This is sort of interesting to me. There are already iPhone apps that let you take a credit card (by inputting the number), but this is a device that plugs into the headphone jack and let's you swipe a credit card.

The other thing that is REALLY nice is that it allows you to accept a credit card without signing up with a processing vendor. I'm not sure how that works -- usually a merchant has to sign up for a service that handles the transactions.

Pricing is not available yet, since it's in trial. Since it doesn't require a monthly fee, I'm assuming the pricing will be per transaction, but I'm not sure.

The way it works, I think if you owed me a few bucks, then I could swipe your card, and you could pay me that way -- so one step closer to all electronic money -- where your phone becomes how you pay for things, right?

It's coming to Blackberries too.

Start accepting payment cards immediately with Square. No contracts, monthly fees, or hidden costs.
....
As a payer, get your receipts sent to your email or mobile phone instantly and access them securely online. You can also use a text message to authorize every payment in real-time

http://squareup.com/

Today should have been an easy day, where I could catch up on some stuff. That was partly true, but I swear to GAWD, the application we support is a pain.in.the.ass sometimes. But the weekend is here...no thought to that until Monday morning!

***
AT&T finally enabled picture messages (MMS) on the network. The original iPhone did not support MMS messages -- since e-mail is so easy, I think Apple figured that you'd use e-mail to send pics. That was a bad decision on their part.

But even after the iPhone supported MMS messages -- AT&T took MONTHS to enable it -- even though they had plenty of warning that Apple was going to release the update. What a sluggish company AT&T seems to be.

So, when it became enabled today (via a carrier update through the normal iTunes sync), I tested it out by sending a friend the standard "pic in the mirror" message -- reference the http://guyswithiphones.com/ site. WARNING -- many of the pics are totally XXX -- you won't see my pic there (you may all now sigh a collective sigh of relief).

Anyways, I digress...the user interface for the pictures messages works pretty well. It's integrated into the standard text message UI -- and you tap on the picture to open up the full sized version of it --


***
Anyways, D and I were thinking about heading to 4th Fridays tonight, but he's still under the weather, so I'm meeting up with another friend.

Other than that, I think this will be a fairly busy weekend.

This is Pride weekend in Richmond. Tomorrow morning, I hope to get an early bike ride in. Then, a local gay athletic group is making sandwiches for the homeless.

Then, Gay Pride for a while.

Sunday, planning brunch with a couple of friends. And I may very well head back over to Ekoji Sunday night. Maybe the weather will cooperate for a bike ride on Sunday afternoon.

After I got home from my bike ride tonight, I was putting a wireless speedometer/odometer on the hybrid bike (I already have one on the road bike). The speedometer (on the handlebar) has to be within 70cm of the "cat's eye" (sensor) on the fork. And the sensor has to be within 5 mm of the magnet that you attach to the spoke.

Well, it wasn't registering, so I thought I would measure and make sure that the speedometer was close enough to the sensor was close enough to the magnet.

Well, I couldn't believe it, but I didn't have one thing in the house that would measure centimeters or millimeters! All my tape measures and yardsticks, etc. are in inches and feet! It surprised me! Surely there's some piece of equipment in the house somewhere that will measure cm and mm!

Anyways, I remembered an iPhone app called "Units." So, I used it to convert inches to millimeters, so I could tell that the sensor was too far away from the magnet.

It was easier to position things on the road bike than on the commuter bike tonight. The commuter bike has wider tires and a wider fork, so it was harder to get the sensor close enough to the magnet on the spoke.

I intended to get a walk in tonight, but by the time my new hedge guy showed up, so I could discuss what I want him to, finished talking to my sister on the phone, and then finished updating both the iPhone OS and iTunes...here I still sit!

I'm a bit sad today. Sounds like my youngest nephew just got his orders to ship out to the Airforce. That means both nephews are in the forces.

***
The iPhone update was minor for me.

The iTunes update was a bit more important. It allows me to organize the apps on my iPhone screens!

Prior to this, I had to drag the icons around on the iPhone -- at best tedious. It's nice to see that I can now organize them in iTunes and have it synch to the phone.

