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Later: In case you were wondering, no, I didn’t get an iPhone. Even if I had, I probably would have put it up on eBay. I just thought the hype and hysteria was amusing. But I did see my first iPhone in the wild today on U Street, and damn that’s a pretty phone. But I’m holding firm - I’m waiting for iPhone 2.0

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7:15pm: the small Cingular store at Leesburg Pike and Old Gallows was hastily re-branded an at&t store and is actually selling iPhones. This store doesn’t even show up on the at&t website as an authorized reseller, but 20 or so people figured out this secret. THIS is the place to get your iPhone without too much of a wait.

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7pm: the stores have been open for an hour now, and the lines are moving well. The at&t line is has about 50 people, while the Apple line is about 200 strong. At at&t, there’s a security guard to guard and lock/unlock the door to protect the limited few allowed in at a time. The apple store seems much friendlier and their line is moving well.

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2:30pm: I just swung by the AT&T store and Apple store in Tysons Corner Mall and both have nice, orderly iPhone lines already formed. The line in front of the Apple store was at least 150 people long, while the line by the AT&T store had only about 25 people. I’m assuming the Apple store is going to get more phones than the tiny ATT store, but right now I think the smart money is on the AT&T store line.

For those familiar with the layout of Tysons Mall, the Apple iPhone line (blue) starts in front of the Apple store (yellow), snakes towards Macy’s, makes a U turn, then heads all the way back to Chipotle. So basically, it spans about 25% the length of the mall. The AT&T iPhone line (cyan) starts in front of the AT&T store (green) and pretty much just loops around the rail near Nordstrom.

The funny/bizarre part is that there are places where people need to get from one side of the mall to the other, so there are breaks in the line, some as long as 20 feet. As the queue grows, people are going to start jumping in at these breaks and havoc is going to ensue, I guarantee it.

What I was most surprised at, though, was not the length of the line but the diversity of people in it. There were way more women in line than I’d have guessed, although many were accompanied by male friends/significant others, so maybe that means there are just a lot of dorky couples with nothing better to do in this area. But there was a proportionate numbers of all the races and even a reasonable ratio of of young versus old people.

Ah, the iPhone: it truly brings people together, as long as they’re all really geeky.

I’ll have photos up later, and I’ll swing by later this evening around 6 or 6:30 to see what it’s like once the doors are open.

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9:30am: Traffic is pretty light this morning, maybe because so many people are already camped out for an iPhone. Well, more power to them.

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The following clip and the story surrounding it highlight why letting lawyers run your business is probably an awful idea.

Basically, these guys made a music video (a pretty awesome one at that) about the Die Hard films, and used clips from the films in the video. So clearly, they don’t own the copyright to these clips and they’re probably beyond fair use. So of course, the lawyers at 20th Century Fox were quick to shoot off threatening cease-and-desist letters and used the DMCA to force Youtube to pull the video off the site.

The reasons this was a bonehead move are two-fold.

• The video in no way threatens the financial success of the new movie, or sales of the old movies.
• But more importantly, this video promotes the Die Hard movies - I don’t know anyone who isn’t filled with a strong desire to go watch the movies again after watching this video. These guys are helping out the studio!

But of course, lawyers don’t care. All they see is more busywork to help them justify their existence high salaries. Yahoo, more takedown notices!

Luckily (and surprisingly), someone at Fox’s marketing department has a brain and realized the value of this video. They contacted the band and worked with them to make the video even better (they even paid them!). The NY Times has a good story about it.

Anyway, here’s the video: “Die Hard” by Guyz Nite

Of course, now I can’t get this damn song out of my head:

• “We’re gunna die, die, die, die hard…. we’re gunna die, die, die as hard as we can”
• “No one dies harder than John McClain, even when his wife’s stuck on a plane”
• “No one dies harder than John McClain, saving all those people on that train…”

Strangely, just today I saw a guy on GW Parkway with a bumper sticker that read “Yippee Kay Yay M____”. A sign perhaps, or just really smart guerrilla marketing?

UPDATE 6/25/07: We did a “drive through” of the garage and tested how annoying it will be to park there. It’s definitely not an easy maneuver, but at this point I’m more disappointed with Bogdan than angry, so we’ve decided to take the new offer just to be done with it.

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UPDATE 6/21/07: Bogdan Builders counter-offered with an increase in price of only $1,500 (as opposed to the original $2,500) for the bigger spot. They also put a deadline on the offer, saying it expired on the 24th, which I thought was a little obnoxious.

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Last year, I entered into an agreement with Bogdan Builders to purchase a parking spot in the new condo building being built across the street from me. They required a deposit of $5,000 to reserve a spot that would be ready in “late Febuary or early March”. Needless to say it is now June and they’ve just “discovered” a problem.

