Apple usually makes this stuff simple. The 1.1.2 Firmware has been out since yesterday, and iTunes STILL does not know about the new firmware release. I found a link on engadet where you can download the actual firmware. After downloading the 160MB file, and sticking it on my desktop, you'd think a simple double click would start the update.... nope. Double clicking the file opens iTunes, but then it sits there and does nothing. Dang it. Here's how to get that file working... <shift> <click> the "Restore" button in iTunes, it will give you a file dialogue to choose a file, then simply locate the file and click OK.

NOTE: Doing the update this way required me to restore my iPhone to factory default settings during the upgrade, when I chose to restore from my last backup, it applied the 1.1.2 firmware, and then restored my phone from said backup. It took quite a while and I am now syncing all my songs and movies back to the device, doing the update this way, will RESET your phone to factory settings. But as long as you have a recent backup, it should not matter.

My good friend, Scott (a Type I diabetic) is trying to raise $50,000 this year to fight diabetes. Now that he's working for Microsoft, he has all kinds of cool contacts, like people that will help him rent out Vancouver's Cinetopia and let a bunch of geeks come play Halo 3 on their 50 foot tall high definition screens. I'm in.

Your $25 (or preferably more) donation goes straight to the American Diabetes Association and gets you in for a night of Halo 3 in Hi-Def! Five hours of gaming, can you take it? To sweeten the deal, I'll state that I'm terrible at this game, so if you want to come an 'pwn' me... it won't be hard.

Here are the details:

• When: Thursday evening, October 11th, 7:00 - Midnight
• Where: Cinetopia - Map & Web site
• Register: http://iammasterchief.com/ with the RSVP code "FIGHTDIABETES"

It should be a blast. More details on Scott's site.

The biggest piece of the new update is of course the wireless iTunes store. But even cooler in my opinion is that Safari is again, working with .NET 2.0 AJAX. Ok back to work on iPhone applications I could build.. hmmm.....

Update: People have been reporting the ability to listen to .wav files in email attachments. I just tried with my Vonage voice mail account, and it's not working for me. Bummer. I was really hoping that would be something that did work.

 I'm headed to Las Vegas this Monday through Wednesday. I'm going with one of my best friends, it's something we try to do once a year, especially since we don't work together anymore. We'll play a lot of poker, and Eric has told me that his last trip he learned to play craps. So I suspect I'll be learning to play craps this time, apparently it's a ton of fun.

Poker is my favorite thing to do there. Nothing high stakes really, just a little $2/$4 limit Texas Hold 'Em. Keep an eye on my camera blog, I'll be updating it with random pictures from our trip. We fly out Monday morning @ 8:30 AM and come back Wednesday night around 11PM.

I'm looking forward to three days with no kids, is that bad? I'm sure that when I get back I'll be glad to get home.

I purchased the device from Newegg for just under $200. Seems like a good deal, and I'm impressed with the manufacturing of the device, the thing is heavy and it's solid. It comes with USB, CAT5, and power cables, pretty nice for the price considering when you buy a printer, you don't even get a USB cable.

The NAS drive arrived around lunch time today. I was working from home so that I could sign for it when it arrived. I immediately took it out to the garage, and put it with all my networking gear. I unboxed it, plugged in the CAT5 and power, and went back inside. I sat down at my laptop and ran AngryIPScanner, looked for the new device, and opened up Internet Explorer and connected to the IP address over HTTP.

There was a page with an administration link, and a list of all the current shares that were setup. I clicked the administration link, and was challenged to enter security credentials, a guess of admin/admin and I was in. First order of business, change the admin password. Then I renamed the device "NAS". So now all my network devices can see a 'thing' called NAS on the network. It even picked up DHCP, DNS, and the gateway all automatically, nice.

I created three shares initially in the the LaCie interface, itunes, photos, and misc. I then terminaled into my desktop machine where the majority of my media and photos are. I mapped a drive to the NAS itunes share, and after entering the userid and password, I was connected. I started to copy all of my itunes and photo files to the respective shares on the NAS, I did the same with my laptop.

I copied Gigabytes of data to the device, it pretty much finished around 4:00 PM. So the copy process of almost 50GB was not too slow really. Here are some screen shots of the device's user interface, it's not glamorous, but it's clean, and makes sense.

