ll be able to do this without including The Lawrence Arms or The Replacements. Maybe I should consider not scrobbling the music I listen to at the gym. We’ll see. 

• Archers Of Loaf
• Lucero
• Cheap Girls
• The Jealous Sound
• The Replacements
• Matt & Kim
• The Lawrence Arms
• Sonic Youth
• The Court And Spark
• Ida Maria
• Company Of Thieves
• Jawbreaker
• Mia Riddle
• Team Teamwork (The Ocarina Of Rhyme)
• White Mud Free Way
• The Gaslight Anthem
• The Beatles
• Thorns Of Life
• Minus The Bear
• The Barrens
• Pixies
• Hidden People
• Challenger
• The Laureates
• M. Ward

Also, today was exciting as finally something that I’ve submitted to a site made it! A complaint that I submited to White Whine made it today. The site basically just picks one “white person complaint” a day to highlight. The idea is that they are complaints that most people should be thankful to even be able to have. Here’s mine.

My iPhone seems to be a little confused this morning about which way to be turning. Or maybe it’s trying to play a lame April Fool’s Day joke on me. As you can see from the conversation that’s happening via text, I was already a little confused otherwise I would have jumped all over the classic Mallrats reference. For anyone that may be wondering, the topmost message in the left screenshot is indeed a reply to a random Flight Of The Conchords reference I sent.

But speaking of April Fool’s Day, I hate it. This tends to come as a shock to my friends when I tell them, but I just find it annoying. I feel like I spend the entire day being blamed for pranks pulled by other people. I come off as the kind of guy that would be all about pulling pranks and playing jokes on others and, to a degree, I am. So this makes me the first person that people blame for pranks…every day of the year. And sometimes, it is me. But it’s so cliché and expected today. Why would I bother? My pranks usually fall into one of the following groups: making someone believe something ridiculous about myself or that I did/didn’t say/do something, sending horrible links to people disguised using TinyURL that are not Rickrolls, or bigger ones that tend to require a lot more effort and planning. The first two I’ll do any day of the year if the opportunity arises and for the third one, if I’m putting a lot of effort, I want to go for maximum shock and do it on a random day instead of April Fool’s.

So everyone should go and have fun today, but I’ll sit this one out. I won’t be installing the blue screen of death screensaver, freezing anyone’s office supplies into giant blocks of ice, filling someone’s office cube with packaging peanuts, installing software that randomly inserts keystrokes here and there, or partaking in any other office or non-office related pranks.

And while I’ve already been accused of using this as a way to boost a prank later in the day, it is not. I promise.

I caved.

I really wanted to hate this thing. When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone at MacWorld 2007, I thought it was absolutely silly to have no buttons on a phone. And the fact that the system was so closed and there is no removeable media wasn’t helping anything either. So later that year when it came time to buy a new phone, I went with the AT&T Tilt, a Windows Mobile phone with a slideout QWERTY keyboard and GPS made by HTC. It’s a really great phone. I tweaked the hell out of it–I won’t go into details–but at the end of the day, Windows Mobile is slow, ugly, and slow. It needs a complete overhaul. I got sick of how cumbersome the software was to use and started looking at Google’s Android, but even a few months after the first phone, the T-Mobile G1, has been released, I think it still needs about another year worth of work before it is really ready for primetime.

About that same time, I was playing around with my friend’s iPhone a bit. I found that on my very first try, I could type out a message almost as fast and just as accurately as I could on the QWERTY keyboard on my Tilt. I had a series of other things I thought would be problems with the iPhone, but this was the biggest and it turned out to be a non-issue. Then I started looking through the AppStore, there’s an application for everything! I also realized that even though my Tilt had a microSDHC slot, I never swapped out the card or needed extra space so this wasn’t an issue either. At this point, with the overall slickness of the user interface which is a complete departure from any other smartphone I’ve ever used, I was sold. Very sold.

So a few weeks later, I picked one up for myself and after using it for a month, I can easily say that this is the single best electronic device I have ever used. It’s actually not even a close call. I can do pretty much anything you can imagine with this thing, a lot more than you can do with any other smartphone other there. It’s incredible really.