A little background: the parking garage is under a new condo building called Logan Station being built by Bogdan across the street from me in Washington, DC. For security reasons, parking spot owners who do not live in the building (like me) cannot use the garage elevators but instead must use a stairwell that is accessible from the street. When I originally put down my deposit on the space, the agent showed me blueprints and explained the stairwell would go down to both the 1st and 2nd level of the garage. So I purchased a spot on the 2nd level very close to the stairwell, since all the spots on the 1st level close to the stairwell had already been sold.

This week, I was able to tour the garage. Surprise surprise, the stairwell now only goes down to the 1st level. Where the stairwell should extend down to the 2nd level, there is now a storage room that is rented out to owners who need extra storage. I’ve been told that Bogdan will make a nice annual profit off of this storage space. Well the problem for me is that there is no way to access my spot except to walk down the stairwell one level, then walk to the other end of the garage and walk all the way down the parking garage ramp to the 2nd level - a ramp that will be slippery with oil and grease and will potentially have cars driving on it. Also keep in mind that the garage is about the length of a city block.

What Bogdan has offered me is to switch my spot for a spot mostly up the ramp. But that’s still on the complete other side of the garage. I would still have to exit the stairwell and walk the length of the garage to get to my car. They’ve also offered to let me purchase a spot just as close to the stairwell as my old one except the new spot is on the 1st level. However, I must pay an additional $2,500 for the new spot. Now, granted, the new spot is bigger and the normal jump in price from a compact spot to full-size is $5,000. They see this as a fair compromise, but I do not. The spot is far from the elevators and located right behind the initial ramp into the garage, meaning that it’s very hard to get into, especially for a big car (it pretty much requires a few three-point turns and/or backing in). Also, being far from the elevators, it won’t be that attractive for residents of the building, who have free access to the elevator. So I don’t think it’s actually worth $50,000 or even $47,500. Also, since I feel that I’ve been the victim of a “bait-n-switch”, I would have hoped that Bogdan would voluntarily offer me the bigger spot and their apologies.

So I’ve proposed that we make an even switch: my spot on the 2nd level for the larger, poorly-positioned but close-to-the-stairwell spot on the first level (space #12).

Here is the letter I sent to McWilliamsBallard and Bogdan Builders (emphasis added by me for this post):

Now we’ll see what they say.

So I really like bookmarklets, because they’re easy to use, don’t require any installation or restarting, and are easy to customize. That last point is key, and I’ll explain why.

I wanted a way to quickly grab some text on a page and add it to my Google Calendar in the details of a new event. For example, I’d like to highlight an event description, date, etc and throw that all into the details section of a new calendar event. Then, on the new Google Calendar event page, I can look at the particulars about the event and type those into the date, time, location, etc fields without having to jump between tabs.

Most of you are probably thinking, “Um, is it really hard to just commit that stuff to short term memory for a few seconds it takes to bring up Google Calendar and click New Event?”. To which I answer, “Yes, and stop judging me!”

So I went in search of a bookmarklet that could grab text on a page and add it to my Google Calendar. I found Brandon Erik Bertelsen’s post about bookmarklets and shortcut keys which was huge because included a Google Quick Add with a New Tab bookmarklet. This did ALMOST what I needed, but it took the selected text and made it the new event title, not description.

So, since bookmarklets are sooo easy to customize, I grabbed the code and added my own logic to put the selected text into the details, not title. Here’s the new bookmarklet:

If you’d like to further customize this bookmarklet, go for it. These Instructions for making Google Calendar event reminder buttons are helpful in figuring out how to craft the final url.

For more info on bookmarklets, checkout my previous post regarding a Supercharged Del.icio.us bookmarklet or read the Wikipedia entry on bookmarklets

One thing I learned from my horrendous, 12 hour ordeal with United Airlines yesterday:

Flight attendant:	Are you an ese?
Me:	whaaaa?
Flight attendant:	Are you an S A?
Me:	Oh… SA… wait, what?
Flight attendant:	Are you an S A?
Me:	What’s “SA” mean?
Flight attendant:	Space Available
Me:	Oh ok… wait, what’s “Space Available” mean?
Flight attendant:	(Goes on to explain what Space Available Travel is)
Me:	Oh, no, I’m not, I just got put on this flight because my last flight landed ridiculously late and I missed my connection.
Flight attendant:	Oh, cause if you were SA, you could move to an empty seat in business class.
Me:	Wait, WHAT? Can’t I still move up, given that there are so many open business class seats?
Flight attendant:	Sorry, no, I could get fired if I let you do that.
Me:	Doh.

So the moral of this story is: next time someone asks you whether you are an SA (or ese), say Yes.