I’ve just done something most of my friends will find shocking. I’ve just cancelled my mobile phone service with AT&T and switched to another carrier. More importantly, I’ve switched away from the iPhone. Really. And I’m sleeping better for it.

This is about the point when my iPhone-owning friends look at me like I’ve been hitting the egg nog a bit too hard. Upon hearing this story, one of them followed the look up with: “You’d have to pry my iPhone out of my cold, dead hands.” Not so long ago, I might have agreed with her. So what changed my mind?

One thing I have to point out is that I have the iPhone 2G, which I ordered online the very first day they became available some 2 1/2 years ago. (Personally, I like the way they look in comparison to the 3G models.) Having a general-purpose pocket computer improved my daily life in a thousand different ways, and I soon came to rely on it to function.

Now, I live in San Francisco, which along with New York City is one of the two most iPhone-heavy cities in the country—it seems like everyone and their dog has one here in SF. What this means is that AT&T’s at-best-lackluster service is truly awful here. There are entire swathes of the city where I get little or no service. In the Mission, one of the only flat neighborhoods in SF, I could not use my phone indoors. I had to stand out on my driveway to get a signal, and even then I had a less than 50% chance of connecting a call or keeping it up on a weekend. The EDGE network, there and in the rest of the city, was nothing short of unusable. I can’t count the number of times I stood at a bus stop trying futilely to load the pure-text website that would tell me when the next notoriously slow bus would arrive, only to see the damn bus beat the iPhone. It became painfully obvious that I was paying $80 a month for a data plan I couldn’t use at all. Correction: $80 a month for nothing.

In fact, it became painfully obvious that what I had wasn’t an iPhone, but an iPod Touch with a camera. So for the past few months, during which time AT&T’s service has been growing steadily worse—you’d think that instead of spending however many millions of dollars on those ridiculous Luke Wilson commercials, they’d, I don’t know, put a few more fucking towers in SF or NYC—I’d seriously been considering divorcing AT&T and finding someone who cared about me. Or at least didn’t piss me off daily.

The last straw came last weekend, when AT&T tried to quietly stop selling iPhones in NYC. It seemed clear then, if it hadn’t before, that things will only get worse before they get better. If they ever do—it’s arguable that they’ll never get better for the 2G network. The very next day, I stopped by my local Best Buy and spent $50 for a Boost Mobile phone. 10¢ a minute to talk, 10¢ per text message, pay as you go. It’ll pay for itself within a month. Less, even.

Even though it’s a cheap piece of plastic, and I have to put numbers into the address book manually (how quaint!), I can actually make (and receive) calls on it.

Have a happy new year, everyone. I know my AT&T-free one will be.

So I went to Safeway during halftime today to get a sandwich for lunch, and imagine my dismay when I find out that they’ve taken my favorite sandwich, the Hail Caesar, off the menu. I don’t get it. Why? Why would you take clearly the best sandwich on the menu off the menu? I feel betrayed.

Charles Arthur is an idiot—he appears to be telling people that it’s perfectly all right to violate Apple’s EULA by upgrading straight from Tiger to Snow Leopard and still only paying the $29 upgrade-from-Leopard price, and that since you can get away with purchasing just one copy of the OS and installing it on multiple computers, that you should. No, what surprises me is that this piece of “journalism” apparently got past his editor and got published on the Guardian’s website. Last I heard, editors are supposed to pay attention to pesky things like laws, or barring that, ethics.

No, I take that back. Maybe he’s not dumb. Maybe he’s just a charlatan. Jesus. (hat tip: George)

So I just got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and I thought, as I often do, that I need to do something about this. See, I have a routine when I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night:

I’ll shuffle over to my bathroom, which coming from my bedroom is just before the corner I round to get into the kitchen. Then what I’ll do is, standing just outside the bathroom, I’ll lean forward, turn my head away, squinch my eyes shut, then grope for the kitchen light switch to turn it on. Then, still looking away, I’ll back up quickly and go into the bathroom, using the light shrapnel from the kitchen to see by so that I don’t fall into the bathtub and crack my head open, because my bathroom is pitch black.

