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Time for a frivolous post that will be of no interest to anyone but myself.

I am a picky person. This is obvious the more one reads this site. One of the areas about which I am super-picky is gadgets. One of the gadgets about which I am über-super-picky is cell phones.

I proffer for reference this and this.

Okay, so I have had my Nokia 6230 for over a year now. I love this phone. It’s small and packed with every feature I want. However, the one important feature on the phone that should not be buggy is buggy, and that’s the voice dialing. Often, after speaking the tag assigned to who I’m calling, the voice dialing mode freezes. I then have to either wait a minute or two for it to stop freezing and pop back into action, or I have to turn off the phone and start it back up.

Did I dare contact Cingular about this? No. Or at least, not right away. Like every other massive company these days, their support people are clueless about anything technical. So I have been putting up with the flaw.

In January, I was in Vegas for CES and stopped by the Nokia booth. There, I started talking to one of the booth monkeys and showed him my 6230. You know, every time I talk to someone who knows anything about Nokia and cell phones, when they find out I have a 6230, they inevitably say, “Oh, that’s a great phone.” Booth monkey said such, and I told him, “Yeah, but…”

After describing the voice dialing freeze, the guy told me that that flaw had been fixed long ago with a firmware update and suggested I talk to Cingular about that.

Foolishly, I tried to follow his advice. The conversation with the Cingular monkey went something like this:

“Yes, a guy who works for Nokia told me I just need a firmware update.”

“Do you ever turn off your phone?”

“Uh, why?”

“That’s when we push updates to the phones.”

I declined to point out that nothing can be pushed to a phone when it’s turned off, but I think I understood what she meant.

“The only time I ever turn off my phone is when I fly or when the voice dialing thing screws up, so, yes, I do turn off my phone.”

“Well, try turning it off tonight and see if anything happens.”

I gave up right quick on Cingular being able to help me.

Slam cut to a few weeks ago. Sven and I were inside the belly of the bloated whale that is The Beverly Center. I noticed something peculiar: A Nokia store! Zounds! I went in it right then, and once more the next week to ask some questions, and then again Monday. I had a plan: To replace my Cingularly bastardized phone for a real, unmolested Nokia 6230. Or, in the parlance of the geeky, an unlocked 6230.

You see, the American cell companies utterly control which phones are sold in the U.S. Because the phones are heavily subsidized by the cell companies, they go through a lengthy process of choosing from whatever phones the equipment makers have and tweaking them to do what the cell company wants. This usually includes removing features that force you to spend more money on services.

For instance, my Cingular 6230 does not allow me to save ringtones and games that I purchase where I want. Such things are stored in a place your average Joe can’t get at them, so that when you get a new phone you can’t copy those things to it. Oh, I suppose the cell companies say it’s to prevent piracy, but that’s everyone’s excuse for shafting the consumer.

Another feature that was disabled on my phone is network selection. This became an issue on my business trip to France last year. (Oddly, I seem to have not mentioned it in the travelogue.) My phone was not working on Cingular’s preferred roaming partner in Paris. The signal was also very poor where we were staying. On a real, unmolested phone, I would have been able to go into the settings and tell me phone to try another network. But no, Cingular had disabled that feature, and I had to make many land-line calls and wait days for Cingular and the French company to fix the issue.

[UPDATE: If you don’t believe me about phones being crippled by the cell companies, read this recent tidbit.]

Most cell phones that use GSM (which is what Cingular’s system uses) are tri-band phones. That means that there are three GSM bands it can use: 900, 1800, and 1900 MHz. Sadly, the GSM carriers in the States tend to use 850, 1800, or 1900. So often there’s even more of a delay getting new phones to the States while the equipment manufacturers create a separate version that swaps 850 for 900. Can this be any more tediously boring? Or, if you’re like me, could it be any more tediously frustrating?

So I went to the Nokia store on Monday to get an unlocked phone. When I told the guy there about my voice dialing problem and so on, he said that often those things can be caused by the cell companies messing with the OS on the phones. (I do not imagine the cell companies do this on their own, however, but with the help of the equipment manufacturers as well. They want to sell phones in the States!)

The conversation with the Nokia man was becoming curious, making me finally ask, “Do you sell the phones here?” They do not! It’s merely a showroom. He told me where I could buy an unlocked 6230. Somewhere on Sunset. Or I could buy it online at Nokia, where there are very few unlocked phones for sales in the U.S.

