Some people scoff at the idea of a New Year’s resolution. Personally, I relish the challenge. I accept the fact that it probably won’t work out completely, so I tend to like resolutions that are scale based instead of directly quantifiable. For example, if my goal was read more and last year I read 5 books, and this year I read 6 I achieved my goal. If my goal was to read 20 books, that is a little harder. By picking something to generally focus on, I tend to increase my chances of success.

This year, I started with a list of potential resolutions. I just started writing down ideas that could potentially be resolutions. This list takes up an entire page in my field notes, almost 30 potential resolutions. Some of them are more goals. Here are some choice selections:

• Fill my journal
• Run a Marathon
• Do a standing full on the ground
• Do an Olympic distance triathlon
• Fix my personal website
• Blog once per week
• Publish a photo per week
• Make more websites
• Take up crossfit
• Win at something
• Keep my apartment clean
• Learn to cook (seriously)
• Run 50 miles a month
• Build things
• Host more parties
• Do more by hand/from scratch
• Get my mile time under 7 minutes
• Write more
• No more than 1 cup of coffee per day
• Open source my budget
• Learn to bake bread
• Dress better
• Eat more vegitarian
• Learn to draw
• Be more creative

This is a gargantuan list of tasks. Some of them seem more mutually exclusive. I mean, if I didn’t work, could utilize all waking hours, and was partially super-human, I could probably get through all of them. I do work, need time to rest, and am not super-human (sadly). Therefore I have cut the list down.

I’ve decided to focus on one:

Be More Creative

To mean this means more than creating art. I want to be more creative in as many aspects of my life as possible. For example, I’ve been focused on Cheerleading for 15 years of my life. I train by lifting and tumbling. Instead, this year I plan to expand my athletic endeavors to include more skiing, snowboarding, running, swimming, biking (I already did this one, but yeah), rock climbing, etc. I plan to be more creative in the types of foods I eat, and where I get my finances from. I plan to redesign my wordpress blog. I want to focus on design idioms in my online and physical life.

The way I see it, being creative is a way of thinking about life. I intend to change the way I think about my days, hours, minutes, and seconds, free time, vacations, workouts, drives, photographs, and much more.

I have been using Dynadot for a bit as they were about a dollar cheaper than GoDaddy and The Brooks Review recommended them.

As of today it is official. All my domains are gone from GoDaddy. For various reasons that I hope to explain over the next year, I have 25 or so domains. The 21 that were at GoDaddy have now been moved to Dynadot. I’m looking forward to having an easier time administering them, and spending less on them in general.

Here’s my situation. I’ve been running an original Edge based iPhone 16 GB for the past 3+ years. I was waiting for the next new iPhone to come out so I could grab one. I was very excited for the announcement of the iPhone 4S, and unlike everyone in the media, I was not disappointed. I liked the design of the 4, and was happy that they were keeping it a little longer. I really have been wanting some more storage space. I like to have a lot of data on my phone, between my huge photo library and some videos to watch while commuting. So, all in all I was really excited about the new iPhone.

Fast forward, I decide not to rush out and grab it on day one because I wanted to make sure I could get my employee discount, seeing as I work for a company that has a close relationship with AT&T. I ordered it on Sunday. That translated to roughly a week and half delay from when they first started shipping. Still, not a huge deal. It would have been nicer to know when to expect the phone instead of having to check the AT&T website everyday to see if my items had arrived and shipped. To be fair, they sent me an email after the items shipped, but not until I had already been on their website and seen the tracking number.

So the phone arrives last night.

Since I ordered it from the AT&T store, I don’t have AppleCare+, because they didn’t have it when I ordered it. So I stopped by an Apple store on the way home, but they don’t carry +, so they advised me to call. I did, but they were closed by 8, despite the fact that a gentleman on the phone said they would be open until 9 PM PST (The representative I talked to on the phone this morning confirmed this). I tried back twice because I didn’t believe them, still closed. The guy at the store tells me that it’s not going to be an issue if I open my phone tonight, though (he was right about this part).

So I go home and unpack the phone and start setting it up. I’ve been reading on the web that there have been a few issues setting up a new phone based off an existing phones backup. To try and avoid these concerns, I initially decided to try and load my iPhone as a new device. I set it up, and got it running. Was playing around for a bit and then realized that I have tons of data on my phone, like SMS messages and other information.

I woke up early this morning and decided I’d try do it the other way. I went through the process of restoring the iPhone as my old phone. This process only took about 15 minutes and looked to be working pretty well, until I tried to use Siri to set a reminder. It said it couldn’t.

