It’s gorgeous, of course. And in accordance with the international laws of humor, existentialism and cellular service, the very first call I received on my spanking new iPhone…wait for it…dropped.

The iPhone shipped last Saturday, is supposed to arrive Thursday, and every day in between seems 3 times as long. Aargh.

Faithful readers (all two of you) will know that I haven’t been updating my site with great regularity in the past months, but that’s all going to change soon.

With the recent release of WordPress 3.0, I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with the new custom post types feature, and I’ve gotta say that I’m pretty excited about it.

For those who want to use WP as a GUI to create arbitrary objects, tables and URLs in a relational manner—as you would with a web application framework like Rails or Django—you’re still better off using something like Pods CMS. However, in case that you want to use WP more like a traditional CMS, where the primary content still consists of text-based posts, WP 3.0 is the answer for your needs.

In the coming weeks, I plan to overhaul my web presence:

• I’m consolidating all my 5 sites into 1 (this one, since it’s the most actively read and maintained).
• Part of that consolidation will be putting together all the reviews I write (books, music, movies, software) in a single, cohesive format (read: custom post type) that will make them easier to find and browse. That is, depending upon whether I can find some way to batch-convert existing posts into the new post type.
• I’m also going to introduce a lighter form of post, in the tradition of Tumblr and Daring Fireball. These tumbles will be interspersed with my regular posts, and will hopefully make it easier for me to share links and easier for you to browse to them—by clicking on the title rather than hunting around inside the post to find them. You can see an example of my first tumble below (Aaaaarrrgggggghhhhh!), where you’ll notice a (this is the technical term) tumble-y icon off to the right, that will provide the permalink for easier, er, re-tumbling.

?!?! over iPhone 4, and I kind of am too^†, but I gotta tell ya, what’s really making me go ?!?! is Safari 5. Included:

• Safari reader, a feature that works much like Arc90′s popular Readability bookmarklet by detecting when the currently loaded web page has an article, and allowing the user to reformat the page in an easy-to-read, scrollable view that cuts the obnoxious ads out. What’s more, they actually go through every page of multi-page articles and concatenate them together for one seamless, easy reading experience. Say it with me: ?!?!

  Now, you might be thinking, “How are the content providers going to let this stand, when it could wreak havoc with their ad sales?” Well, grasshopper, its at least partly because when Safari is concatenating the pages’ content, it does a full HTTP request on each page, so the innocent kitten publishers who artificially split up short articles into 3 and 4 and more pages just to maximize ad annoyance views don’t have to worry about losing their accustomed number of ad-frame loads.

• A smarter address field, that no longer requires you to remember exact URLs; it searches within (rather than at the beginning of) the URLs and page titles in your history like Firefox has been doing for months (perhaps years) now. I’ve got two things to say to that: hallelujah, and about damn time.

• Never expected this, but sanctioned, easy to install, secure extensions, that can be developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. ?!?! Also, ROCK.

• Then, of course, is the improved HTML5 support and the ever more feature-packed web inspector, the icing and the cherry, respectively, on the sundae.

All in all, pretty ?!?! for me.

^† I gotta tell ya something else. Humble pie tastes terrible. Turns out my new cheapie phone doesn’t have much going for it other than its cheapness. I can at least get calls on it more reliably than the iPhone 2G, but text messages don’t work. At all. Seriously. All my friends have stopped sending me text messages, because literally more than half of their messages to me never get there. Not get there late, which sometimes happens too, but never get to me at all.

Then there are the times when I myself am trying to send a text, and the phone (a $*@#!^% Motorola i465) reports that the message was sent, though it actually wasn’t, and I’ll have no idea that the message never got out the door until I happen to reboot my phone days later, and all the recipients are asking me why they’re getting replies to their messages so late.

In fact, if I had an actual piece of crap the size of my phone, it’d be more useful, because then I could use it as fertilizer. This…thing isn’t worth the plastic it’s made of. So, well, iPhone 4. As much as I loathe and detest the idea of giving AT&T my money again, at least I’ll get a nice phone in the bargain.