I’ve owned four computers in my life: a Performa 630 CD, the very first bondi blue iMac, a PowerBook (Pismo) and my current iMac G5. Sixteen years ago, while owning that Performa, no one thought of backing up their files in case their hard drive crashed. It was just a given that the computer would continue to run as expected. And you could always transfer files to a diskette if you needed to keep them extra special.

Now that my iMac is an achingly old (in computer lifespans) five years I’ve decided it’s time to back up all those old files just in case there is an impending hard drive crash (or monitor outage, logic board death, etc). So now I’ve got all that info saved. I was going to write about this experiencing concerning an Apple product that I’m using but I’ve decided against that so this post may be a little abbreviated from what it was once going to be. Sorry about that. But all’s well with the backup. And it’s being done wirelessly.

Today, in true Apple formality, I received my blue t-shirt.

The (current) blue t-shirt is the shirt worn by all Apple employees in the store. As an employee that has been shadowing for the last few weeks, this is a big deal to me. I’ve had the lanyard with my name on it for some time but the customers coming always wouldn’t recognize that because I wasn’t dressed like all the other employees. There would often be a question of “oh, do you work here?”

So tonight I was finished up with a customer setting up their iPad and Andrew, who has been so very kind and welcoming to me since day one, motioned me aside and said he needed to speak to me. We started discussing aspects of introducing our MobileMe service to customers and how I had approached the different elements this service had to offer. The conversation seemed a little strange, but I presented how I had delivered the different elements of MobileMe to different customers. Then Big Tony (who is a mentor at the store) came along up beside me, mentioned in a booming voice “Can I have everyone’s attention?” to, literally, employees and customers in the store. (So of course Andrew was the fall guy to keep me distracted while Big Tony could getting everything set up. So clever.) He then proceeded to announce to everyone that I was a new Apple employee who had just, basically, earned his stripes and that we should all give me a round of applause. And with this, he handed me the company-issued iPad-branded blue t-shirt that all the other employees were wearing. It was at this point that I’d not be wearing street clothes with the lanyard, but that I was one of them, an equal, someone who would interacted with customers solo without any kind of supervision. Needless to say, I was beaming smiles and gave a gracious bow as the claps from employees and customers alike abounded. Co-workers that either weren’t on the floor at the time or that were out-of-sight of the main room that I had shadowed with had big, beaming smiles on their faces and gave me high-fives or fistbumbs the next time they saw me.

Wow.

I felt so appreciated, so respected for the work that I had done and the interactions with customers that employees had watched me perform during the reverse-shadowing sessions. It was a strike of confidence and acceptance that I carried with me all the ride home.

I am official. Officially Apple.

How can I help you today?

Yesterday Apple and its carrier partners took pre-orders for more than 600,000 of Apple’s new iPhone 4. It was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions. Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration. We apologize to everyone who encountered difficulties, and hope that they will try again or visit an Apple or carrier store once the iPhone 4 is in stock.

Next Thursday on release day is going to be a busy day!

Also, today Apple release iTunes 9.2 which includes the following iOS4-ready features:

• Sync and read books with iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1
• Organize and sync PDF documents as books. Read PDFs with iBooks 1.1 on iPad and any iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
• Organize your apps on your iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes
• Faster back-ups while syncing an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
• Album artwork improvements make artwork appear more quickly when exploring your library

iOS4 stand-alone upgrade will be available for current iPhone users on June 21. (Original iPhone [metal] is excluded and not all new features will be available for all models. More info here.)

Yesterday’s in-store interview (#3) was a success! I am now a full-time employee of this company. Have you noticed how I’ve never mentioned the company by name? I thought it best to avoid googling caches (although I’m sure there’s about a billion for the A-word) and tying me to them, especially during the hiring process. I haven’t said anything derogatory but you never know who’s monitoring. But it probably doesn’t matter now that I’m hired unless I started bashing them. Which is unlikely.

Apple. There, I said it.

Unfortunately the position I’m hired for isn’t exactly the DreamJob I’ve been hoping and laboring for. It’s not the location I wanted (Georgetown) or the position I wanted (Creative). It is a Specialist position at the busy Pentagon City store, which I think was my fourth store choice because its busy and hectic nature of being set in a mall. But I’m not going to complain about it, it’s still with Apple and I’m happy with it. The P-City store is the highest-grossing on the East Coast, so it will be nice to cut my teeth there. And the store manager said that moving into a Creative position when one opens up is encouraged and transferring to another store is okay too. So I’m going to give this Specialist position a run for its money and move up from there. It won’t be the nice one-bus commute in the city (and above ground, too) that I had hoped for either. But again, I’m not going to really complain about that either. After all, it was DreamJob.

The pay is not that good though and that’s the one thing that is a little unsettling: it’s about half of what I was making at Grafik. While I was going to try and hang on to my part-time job at Evolve it now seems mandatory. I hope I can get the schedules of both jobs to fit each other.

Now, how would you like your discount?

