So far, four days in, the experience has been awesome. I always was curious about getting a Nokia 770 internet tablet for surfing around the house. While the screen is smaller, the iPhone is perfect as a internet tablet. It connected to my wifi network without a hitch and I’ve yet to find sites I can’t view with the built in Safari browser (I’m sure they exist). Sites that are built for the iphone, like Facebook’s new iPhone site, are even better.

The iPod experience is better than my 5G video iPod. While a certain part of me misses the click wheel, having the ability to switch between playlists, artists, songs and videos at a touch of a finger is awesome. I do think it’s a little odd that there is no status bar when a song or video is playing that allows you to see how far into the content you are and how much is left (there’s probably a name for this all too familiar bar that is alluding me right now).

For the rest of the experience:

• The phone is good - what you’d expect from a cell phone with a few more bells and whistles
• Texting is good - how do you really improve on that experience
• Maps rocks - it just does
• Weather app is fun
• Stocks app is worthless - I only own mutual funds
• YouTube is ok - I haven’t really had the desire to surf a ton of videos on YouTube
• Camera is ok - bad in low light, blah, blah, blah
• Photos is awesome - my kids love flicking through the photos
• Notes is ok - been using it for the grocery list and house todos
• Keyboard typing is good - I type faster on it then I ever did on my Blackjack’s tiny little keyboard

Right now I am POP3ing mail from Gmail. This is quite lame as it doesn’t mark mail read on the Gmail server, so I am basically managing two accounts. Sending mail works like a charm though. Work email isn’t there yet. It does support IMAP for Exchange and has a VPN client so I am sure this is just a matter of time.

I have very few complaints:

• No 3G. Edge is slow
• No way to find contacts by typing. You have to scroll which sucks when you have a cubic ton of contacts sync from Entourage
• Syncing Exchange to Entourage to Address Book & iCal to iPhone is slow
• Did I mention how slow Edge is

I’m definitely in love with it. It’s super fun to surf on, play my content, talk on and play with. Now if I could find a good app to blog with, I’d be set.

Since the site is run on WordPress, I started at http://wordpress.org/hosting/. After reviewing and comparing the providers on this page, I decided on AN Hosting. For the price ($6.95) per month, it seemed like a good deal. Transferring and setup were flawless. I worked with their technical support on a few trouble tickets to get everything setup quickly and easily. The only bummer was they charged for a full year up front. I did notice that AN Hosting is actually MidPhase Hosting and all billing and trouble tickets were handled in the MidPhase name.

So, while homeless during my move to Phoenix, I was shocked to received the following email:

Subject: We had to suspend your account
From: support@midphase.com
Body:

Hello,

We had to suspend the account with disneyfrontier.com due to high CPU and RAM usage.
Currently the web site is using about 25.41% of RAM.
Our limits are 10% of each resource.

Unfortunately we can’t afford to host so large account on a shared server it affects other accounts.
I strongly recommend you to consider upgrade to a dedicated or VPS server or limit your downloads.

More information for a VPS or dedicated servers you can find on the
following pages:
http://midphase.com/html_files/hosting_plan_vps.php
http://midphase.com/html_files/hosting_plan_dedicated.php

Thank you

This email was sent on May 29th at 9:34AM. I can understand why they need to do this. Shared hosting isn’t for big popular sites. With the recent release of Pirates of the Caribbean 3, the blog was receiving almost twice as much traffic as it normally does. However, I had just installed a few plugins that I thought might be increasing the CPU load. I inactivated the plugins and sent the following reply:

I disabled some wordpress plugins that I think may have been CPU and RAM intensive. Can you please re-check my usage?

The response was:

Dear Josh,

Current CPU usage is 26.96%MEM
Your site is too heavy to be hosted on shared server, sorry.

Thank you

And boom, my site was shut off. This was at 11:18 AM. Less then 2 hours from the first email. No time to upgrade. No time to find a different hosting provider. Nothing. Due to their shut off, my traffic obviously went down to zero. I lost all my Google juice. And because I was in the middle of the move, I couldn’t get the site back up until June 4th. That was seven days of downtime.

So, I switched back to GoDaddy (on their $6.95 plan). The Disney blog is a hobby site for me and doesn’t make enough money to cover hosting. Their is no way I can afford to pay for dedicated hosting on it. I understand where AN Hosting is coming from, but they should have given me some time to make the necessary changes.