Facebook 3.0 for the iPhone is finally out!

It seems to be working fine. Different navigation, switched to the "new" newsfeed, can now search for new friends (as opposed to just viewing existing friends), etc.






















New for this release --> http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=145061571354

So, I'm listening to Pandora tonight on my walk like I always do, and I make the mistake of thumbing up a song that I like, which doesn't sound like a mistake, right? It WAS a song that I like, but NOT one I wanted to listen to right then. So, I thumbed it up, and pressed skip. Long story short, Pandora played song after song after song of that same genre, until I had run out of skips (you can only skip so many each hour in Pandora).

So, I switched to my local songs...but as I was walking, it kept making a Bloop-Bloop sound and Bloop-Bloop skipping to the Bloop-Bloop next Bloop-Bloop song...

I couldn't figure out what was happening...The iPod app on the iPhone has a "Shake to Shuffle" setting, and evidently I was walking vigorously enough to make the Bloop-Bloop iPhone switch to a new song!

****
Have you ever tagged yourself in a Facebook picture, even though it was not the best pic, but you liked a particular feature?

I tagged myself in this pic from a reception the other night at the Gay Community Center, because I liked how my legs looked in it, lol! I mean, my eyes are closed and everything, but I still tagged myself in it! Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, lol!

Facebook comes in handy sometimes. A friend from high school -- really, he was in my middle sister's class -- got in touch.

He was a goofy guy -- which I like -- and I remembered him immediately. He is also pretty tender-hearted, and I felt bad when I told him of another high school friend who passed away last Fall. It seem to make him sad.

He also was quite blunt about a couple of things, which surprised me, lol!

***
Work is in high gear right now -- the team is tired. Sometimes I find myself laughing hysterically -- which is not necessarily bad or good...The business users at work seem to enjoy the fact that I spend time talking to them -- evidently, the last Project Mgr didn't spend enough time with the customers.

***
It wouldn't be a week if I didn't talk about an iPhone app, right? Usually, I stick to the free apps, but I decided to splurge on a $4.99 app called "Sketches," just for fun. It lets you draw with your finger -- either on a colored background, or on a picture that you have in your album, etc.

Here is me playing with that picture that I like of D and me --


Here are some of the tools --

I've installed the 3.0 iPhone update. It's got some good (and too long awaited) features --> http://www.apple.com/iphone/softwareupdate/.

It did a slightly weird thing with my apps -- when it automatically installed the new Voice Recording app on the first page, it pushed just one of my apps onto page 2, all by itself. At first, I thought it had deleted my other apps or something, until I realized that they were all still there, but were on pages 3+. So, I just had to do a bit of re-arranging to get it straight again.

Copy/Paste

Really? We had to wait this long for the OS to have such advanced functionality as copy and paste? (I am totally being sarcastic here...)

However, the implementation is good. Hold your finger down, and you get a menu and a highlight that you can drag with your finger --



Later, when you're somewhere else, you hold your finger down, and you get the option to Paste --



And, if you change your mind about the paste, you shake the iPhone (like an Etch-a-Sketch) to get an option to Undo the paste. You shake the iPhone for a fair number of things, so it makes sense from a user interface perspective to have a shake as the Undo --

MMS - Picture Message

Up until now, you would just send and receive pictures via your e-mail on the iPhone, which worked out fine for me.

The only time it wasn't so good was when someone else would send me an MMS -- but the iPhone just wasn't equipped to do it. So, AT&T would send me a web link with a password -- pretty lame -- especially since I couldn't copy/paste the password, so I'd have to write the password down before I clicked the link, so that I could remember it. Very lame, lol!

Although the iPhone is now capable of MMS, AT&T is not - so still in wait mode on this one until later this Summer.

Spotlight

"Spotlight" search now works on the iPhone. You can see below, when I search for "Karm" it shows me both websites and songs. It would also have shown contacts, so it's a universal search feature.

Horizontal Keyboard

Nice to finally have a horizontal keyboard --

Voice Record

Voice Recording is a new little app that Apple threw into this release. I already used Evernote (which has a voice note), so this one doesn't do much for me.

