My iPhone is dead. Long live my iPhone! Today I wonder, how did I ever make it through college?

My iPhone died. Well, not died necessarily, but it's dead to me. I was upgrading it to the newly released 4.2 Gold Master, when it threw a fatal error. Can't upgrade. Tried going back to 4.1 - same error.

So that sucks. Made an appointment at the Genius bar at the apple store for this afternoon. I'm confident they'll fix it.

But here's the problem - what do I do between now and then? I have a wife that calls me; I want to know if she or my daughter needs me. I have people that need to get in touch with me for business. I need my phone to work.

So I decide to move my SIM card from my iPhone 4 to my old iPhone 3G that I use for backwards compatibility testing with 3.1. No dice, the SIM cards are different sizes. So I call around from the phone on my desk and find a place that says they have one in stock. So I get in my truck and start driving. I get to the place where I remember the google maps on my Mac saying the store should be. But it's a golf driving range.

Oops. So now I need my iPhone.

And it's in no mood to help me.

So here I am, driving up and down the street trying to find some place I can get an adapter for my phone, feeling disconnected and helpless, and it occurs to me that, not long ago (relatively speaking), I didn't have a cell phone at all. I got my first cell phone in 1994, I think. I got my first cell phone with Internet access in 2004.

How the Hell did I manage? And how the Hell did I get so dependent that I felt like I couldn't function without one?

And how the Hell is my 4-year old daughter going to feel when her cell phone dies for the first time when she's alone (presumably as a teenager)?

For now, I found a place with some very helpful people and got my SIM card moved over with an adapter, and I'm back to my old iPhone 3G with the crappy camera and no multitasking (I'm keeping it at 3.1 for compatibility testing, remember).

I'm sure I'll get my iPhone 4 back, and I can can make and receive the calls I need until then.

And I'll get to keep my new sense of perspective about how connected I'm used to being. And about how much the iPhone has changed how I interact with my world.

Do not buy a new Tivo. Just trust me. You'll regret it. We do.

TiVo has completely lost their way.

I love TiVo. Or have. I got my first one in 1999. It has started having issues (locks up every couple of days and has to be power cycled). That sucks, but the thing is 11 years old. So, for my wife's birthday last month, I bought my wife a new TiVo Premiere XL.

I thought it would be a good idea. Wow, I was wrong.

The illustration above is exemplary. I paid extra for the TiVo-branded WiFi adapter because I figured it would have the best chance of being able to deal with it if something went wrong when I was out of the house. I've talked her through reconnecting our XBox 360 to the wireless network before, and that wasn't fun.

Holy Crap.

There are two ways to set up your TiVo WiFi adapter. Have a wireless network with a WPS compatible access point (which we don't have, because nothing else in our house would be able to use it), or a 13 step process that includes the steps:

• connect the Ethernet cable to your computer
• disconnect the computer from your home network
• In a web browser, enter 192.168.10.1 in your address bar and press enter
• Choose the manual setup option
• Enter the network name (SSID).
• Select the Security mode you use on your network and then enter the security settings as specified in the provided table
• Disconnect the adapter’s Ethernet cable from your computer and plug it into the back of your TiVo DVR.

What the Hell?!?

But even once that's set up, it's still a complete piece of crap.

First of all, there is no option for interoperating with a cable box. None. No IR out. So you are forced to get a CableCard and likely a Tuner Adapter form your cable or satellite provider.

Good luck with that. It took us almost 3 weeks.

In the mean time, I had hooked up an antenna so we could get a few channels. Once we finally got the cablecard working, I wanted to remove it. It took me An Hour and Fifteen Minutes for the TiVo to let me tell it to delete the antenna, a process that required me to "repeat guided setup" which forced the TiVo to re-download all the channel guide data for the cable line up that hadn't changed.

And then, the worst part. The interface is virtually unusable. The fastest I have *EVER* had this TiVo respond to a button press on the remote is 2 seconds. Hitting 3 or 4 keys in succession, the lag has hit 11 seconds.

Looking at the TiVo forums, there is a consistent suggestion that you can speed up the menus by disabling the "HD Menus" and going with the SD-only menus. Funny thing is - I'm already using the SD-only menus. The HD menus are way slower even than what I'm describing here.

This thing is easily 80% slower than the eleven year old Series 1 I'm replacing. And that's with the extra HD UI turned off.

Or, at least, that I planned on replacing. I still have 2 weeks of my 30 day money back guarantee left to make up my mind. At this point, I don't think the TiVo has much of a chance.

We have a Winner! (so far) - the Battle of the iPad Styli

A long, long time ago, I bought the first US Robotics Pilot 5000. Using Graffiti, I could actually take notes for the first time in a meeting that I wouldn't have to type in later (although I did have to correct missed letters periodically).

I used PalmOS and a Stylus to take notes up through my Kyocera 7135, which I loved. But when it died, I couldn't bring myself to get another phone with that outdated OS, so I made the jump to Windows Mobile with a Verizon xv6600 in 2004 or so. And up until recently, I still didn't have a device I could take good notes on. I still take notes writing much faster than I do typing with my thumbs, so once I got my iPad, I went looking for a way to take notes.

Turns out, I don't write very quickly with my index finger, and what I do write is even harder to read than my "normal" writing. So then, I had to look for a Stylus.

I've tried 3 so far, the Ten One Design Pogo Stylus was the first, but its tip is spongy and inexact. The Mybat Stylus Pen was even worse. It felt "sticky" - it just wouldn't glide smoothly across the surface (which might be why Amazon says so many people buy it with screen protectors (I'm not using one). Then, after a couple of months of waiting to find one with promising reviews, I found the Boxwave Capacitative iPad Stylus and it showed up yesterday. I can't think of anything I would rather have different. It's the right size, seems durable enough, is comfortable to use (at least after 1 day), takes wonderful notes in Penultimate (shown here), and has made me much more productive in OmniGraffle.

My favorite part (although I would love it even with out it) is a lanyard that has a plastic plug that holds into the headphone jack on the iPad. It keeps the stylus handy, and is far more useful that I would have expected before I used it.

There may be another stylus that comes along that I prefer, but for now, this one has won. And even if I find a better one someday, this one will still be the one that first met the requirement that it was good enough that I will stop and look for it when I don't have it handy, rather than just doing what I was going to do without it. And that's the primary bar for usability, to me.