I am an Apple fanboy, and I readily admit it. I drank the juice.

We have a Mac Mini (single core - old skool) that our kids use and a shiny iMac for us. I use a MacBook Pro at work (G5 prior to that, and a purple iMac before that). Before the Mini became our kids' they had a really old G3 iMac that finally died after about 10 years of dutiful service.

We have 2 iPhones now, which are pretty cool. We also have a few other iPods (shuffle, nano, and video).

We have been long-time .Mac subscribers, and actually use everything offered by the service. This is the rub.

You may know already that the launch of the iPhone coincided with the relaunch of .Mac into MobileMe. Apple bit off a very large bite coordinating all of the things that had to come together. They dropped the ball, too. I would also say that AT&T did some fumbling, too, but I think Apple did the most fumbling.

What's my beef?

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We had a really good time seeing an old friend play at a local outdoor arena last Friday night.

I am cross-posting with my family blog for this entry. Go check it out!

UPDATE (20080729): AT&T put a captcha on the order status page, so the script below no longer works. It was fun while it lasted.

Lots of people ordered iPhones at AT&T locations under the Direct Fulfillment method, and we are getting anxious. They are shipping out, but in more of a trickle than a flood. I found a forum of other people who are just as neurotic about it as I am, which makes me feel a little better. This time last week was the Day Of The iPhone Launch, and I was like a kid on Christmas morning. I could Not Sit Still.

So now we wait.

Someone on the forum whipped up a screen scraping script that would tell you how the orders for the store you placed your order is fairing. We brought his server down. He came up with another version of the page, which is here.

I also decided to whip up a quick and dirty ruby script that does the same thing. I called it att.rb on my compy.

UPDATE: fixed some formatting with the code vs blog markup and added the queue. UPDATE 2: redid code to be a little more ruby and a lot less perl. UPDATE 3: Added better reporting on cancel status.

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I was like a kid on Christmas morning this past Friday. I took off early and my wife and I met up with another couple for a date. At the Apple store. The line in the afternoon was at least 2 hours in the hot sun, though. Bummer. I was thinking the line would have died down by then. Lines the next day were still multi-hour waits, though.

Dang!

So we went to the AT&T store Friday night to place our orders. They are on backorder as I type this. Apple wasn't expecting the sales they had this weekend.

My friends went back to the Apple store Friday night and were able to get their phones already. Yes, I am jealous.

I want my iPhone!!!

I found a lot of documentation that told me how to put an object into a YAML file. In my particular case I am reading through a file that needs to create or update a lot of things. I show the user what's about to happen and give them 1 last chance to back out.

I store each set of changes/additions in an object, and it works great. You have something that is nice and legible, too.

The problem is that retrieving the info from the YAML file was proving difficult for me.

I did what this documentation told me to do, and I got an error. After much googling and cursing, I found this post that said they also had trouble and gave up because XML is easier.

F that.

So I got it to work, and here's what I did...

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I work for a market research company that is also a part of AOL (which is also a part of Time Warner). Our stock price is not awesome right now, either.

So I went to an industry "technology" conference in NYC a week or two ago. It was really just an excuse for the industry organization to bilk some cash out of our companies. The content was really light, and I was disappointed to see that the ratio of legit "tech" people to "brass" people was terribly skewed in the executives' favor.

That conference either needs to be redone to actually cover technology, or it needs to go away and be rolled back into the main organization conference. That's just my opinion.

To balance the scales I am now going to the Lone Star Ruby Conference in Austin. It's wicked cheap, and filled to the brim with content. The creator of ruby is also speaking. How freaking cool is that?!?

I'm totally pumped.