Nonetheless, here's how the Voice Recording app looks --

Youtube login

It's nice that they threw in the Signin button, so that I now can sign into my Youtube account (I could have done it on the browser before but now it's built into the Youtube app).



So, then you get your own Youtube videos --

I haven't been posting lately -- the whirlwind continues to twist, so I've had to take a breather and find the center again. It's hard to describe what I am feeling in my gut, but it seems that I am in a life transition now, and it's something that I just have to handle alone...and when something happens that I really don't have control over, I just let it go to the wind...

Work is a bit tiring - it's such a big project with so many moving parts, that I have felt like I was just being "slow" sometimes, having to ask about things a couple of times before I got them. I do like my boss though -- she's got a good air to her, and she says how things are -- which is much appreciated. I guess I shouldn't trust someone so quickly, but I do trust her.

I went out with friends to Caliente last night and had the Pasta Poblano -- tasty, but HUGE dish. I brought part of it home, but proceeded to eat it before I went to bed. I was totally stuffed. Somehow, even without exercising (still giving my leg some rest), I have not put on any weight. I think working is using up some calories :)

I downloaded an iPhone app with some artwork from the London National Gallery. They have one of my FAVE paintings -- I love the mirrors in paintings, and I love that I can zoom in!


I love that the mirror shows a window to the outside...

I always go for the free apps on the iPhone. I guess I'm cheap that way.

Back before Apple's WWDC this year, Lonely Planet temporarily put out it's iPhone San Francisco version for free. I have always liked Lonely Planet travel books, and considering my heretofore mentioned cheapness, and my pleasure when I visited San Francisco last year, the free Lonely Planet San Francisco version was perfect for me!

It would have been REALLY convenient to have this on the iPhone last year when I visited!

In this article, there's a video of the artist using an iPhone app to create the New Yorker cover.

I think it's pretty cool -- I don't have that particular app on my iPhone -- I tend to be cheap and only get the free apps unless I know I have a use for it.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/05/jorge-colombo-iphone-cover.html

Although it makes sense, I had never pictured the military using iPod touches and iPhones. They are definitely little hand-held computers, but I didn't picture them used this way!

With their intuitive interfaces, Apple devices—the iPod Touch and, to a lesser extent, the iPhone—are becoming the handhelds of choice.

...
Apple gadgets are proving to be surprisingly versatile. Software developers and the U.S. Department of Defense are developing military software for iPods that enables soldiers to display aerial video from drones and have teleconferences with intelligence agents halfway across the globe. Snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan now use a "ballistics calculator" called BulletFlight, made by the Florida firm Knight's Armament for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Army researchers are developing applications to turn an iPod into a remote control for a bomb-disposal robot (tilting the iPod steers the robot). In Sudan, American military observers are using iPods to learn the appropriate etiquette for interacting with tribal leaders.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194623

It has been carb city today!

I started the day with pancakes, and now I just made a berry cobbler. At least O is around to help me eat the cobbler!


The sleet this morning and generally cold and gray weather has made me want comfort food.

iPhone Update

The iPhone had a firmware update today. It seemed to be a large sized update (judging from how long it took to install), but from what I understand it was mostly just a big fix update. Alas, I don't think it has any of the missing functionality that I'd like to see.

Home Phone

My phone service FINALLY transferred from Cavalier to Vonage. The Vonage line has been active for outgoing calls but until Cavalier released the number, my home phone wouldn't ring for incoming calls. So far, everything with Vonage seems to work well.

Job Hunt

A friend who does resume work gave me a lot of good pointers on my resume, which I have taken. She actually took the time to make a bunch of modifications herself, which I appreciated very much!

I've been trying out a few new iPhone apps. I know you're shocked.

First, Pac-Man. Works well. The free version only has level one -- you have to buy it to go past the first screen. But that's fine, I think I have it just for the novelty of it, not because I really want to play Pac-Man a lot.




Next, iMapMyRide. GPS mapping for your bike ride or run. I haven't actually biked with it -- I tried it out when I drove around town.







