Binoculars or maybe Kenny Chesney

The plot or the subplot? Where to spend the time?

So, OK, we had tickets to go see Kenny Chesney's Flip Flop Summer Tour last weekend. This was good, because they had five acts, and both my wife and I had a favorite in the mix. I'm a a big Brooks and Dunn fan and she is in love with Kenny Chesney and may also know one or two of his songs. Anyway, this was a stadium concert so since I live near Cleveland, we were a-goin' to Browns stadium.

Now, we jumped on-line for tickets the day and time they went on sale. Does this get us in the front row? No. Does it get us in the first ten rows? No. if we go by lots of ten rows, this will be my longest blog ever, so let's safely assume that we did not get seats very close. Since it was clear we were not going to get up close, we went for "Club Level" seats. There are actually much nicer seats, with actual seat cushions, cup holders, and an entrance that the usual riff-raff can't get through. I have sat in the Club section for Browns games, and it generally rocks. You have your own concession stands which serve fare much nicer than the usual dogs and nachos (although you can get those too). They have a full bar available. They have people who will go get your stuff for you if you want them too and are willing to wait for that.

They are also, obviously, more expensive seats. But, having sat in the Club before, I assured my wife they were awesome seats are worth the dough. And, had we been going to a football game, I would have been absolutely right. But, this wasn't a football game. First off, our seats were on right about the 45 yard line. Unfortunately, the stage was in the opposite end zone. So, we weren't too close. This isn't noticeable when watching a football game because there is a whole field of action to keep up on, and the height and angle from the 45 yard line club section is a great boon to following the game. However, when your wife's primary goal in going to the show is to see how good Kenny looks in his tight jeans, 45 yard line club seats aren't exactly ideal.

Anyway, I knew that Club level seats wouldn't be right on top of the stage, so I told my wife I'd go out and buy some small binoculars. Now, I have some really nice, really heavy binoculars, but I wanted something small and light that we could wear around our necks for 6 hours without feeling the weight too much. So, I go to my local Dick's Sporting Goods store and I try out about 5 pairs of smaller binoculars. The salesman is patient considering all of them are locked up and I take each pair to the front of the store to look out at the parking lot so I can really see how well they work.

Well, I have it narrowed down to the ones I think are right - a nice 12X Simmons folding model. But, I want to compare the field of vision to my big, nice binoculars which I have in the trunk. So, I tell the salesman I'll be back (in my best Arnold impression which he thankfully laughs at) and I go out to my car and get my binoculars and start looking around the parking lot. This turns out to garner a lot of attention from people in and around the parking lot. This may be because I find a number of interesting sites around the area and end up looking around with high powered binoculars for maybe 7 or 8 minutes. Yep, when I put them down, I notice I have people from maybe 6 stores all looking out their windows right at me, as well as a number of people who are walking to their cars.

I go back inside Dick's sporting Goods, but, now I have a dilemma. I know the best ones to get are the 12X Simmons, but, they only have them in camo. I also know my wife will wear something in camo for 6 hours right about the same time hell freezes over. So, I call her and tell her that the best ones are 12X but camo, or they have some 10X that are in black. Well, since she is wearing pink to the show, you more fashion-conscious folks (I'm looking at you, tait) will recognize that the only possible response she can give is for me to get her the black ones. So, I do.

The binoculars prove to be very good ones, although you have probably guessed that my wife swapped with me once Kenny got on stage so that she could get 2X closer to Kenny's jeans.

The show was really, really good. Brooks and Dunn were awesome, Sara Evans and Sugarland both put on good shows, and Kenny's jeans did not disappoint all the drunk ladies. About 8:15 a water main burst at the stadium and so all the bathrooms and all the concessions were closed. This proved to be a bit of an issue, since much of the crowd was comprised of rowdy, hard-drinking country fans and women who were getting drunk hoping to make their way onto Kenny's Tour bus. The stadium had to bust out the port-o-potties, the lines were very long, and there were none in the Club section at all, so not only did we have to mix with the common folk, and the common folk's wastes, we also had to walk a long way to get there. So, we only made THAT trip once and then held it the rest of the night. From what I hear, there were quite a few "ladies and gentlemen" who came up with their own solutions. I will be forever grateful that I did not sit near any of them.