So the iron grip of the dumb-ass cell phone companies seemed in tact. Nokia couldn’t even sell their own phones unless they wanted to risk being dropped by the cell companies out of spite and greed.

To add pain to the whole affair, Nokia yesterday announced some new phones, one of which looked like a great set with the elements I want most: small size, Bluetooth, and, now, a camera. (I have gotten very used to posting to The Wren Forum from my cell phone!) The new N73 looks brilliant. While Motorola has been releasing many quad-band phones, which are 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 and thus usable just about anywhere in the world, including the U.S., Nokia has been slow to follow suit. But the N73 is quad-band.

The pain is that, once again, there would be a delay in the U.S. while the cell phone folks decided whether to pick up the N73 at all and, if so, how to change it so the phone is missing features. It could easily be a year before the N73 ever gets to America, if ever even at all, ever!

A final piece of news came in today that prompted me to write this boring post: Nokia is opening stores in the U.S.! While I don’t live in Chicago or New York, where the first stores are slated to sprout, I’m sure that once the stores open up, I’ll be able to buy an unlocked N73 online from Nokia. And then, friends… then my cell phone happiness will reach its peak! I will hold onto my crippled 6230 for now while I see what happens.

The fact that I have just written a forty-thousand-word piece on this topic reminds me of something I’ve been pondering a while. What if I were to get rid of all my gadgets? Maybe by the time I can buy an unlocked N73, I will have set all my gadgets ablaze and moved to a house in the Colorado Rockies somewhere, hiking and reading and living a simpler life.

I have blathered excessively to friends about my disappointment over the lack of availability of the Nokia 6230 through our corporate AT&T representatives, and I am about to do something I do not want to do. I am about to order something other than Nokia.

I have always had a Nokia cell phone (okay, except for my first cell, a Qualcomm brick thing). I have yet to find a phone with the intelligent user interface features of the Nokias. Nokias, like Macs, are a pleasure to use, and work exactly like a cell phone should. Finding names in the phone book and entering message text, potentially the most tedious and frustrating of activities, are simplest on a Nokia.

But I am now asking myself if perhaps a little frustration with the user interface will be a fair exchange for having a phone with the features I want and a tad more technical reliability.

I have to be 100% honest here to say that, beautiful interface and pleasureness to use aside, most of my Nokias have had one or another kind of strange technical glitch. My tiny blue one would freeze and need to be re-set by removing the battery. Two of them have had headphone profile freezing problems, the phones thinking a headphone was attached when there was none there. And my current phone turns itself off if handled or jostled a certain way.

I do not know if any other phone makers have more reliability as far as bugs and glitches go, but I wonder if I should try. The Motorola Razr is looking awfully nice and has the features I want, but it’s a Motorola, and using Motorolas is a pain in the ass. It’s also a clamshell, which I find inconvenient and unnecessary. I’ve poked around my boss’ Sony Ericsson, and it’s cool, but suffers from its own interface ugliness. Is it worth suffering through the poor UI features of these phones to get something more reliable and full of the technical features I desire?

I could of course merge my Palm with my phone and, finally, have all my info and my phone in one device. But the Treo 650, while immensely cool, is relatively huge. I want the tiniest phone possible, since I carry my phone in my pocket at all times. The Treo would not fit very comfortably in my jeans, and it has an external antenna. Snap!

Why can’t I just get the phone I want? Why do I have to go through this nonsense? Or—and this is the most important question—why do I care so much? My life would be easier and I’d be more relaxed if I didn’t give a flying crap what kind of phone I had. That the tiny details of industrial and interface design cause me so much stress is a bane, and I wonder if I should just let it all go.

Long pause.

I of course am dreaming. Details matter to me, and I think they always will. Perhaps what I really need to do is move beyond accepting the fact that I am too picky and through to the admission that not everything will meet my draconian standards of quality. In accepting that most things are made like garbage, perhaps therein I will find relaxation.

So, is it a Razr, a Treo, or wait another 46 months for a 6230? Decision time.

Back yonder ’round about 1998, when I finally dove into the world of the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant, otherwise known as a PIM (Personal Information Manager)), I bought a new but discontinued Newton, the MessagePad 100. It was fairly inexpensive, as Newtons went, and I could not afford any of the newer models.

