Just got this from Commission Junction:

Dear California Publisher,

ALL HANDS ON DECK! California’s budget tax bill now includes “affiliate nexus” language and could be voted on as early as next week! Commission Junction is opposed to the internet retail tax and this language in general, and we strongly encourage you to send a letter of opposition to Senator Denise Moreno Ducheny (senator.ducheny@sen.ca.gov). But don’t stop there:
Navigate to the California State Assembly web site
Use the “Find My District” link on the left of the home page and then type in your address and zip code to find your district number. Close that window.
Use the “Assembly Roster” link on the home page to find links to email your assembly member.

We encourage you to use email and phone calls to express your opposition.

Please visit this page and scroll to the California Internet Retail Tax section to find a template you can use and modify accordingly for your email as well as the Senator’s email address.

Let’s join together to oppose this bill!

Sincerely,

The Commission Junction Team

I have tried a number of blog posting tools in the past, and it has been a long time since I have messed with one. I have just installed BlogJet and it looks pretty cool. In addition to the standard browser plug-in, BlogJet has a stand-alone application…which is what I am using to write this.  The goal is to find a tool that allows me to post to many different blogs from one interface with a minimum of clicks. We’ll see how it goes.

Since Gavin was born, I have been focusing on at-home hobbies, when I have a “free” moment or two. For those of your with kids, you know why there are quotes on there. My cousin David said it well, “I remember when weekends were for relaxing not catching up.” A month or two after the G-man was born, I bought a Char-Broil smoker at the Home Depot. It has a side fire box and for $159, I think it is probably the best bang for the buck for a non-commercial smoker. It has a pretty large smoking chamber that comes with lower and upper grills…the lowers are designed to hold charcoal if you want to use the smoking chamber as a bbq…but, they also double as more places to smoke meat.

I came across the Bay Area Meat CSA (aka BAMSCA) a month or so ago and I was able to buy a quarter of a hog that was around 200 lbs whole. I have met some very cool people who are into tinkering in the kitchen and buying quality, local meat. That kinda sounds wierd, but it is all good. Since I took the rear quarter, that means I got the “fresh ham.” A fresh ham is basically a raw ham that has not been cured, brined, smoked or cooked….raw homey. On the advice of Peter Licht (who is teaching a chacuterie class on the 21st of June) I brined the ham for 3 weeks+ before I smoked it. Ths is not an easy task as a ham from a 200lb hog is very big. You need to clean it as well as you can. Scrubbing the skin and exterior of the ham with water and probably some soap, rinse it well and then put it in a food safe plastic bucket that has your brining solution. Cover it with cold water, seal it up and put it in the fridge….oh yeah, did I mention that you need a fridge that you can put a 5 gallon bucket into? If you have pulled all of this off, you will have a brined ham. As I mentioned, I brined mine, skin on, for about 4 weeks. Over-brining can lead to a tough to chew piece of meat, but a 25+ lb ham can take 4 week of brining no problemo.

Now for the important part….the smoking. I smoked mine for about 5 hours. I wanted some smoke flavor, but I didn’t want it to be overpowering. Unfortunately, 5 hours on a ham this size is not nearly enough. The outher 1/2 inch or so of meat had some smoke flavor, but with the skin on, it is very hard to get the smoke into the meat…but, the skin kept everything nice and moist. My thoughts for round two are to smoke a similar sized ham for about 10 to 15 hours, skin on. Then put it into a 350 degree oven to finish it off (internal temp of 165 to 170 degrees F). I finished mine in the oven at 350 for a few hours, but I did not place the thermometer in a good place. I stuck it in the shank end of the ham away from the bone almost completely butting up to the end of the guage. While this gave me a good reading at the small end, the fat end was not cooked around the bone. My recommendation is to place the thermometer about 2 inches from the bone on the meaty side of the fat end. I would then probe it in a few places when you think it is ready to take out of the oven. Regardless, it is going to take a long time to cook. An alternative might be to start it in a 250 degree oven over night, then get up and smoke it for the rest of the day. I finished mine with a mixture of cane sugar and dijon (spread on with a cake spatula) and then sprinkled bread crumbs over the top. The ham was thne put back into a 425 degree oven until it was hard (about 20 minutes). You need to take the skin off and I would say most if not all of the exterior fat before putting on the mustard. That crust is amazingly good.

To recap, I would smoke a fresh ham for about 30 to 40 minutes per pound and then finish it in a 350 degree oven. Be sure to probe the ham in a few spots when you think it is ready to take out of the oven. Be sure the ham is very clean and that your bucket is sanitized before brining it….you will probably find some mold is starting to grow in the bucket when you take it out…but, don’t worry. Clean it off, soak it in some water for a few hours to pull some of the salt out and smoke that thing.

I guess I will never cease to be amazed by the people in Washington. Hopefully, at some point, someone with 1/2 a brain and who has read the Bill of Rights will take the bull by the horns out there. Anyway, I was just reading about the new SBA ARC loans. Essentially, the Small Business Administration is going to make loans for people who have SBA loans, that can’t make the payments on their existing SBA loans. That sounds like an awesome idea. Did they not see what happened with Chrysler and GM? Is it not okay to let our “free market” economy work as it is supposed to? Do the people in Washington think they are really smarter than everyone else in the world? What a bunch of jokers. Check please

Just put some new Gavin videos up on youtube if anyone is interested.

I mean, Hallmark should be hiring some of the people that create these penis enlargement emails everyone gets. I have decided to pay homage to some of them by posting the better ones I receive here. Feel free to forward some along to me as well.

• Does your pipe reach knees?
• Turn your bedroom life into a volcano of pleasure.