Impressions
The thing just feels good when you hold it. Like it's really solid and engineered well. Setup took me less than a minute. I'm going to post more about the details of the device in the coming weeks. My plan is to put all of our media onto it, music, photos, movies, etc. Thus having an entry point for all computers on my network to access said data. I'd also like to create some sort of automated backup to it as well.

I have not installed the LaCie software yet, but I'm curious what's on the disk, so I probably will. More on that in a later post. So far, I'm totally stoked for the amount of money I spent, for what I've actually gotten. How often can you say that?

Screenshots of the User Interface (web based from the device)

Here is the status screen that shows the shares, and what services can connect to them.

Network details

Disk usage metrics (just after I started copying to it)

Service status screen

He's not walking yet, but if you distract him, he'll stand there for like a minute before he 'realizes' he's standing.

Pretty funny.

I just went to the Apple site, and went through the quick steps to get my $100 credit. If you need to get your credit, go here, and type in your cell phone number, and serial number. The serial number of your iPhone can be found inside the Settings > General > About section. Once you have entered these two items, you're sent an SMS message containing an code.

Simply enter this code, and your phone number into step two on the web site, and that's it. You are presented with a page that has your $100 credit. Just print it out for use in a brick-and-mortar store, or copy and paste the credit number and pin for use on the Apple Online Store.

I was going to get a new Nano, but opted for a iPhone dock that will connect to our home stereo (with remote!), a 2nd pair of earbuds with the little button on them for answering calls and advancing tracks, and lastly a $25 iTunes gift card. My total cost after the rebate was $3.

One of the things I think the Internet is great for is getting information on large ticket purchases. There is a multitude of resources for researching purchases. Product write ups, manufacturer web sites, and lastly (and arguably the best) consumer opinion. I really like sites that have a rating scale that aggregate the results of every person's review. Sometimes reviews contains tidbits of information that are not available in the product documentation, nor disclosed by the manufacturer. Sometimes it's a special setting to use, or it's a tip on what or what not to do. Other times it's a gripe that saves you from a huge headache.

These are the good reviews and there are reviews written by people that have no understanding of why they're submitting a review, yet alone how to write a review. I'm not saying that I'm the review-master. But when you're scanning through a ton of reviews, and you read something that's completely unrelated or not germane to the product, your time is being wasted.

I was recently looking for a few items online, some purchases I'm considering.  The first item is a Canon Zoom Lens, an "L" series lens which is their top of the line, semi-professional lens. The one I'm looking at (drooling over) is priced at around $600 (retail price is over $1000) which is quite an expensive purchase. So naturally, I want to glean as much information as I can. While this is an entry level lens (read low end) in the "L" series, I still want to ensure that I know what I'm getting into. Looking at Amazon's reviews I see:

So it seems like it's got a favorable rating among people that have reviewed it. Over 100 reviews, cool. So now I'm really interested in people that have given it one, or two stars. Let's see why they didn't like it so much. I start to look for lower reviews, and see if I can come across a reason why it might have some downsides, and I come across this.

Are you kidding me? This review has nothing to do with the lens. So the guy gives the lens a two star review? What an idiot. What's even more shocking, that I just noticed, is that 4 people found the review helpful? WTF?

Another purchase I'm considering is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive to keep all my music, video, and photo media on. With a device like this, I'll be able to access the data from any machine on my network, and free up this space on my computers. I will probably even be able to use it as a backup device. While this device is not expensive as the previous, the function of this one is almost more important to me, it's something I'm likely to use almost daily.

So I'm considering a LaCie 301138U 500GB Ethernet Disk mini NAS. It retails at newegg for just shy of $200. The reviews are almost all favorable, and I like how newegg lays it out. Looks like 80% of the people gave it a high rating (8 of 10) and 20% of the people said it was average (2 of 10). After reading each review since there were only 10, it seems like a good deal for me, and I'll give it a shot. Newegg is really good about returns, so if it does not work out, I'll return it.

All of the reviews were written well, nobody complained about FedEx or anything stupid like that. I'll have a post soon about setting up iTunes and media and sharing them between workstations on a network. It seems like it should be really simple, but my guess is that I'll run into some issues.