Newton Box

I loved the thing. The handwriting recognition wasn’t nearly as bad as people had made it out to be… though, granted, my 100 had an upgraded engine for that. The Newton was a study in delightful, fun, easy-to-use design and UI. It was an utter pleasure to use. It synced with my Mac, so I could keep all my data together. That data, free of photos, music, and video, could fit in the tiniest of storage spaces.

Newton 2MB Storage Card Box

Yes, that’s a 2 MEGABYTE card. You would not even be able to store one song on that today.

Some time after I got my Newton, I got my first cell phone, a Qualcomm thing where you could slide the earpiece to answer and end calls. It was an amusing phone, looking back on it. But it had a mean streak. One day, I put my Qualcomm on the top of my cubicle storage shelf. I forgot it was there, and when I closed the door to the shelf, the phone came sliding off, and it smashed my Newton’s screen. It was a sad day.

My Newton, Shattered

The Newton being a “dead” platform by then (more on that later), I decided I should buy a Palm Pilot instead of another MessagePad. The “Pilot” part of the Palm name had already been sued out of existence by the Pilot pen company, so the device I bought was simply called a Palm III.

The Palm was nice. It was small, incredibly simple, sipped on battery power, and was perfectly suited for my needs. But it was not a Newton by any means. It had frustrating limitations based on OS design choices, and, worse, synced very poorly with my Mac. Thanks to that, my Palm became my one repository of all phone numbers and calendars. I could access the info via the Palm Desktop app for the Mac, but it was such a terrible program, I simply never bothered. My Mac was cut off from my information.

When the Palm III began to show its age, I upgraded to a Palm Tugsten T. The Tungsten had a color screen, a fast processor, Bluetooth, but was still limited by Palm’s unchanged app designs and inability to sync properly with my Mac.

By this time, the Mac had made a huge comeback. OS X kicked ass, and Mac hardware itself was becoming utterly sick, as the kids these days might say. The new OS improved and began to offer wonderful features combining integrated use of calendar and contact data. Because I wanted to use these features, I had to double up on locations for data. In the world of information, you should never do this. You should only ever have one place for personal information, otherwise confusion and mismatched data will ensue. However, technology was not allowing me to work this way, so I made a valiant and very successful effort at managing two contact lists.

In the meantime, I seemed to go through cell phones like water. I was definitely a Nokia fan, as you can see, because their interface was the most well thought-out, in my opinion. (Below are all my cell phones, minus the Qualcomm and my first 6230. From left to right are the 3360, 3560, 8290 (the greatest!), 3120, an unlocked 6230, and the Microsoft mPhone Vista Personal Ultimate Edition.)

All My Cell Phones

The following is not one of my old phones, but I had to include the picture anyway. It’s a circa 1994 Motorola sitting next to the new Motorola WSHR. Thanks to Fuz for letting me have this brick.

Motorola Circa 1994

A year or two ago, I was tired of keeping two sets of records, so I stopped using my Palm for contacts and moved everything to my Mac. My Palm was then only being used for my calendar and a list of all my passwords. The Mac stored my contact information so I could use it seamlessly for iChat and Mail. With .Mac syncing, I had my contact info on my home Mac and all of my work Macs, and if for some reason I needed the info on the road, I could look it up on my Nokia or iPod. iSync did an okay job of syncing a selection of my contacts to my Nokia cell phone, though again, there were limitations.

This was all a mess, but it worked somehow.

When rumors of an Apple phone started to surface years ago, you can understand why I was so intrigued. Many was the time I had been tempted to buy a used Newton 2100 and spend the time to hack it to work with OS X. Believe it or not, people out there still hack the Newton, and you can find solutions to make a now-ancient MessagePad sync with any modern Mac.

The temptation to buy another Newton never took solid form. I had become accustomed to a smaller device. Newtons were huge by modern standards. No, what I really, really, really wanted was a new Apple device. No one else was going to have the smarts or the business drive to make a really good phone/PIM gadget that worked seamlessly with the Mac.

This January, for the first time in maybe 14 years, I got to attend Macworld. I went on Disney’s dime, and so I bought the package that got me good seats for Steve Jobs’ keynote. I have never been to a Steve keynote before. His October appearance at a Studio work event was fantastic, but that was not a keynote. The January 2007 Macworld keynote will, of course, be the one that goes down in history, because it’s when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. (Download the “Macworld San Francisco 2007 Keynote Address” video if you follow that iTunes link.)