After I’m done, I do the whole squinch-eyed groping-for-the-light-switch routine in reverse, and all because I don’t want to blind myself. Clearly, I am in need of a night light. Equally clearly, it has to be a blue canary night light. Lite.

But tragically, there is no such thing. And I can’t understand why. Google searches for “blue canary night light,” “blue canary nite lite,” and “blue canary night lite” all turn up song lyrics and forum posts from frustrated souls like me bemoaning the lack of a purchasable blue canary night lite. I mean, wtf? If I can get a leg lamp, why can’t I get a blue canary night lite? God.

Entertainingly, however, every one of the sponsored links on a search for “blue canary” is night-light-related. But this situation still sucks.

I do not own a Kindle. I do not plan to own one in the near future. The reasons for which are manifold, among them the hefty price tag. What’s the deal-breaker for me, though, is the lack of a companion desktop app. I’m at one of my computers pretty much constantly, so having a desktop solution with which to read ebooks is pretty important to me. Sadly, there’s no such thing in the Kindle ecosystem.

What I’ve been using up till now is Adobe Reader, followed by Adobe Digital Editions, both of which are some of the sorriest excuses for software I’ve ever had to use. Aside from the whole activations clusterfuck—and believe me, there’s really no other word for it—and the indifferent-at-best customer support, ADE has two “features” that move this, ah, software from terrible to appalling:

• ADE crashes after startup. Every time. I have to restart it after the first crash. Every time. Though it’s worse when you have a book open rather than the library list view.
• Turning a page takes 5 seconds. Seriously. And this is on non-reflowable books. How much processing can turning the page possibly take?

Put that all together and what do you have? A recipe for disaster, and the reason I will never buy an Adobe-format ebook ever again.

So what are my alternatives? Palm Desktop reader? No, I don’t have a Palm OS device, and my experience with Palm software in the past has not been positive. MobiPocket? Double no. What the hell is a mobipocket anyway? Microsoft Reader? N—well, hold on there. Microsoft Reader actually has one of the most usable and thoughtful designs for an ebook reader I’ve ever used. All MS reader format ebooks are reflowable, and you can set the font size and text clarity, which makes for a solid, comfortable reading experience.. Pretty much all I need, except, oh yeah, I need to start up my Windows VM to run it. So, no.

What’s left? Enter the Barnes & Noble eReader, which as far as readers go is the best one I’ve ever seen—turns out it’s actually just Palm reader rebranded. Not that it doesn’t have its flaws, mind you—for one thing, the settings are split up into two sections, accessed from two different menus, using non-intuitive keyboard shortcuts—Cmd-S for view settings? Really? Have they never used Mac software before?—it’s not Mac-like at all. That said, you can change line spacing, page background (though I don’t know why you’d want to use anything but plain white), font face, size, color, and even highlight color pretty much arbitrarily, plus add bookmarks and annotations. Where it counts, this little app works like a charm. It loads fast, pages fast, and remembers where you were on quit. Pretty much everything you could ask for, though I’d like a bit finer-grained control on the line-spacing. While it definitely has some kinks, the software nails what’s important. Add into the mix a selection to rival the Kindle’s, and you’ve got a formidable competitor.

So, long story short, I’ve switched over to the B&N reader, but—you knew this was coming, didn’t you?—my story is not without its adventures:

I hadn’t logged on to the B&N website in ages, so I didn’t remember my password, nor was it anywhere in my keychain. So I went to reset it. Now, I use Keychain Access to randomly generate all my passwords, and these days I’m using 15-character ones except where expressly forbidden. So without much reading of instructions (I’ve reset my password on a website a time or three), I put in my shiny new randomly-generated 15-character password, and it went through without a hitch. The website said my password had been changed, and then asked me to log in with the new one…pretty much SOP, right? Of course, this is where things started going south. I put in my new password, and the site came back with an error that there was no record of that username/password combination in their records. I was like, WTF? I just changed my password.

