The weekend elapsed and now we have a plethora of those early adopters complaining about everything from the ring tones to the unsuccessful phone activation. I just find this sort of bouncing attitude very amusing. Before buying their beloved iPhones, these people were certain that Apple could do no wrong. Forget the fact that you’re being asked to pay $499 or $599 for the 4GB and 8GB variety of the iPhone AND a2-year contract with AT&T (the exclusive carrier) that you have to sign to even use this sucker.

There aren’t any numbers that I’ve seen tracking the number of people who bought the iPhone for their own use as opposed to trying to make a quick buck selling it to other fans who were not willing to sit in line for days. But, I can imagine that a large number of iPhones were sold and now imagine that many people all sitting at home on the weekend trying to activate their respective phones. Is it really that much of a surprise that the AT&T servers were overwhelmed? But I guess to some, it truly is surprising as they’re whining about not being able to use their shiny new iPhone.

As much as the features of the iPhone are intriguing, AT&T’s prior history of lackluster service and Cingular’s spotty network hasn’t convinced me to switch over from my very reliable Verizon service. I might someday consider the iPhone, when Verizon starts to offer it and the price as dropped to about $49.99 for the 8GB variety and I can get it as a free upgrade.

Early adopters be damned. You guys can figure out all the quirks and issues, I’ll wait for everything to be ironed out and the 2nd generation phones to hit the market before I even think about getting the iPhone.

Cheers

Through all that mess, I still actively bought, installed, tinkered and played many PC games. At the same time, in the console market, the Nintendo Entertainment System reigned supreme. My father did buy an NES console for my brother and me and we dutifully played through Super Mario Brothers and were amazed that 8-bit graphics.

At this point in time, the PC’s with their SVGA graphics capability severely outpaced the best pixels that a console could throw up on the TV. Additionally, the variety of games available for the PC in a multitude of genres kept me happily ignoring the console for quite some time.

During this time, my brother managed to get his hands on a Sega Genesis, Super NES, Nintendo 64 and XBOX. As you can imagine this trek took us from the early 90’s to early 2000. Throughout this time, consoles were considered by me and many others to be an interesting distraction with no comparison to the PC when gaming was in question.

This premise held true until the release of the Sony Playstation 2 and Microsoft XBOX which finally made PC gamers stop for a moment and take notice. My first exposure to the XBOX came when I decided to borrow my brother’s console to play Jade Empire. I was very quickly blown away by how brilliant the game looked on my 50″ Samsung DLP HDTV. I went to play a few other games and was equally impressed by how far the consoles had come.

During this time, I continued to play PC games but with less frequency and had found that the variety of games and genres were shrinking. Also, I found that I was buying games with less frequency and in the time between purchases some component in my PC had been obsoleted and thus playing that new game not required it’s purchase but also a new PC component.

I got the newest Ubuntu Edgy Eft installer CD and booted into it and was surprised to see that I got the full GNOME window with a usable Linux as opposed to the usual install screen. This is, by far, the smartest thing any Linux distribution can do. Edgy Eft is actually a Live Linux CD that allows you explore what Linux has to offer before choosing to install it. All my peripherals were detected and optimized. So, I could watch videos, listen to music, browse the web and check my mail; all without having actually installed Linux.

Needless to say, I installed Ubuntu and couldn’t be happier. My hats off to an absolutely awesome distribution and installation method!

Cheers

Prime amongst a growing list of things that I haven’t and probably will never get done is being able to play the guitar. Music, in general, has always been a big part of my life. I enjoy listening to it. Singing, albeit badly sometimes, to it and generally being surrounded by it. What better way, I thought, for me to get more involved in music than to play an instrument myself.

I began taking guitar lessons shortly after coming to the US in the early 90’s and tried for close to a year to get my head around all the chords and notes. For one reason or another, I just never managed to get anything going. I later tried to learn on my own and needless to say that went less swimmingly.

There are, of course, many other things that I haven’t had a chance to accomplish, but I’m not going to declare a loss in those yet. I’m still convinced that I can learn to ski given some time on the slopes and being so close to a ski mountain it seems like a shame not to be able to do it.

It is interesting how a life changing event like the birth of your child can make you consider things that went unconsidered just months prior.

Cheers