I am trying to get a refund for the 7 months of service they charged me for but didn’t fulfill. I am also working on transferring the domain name back to GoDaddy.

Hopefully, wordpress.org will remove AN Hosting as a recommended provider. They were awesome during setup, but I feel they didn’t give me any options the first time an issue arose. For many who read this blog and someday hope to get a site on digg.com, think what would happen if you were hosted on AN Hosting. You’d get dugg and then shut off.

Tags: AN Hosting, Shared Hosting, Godaddy

So, when I heard about this joint interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (iTunes Link), I wanted to watch it. Both these guys are visionaries and have contributed a ton to the computer industry. I highly recommend investing the hour and twenty minutes to watch this.

Most - I won’t say all - video podcasts are in one of the following formats: Quicktime, mpeg-4, or h.264. This means up till this point, I couldn’t stream them from the XP MCE to the 360. That is, until Microsoft released support for mpeg-4 and h.264 with their 360 Dashboard update that just hit.

Last night, I upgraded the Dashboard - thanks Microsoft for asking rather then just forcing it. I opened up iTunes on the MCE and subscribed to four video podcasts. I set iTunes to download them to one of the shared directories so the 360 would see them. At this point, I’m almost giddy with excitement. I just saved $300 on an AppleTV.

And boy was I disappointed…not a single one of them would play. They all said invalid file format or unsupported codec when I tried to play through the MCE Extender software or didn’t even show up when I tried to play them through the Dashboard software.

I didn’t expect any quicktime encoded videos to work, so I looked for podcasts that were in mpeg-4 format. The only way I could tell was by file extension, which probably isn’t the best way. The point isn’t whether or not I can find podcasts that will work. The point is that I want to be able to watch the podcasts I want to watch. Maybe I will have to get an AppleTV after all.

UPDATE: Microsoft posted a handy FAQ on the new video features available from the update. First, the new video formats are not supported through Windows Media Center Extender which explains why that didn’t work. Second, the new video formats are not supported via Windows Media Connect, which would explain why trying to play the software through the Dashboard didn’t work. You have to either use a removable media or optical media (i.e. CD or DVD) since Windows Media Player 11 won’t stream either mpeg-4 or h.264 to the 360 from another computer. So while I can now watch the content on my 360, I have to use a thumb drive or disk to transfer it. Arg!

Tags: AppleTV, Xbox 360, MCE, Podcasts

However, Amazon offers online storage as part of their S3 web services. The way they charge is a little different. They charge a monthly fee for the amount of space you are taking up on their servers as well as a monthly fee for data transfer. With two fees compared to Mozy’s one, you would think Mozy would be the cheaper alternative. Except that Amazon is dirt cheap. They charge $0.15 per GB of space used and, with their lower price going into effect as of June 1st, charge only $0.10 per GB uploaded (there is a tiered fee for downloading data that ranges from $0.13 to $0.18 per GB). That means for a backup solution, you’re costs will be front loaded but month over month costs should be cheaper. For $4.95 per month, you can house 33GB of data a month - assuming no uploading or downloading. And since you only pay for what you use, you may not have need to backup 33GB - making it cheaper than Mozy in the long run.

This is unless you have more than 33GB of data. If you have more than that, use Mozy. And if you have less than 2GB of data, use Mozy (it’s free). So, the Amazon sweet spot is between 2GB and 33GB. This is what’s making it hard. I’m in the Amazon sweet spot. But I don’t want to have to change my backup plan when I reach 33GB. Arg!

As for the software, for Amazon I’m using Jungle Disk. The nice thing about Jungle Disk is it lets you not only run incremental backups on change files, but it lets you mount the S3 service as a drive on your Mac.

Malcolm Gladwell covers these questions using rich and interesting case studies backed by research in his book blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Using our trained unconscious mind, humans are able to have very powerful gut feelings. Some think it’s almost ESP or a sixth sense. However, Gladwell shows that these reactions are based off past experiences and can be honed and trained.

The book is a quick read at 254 pages - about 2 one-hour flights. I found the mix of psychology with everyday examples easy to follow and very interesting to explore. Although I wouldn’t classify it as a self-help book, it does have the power of changing the way you think. All in all, I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning about how we think.