I am a nerd.

Posted on by grahams

While it certainly wasn’t the nerdiest thing I have ever done, waking up at 6am on Friday morning to get an iPhone 3G is up there. I got to the Chestnut Hill mall around 6:40am and was approximately 50-60 people deep in the line. The store was not opening until 8am, so I sat down on the floor, busted out my laptop, and caught up on my RSS feeds, etc. Quickly the line was twice as long, extending all the way out of the mall.. My “line buddies” were all pleasant and we were chatting the whole time. We had heard that the Apple Store had planned on moving 100 customers per hour through the store, so being 50 people deep I was expecting to be out of the store by 9pm at the latest. While we waited Apple had people going up and down the line giving out Coffee, Tea, and some kind of fancy (smart or vitamin) water, which I thought was a nice showing of appreciation of your psycho-fans.

The store opened at 8am and they let the first batch of about 25-30 people in. They easily had 30 employees working the store, so it seemed like everything would move along quickly. Unfortunately, as some of you are already aware, this was not the case. It was quickly apparent as 20-30 minutes passed with only a handful of customers leaving the store that things were taking longer than they estimated. Apparently both AT&T and Apple’s servers were getting crushed. The server for the wireless handheld POS terminals the Apple employees use even crapped out at one point, although that was a quick reboot..

It was 9:40 before I got into the store, and all that meant was further standing in line. I finally was served around 10:15am, but it took forever to execute the transaction because of the network/server crush. Initially, after I finally paid, they took me to a station where they tethered the phone to a mac and tried to activate it with iTunes, but within the first minute the rep mentioned something about doing it at home and I jumped. I got out of the store at 10:40, and there were easily still 150+ plus people still waiting on line. Apparently soon after I left they stopped trying to activate the phones in the store at all, so perhaps the line started moving along quicker after that.

I got home and tried to activate, but it wasn’t until after lunch that I had any luck.. Eventually, either Apple/AT&T fixed their problems or enough people gave up that I was able to activate.

All that said, I kind of expected these kinds of problems, so while it sucked, I was prepared for it to suck… I’m loving the phone so far, although it’s going to take me awhile to become proficient at typing..

Prattling about Profound Productivity

Posted on by grahams

I’ve been really productive lately… Witness the complete success of my pulled pork experiment, fixing the sinlaws DirectTivo (I think I fixed it, at least), sprinting towards deadlines at work with reckless abandon, and traveling all over the place to be with family and friends.

I made a mad dash to get my project to Alpha release by the end of June, and managed to demo it at our weekly development meeting on the 30th. I think I impressed everyone in on the demo, I’m pretty sure several of the people who were doubting whether or not I could deliver on my performance and compatibility claims were put in their place. And really, while I referred to this as an Alpha release, imho it is Alpha-in-name-only. While it’s the first release to grace the hands of the testers, it’s feature complete and has been pretty well beat-upon by me and my fellow developer. Hopefully they will beat the hell out of it and track down anything I missed, but I feel great about the quality as it stands now (not quite shippable, but definitely branchable).

The pulled pork has been going over like gangbusters (with everyone besides , that is, who isn’t a fan)… I brought some coworkers home for lunch and each had a few sandwiches… For my entire life I thought Barbeque was some kind of voodoo art which required tons of specialized equipment, but it turns out you can make the real deal with stuff most people have access to.

Pulled Pork: Coda

Posted on by grahams

The pulled pork turned out great, although not exactly as I expected.  I estimated it would be done in about 14 hours, which should have been ~8pm.  I figured it might go until 10pm, but I figured that was definitely the outer bound.  The internal temperature seemed to park itself at ~160F, and I really needed it to get up to 190-205F.  It stayed around 150-160 for the final several hours I left it on the grill.  Finally, around 10pm without any temperature movement I moved it to the oven.  As soon as I moved it to the oven the temperature slowly started to move up.

I suspect that the grill was too cold, even though I had a probe thermometer telling me the temperature of the grill.  My current thinking is that the probe was reading wrong; perhaps the probe needs more density (than air) to get an accurate reading.  Which might have meant that my temperature was off all night.  The thermometer on the grill lid read just under 200F the whole time while the probe was reading around 250, so it’s very possible that the lid was right and the probe was wrong.

Regardless, after I moved it into the oven I set up the remote probe to beep when the pork got to 203F.  This happened at 4am, and the remote woke me up to attend to the pork.  I let it rest for about 30 minutes then started to pull it.  And it was like heaven.   It just fell off the bone and pulled apart like nobody’s business.  It tastes delicious, although at 4am I only had a bite.  I’m very-much looking forward to lunch today. :)