Today is the day of my DreamJob interview. Yes, on a Sunday after the retail store closes in Clarendon. I’m told to dress “business casual” but all I have are jeans and dress pants. So I’m off downtown to find some khakis. Nothing says business casual like khakis, right?

I’m thinking “what would Jim Halpert wear?” I mean, he’s pretty business casual in a “always put together” kind of way. But minus the tie, I don’t think I’ll be sportin’ the tie today.

So I’m downtown with a $100 bill budget. Luckily, there’s a huge sale going on at Macy’s today, and a lot of it is dresswear. The khaki’s are on sale ($32.99) and Michael Kor shirts are on sale 1/2 price: $24.99 each. I’m trying to decide between dress shirts named Frosted Lilac and English Blue but since they’re on sale I decide to get them both and make the decision of which to wear at home.

Ok, the English Blue is winning out. Would Jim Halpert even wear lilac? Black accents of shoes, belt and 611 Records shoulder bag. Contents of my bag: three black pens (two Uni•Ball Vision fine point, on Sharpie ultra fine point), water bottle, resume in manilla folder, sunglasses case, hand lotion, a paper towel, tin of wintergreen Altoids and a blank book given to me as a gift-with-purchase from Apple several years ago. Now gimme that job!

Yeah, yeah, so Apple’s iPad is out today. Now if I had a job I would be first in line to get one. But that’s not the case. Maybe someday soon I will have one.

Instead, this is what I did today:

• worked my part-time for today’s three hour shift—
• completed two online tests for the job that is 12 blocks away from my house, who contacted me on Tuesday after sending in my resume the previous week. There were two tests, one that had some basic analytical and grammatical questions that seemed kind of odd and very S.A.T.-ish; the other test was a “personality test” (as was told to me on the phone Tuesday) and was even weirder, a listing of traits that first I had to pick out what I thought people perceived of me and then the same traits where I picked what I felt represented me. Very bizarre and makes me think about what kind of organization it is—
• installing a Mac OS X update and then updates to Adobe’s Creative Suite. This is getting me prepped for a freelance gig through former employer G that will start on Monday. I’ll be working from home so they’re providing me with disks to upgrade my four-year-old iMac to their system. It will be easier to transfer files that way and I’m very thankful they gave those to me. I was running old versions on their software from when I worked there but now I’m at least up to version 3.

Another caveat about the free system upgrade to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.8) is that it will get me pretty much up to speed for my “career seminar” with a certain employer which is the DreamJob. My meeting with them is next Sunday and I couldn’t be more psyched. Also in preparation for this meeting I’ve downloaded a 30-day trial of iWork and Monday I will use a gift card to purchase the most recent copy of iLife. I’ll need to bone up on these software packages and so if you can take a hint or click on one of the links then you’ll know who the interview is with and who the DreamJob employer is.

I’m writing this on my new iPhone 3G/s. I took the plunge.

I tried to deal with the shattered-into-100-pieces glass situ but it really got to be too much. Watching video was fine, but trying to read anything, from emails to websites, was somewhat annoying.

Yesterday I worked a cater/waiter event and made some nice cool cash and since it’s under the tax claimant limit I can run with it. This was the impetus that pushed me over the edge to decide it was time to get a new phone.

I’m up today, early from yesterday’s physical work and therefore an early evening, and I decide that this is the day. Why wait, right? The Clarendon store opens at 11:00 and I figured it was better to get there as early as I could for two reasons: a smaller crowd, and more time in the afternoon to play with the new toy.

When I get to the store I hold two new iPhones up, showing their backs. I’m still torn between the black or the white. And while I’ve leaned towards the white for its crisp look it’s still black on the interface side while you’re using it. I thought it would be cool, on the white ones, if they would make the front side top and bottom (where the ear speaker and home buttons are) white as well, and maybe have a white background for the desktop icons. So I chose the black back for its cohesiveness.

Apple apparently doesn’t want you paying cash for iPhones (afraid they will be “jailbroken” and shipped overseas or something) I have to buy a gift card and turn around and use that gift to purchase the phone. Whatevs. I have a leftover balance on the card and with that I get iTunes gift certificates.

The process to activate the new phone was pretty quick and simple. The employee helping me said it would be activated “within twenty minutes” but then about 30 seconds later it pinged and was on. My old phone was instantly turned into an iPod touch.

Now, to fill these 32 gigs up with almost all my iTunes library and even more video (Dexter episodes for $0.99 anyone?)!

As shown in the previous post, my iPhone didn’t come back from Rehoboth the same way that it left. Luckily, it still works. Even the touchscreen aspects are still functioning properly although there is a little bit of “scratch” on some parts of the screen. It’s not enough to scratch my finger but it’s still friction.

This is how it happened:

We all woke up on Saturday and did the normal routine: coffee and computers on the back deck. It’s such a great time, those mornings, usually nursing a slight hangover, bedhead, clacking away on keyboards, talking & laughing about the previous evening’s activities.

