We’ll have to wait and see….
Today I wanted to go get an iPhone 3G and do a first day impression report if the speed was the upgrade and being shackled to AT&T for another 2 years. Sadly, that won’t be happening today due to long lines and activation problems.
I personally underestimated the demand and I didn’t think the line would be all that big. I made my way over to the store at about 9:40 this morning and the line was a block and a half long. A friend of mine that works on the other side of Chicago’s Loop reported that the AT&T store on Monroe had a similar line. To give you an idea of the length of the line, I’ve drawn on a Google map. One difference in reality from that map is that people weren’t standing in the cross street, but you know…
View Larger Map
However, I do have some good things to say about the new iPhone OS that also was unleashed today. If you’re not in a 3G covered area, this is the big news.
The upgrade process I did last night went smoothly and downloading and installing apps from the iTunes story did as well. I haven’t had a chance to play with many of the apps yet, but I’m really excited by mobile NetNewsWire and Twitterific. I love both of the desktop versions of those apps and I am very happy to have pocket versions. The AIM client is nice to have as well, but I’ve read reports that its buggy. I haven’t used it enough yet to run into that.
I won’t list all the new features as there are many web sites that cover that, but there are some really nice changes that affect my daily life. The calendar is now multi-calender aware, which was something that was killing me on the old OS. Mail has bulk move and bulk delete now, which will save me a bunch of time. You can BCC mail now as well, which is useful in business contexts.
As I do more, I’ll do another post. So, with only a few minutes really into it, and not waiting in the long line, the OS upgrade is worth it. Not sure about the hardware. Luckily, everyone gets the OS upgrade even if they don’t buy a new phone.
Despite having a name very similar to CRT’s, the Center for Real Estate and Social Technologies (CREST) aims to be “the definitive research and education resource for social technologies in the real estate business, conducting surveys and other projects to generate benchmarks and best practices that REALTORS® can employ to improve their social networking, blogging, and social media marketing efforts.” To attain that goal, CREST announced themselves and launched their first survey over on VARbuzz yesterday.
If you’re a REALTOR® who write and maintains your own blog, the first survey is aimed at you. Why don’t you toss them some answers?
In my reading this morning, Chicagoist had a post which alerted me to Wordle. We’ve been using word clouds in some of the flyers we’ve been making lately. (And by we, I mean Ana and her excellent work.) Wordle is a quick and effortless way to make clouds that you are then free to do anything you like with.
For some geeky fun, I took the C++ source code (and header file) to librets::RetsSession from the libRETS source code, and generated a could. Who woulda that that in C/C++ return was the most recurring word? Okay, yeah, EVERYBODY. Click on the image for a larger view.
Today, Mark and I were walking back from the Hilton after sitting in and listening to the Business Issues Committee meeting here at the midyear meetings. (Hopefully more on that soon from an expert!)
In any case, we passed a bus stop bench and saw a bunch of books sitting on it and we couldn’t resist taking a picture or two. (Click on the image for a larger version.) The fact that two of them were HTML books really amused us.
I’m not exactly sure what that collect of books says to me other than “disgruntled web designer.”
Previously on CRT’s blog, we talked about my trip to AZ….
I got an e-mail from Dru Bloomfield today saying the video from our panel on blogging is up on the SAAR site. You can watch it here on SAAR’s site, but be warned, it clocks in at about an hour and a half.
On a completely unrelated and egotistical note, I hate watching myself on video as I always seem to do something that ends up annoying me. In this video I seem to be doing some Mr. Burns hand-wringing thing from time to time.
The Bloggers’ Lounge and WiFi HotSpot at NAR’s 2008 Midyear Legislative Meetings & Trade Expo officially open today.
Technically, the HotSpot was operating yesterday, but it wasn’t officially open. It’ll be open 24/7 until the end of the show. The Bloggers’ Lounge is open from 10am to 6pm today through Friday.