Posted by trupundit @ 10:42 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

iDone

OK, iPhone finally launched.  My project is done.  The war room is over.  The 15 hour days are over.  I get to go home tomorrow.

iPhone has been the most challenging project I have ever worked on.  The worst part has been not being able to really say much about it.  Until now anyway. 

In case you are not a regular reader (not that I have had time to be a regular writer lately), I work for AT&T.  And no, that does not make me inherently evil, despite what you might have read on the Internet.   Anyway, my project was to work on the team developing training for all 17,000 AT&T wireless retail emplyees.  Now normally, this would be no problem at all for me.  I do big projects all the time, and do them pretty well most of the time.

This time though, was difficult.  I officially refer to the iPhone project as a Tale of Two Projects, for it was indeed the best of times, and the worst.

To begin with, I should never have been on the project in the first place.  I work for the Wireline side of the house.  Mobility (Cingular) has it's own training department and it's own training designers (not to mention it's own marketing, it's own Sales Ops, it's own IT department, etc etc etc).  Anyway, just before we reached a point where the training needed to be under development (February), Mobility started one of it's largest training projects ever.  Once they had committed to it, there was no going back, so, incredibly, they were short staffed to tackle iPhone training.  Enter the monkee.  I was loaned to Mobility.  But, I had to accept the project without knowing what it was because, back then, it was pretty much verboten to even say iPhone aloud in a company building.  You think I am kidding about that last sentence, but I am not.  For the first four weeks I was on the project, I couldn't even list it in my time management program.  I had to list it as Project  X and only my boss knew what it was.  Anywho, I accepted the project and found out it was iPhone.  Let me tell you that that was a true high point for me.  Not only was I the only person in all of (landline) AT&T training working on iPhone, I was close to being the only person from landline PERIOD working on iPhone.

So, I signed my NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), and entered the secretive world of the iPhone.  Let me tell you, EVERYTHING was a secret on this project.  Compounding that issue was Apple's reluctance to share all the details with us.  So, while I knew quite a few secrets early on, like the self-activation, the price of the plans, and lot's of technical data, there were other things I found out at the same time you all did, such as YouTube.  Since one of my training pieces was a wbt (web-based training) about just how cool iPhone was, it was quite frustrating to have some of the cool features held back from me.  But, we got through it anyway.

And, there were some pretty cool moments.  I had a meeting in Cupertino with none other than the infamous Bob who starred in all those demo videos.  I was encouraged to spend time trolling the mac rumor sites.  I have to tell you that some of the best times we had on this project was in reading all the theories and rumors that weren't even close to the truth.  I also got to work with a number of folks from Apple.  They are a pretty cool group and very talented, if a little paranoid at times.  Good folks though.  I also got to work with a lot of Mobility people I would never have otherwise met.  They are also a good group of folks, although they work too **** many hours.  Plus, Mobility HQ is a pretty doggone nice building.

But, there were also the not-so-fun times.  I haven't had a complete day off since mid-May.  I have worked well past midnight way too many times.  I've had to tell friends over and over that I was sorry I couldn't tell them anything.  Then there were the leaks.  If you trolled any of the rumor sites, then you undoubtedly saw several different AT&T training manuals and whatnot shown on them.  As cool as it kind of was to see something you'd contributed to become such a hot commodity, it was not cool at all to know that someone else had broken rules you had kept.  Oh well, doesn't matter now. 

So, to those of you who bought one, thanks for the business.  To those of you who bought one and experienced any kind of trouble at all, please accept my apology and understand that we were all working very hard to avoid issues in the first place and also to fix them as soon as possible when they cropped up.  Our work to rectify issues certainly didn't satisfy a few crabby bloggers, but believe me, it wasn't for lack of effort.  I have spent the week at Mobility headquarters in Atlanta, and let me tell you that there were a whole pile of us there well into the wee hours of the morning every night this week.

Finally, the best thing about Project iPhone is that it's over and I get to go home.  It was a wild ride at times, and I'm looking forward to some well-deserved R&R. 

Posted by trupundit @ 11:54 pm EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments

Geez

Just had to knock down one of Garbone's three immediate posts hogging up the banner.

