My favorite things about the iPhone 2.0 software update:

- ability to select multiple email messages and move/delete them all at once

- iPhone can now play *.wav attachments on emails, such as the ones sent by Vonage containing voice mails from my other phone number

- Apple Remote application, which allows you to control iTunes over wifi to play music on your home stereo

- screenshots now possible, by briefly pressing the home & sleep buttons simultaneously

- ability to save images from emails and web pages

My biggest outstanding gripes:

- still no copy & paste

- still no way to search your email

- still no way to upload files to websites in Safari

- still no freakin’ scale bar in the maps application

- still no way to view the full names of songs, videos, photo albums, etc, so even moderately long (~25 character) names are impossible to read fully

- weather app still doesn’t remember the last-displayed forecast, so if you can’t get a network connection, or if the weather update fails as it occasionally does, you get nothing; it should just display the data from the last update

- still no tethering, though this is probably an artificial AT&T limitation more than anything else

I haven’t yet upgraded to iPhone hardware version 2.0, better known as iPhone 3G, because I’m waiting for them to release a 32 GB version, which I expect will happen in September or January.  But here are the things I’m most looking forward to in the iPhone 3G:

- improved audio quality and increased audio volume from the built-in speaker; I hardly ever use headphones but I use the built-in speaker daily for listening to & watching podcasts, but it’s too quiet if you’re in a room with say an air conditioner, or if you’re eating crunchy cereal

- flush headphone jack: not that this is that big of a deal with the original iPhone because you just need to use a $10 adapter, but it can be a pain if you happen to be without that adapter and want to plug something into the iPhone

Ironically, the 3 biggest selling points of the new iPhone -- 3G, GPS, and "lower cost" -- don’t matter much to me.  I’m on wifi 99% of the time, and when I’m not, EDGE is plenty fast, so 3G isn’t all that exciting to me.  GPS is cool but the original iPhone’s "Locate me" feature using cell towers and wifi signals for location actually works extremely well, just not to the level of precision of GPS.  And the "lower cost" of $199 or $299 instead of $399 or $499 (or $599 as it was when I bought it) doesn’t matter for two reasons: first, because the iPhone is such an amazing and useful device and has become such an integral part of my daily routine & workflow that I would buy the 32 GB version at $599 again if I had to.  And second, the contract price has actually gone up by $10 per month, which means that over the life of the contract, the TCO is about the same anyway -- in other words, Apple is tacitly acknowledging that people really are falling for the cell phone pricing shell game that exists in the US cell phone market, and that in order to fully compete in that market, Apple has to play the same stupid game.

faildogs.com is the site I was talking about at the picnic today.  Here’s an example:

Aunt Nancy and Uncle Bob just sent us some great photos of our whitewater rafting trip in Steamboat Springs.  They stood on the shore and patiently waited the hour or so it took for us to come down the river and pass their spot.

When you land in Philadelphia after flying from Colorado, the first thing you think is, "Where are all the mountains?"  And the second thing is, "Man, there are trees everywhere."

Having been born and raised in Pennsylvania, I have grown accustomed to all the trees, to the point that I don’t even think we have an abnormal amount of trees.  But being in Colorado, with its vast open ranges, mountains, and whitewater rivers, dotted but not smothered in trees, I feel like I’m on another planet.

This trip was only a short 5 days, and it stormed or threatened to storm almost every day, but we managed to get in a couple of hikes, a bike ride, a trip down the Alpine Slide, some whitewater rafting, and a trip to the rodeo.

The bike ride and the rafting were both along the Yampa River, which is slow and tranquil in some spots and fairly frothy in others -- it’s considered a stage 2 whitewater, though probably only because of one or two drops of perhaps 3-5 feet.  Most of its whitewater sections along the ~5 mile, 90-minute trip are pretty tame; we were neither required nor advised to wear helmets for example.  But the scenic beauty of the river, the surrounding landscape, and the charming backyards of Steamboat Springs make it an extremely enjoyable ride even if the rafting isn’t extreme.