WiFi Flyer Bloggers’ Lounge Flyer
Every once in awhile you get bit by the Law of Unintended Consequences. What is this law you ask? To quote wikipedia:
The Law of Unintended Consequences states that any action will produce some unintended consequences…
This maxim is not a scientific law; it is more in line with Murphy’s law as a warning against the belief that we can control the world around us. In other words, each cause has more than one effect, which will invariably include at least one side effect. The side effect can potentially be more significant than any of the intended effects.
Our blog got hit with that big time since late last week when I installed and turned on the WP-SuperCache plugin. I thought I’d been installing a performance improvement, but I ended up breaking the comment system due to a bad interaction with Spam Karma 2 (SK2). Most people who’ve been trying to leave a comment in the past few days have been shunted to the moderation queue or blocked as spam.
After some web searching I found two sets of directions to fix this. The first is a plugin from Priv for SK2 that makes SK2 notify WP-SuperCache when its updates things. The second was some code modifications from quenting I needed to make to both SK2 and WP-SC to make some ‘magic’ anti-spam stuff that SK does work.
The end result is comments work again and should not have the false positives. Of course, I have to wait and watch the next few days to see if it actually is working… So comment away! 
We don’t normally do trip recaps here on the blog because we would end up writing something almost every day. Okay, we really don’t travel every day, but it sure seems like it sometime. This trip was worthy of a shout-out.
I was invited by Doug Groppenbacher, the President-Elect of the Scottsdale Area Association of REALTORS® (SAAR), to take part in the Technology Symposium that SAAR had last Friday. I had a 25 minute or so intro for the day, and then I moderated a panel on blogging with (pictured below (thanks Dru)) Steve Belt, Dru Bloomfield, and Jay Thompson. (Yes, THAT Jay Thompson. ) All in all, the day went perfectly. The audience had lots of good questions, and they went well with the prepared questions I had. SAAR will have videos up of the panel and I’ll share them here if I can. There are more pictures of the panel in Dru’s photoset, including my awesome He-Man slide. I then had a nice lunch with Dru, Irene Hammond, and John Wake, where we discussed generational as well as gender differences in social technology usage.
The next morning, I took a bunch of Phoenix/Scottsdale bloggers out to breakfast to answer any NAR questions for them and so I could ask some questions of them. I never pass up an opportunity to learn more about the industry from the practitioners hitting the ground every day. Besides the three people on the panel I’ve already mentioned, we were joined by Artur Ciesielski and Joanna Zajusz, Christoph Schweiger, Jonathan Dalton, Patrick Mahony, Craig Frooninckx, Max Chirkov, and Heather Barr. It was a great discussion where I learned a lot and hopefully imparted some knowledge as well. I even got my geek on by talking Perl and Ruby with Craig! (By the way, next time I go to Scottsdale, I’m going stay at the Valley Ho, where we had breakfast.. The retro aspect of that place really got to me.)
The whole trip was filled with a great group of people really passionate about their industry and in using internet technology to reach out to and work with consumers.
Heading out to NAR’s midyear meetings? Want to be able to compose your blog posts in peace? Just want some internet access to check on the business back home? Then you’re in luck as CRT will once again be hosting in the always popular WiFi Hot Spot and the increasingly popular Bloggers’ Lounge.
The following PDF’s have the lowdown on the locations and times. Print them out, pass them around. Tattoo them on your back! (Okay, maybe not the last one.)
WiFi Flyer Bloggers’ Lounge Flyer
Keeping with my trend of welcoming new people many weeks after they are new people, I’d like to welcome Ana Schmitz to CRT.
Ana joins us as our new Communications Associate. However, she’s been with NAR for over 10 years, most recently in our marketing dept. We’re happy and lucky to have her with us. In just two weeks she’s already jumped into all of her major job responsibilities as fast as we could throw them at her.
Ana is looking to learn more about technology in general and would like to be a rock-star programmer. For some reason, she thinks she can learn that stuff in CRT. She’s already been doing self-study on Java, and for a project we need done, she’ll be learning PHP. As a welcoming present in our comments, please feel free to leave her other technologies she should look at.