I had to call in this morning to AppleCare to get my AppleCare+ thing taken care of, so I figured I’d ask them about it. It seemed to be related to my iCloud settings. Couldn’t figure out exactly what it was, figured Apple would be a good option in finding an answer. Nope.

I first called in with my serial and before I could even say that I was calling to buy AppleCare+, the representative was on it, and said that I was eligible. I told her that was why I was calling, and she took my credit card information. I didn’t think of it until after, but she never stated how much she was going to charge me. I asked afterward, she said the product was $99, and there might be tax and it could be up to $5.25, but she didn’t think there was. She was VERY polite and kind, but not knowing what you are charging me does not seem right to me. I digress.

I told her I was having issues with iCloud. She walked me through the basic steps of setting up the backup and I kept getting an error message. She put me on hold several times throughout this process and was still unable to help me resolve my issues. Again, she was VERY polite, but did not seem to be able to help.

Finally she gives up and schedules me to talk to an iCloud specialist. Not a huge deal, but the first thing she tells me is that the specialist is going to call me, but when I ask her when, she tells me she doesn’t know. She put me on hold, again, and comes back several minutes later saying that I need to call a specialist. I say, that’s fine, what’s the number and when should I call? She puts me on hold again, only to come back and say that the system was down and she will have to call me back.

When I speak to the specialist, he was very kind, but did not seem to understand the problem I was having. We went through several phone calls, as he required me to have WiFi, but I was out and so did not have access to a WiFi connection.

In the end I spent some time debugging it. It was clear that reminders wouldn’t work if they were turned on in iCloud, but they would work just fine if iCloud sync was off. I went to go look at my calendars and that wasn’t working correctly either. When I went to my .mac account on my phone, asked me for my password. Once I entered that and turned on cloud syncing everything started working.

Also of note, Syncing with iCloud and backing up to iCloud are two very different things. Syncing means having your contacts and mail and calendar on the iCloud server. Backing up is a full device backup. A better explanation of that would have been helpful.

In the end I feel like there was just too much confusion with the setup. Most Apple products have been very plug and play. This device required some serious setup to get it the way I wanted, and it was not clear how to get there. I’m troubled because I’m pretty sure Steve would have taken some peoples jobs over how bad this process is and I’m not convinced Tim Cook has the same mentality.

http://mycharitywater.org/zackruns

Thanks again to all who have donated and also those who have motivated me to run this distance. Especially those who challenged me to run distances of this length.

As a fun piece of trivia, I was once a track captain, though I’ve never been a cheerleading captain.

I should be allowed to use my kindle during landing or take off. People are allowed to hold their books, my kindle is lighter than a book. Nobody believes the old garbage about electronic devices interfering with the cockpit equipment. What about electronic watches? What about pacemakers. Are you telling me that all of this electronic equipment is deadly to a plane?

Seriously, come up with better reasons or allow me to use my kindle through the landing.

Sincerely,
Me

I saw this video on Youtube that gives me just a small ray of hope that maybe someday my skills will improve:

Basically the gist of the video is that everyone goes through a phase of work that they know sucks. It takes years of practice to get past this phase and get to a point where we are good. My problem is that I spend so much time looking for perfect, when good enough will do.

The big problem for me is the cost of digital books. I have a huge library. I’ve spent lots of money on books over the years. Mostly tech books. These books were expensive to buy for stacks of paper, roughly $30 a piece (some more, some less). The problem is that I don’t get a digital copy of the material when I purchase the book, so if I want to read the same book on my kindle I have to buy it again (usually spending another $30).

My largest gripe at the moment is that some tech books cost more digitally then they do for physical copies mailed to my house. Here’s an example:

Other than demand setting price, I see no reason for this. How can a book cost more than $3 dollars more for the digital copy? The costs are so much cheaper with digital copy.

The digital costs aren’t completely invisible, but they seem to far undercut the physical costs. It makes no sense to me why the kindle edition would cost more.

My other major concern with the kindle is that I could not find any easy way to read the web content I wanted to read on my device. That was until I found the Instapaper App. Converting HTML to mobi is not the easiest thing in the world, and the kindle at the moment has a very interesting way of reading web content. Saving a link with Instapaper and transferring it to the kindle makes it incredibly readable. Problem solved.

I think the kindle has been quite successful for Amazon, and I think it is useful. I think it would be better if there was a better way to get started. Apple does this well with their products and I think Amazon is just a step behind. The Kindle has a ton of potential, but it is just shy of that stickiness factor that products like the iPad have.