During our first hike, at Mad Creek, I got into the creek up to my waist; and at the end of our bike ride I got into the Yampa completely.  The water was freezing both times, but it was at least a hot sunny day for the bike ride.  When I got into Mad Creek, it was the middle of a downpour.  But I generally can’t resist getting into rivers and lakes given the opportunity.

I’d never ridden an Alpine Slide before, but I gather that it’s something icy, fast, and fun in the winter.  And in the summer they let you ride down it on these little carts that are about twice the size of a skateboard, with 2 wheels on one end and just friction on the other end, to prevent you from going too fast down the long concrete slide.  There’s a single joystick-like control that you push forward to go and pull back on to stop.  The track itself is probably a quarter-mile long, just winding back and forth down the mountain.

As we rode the chairlift up to the top, a girl went down the slide below us, going full speed, and wiped out pretty badly right in front of us on the first curve.  Some of her arms and legs went over the side of the track, and she ended up with a big gash in her hand and probably some nasty scrapes all over.  If I hadn’t seen that, I might have just floored it when it was my turn, falsely assuming that the arched sides of the track would keep me safe all the way down.

The rodeo was pretty interesting and not exactly the redneck-infested event that you might expect, though we weren’t in the south so maybe you wouldn’t expect that.  The best part was the "calf scramble," where they invite all the 6-12 year old kids into the arena and then let loose a calf which has a ribbon on its tail; the kid who gets the ribbon wins.  There must have been 200 kids and it was a hilarious sight to see the mob of them chasing this calf, which was running for its life.  They then repeated this event with kids 5 and under and using a sheep instead of a calf; this had the added bonus of the sheep bounding right on top of the mob of kids as it tried to escape.

On Saturday we had to drive from Steamboat to Denver to catch our flight home.  It’s a 4-hour trip, but the country out there is just beautiful, and since our rental F-150 had a line-in jack through which we could play the music on our iPhones, it was a nice drive.  We passed through Winter Park, which has a restaurant called Fontenot’s, and I got a dish called Orzo Pasta Salad.  It’s a base of cold orzo -- which I’d never had nor heard of before -- with field greens on top, then hot sauteed mushrooms in a "roasted red pepper balsamic dressing," and finally Pecorino cheese on top of that.  I ordered it without the actual red peppers, and would have also omitted the onions had I known they would be hiding in it; but regardless it was an amazing meal.

Another great thing about Colorado is the climate: whereas in PA, during the summer, the temperature may go from a high of sweltering 90 degrees to a low of sweltering 70 degrees, in Steamboat Springs it goes from the 80s to the 40s.  So you get the nice hot summer days and still have nice cool nights.  The pool at the condo was even heated, so while not great for daytime swimming, it was a giant hot tub at night.

It’s difficult to describe just how different and amazing Colorado, and Steamboat in particular, is.  It’s huge, it’s wide open, the sky is far more blue, the rivers are clean, and the views, pretty much no matter where you look, are breathtaking: there are mountains everywhere, many of them snow-capped all year ’round.  Not to mention the skiing and snowboarding in the winter...

I’ve been to Steamboat 3 times now, and it’s hard to leave.  I feel like I belong there.  We would move to Steamboat in a heartbeat if it weren’t for the fact that we’d miss all of our family in PA too much.  But Kim’s mom would follow us there.  So I know I won’t be able to convince all of my family to come, but I figure at least one or two of you would be down for it.  Rolly and Margie?  Maria?  ...Sinjin?

Kim was on photo duty for this trip; here are her albums:

Drive to Colorado

Mad Creek Hike

Steamboat Lake Hike / Aunt Nancy & Uncle Robert Visit

Biking and the Alpine Slide

Whitewater Rafting

Rodeo and 4th of July Fireworks

Drive to Denver

Here is a bit of Scott Adams’ latest:

When it comes to picking our next president, I can’t decide if I prefer the smooth-talking, inspirational candidate who promises to give my money to people who don’t work as hard as I do, or the old, short, ugly, angry guy with one good arm who graduated at the bottom of his class and somehow managed to shag a hot heiress and become a contender for president.  It seems dangerous to underestimate that guy.

