Austin, in summary, originally uploaded by Dave Schumaker.

Ending our week in Austin. Here’s a summary of what it was all about!

I originally posted this on gdgt, read and comment here.

In the weeks leading up to the iPad 2 announcement, I clung to a rather steadfast belief that I wasn’t going to be interested in iPad 2. “My iPad is perfectly fine,” I thought, “besides, probably no retina display, slightly faster processor, and maybe a FaceTime camera — big deal!”

I thought about how I would justify this in my head and how it would sound to my friends, all of whom expect me to have whatever the latest and greatest Apple device is. I even thought of the perfect analogy.

This upgrade was going to be akin to the iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS upgrade (interestingly, that’s the argument I’m currently telling myself for the potential iPhone 4 to “iPhone 5” upgrade). More evolutionary than revolutionary, no must have features, pretty much the same design. Did I *really* need to upgrade back then? Probably not.

Anyway, here’s why I thought that was an apropos analogy:

At the time (a month or so ago), based on what all the conventional rumors were saying, the iPad update wasn’t going to be that impressive. Same screen, mostly same form factor, potentially two cameras (FaceTime – yay?), new CPU and increased RAM. The two cameras rumor, I didn’t really care about. Besides, how many times have I used FaceTime? Probably once, and that was to test it out. What I wanted was more RAM and maybe a better display.

So, March 2nd, 2011 arrives and Steve Jobs strolls out of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and surprises everyone. He launches into the standard Apple press event and highlights numbers of apps they’ve sold, misquotes various competitors, and uses almost every synonym related to the word “magical.”

Finally, he announces the iPad 2 and its feature set.
– Same enchanted display
– Magical A5 dual core processor
– 9x otherworldly graphics performance
– Conjuringly thin design
– Spectral battery life
– Wizardly cameras*!

* Notice, like the iPod touch 4th-gen keynote (a device which was renowned for just how crappy its cameras were), Steve made zero mention of the number of megapixels iPad cameras were capable of. Contrast that with iPhone 4, which literally had an order of magnitude more megapixels, Steve couldn’t say “5 megapixels” enough times and tout the phone’s ability to take pictures. And believe me, I love the photos that phone takes.

Anyway, I quickly fell under the influence of the infamous RDF. I wanted one. Needed it even. My current generation iPad instantly looked obsolete. It smelled obsolete. Just using it seemed to hurt my technology street cred.

Here at gdgt HQ, we discussed who would be waiting in line at the Apple Store next Friday and when we should go. Interestingly enough, one person who had an iPad wasn’t excited about it at all. Two others who didn’t have iPads were eventually persuaded / convinced that they needed them. I was all about it. Another remained irrationally committed to his singular cause of being the only person in San Francisco that would eventually own an Android tablet (subject to price and availability, of course).

So, for the last week, I’ve been all about iPad 2. I couldn’t wait for it to arrive. I stressed about how early I should wait in line. I thought about how awesome it will be to use while I’m in Austin for SXSW and our gdgt live event.

And tonight, it all just suddenly changed. The iPad 2 embargo is up, so all the major news organizations and tech publications have posted their detailed reviews of the device. They love it. It’s even faster. Feels good to hold. It still sets the bar for any tablet coming out.

One thing everyone seems to agree on though, is that it’s a brilliant device for people new to tablets or otherwise buying their first iPad. For people who already own an iPad, it’s a tossup. There’s definite speed improvements, and more RAM is great in apps like Safari, but it doesn’t offer much otherwise.

And that’s the feeling I can’t shake. This iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS analogy. Using my iPad tonight (with iOS 4.3), Safari is still fast and mostly responsive. Yeah, the meager amount of RAM in the device means I still lose webpages when I switch tabs, but do I really want to drop another $600 for the device for that reason alone? Probably not.

So, I might sit this round out. I’m not urging or suggesting anyone else do the same, I’m just reflecting on my own thought process over the past few months. For someone with a massive case of gadget envy and weak defenses to the RDF, it’s been a wild roller coaster ride.

So, what will you do? Are you still excited about getting one? Has your enthusiasm been tempered for one reason or another? In the market for something else?

—-

Some caveats:
1. I’m completely aware of the possibility that once we get a review unit in the office, all bets are out the window. I might want one all over again, and just as bad, if not more so.
2. I realize the possibility that some new app or game will come out to take advantage of the features. For example, if they somehow come out with a better version of Civilization that runs better on the new iPad, it’s over. Goodbye. See you later.
3. There are social pressures as well. If my friends, my significant other, or even my parents get one, well we can’t have that now, can we. (Honestly, we probably can. It’s a ridiculous justification.)

Anyway, stay tuned for my post tomorrow, where I write a thousand word essay on why I’ll probably be camping out overnight to get an iPad 2.

Stryker Vineyards, originally uploaded by Dave Schumaker.

Barrel tasting in Sonoma.

I have a little problem.

AT&T won’t stop texting me.

They periodically (multiple times a week) send out these tips and reminders via text message. I’m not charged for them, but it’s just annoying to receive them.

Their solution is to simply text “STOP” back to them. I’ve done that.

It didn’t work.