I wish I had a video of myself and Ben at that keynote, because the iPhone, as Steve was revealing its many wonders, turned out to be far more exciting and fantastic and brilliant than I had ever imagined it would be; Ben and I were excited beyond reason. My facial expressions alone would, I’m sure, be priceless YouTube fodder.

Here it is, over six months later, and I’ve had my iPhone for two weeks. I love the thing. The keyboard is much better than people—most of whom had never even used it— have made it out to be. The iPhone is a study in delightful, fun, easy-to-use design and UI. It is an utter pleasure to use. It syncs with my Mac, so I now, once again, keep all my data together.

Between the Newton and the iPhone, I had probably 8 years of simply passable PDA experiences. I am finally at the day I’ve thought about for so long.

Of course, there is another similarity between my old Newton and my new iPhone: both are early version products. Had I been able to own a newer Newton back in 1998, I’d have had a more refined product, with less quirks and a very mature feel. My iPhone, being on version 1.0, has plenty of things it could do better. However, the iPhone feels like it’s already been around for years. As someone else said, verison 1.0 of an Apple product is like version 7.0 of another company’s. What’s so fantastic about both the iPhone and the Newton is that Apple got the basics right from the very beginning. The concepts were sound, the designs were top-notch, and intelligence just oozes out of both products. As the iPhone gets updated over the next few years, I know Apple will fix some things, add others, and the iPhone will only get better.

Old Newton, New iPhone

For a great set of beautiful pics that inspired me to dig out my own Newton, go visit philcarrizzi at Flicker.

From philcarrizzi on Flicker

iPhone Pre-Opened
Click the photos to see more pics of my new toy(s).

Here was me on Friday, June 29th:

  • Calling AT&T business services to find out how much exactly my bills for my company-paid phone service have been costing, and comparing that to how much I’d save with an iPhone plan;
  • Calling AT&T business services to see what I’d have to do about making sure I could get an iPhone with my same phone number and discovering I can only do that if it’s changed to a personal account;
  • Calling AT&T business services again to see about changing my business account to a personal account and if that was something I could do right then and there;
  • Not being able to do so because it is a business account and I am not in control of said account;
  • Calling the lady at work who does control my account;
  • Calling her again and finding out she had, between my calls, left a greeting saying she was out of the office;
  • E-mailing some guy at the lot to ask, hey, since we now have personal responsibility for our accounts and have to pay them ourselves, either by expensing the charges or eating the charges, is it not okay for me to just get an iPhone as a personal device and do the very same thing?;
  • Reading same some guy’s reply that, oh my goodness, no, because a corporate liable device is not the same as a personal liable device bleedy bleedy blee; Becoming resigned that, in fact, I would need to wait six months or more to get an iPhone through work.

Here was me once June 29th entered the five-o’clock hour:

  • Deciding that I was more than so over my busted Palm Tungsten and my wonky, failing, second Nokia 6230;
  • Making up my mind that it was worth it to pay for my own mobile phone service for six to nine months until AT&T allowed business accounts to activate iPhone-specific plans;
  • Wondering if I were to, say, head out for an iPhone that night if it’d be better to go to an AT&T store since they might be less crowded;
  • Realizing, with no hint of surprise, that the Apple Store in the so-called Fashion Square Mall was on my way home and would offer, without question, a better shopping experience than any AT&T store could ever hope to offer;
  • Half-assedly assuring the tiny, frugal part of my brain that it should relax because, hey, by the time I got there, I’d be so far back in line that they’d mose definitely run out of the 8GB iPhones before I got into the store;
  • Half-assedly priming the much larger, less-frugal part of my brain by asking, hey, how big exactly would the line even be at Fashion Square?;
  • Realizing, with some small sense of thrill and a bucket-load of tempered excitement, that I was going to go iPhone shopping.