I generally like things to not be dumbed down for me, but the slickness of the user interface and overall snapiness make it such a joy to use that I don’t even miss some of the more advanced things that Apple likes to hide from its users. And when I do, I can usually get to them via a jailbreak application. So far, I have found very little that I couldn’t pull off with my Tilt if I wanted, but this just does it many levels better and faster. In comparison, the only thing that I don’t have on my iPhone that I had on my Tilt is voice based navigation, but I’m pretty convinced that this will be coming soon through the AppStore.

Even the minor details that Apple added in are wonderful. For example, the screen. The auto-adjusting of brightness based on ambient light is amazing. On my Tilt, I had to map a button to be able to easily adjust how bright the screen was. I had to use it all day long. Since I got the iPhone, I haven’t had to adjust it once. When I’m laying in bed at night, it’s perfect, doesn’t hurt my eyes at all. When I’m in the office, perfect. Outside in direct light, perfect.

Seriously, this thing is always in my hand. I use it constantly. Battery life has been bit of a complaint for a lot of people, but I find no trouble getting through a full day with a lot of usage and I think it could be possible to get through an entire weekend on a single charge just by turning off 3G and wifi and being mindful of data and GPS usage. Really it’s about the same, if not slightly better than, my Tilt.

There are a few minor complaints that I have with it, but they really are minor. Lack of a flash for the camera, lack of video recording, lack of any ability to do any photo album management on the phone itself, and the fact that multitasking is not available for third party apps. Most of my other complaints that I would have had, includind lack of copy and paste, have been fixed simply by jailbreaking the phone.

I think my biggest problem with it now is actually that I’ve gotten completely addicted to the AppStore. I’m constantly looking for new apps to install and mess around with. I think I’ve downloaded like sixty or so of them so far.

I actually don’t use it at as a music player much. I stick with my three year old iPod for everything but the gym. So the iPhone is only loaded up with maybe 20 or 30 albums to get me through my workouts. However, if they could put out an iPhone with as much or more storage than my iPod (60GB), I’d be all over it. However, when I do use it as a music player, I find that I absolutely hate coverflow. I think it’s really annoying to go through more than just a handful of albums that way. And most of my music doesn’t have artwork with it so it kind of defeats the purpose.

I feel like a complete nerdy fanboy for liking this thing the way that I do, but Apple really outdid themselves. I know it’s been two years since it was first announced so I’m a little late, but I can’t get over how obsessed I have become with this thing.

Here are my favorite apps so far:

• Facebook
• Twitterfon – Great free Twitter app
• eWallet – Stores  and encrypts passwords and all kinds of personal information
• Bankarama – Basically just a simple way to keep track of expenses and the money in your bank account
• Guitar Toolkit – Tuner, metronome, chord finder and more
• iMapMyFitness – A nice little interface for mapmyrun.com. Includes GPS tracking for when you’re running outside and can upload your run right to your account
• Toodledo – Interface for toodledo.com, an excellent todo list site
• Now Playing – Great app for getting movie showtimes, reviews, and information and managing your Netflix queue

I have a ton more that I use everyday, but these apps really stand out as being insanely useful. I also was able to set up FTP, MySQL, and text-editing very easily so that if I need to quickly troubleshoot a bug in the software that I develop and manage for my radio station, I’m ready to go. It’s actually a lot easier than it was with my Tilt.

Yesterday, I was sitting here at work minding my own business when all of a sudden my boss was behind me. He says to me “what do you think about using some of Apple’s business development funds to get yourself an iPhone?” The business development funds are the money that Apple gives to my company to pay for pushing their products and to partially pay for my salary. He said the one catch was that I had to get in line then and wait for it. I asked if I would get paid for waiting in line and he said I would so I said “hey, if I’m getting paid for it, yeah, I’ll wait.”

Turns out he was just kidding, but I wouldn’t have complained about getting a free iPhone. 

I certainly wouldn’t buy one myself though. Too much money for a something that doesn’t even do half of what I would ask of it.