When I first posted these videos of my little buddy a few months ago, there was apparently a problem with the way I formatted the videos, because many of you couldn’t view them.  Well I’ve now fixed them, so everyone should be able to see them just fine, even on your iPhones.  Let me know if not!

On a technical note, here’s the command I used to create these files:

ffmpeg -y -threads 2 -i video.avi -s 480x320 -r 29.97 -vcodec mpeg4 -g 300 -b 350k -async 50 -acodec aac -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 128k video.mp4

The videos came out of the camera as 640x480 AVI files consuming about 2 MB for each second of video.  The conversion to 480x320 in MP4 format produced files using only 58 KB per second of video.  The first file, for example, started out as a 45 MB AVI and ended up as a 1.4 MB MP4, which is a reduction of about 97%.

Encodable.com has a great new writeup (ahem) on how to avoid viruses, spyware, and other malware on your PC.  I posted it on the tech blog but wanted to specifically mention it here too, since it’s a topic of general interest.

Here is yet another glowing movie review by me.  Noticing this trend, I’d like to begin by pointing out that we have Netflix, and we watch probably about 6 movies each month; so it’s not that I just love every movie that comes out, it’s that I only post about the great ones.

Now, about The Happening: as predicted, I loved this movie.  Evidently I’m in the minority, though, as it’s gotten a mostly rotten rating on the tomatometer.

I think in order to appreciate The Happening, you have to be able to realize, admit, and/or accept that you’ve been desensitized over the years by scores of movies with gratuitous drama, slapstick comedy, explosions, and special effects.  Those things have their place, but when you’ve been pummeled by film after film of non-stop in-your-face madness, it can be hard to appreciate movies that are more subtle.

In fact, that applies to the other great M. Night movies too: Unbreakable and The Village.  They’re 2 of my favorite movies of all time; I like them better than The Sixth Sense despite the critical acclaim that that movie received.  I didn’t like Signs or Lady in the Water as much, though, so it’s not that I think M. Night is King Midas.

So what’s so great about The Happening?  Mark Wahlberg, for one thing.  But in general, the movie is quiet and subtle, which I think allows it to be intricate and interesting.  It’s also hilarious: there are a few scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny, and the fact that they’re in the midst of a film that’s totally not a comedy only makes them more comical.

Some reviews of the movie say that it portrays small-town Pennsylvanians in an offensive way, but I’m from small-town PA and I love PA and I didn’t get that vibe.  Others say that its message is pretentiously environmentalist; again, that’s a vibe I didn’t get, and though I recognize that aspect of the plot, it’s nothing at all like, say, The Day After Tomorrow.

It would perhaps be fair to describe The Happening as anticlimactic, but I don’t think that detracts from the movie as much as it would in other, more typical action-packed kinds of movies.  And I’m seeing comments that this was a stay-till-after-the-credits movie, which we did not; I suppose it’d be prudent to make that standard policy given the huge post-credit event that apparently happens in Iron Man.  But we virtually never see movies in theaters anymore, which brings me to...

Movie theaters suck.  Each of our tickets cost ten dollars.  The cheapest item at the concession stand was a bottle of water for $3.75.  Of course I brought my own bottle of water, but I had to sneak it in like a tiny criminal.  The smallest popcorn you could get was $4.50.  For that price you can buy an entire box of popcorn -- six whole bags -- and it’ll taste better too.  Then we had to listen to a couple of meatheads yakking through all the previews and the first ten minutes of the movie, until we finally moved across the theater to get away from them.

It’s certainly nice to see a film on the big screen with surround sound, and going out to the movies is a nice experience in a way, but the exorbitant prices and obnoxious people just make me mad.  I guess that’s why Netflix gets $18/month from us, while movie theaters get about one visit every 6 months.