Posted by trupundit @ 9:23 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

HD vs. SD on the 360

OK, I've been playing on an SD TV since I got my 360.  Today, with Live down, I hooked it up to the HD dowstairs for a bit.  I played GOW, COD2 and R6V to see the differences in each game.  Some folks playing on SD may wish they had an HDTV to play on, so I thought I'd research that wish list a little bit.

My SD is a 27" Sylvania.  I am connected with a gold-plated S-Video cable I bought at Best Buy for $15.00.  This exercise aside, if you are playing your 360 using the composite cable and your TV has an S-Video connection, stop reading this, go to Best Buy, and spend the $15.00.  Makes a BIG difference.

I connected to my new HDTV (Panasonic 42" Plasma HDTV TH-42PX60U) via the 360 in-the-box supplied component cables.  Here are my observations:

GOW: Looks a bit better/sharper and definitely brighter.  The larger screen (42" versus 27") allows me to see things in the distance more clearly.  Verdict: Looks a bit better, but not worth buying HD if you don't already have an HDTV.

COD2: COD2 looks fantastic on my SD, and it just gets better on HD.  Very sharp picture.  I had some trouble aiming at first because the picture was almost too big.  Backing up helped a lot.  Verdict: This game looks fantastic in SD already.  No reason to go HD unless you already have an HD.

R6V:  Ok, here's the one that made a good diference.  Everything was way sharper.  I can see HD definitely improving your game with this title.  I was hitting folks much more easily.  Now, some of this is attributable to a larger screen and therefore larger foes, BUT, this is the only game of the three that I was stopping and spinning around in because it looked that much better (yes, I died a few times satisfying this crazy twirl itch).  Verdict: If you are a Rainbow 6 nut, go out and buy that HDTV!

Overall verdict: I am not seeing enough of a difference to warrant going out and buying an HD monitor.  As you may recall from my world-famous 360 purchase thread, I was at one time considering buying a 22" HD monitor to game on.  After this experiment, I will stick with my SDTV for the fore-seeable future until I have the extra scratch laying around to go with a larger HDTV for gaming.  Alternately, if someone starts to really take advantage of the component connection, I may have to upgrade then.  I won't go out and buy the new $469 XBOX 360 with HDMI, but that may make a difference - especially with newer titles where the developers KNOW that HDMI will be available.

Because of the size difference, I will start to play on the HDTV more often, simply because I can see targets better.  But, to go from a 27" SD to a 22" HD would make the targets smaller, and the resulting sharper picture is not, to me, worth it at this time.  

Posted by trupundit @ 7:38 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

iName

With Apple recently settling it's lawsuit with Cicso over use of the iPhone name, I thought it was time Apple got down to business and just trademarked pretty much everything with an "i". Look for this next year:

Press Release: Macworld 2008

Apple announced a number of new trademarked product names this year. Here are the highlights:

iV - 3D holographic television (in white)

iStick - 10 terabyte thumb drive

iSuck - vacuum that is nothing at all like a Dyson

iToast - toaster that will eliminate the phrase "dumb as a toaster." Most of you will WISH you were as smart as an iToast

iDrive - car that runs on industrial wastes and emits Chai tea

iBurn - a completely clean and green coal substitute

iWrite - Apple has reinvented the pen (in white)

iPee - a vast improvement to today's Internet Protocols. What were you thinking it was? That's sick!

iCon - software that allows you to manage your very own "con" festival from a single iMac

iFell - personal alert system that interfaces with your iMac and your iPant (see below) to notify the authorities when you have injured yourself

iCrash - sorry, not a new product - that's just our internal name for Vista machines

iYawn - our official name for Vista machines

iPlay - our TRUE next-gen gaming console. All those other guys have been stealing our ideas for years. It ends now!

iTime - it's a really cool watch (in white)

iWatch - personal binoculars with night vision (in white - betcha thought THIS one was the time-telling watch. No, we're much more clever than that!)

iPant - robotic dog that interfaces seamlessly with your iPod, iPhone, iMac and everything else in this list. Oh and Windows Vista too, but only with the iSupposeSo dongle

iPants - TWO robotic dogs, no no, just my little joke. iPants are a gigantic leap forward in the high tech world of, um, pants.

iKnow - Steve Jobs collectible figurines

iAm - high-end Steve Jobs collectible figurines with patented Burning Bush data management

iWish - the first Mac to outsell the PC

Posted by trupundit @ 9:17 am EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments