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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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've wanted to include a little blog candy for a while, and this weekend I made it happen. I like how you can see what's playing on my iTunes in iChat or AIM (Adium actually). I wanted to do the same thing on my blog.

I found a nice plugin for iTunes that enables this. Here's how it works:

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I recently upgraded from Tiger to Leopard (the newest Mac OS). The upgrade went VERY smoothly. I chose the basic "upgrade" path rather than the "archive and install" bloat or "scorched earth" start over again. I did this because I do web development on my Mac, and I didn't want to reinstall all that stuff. Yes - I know, most (all?) of it is in /usr/local, but still.

Leopard ships with Apache2 rather than the Apache 1.x version that was in Tiger. This is great, except that Apache hates me.

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