We decide to head out for breffus and we go to Sunshine in Dewey Beach. There I have a gyro omelette, which sounds crazy but was delicious. Afterwards, we split for errands. Christopher is going to do some shopping so I decide to hang out with him, driving around in the top-off Jeep. Well, I’m texting, checking status, etc while we’re stuck in traffic and instead of putting the phone into my pocket which I normally do I put it on the seat, between my legs, figuring that I’m only going to be breaking out to do something else soon. Of course I forget about it there when we stop in the parking. I open the door, slide out of the slide and crash goes the phone on the pavement. Crakt.

After much cursing I decided to not let this incident destroy my beach weekend. It works, deal with the mess later.

Now, dealing with the mess later, I’m exploring options on what to do about this. I first go the Bethesda’s Apple Store because I could secure a quick appointment the afternoon of “The Crash”. I hadn’t been to that one before so it would be an adventure. I even saw cutie John King from CNN there at the Genius Bar. But the Genius told me it was $200 for a glass screen/sensitivity chamber replacement which is the cost for a new 3G/S. Next.

Then a friend sent me notice of takeitapart.com which is a great little site that demonstrates how to, um, take things apart. In true Web 2.0 fashion there is a YouTube clip with each instruction so you can watch along. Really nice. But unfortunately the first generation iPhone is as easily accessible as the newer ones and the voiceover on the instructional video was “yeah, this is kind tender here… don’t do this unless you’re really sure… ” something like that. I check the price of the parts and they’re practically $140, which is comparable to the cost of a new model.

Now what to do?

It’s 1994. Kurdt has just offed himself, Blur’s Parklife and Orb’s Live 93 play continuously in my CD stack while The Twins™ sunned themselves on the brick courtyard in front of my lovely little garden house. I motored about in my 1977 VW Beetle at 25 mph, filling the tank on Friday evenings on the way home from work and giving her a wash on Saturday mornings. I never locked her doors.

I had recently purchased my first computer, a Performa 630 CD. Yes, it had the “CD” in the name, pushing the new-fangled technology of CD-ROM. Fancy. One of the underlying reasons for this purchase, aside from the fact of not wanting to go into the office to mess around with Illustrator and do side projects was to play some games. SimCity 2000 had just come out and I was embarrased to have my boss finding me playing on my work computer on a weekend, so I figured I needed to move it home. Another game I desperately wanted to try was Myst, a game played with a CD and Mac-only at that point.

Myst was really a revolution when it came out. It featured wonderfully rendered 3-d images, almost unheard of at that time. The interface was simple, static point-and-click images to turn, navigate down a path, etc. The game put you on a mysterious island and you had to figure out what to do; it’s intrigue was in its beauty and simplicity (and once playing, complexity) and wondering around, figuring out how to work the elements on the island and puzzles contained within. I remember it came with a blank notebook where you could jot down things to remember, sketch out maps of the puzzles and basically doodle what was happening around you, as several “books” in the Library on the island showed you as you read them. The game also featured QuickTime movies embedded into the gameplay, which again, was unique for gameplay at that time.

During this time I was also dating Mr. Shipman who was currently working for a client in Chicago and would return to Houston for the weekends. On weekends we would have our together time, going to dinner and having beers and doing dating things. Once I had a big outing planned and Mr. Shipman, after learning I had Myst and being the computer geek he was, said “Why don’t we stay in, order a pizza and play Myst?” Heaven.

Last week Cyan, the creators of Myst, released the iPhone port of the game which is identical to the original from 1993. I think I still have the original booklet that I diligently wrote all my clues in 15 years ago but I’m not sure where it is. It may have been discarded before the last apartment move, I’m not sure. What I do know is that I’m immersed in a world that is oddly familiar (sometimes blatantly) but feels primitive, exciting and full of nostalgia.

I haven’t had to diagram much this time around and back then finding a solution to a tricky puzzle was to sit there and figure it out, whereas now a simple Twitter question or using a provided “hint” link will eventually lead you online to the answer you’re seeking. Trying not to use the hints I’ll still be through it in a week or so now, because I know what to look for, opposed to the couple of months it took me to complete it back in 1994. It’s still fun.

I have been accepted to the Masters Program at Georgetown University. There I will study graphic artistry supplemented with a flurry of work experience and life credits that I will be the top in my class and an invaluable resource to those around me.

I have decided to reside in the dormitory to foster a sense of camaraderie and unity with my peers. I’ve seen my room and although I have no roommate there is a large communal area where I will gather with those who live down the hall to share dinners, television shows and Wii games (television-based activities only to be enjoyed once our studies and projects are completed).

While being twice as old as most of the other students, I still feel comfortable on campus. Although I don’t hang out too long at the student union with the other kids, I do show up every once in a while. When I do, I’m invited to sit down with classmates and we engage in stimulating conversation about design philosophies, critiquing each others work, analyzing published work and anything other topic that may come up. We’ll split a pitcher of beer and then make plans for later.

This scenario is, of course, never going to happen. I realize this as I awake, the iPod/Alarm playing Thomas Dolby singing about a submarine run aground on maneoeuvres. The dream fades quickly, as most of mine do, but I was able to remember enough of the pleasing scenario that was happening in another world and another time.

Bye bye empire, empire bye bye.