And that, friends was me just setting the stage. To quell your desire for a cessation of the drama, yes, I got an iPhone on its first day of availability. I got two. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

I got to Fashion Square at 5:30, half-an-hour before the Apple Store would re-open to sell the iPhone. The line was longer than I thought at first. It wrapped around one end of the second floor and then back the other way toward the food court. Once I got in line, I discovered that several people arriving at the same time as me had been waiting at the AT&T store to which I had considered going. After waiting there all day, the staff finally let the fans know that the store had not received its shipment of phones. They offered to overnight phones to those who’d been waiting in line, but what was the point of that? What would be the point of waiting in line all day to not get a phone at all? So the refugees had made their way to Fashion Square, and now were in the same place in line as me. We discussed the possibility of there not being enough iPhones for us all, which made me realize how frustrating that would be for anyone who’d waited for so many hours in the hot sun at the AT&T store.

This is only my second time waiting in line at an Apple Store. The first time was for the opening of the storer at Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. I wanted to go to that partly to see what all the excitement was about—for every Apple Store opening up to that point had been a big local event—but mostly to get one of the free T-shirts they hand out at every opening.

So on Friday, as at every Apple Store opening, the staff, in black iPhone T-shirts, were pacing the line and getting everyone excited. Shoppers from other realms of consumerland walked by, looking askance at the strange people in line for what they did not know. The few people who did stop to ask, though, when told we were waiting for the iPhone, knew exactly what we were talking about. Even the people who didn’t want an iPhone know what the iPhone was. That did not make them think we weren’t crazy, just a tiny bit less crazy.

Soon, the black paper that had been put up to cover the Apple Store windows was taken down. The “Coming June 29” that had been part of the large iPhone window displays had been removed. They think of every detail. At exactly 6:00pm, cheers went up from down the mall, rippling through the line. We could just see the glass doors open, and the first wave of people entered to clapping Apple employees and what even at this distance were unmistakably huge smiles. They let chunks of 20 people into the store at a time, so we had a wait ahead of us.

I keep saying “we” instead of “me” because a certain camaraderie tends to crop up at any Apple event. Every one of us in line was there, and just as geeky and excited to get one of these fancy devices as the next. Well, there was the guy in the orange shirt behind me who didn’t seem to know exactly what the iPhone was, even though he was about to wait hours for one. “Do you know much about it?” he asked me. Inside, I could not help but laugh. I knew too much about the damn thing. I had been keeping daily vigil by my NetNewsWire since January to catch every scrap of iPhone news. “Yes,” I said simply. A bit later, orange man asked, “What does it do?” I must have looked stunned. I did not know what to say, not because I thought it was a stupid question, but because the iPhone does so much. How do you describe it in simple terms… I mean, beyond the Apple marketing blather triumvirate—not untrue—of “revolutionary mobile phone, widescreen iPod with touch controls, and breakthrough Internet communication device.” Orange man tried to narrow his question down, seeing how I couldn’t answer. I told him what I could.

So we had a wait ahead of us.

Not long after the doors opened, the line had moved up and we were queued next to a cart selling those “amazing” windows you see on TV, the kind that are double-paned, energy-efficient, and swing open to be washed with ease from inside your abode. An older woman manned the cart. She was lively, if worn. We apologized for blocking any view of her cart from the “normal” shoppers, but she didn’t mind. We all had a good laugh at hundreds of people lining up to drop $600 on a cell phone. Window lady suggested that, had she known today would be special, she would have made it a party. Brought margaritas. Fireworks. When she had a chance, she would try to get us to at least give her our names and numbers for a free window installation estimate. The only guy (we were all guys in my recent vicinity) that seemed to actually live in a house was some tall, young, incredibly hot guy with long hair pulled back in a pony tail, wearing flip-flops and a wife-beater. He humored the lady a bit, but he had no more interest in buying windows than he did in visiting Nigeria. Not that I knew whether he wanted to visit Nigeria or not. He just seemed too cocky to want to visit such a place.

After quite a long stay at the window cart, and after much joking about how very few of us “did Windows,” the line moved on. Each of us took breaks to go get Wetzel’s or pizza or cookies or hit the poorly-maintained restrooms. Places were saved with a smile. I brought back a small bag of Mrs. Fields to share, but not a single person wanted any cookies. That’s L.A. for you. Carbs? CARBS!!! A young guy directly in front of me, though, said he used to work in this mall, at the Abercrombie, and so mall friends had often come to give him loads of end-of-day cookie leftovers. He never wanted to eat a Mrs. Fields again.