So, I escalated this war. I replied to stop, with a rage face.

They replied with, “Thanks! We’ll unsubscribe you soon!”

Only they didn’t.

Today, I received this helpful tip for reporting SMS / MMS spam and other abuse. Awesome!

AT&T Free Tip: To report unwanted text or picture/video messages, simply forward the message at no charge to 7726 from your wireless phone. AT&T will investigate the situation and take appropriate action.

Hey! That *is* pretty informative.

Let’s do it.

Step 1: Select text message.

Step 2: Forward message.

Step 3: Report number that text spam is originating from.

Here’s to hoping that AT&T stops spamming me and they properly deal with the people abusing text messages!

Based on a recent discussion I had, here is the current list of iPhones I’ve had. 8! 8 iPhones in 4 generations. To be fair, the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4 were flawless devices for me.

1.) iPhone 1st-gen: Touch screen stopped working.
2.) iPhone 1st-gen: Touch screen stopped working.
3.) iPhone 1st-gen: Some weird short caused constant “device not designed for iPhone. Please use airplane mode” messages to appear, even if nothing was hooked up!
4.) iPhone 1st-gen: Dock connector completely stopped working.
5.) iPhone 3G #1: Upgraded to iPhone 3G by choice. Hoping for relief. Just kidding! Glass screen began to delaminate from iPhone. Weird defect.
6.) iPhone 3G #2: Hopefully it will be perfect for now?
7.) iPhone 3GS: (Upgrade) Worked perfectly!
8.) iPhone 4: (Upgrade) Works perfectly, so far!

(See previously.)

Imagine my surprise this weekend when reading this review of “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in the New York Times and seeing the following quote:

“I definitely felt bad about using my gadgets afterward,” Dave Schumaker wrote on the personal-technology site Gdgt.com, where he is community manager. “I arrived at the show carrying my bag containing a MBP [MacBook Pro], iPad and iPhone — all of which were made in Shenzhen.”

Not too shabby!

(And yes, I still feel bad about these gadgets. Man, oh, man. What a performance by Mike Daisey.)

EDIT: The Big Picture is featuring powerful and scary photos of the damage.

We’re just starting to find out how bad today’s M6.3 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand was.

A former professor of ours when we were in New Zealand in 2006 dropped us an email this evening and let us know that it was going to be bad. He also informed us that the iconic Christchurch Cathedral in the center of the city was destroyed.

It was an absolutely beautiful building – originally built in mid-1800’s and completed in 1904.

As we saw it in 2006:

And as it lays today:

[via TwitPic]

My heart goes out to everyone in Christchurch. This is going to be fairly bad.

Lately, I’ve been on this crazy kick in looking for some sort of lifestreaming software or application. Basically, I (and most likely you — if you’re reading this and one of my internet friends) create a ridiculous amount of data each day. From my tweets, to my foursquare checkins, to my Instagram photos, to uploading things to Flickr, to blogging, to liking videos on YouTube, and sharing articles on Google Reader.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately for one reason: this would make an incredible diary of my life. I’m not the first to think this (just read the Wikipedia article I linked to — people were thinking about this in the 1990’s), but it’s something I’ve found myself becoming obsessed with.

When FriendFeed was announced in 2007, I thought, “this is perfect!” It aggregates data from nearly every web service you can imagine. I happily started plugging things in and letting it archive all my data. It ended up being awesome for a number of reasons.

“Oh, man! What was that thing I tweeted about 2 years ago, about some guy bunting a home run?” Well, Twitter search goes back about 7 days, so that was useless. FriendFeed to the rescue! I could easily search for things I tweeted about (and [website-verb]ed about) from the moment I started importing things.

In August of 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed and proceeded to let the site rot. Since then, there’s been no easy way to export your data, and their search function eventually broke, making the site useless for searching archived data. To this day, FriendFeed is happily pulling in everything I do on the internet, but sadly, I have no way to search for it.

Earlier this week, I found a brilliant PHP script by Claudio Cicali. It scrapes your FriendFeed profile and saves all your data to a JSON file.

After accumulating over 3 years of data, I ran the script (which took an entire evening) and it scraped something like 300K different things I’ve done on the internet in the past few years. The resulting JSON file is over 300MB (now I need to work on a way to parse the data and feed it back into a MySQL database). Incredible!

Sadly though, I don’t think this is a tenable solution. It’s great for fetching all my past data, but who knows how long FriendFeed will remain around. I’d like something more permanent, open-source, and that I can potentially run on my own server.

Locker sounds like it may be what I’m looking for, but it still has a ways to go. Momento on the iPhone sounds exactly like what I need, but you need to manually kick it off (and it won’t pull in data too far in the past).

Anyone have any ideas or thoughts on this?

It’s supposed to rain for something like 9 of the next 10 days. Well, it had to end sometime.

http://yfrog.com/h2os8xdj

[image via Twitter]

What?! Who knew that Social Distortion had a new album out?

http://www.rdio.com/artist/Social_Distortion/album/Hard_Times_And_Nursery_Rhymes_(Deluxe_Edition)/

(Mainly posting this to see if I can embed Rdio playlists via the Embed.ly plugin)