And, Tilt Meter. I haven't really used this, just played with it. It lets the iPhone function as a level. Although calibrating the application was easy, it took me a minute to understand what it was asking me to do.

If you read this journal, you know how much I enjoy playing with my iPhone. In general, there are a few items of basic functionality that the iPhone lacks. Although most of them don't matter to me, one in particular that really annoys me is the lack of copy and paste on the phone.

Copy and paste is something that I need, on average, probably once every couple of weeks. A recent example is when a friend sent me a Facebook message. In return, I wanted to send a URL to his Facebook inbox -- but since I can't copy and paste, my only options were 1) type out the URL in the Facebook reply, 2) Go to the website in Safari and send it to him via his personal e-mail or 3) Wait until I got home, so I could use my home computer.

I chose the last option. In Apple's defense, a lot of the things you would need copy and paste for on a computer are taken care of by other action buttons.

Copy and Paste has been low on Apple's priority list (I guess the users at Apple don't copy and paste on mobile computers?).

Someone else made the point that Apple has to be careful when they design the copy and paste user interface because, once implemented, we'll all be stuck with it. I agree with that. The only reason computer users press "command (or control) C" to copy and "command (or control) V" to paste is, well, that's how it was originally designed, and we're stuck with that original not so-user-friendly user interface.

However, I would think after all this time, Apple could have designed a good copy/paste user interface and implemented it on the iPhone.


In the meantime, Pastebud provides 2 bookmarks for Safari. The bookmarks use Javascript to allow copying and pasting from a web page to either mail or Google search. This will do in a pinch for me (although it would not have solved my problem from the other day).

After I got back from the museum today, O and I went to the bottomless pit, otherwise known as his storage unit, to get another load of his stuff.

Then, we each had dinner engagements with different friends.

After that, we met back at the house for some time together. The time together helped soothe some of the frayed ends from yesterday.


***
I've been playing with Facebook's iPhone app. I don't really use Facebook very much -- I have it mostly so I can keep in touch with a couple of long distance friends.

The iPhone version is pretty well done -- has all the functionality you'd want on your phone, and it's laid out well on the screen.

Between not working right now, the holidays, and the cold outside, I have put on a few pounds. I expected it -- I always put on a few pounds in the winter. But since it's been warm out the last couple of days, I've been getting a walk in each day. It's been nice to get a bit of exercise again!

We also got out to shop yesterday with a couple of gift cards. The merchandise is pretty picked over right now, but O found a couple of things he liked. I didn't, so I've still got my gift cards in my wallet.

As I'm posting this entry, O just came in and crashed from his shift last night. The 12 hours overnight shifts always screw up his sleep patterns.

Insurance Billing Error

After I left my job, I figured I would continue my insurance under the COBRA law, at least until I figured out an alternative. The premium is not cheap, of course, but it's not as bad as it could be.

Anyways, the insurance company's billing system seems to be out of control! I have been getting a bill every couple of days -- each bill has added about 2 months premium to the total. I have received about 10 bills in the last 2 weeks, and the total on the bill is up to nearly $3,000 right now!

It is obviously a mistake, and I called the insurance company yesterday. I told the call agent that it had become a joke that I was getting a bill from them every couple of days. She agreed that something is wrong and "sent it over to accounting."

In the meantime, I've applied for some individual insurance with another company -- this billing fiasco makes me want to ditch the current policy.

Lose It! iPhone App

I found this iPhone app where you put in your current weight, your goal, and how many pounds a week you want to lose.

Based on that information, it calculates your daily calorie budget. You can then input the foods that you eat and your exercise each day.



You can search for foods (like "cheese" in the picture below), or create a new food,



The app keeps track of foods you've selected before -- makes it quicker to pick from a list of the foods you eat most of the time.



It gives a summary of fat, protein (and other nutrients if you want).

O and I will be visiting some of his local family today and tomorrow and doing our gift exchange.

In the meantime, according to the Google Santa Tracker, I have another 15 hours to wait for Santa. It appears that he is in the eastern part of the globe right now...

Link below is to the iPhone version of the Santa Tracker in iTunes.


http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=299844300&mt=8