From time-to-time, the subject of iPhone supply came up. Would they run out of 8GB phones? Would we be willing to buy a 4GB phone if that’s all they had? Who was buying two, and who just one? The limit was two. I hadn’t intended to buy two, but as I waited there, I thought, geez, if they do sell out of these things, I’d get a pretty penny for one online, and then the pain of paying for my own would be lessened significantly. Would I buy one or two? Well, like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you already know the outcome, so there’s no need to reveal once again that I did, nearly at the last moment, decide to buy a second phone.

Two iPhones! Two!

We rounded the last corner. Then we inched up toward the 20-person holding point. Everyone was pretty damn excited. I even said to the people around me, “You know, I feel pretty stupid, but I’m incredibly excited about this! Look how close we are!” Just like the approach of Christmas, the closer you get, the longer it seems to take. Finally, at the front of the line, waiting to be let in, our group of 20 stalled. Or did we? It sure felt like it. We were there for a long time. Or were we? We were all very excited that we were going to actually get a phone, that they hadn’t run out. When would we get our turn?

A subtle signal from one security guard to another, and off we went! It was after 8:00pm, but the Apple people were still clapping and smiling and greeting every person who came in. The store was not packed, but was brilliantly arranged just for this night. The line went to the left side of the store, where we could finally touch an iPhone for the first time. “I don’t know if I’ve ever come to buy something I’ve never even tried before,” I said. Which was the same for every person in that line that night.

Waiting in that last stretch, in the store, I picked up an iPhone. I gave it a few pokes. It was fantastic. Already. The weight, the build, the feel, the screen, the animation, the UI… It worked exactly like the commercials and the vids on Apple’s site demonstrated. I held it for no more that 45 seconds, then gave it to the next person. I was so glad I was there. This was going to be great.

A very happy, smiling, joking fellow was at the head of the line, waiting to send us to a cashier to purchase our phones. As each person left the store with phones in hand, the employees at the door clapped them out. Then we got to take a turn at the register. When I got to my slot, I told the girl there I wanted two 8GB phones. Guess that was when I made the final decision. “One bag or two?” “Oh, two.” Everyone who bought an iPhone got it in a very nice, fancy bag. I’m sure they were made just for this occasion, and once they run out, there will be no more. So I imagined. If I was going to sell the second iPhone, having the bag would be a must.

While the runner was getting my phones, the girl was talking to me about something. I can’t for the life of me remember now what it was. This is due to a mix of my early-onset Alzheimer’s, and the excitement of the moment. She was very friendly, though, and we had a good chuckle or two. She swiped my Amex, handed me my bags, and that was that.

The brilliance of the store set-up was this: They were only letting people into the store who had been waiting in line to buy iPhones. The line went straight to the back of the store, and you bought the iPhone without any delay. After that iPhone purchase, then you could browse the rest of the store for cases, headphones, Macs, iPods, whatever else you wanted, and pay at a second register (the Genuis Bar, annexed tonight for this purpose only). I chose not to buy a case, but did get some protective film for the screen.

Once out of our line, my temporary iPhone friends dispersed amongst banter such as, “Have fun!” and “Enjoy that thing!” As I walked out of the store, my two fancy bags and precious boxes of phone in-hand, I was clapped out by the employees, and thanked. I thanked them back, with a huge smile.

I rushed back to my car. It was all I could do not to run. A big, black guy commented on my stash, and I smiled. Some ladies in a car asked me how much I wanted for them. I mumbled an answer. Why had I parked so far away? What if someone stole these before I even got to my car? Where was all the security to protect we iPhone buyers?

Oh course, there had been nothing to worry about, and I got to my car, got on the 101, and headed home.

This is not the end of my iPhone postings. Oh, no. The phone is a marvel, and I will be sure to post my thoughts here eventually. I’m already on my second phone, and the other one I bought has found a good home… There’s a lot more to say.

Holding My New iPhone

I have no time for this, but why not take a break?

After almost a year and a half, I finally got the cell phone I’ve been wanting. (Blame the U.S. cell phone companies.)

I snapped this little pic in my room just a while ago—my maid got creative with the washcloths. Then I came back to the ballroom in which I’ve been kept prisoner for a week, and, thanks to Bluetooth and my Mac, I could grab this file off the phone (while it was still in my pocket!), and post it here.

If I weren’t overwhelmed with fatigue, I’d be overwhelmed with gadgetitis.