General

Yes, I plan to buy an iPhone this Friday. I really hate my current LG CU500 since it can’t sync with a Mac, the battery life is horrible, and it doesn’t do POP3 or IMAP email. I do have a nice Gmail app for it, though. Like most phones, web browsing just plain sucks. It includes a music player, which I never use because the sound quality is awful and despite their claims in won’t play AACs, only MP3s.

The killer feature of the iPhone for me is the web browser and email. The iPod features are nice, but even the 8GB model I plan to buy can’t replace my 80GB iPod (which is almost 50% full with 5200 tracks). I’ll have to pick and choose which tracks I load on it. It’ll be perfect for going to the gym, which is the only place I usually don’t take my phone, since I only want to carry one device. I wanted to use my CU500 for that, but the music quality is so bad that I gave up on it.

I joined Facebook after Scoble kept tweeting about it all night.

I’m finally home after being away for more than two weeks.

American Airlines went 3 for 3, delaying my luggage on all 3 legs of my trip. It happened yet again when I arrived home. I flew from SFO to DFW yesterday. Due to weather conditions, all flights in and out of DFW were delayed for an hour or longer, so I didn’t miss my connecting flight. We finally landed a little after midnight. I didn’t leave the airport until after 1AM dealing with baggage service, along with a lot of other people. They finally delivered my bag at 7:30 this morning (they had told me it would be sometime between 8AM and noon). According to the tag, my bag travelled via LAX.

My bag was also delayed flying from here to Vancouver and from Vancouver to San Francisco. In both cases, they delivered it to my hotel later that night.

Once again my checked luggage was delayed. I’m at the hotel now and my bag isn’t here. Unlike Vancouver, the airline paged me and told me that my bag went out on the flight after mine, since the flight from Vancouver to Seattle was delayed, which didn’t give them enough time to transfer my luggage. It should be delivered here between 8 & 10PM tonight.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for WWDC in San Francisco. I enjoyed the last week in Vancouver and I’m looking forward to coming back here again next month. Vancouver is my favorite city. It’s very easy to get around downtown without a car and Vancouver has more great restaurants than any other city I’ve been to, including New York and San Francisco.

This is the first time I’ve been in Vancouver for the weekend, so I took advantage of it to play tourist for a change. I didn’t rent a car here, so I took the Big Bus tour, which is $35 for two days, letting you can get on and off the bus at any stop all day.

I had planned to go to Stanley Park, one of the largest urban parks anywhere in the world. Instead I ended up spending the day at Granville Island, a popular tourist spot with a huge market, lots of shops, and street performers.

This is the first stop in Gas Town next to the steam clock.

The other pictures are from Granville Island.

I’ve posted a full photo gallery here. I’ll post more tomorrow.

I managed to get my iPod working again, by restoring it from a different Mac with iTunes 7.0. Here’s a recap of how to restore an iPod if this ever happens to you.

1. First thing to try is resetting the iPod, by toggling the hold switch on and off and immediately pressing MENU and the center button. At this point, the iPod should reboot. In my case, it kept rebooting continuously and wouldn’t appear in iTunes or on the desktop.

2. If it still doesn’t appear, after resetting it, as soon as the apple logo appears, hit the center button and PLAY to put it in disk mode. It should then be visible on the desktop, and if you’re luck, in iTunes. At this point you should be able to restore it from iTunes. In my case, iTunes would crash immediately when I tried to restore it.

3. As a last resort if everything else fails multiple times, and if it doesn’t appear in iTunes, run Disk Utility and format it. At this point, you should be able to restore it in iTunes. Unfortunately iTunes 7.2 would crash immediately on my MacBook Pro. All you can do with the iPod now is restore it – the iPod will display a white screen telling you to connect it to a computer to restore it, and iTunes will recognize it as being in recovery mode and tell you to restore it. If you can restore it now, you should be OK. I ended up using a different Mac at work running iTunes 7.0 and I was able to restore it and get it working again.

When I went to bed last night, my iTunes was still restoring my iPod and it appeared to be working. I got up a few hours later to check on it and iTunes was showing an alert saying that the iPod was in restore mode and I needed to restore before I can proceed. When I attempted to restore, iTunes crashed. Since I have a 5G iPod, there’s no stand-alone iPod updater. I’ll try on another Mac or PC at the office today.

Since I came here for work, I spent most of the day in the office. As always, I like to explore downtown Vancouver after work. I don’t have a car here, but fortunately downtown is very easy to get around by foot. The weather is great; it’s in the 70s and I was able to wear a T-shirt with no jacket.

My hotel is on Beatty street one block away from Robson, one of the main streets downtown. I’m just a few blocks away from Granville street, the main North/South street. I had dinner at one of the many Pan-Asian restaurants on Robson street and spent several hours at Chapters, my favorite book store. I didn’t make it to Charlie’s Music World, my favorite CD store, but I still have plenty of time here.

I arrived at my hotel in Vancouver, but my checked bag didn’t make it. It supposedly went out on the next flight (along with about 3 others from my flight) and it will be sent here later tonight.

Fort Lauderdale airport has the best free wireless internet. Unfortunately I had to connect through LAX.

LAX really sucks. Since my flight to Vancouver was on Alaska airlines, I had to take two shuttle busses from the American Airlines terminal to the opposite side of the airport. The food is outrageously expensive – the only place in that terminal is Burger King and everything cost $10. Of course there was no free WiFi.

I love Vancouver. I just hope my bag arrives tonight.

Update: My bag arrived at 10:30PM with everything intact, including my WD 120G USB drive with a backup image of my MacBook Pro.