Okay, I thought. Maybe it just hasn’t propagated through the system yet, or something. I’ll just wait a few minutes. I waited for about 15, for good measure, then tried again. No dice. So I kept trying again and again, until I finally got a “your account has been locked due to too many failed login attempts” error, suggesting that I either call B&N customer support or reset my password again. So I did the latter, and I got the same problem. I reset the password once again, before I finally read the fine print and realized that the password had to be 6-12 characters long (And why the arbitrary limit? This should not be an issue on modern websites.) at most.

So I reset my password yet again, this time taking care to use a password no longer than 12 characters. This time when I tried to log in, it worked.

…So, wait, let me get this straight: first, there is a ludicrous arbitrary limit on the password size. Annoying, but not outrageous. No, what is outrageous, what is simply crazy-making, is the fact that the B&N site does not appear to validate the password length. It saves an invalid password with no indication of a problem whatsoever, and then fails login with a non-descriptive error message. What, is this such a new thing that no website has ever done it before? Oh my god, changing a password online! How high tech! No one’s ever done that before. Right?!

Are you fucking kidding me? How could you not validate your password field? What is this, amateur hour? Jesus H.

RadioShack’s new “The Shack” campaign is “plain lame.”

Ran into this one today, in somewhat unique circumstances: I had a hover style where buttons inside a table row only appeared when the mouse was over the row, and if you clicked on one of the buttons but moved the mouse into another row before releasing the mouse button, the previous row would stay highlighted.

The authoritative writeup of the bug, and most others, refer to the problem happening with dynamically-displayed submenus, but make little mention of my particular problem. There was some hope that triggering hasLayout would fix the problem, as it’s the closest thing we have to a magic bullet, but it (shocker!) didn’t work for me.

What did work for me was reverting back to the brute-force method one had to use for older versions of IE: using JavaScript onmouseover/onmouseout events to trigger a hover style¹ rather than the :hover pseudoclass. So much for IE7 implementing :hover on non-anchor elements. Sigh.

¹ See the first comment. And shame on you, Webmaster World, for not having permalinks to the comments. Get a load of their generated source, too: they’re still using font tags. Seriously?! And this is a resource for webmasters? Come on.

According to a blogger and Kindle owner, content publishers have put arbitrary simultaneous device limits on Kindle books. The limits vary from book to book, and there is no way for users to be able to tell what those limits are until they hit them.

But here’s the kicker. Amazon customer service reps apparently don’t know this—some of them, or at least the one this guy talked to, think that the limits aren’t on simultaneous devices, but on total number of downloads, and that once the limits are reached, the only way to be able to download the book again (if, say, you’ve upgraded your Kindle, or iPhone, or iPod Touch software to a new version and need to redownload all your books) is to repurchase it.

This is appalling for several reasons. One, that Amazon’s normally not-terrible customer service fell down on the job in spectacular fashion, and two, that it has been painfully reinforced (again) that content publishers really don’t get it. Again, why is it that people who make the effort to legitimately purchase content are the ones who get penalized? The people who pirate content aren’t affected by these draconian and ineffective measures in the least. It’s the honest ones who suffer.

Way to make sure that your customers stay loyal, guys. Jesus.

(via The Atlantic by way of InstaPundit)

was unimpressive at best. The script was terrible, and they went nowhere with clearly the most interesting character in the movie—hint: it wasn’t John Connor. I was expecting more. I’ll give it a low 3 stars.

Both the major film festivals in San Francisco this year were disappointing; SFIAAFF was too small, and SFIFF had a high percentage of bad movies. Plus, and I still don’t know why, SFIFF is still using those #)*(@&! pencil-in ballots (though I made it a point to tell everyone who offered me a ballot that I wouldn’t take one until they had tear ballots). My reviews for the festival follow:

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