I’ll Try Being Nicer If You Try Being Smarter.

Not that I think the Facebook concept is anything super-proprietary, but this is definitely an interesting read on a recent Facebook settlement.

About a week ago, when all of the Boxee hooplah was going on, I bought an Apple TV to install XBMC (XBox Media Center)/Boxee on. I have hacked a few things like the Linksys NSLU2 (aka The Slug) and I have to say, this was by far the easiest install I have ever done. I am not sure the directions are easy enough for my sister to follow, but the work is. After I put the bootloader onto a USB “stick” I popped it into the Apple TV (ATV from here on out), plugged the power cord in, and the installation went off without a hitch. It actually took me longer to figure out what I had to do to boot into Boxee than it did to install everything. I was a bit paranoid as Apple had just released a new firmware update for the ATV and had read on the Boxee forums that it would prevent XBMC and Boxee from working…so, stayed away from the “Update” selection in the menu. Well, once I clicked it, it downloaded the latest version of Boxee and we were off and running in a few minutes. I would say total install time from downloading of the bootloader to booting into Boxee was less than 15 minutes. This really only takes about 5 minutes to do.

1st Boxee ATV Setup

I first setup the ATV out in the living room, connected to a Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT. This router is running in Client-Bridge mode which means that it am connected to the main Access Point router as a bridge when a cable is plugged into the router (wireless connection is possible, you just get 1/2 the bandwidth available). I logged in (you will need a Boxee account to use Boxee) and added two shares on my network…one to a box running Windows Media Center Edition and the other is the SLUG which has all of our music.

Setting up the shares is very easy and intuitive. There is a separate area in settings for you to hard code in an SMB username and password to use by default for any SMB shares. Boxee played nicely with the Windows and Linux box right from the start. The people who built the scraping scripts for XBMC/Boxee did an awesome job. Boxee immediately started adding video files to the library…which means that you see a thumbnail of the DVD box, it pulls IMDB information about the movie including an actor list and a trailer if it can find one…nice. The music began updating, but this is part of where I think things went a bit awry. We have a lot of music. Much of it is live and not have Meta data available for it in the usual places. But, there is plenty of music in there (read A LOT) that does have Meta data. I think it might be a week long project for Boxee to retrieve everything it needs for our music.

So, I fired up a video from the Windows box….great. Boxee let’s you change aspect ratios right from the video screen to adjust fit on the fly…very nice. Boxee is also smart enough to play multi-part video files provided you use one of many (that I have found) naming schemes….basically CD1, CD2 will work…I am now using Part.x.of.x as a scheme and it works perfectly. It is nearly seamless how it goes from file one to file 2. This is something that Windows MCE would never do, score Boxee/XBMC.

Next I try to play something via the Hulu interface. Hulu is an internet video site that has some deals with a lot of television publishers. They will play advertisements at the regular commercial breaks, but here is the thing, you have access to every episode of every show that they carry series of. For instance, my favorite show, Three Sheets (Mojo Network), has every episode aired to date…very nice. Hulu worked, but then the video died, rather it crashed Boxee. I then started having intermittent problems with Boxee crashing, necessitating an unplugging of the unit. I gave it a rest, and moved it upstairs the next day.

Boxee Setup Round 2

Setup two was upstairs in the bedroom with the 42″ plasma. The bedroom is located almost directly over the wireless AP downstairs and the wifi hardware in the ATV is quite good. All of the issues we were having with the living room setup were gone. One thing to note is that I removed the music share to the linux box. I don’t really have a need to play music via the ATV…and to be honest, I have never really understood the appeal of having video of what I am listening to. I have two Audiotrons in the living room and am creating a little web app for my iphone to control them (someday). Anyway, the video playback is great for all of my divx movies. I did try to play back an HD movie the other night and it was jerky….I just don’t think the ATV has the hardware to play HD video and audio well. I will test this again, but I am confident that even with a wired gigabit setup, it would be the same.

Thoughts

So, do I like the Boxee/ATV combination? Yes, more than I thought I would. I am not really into the whole social networking aspects of Boxee, but I do like the interface and the functionality…a lot. I have been waiting for a real network video playback option. The ATV is great because it is small, silent and looks pretty cool. The remote is one of those standard iPod remotes and actually works pretty well. I would still like to have a no-nonsense all video file playback box…not sure this is it. But, will I be getting rid of this setup, definitely not. I think the next project will be to build a high horsepower, silent box to run Ubuntu and Boxee/XBMC so that I can play anything I want and have no issues…I think that setup might provide it.

Not to be one of those paranoid newborn parents, but here is some pretty crazy information on Herpes Simplex I (ala Cold Sores) and II and newborn children…scary. Keep people with cold sores from touching your newborn for a while seems to be the prudent course of action.

The Flav said it best, “Don’t believe the hype.”

Once again the retards in Washington D.C. fell for the hype, or are going to use it as their excuse. The new mantra is that it is better to do something than nothing. Of course, observing is not considered doing “something” by people who don’t have any balls. We “need” this and we “need” that and after allocating $700 Billion and more like 10 times that when you factor in the mostly unknown and unpublicized “backstopping” or guarantees the Treasury has doled out (THANKS HANK!), nothing has changed. Yeah, the people in the media regurgitate some BS rhetoric on a daily basis, but things have actually become worse in my estimation.

Here are some good quotes:

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
- Albert Einstein

“Touch the paper once.”
- Ron Fletcher

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
- Albert Einstein

“The hardest work of all is to do nothing.”
- proverb

My point here is that there are times to act and there are times to watch. Acting in haste is rarely an acceptable and smart way to go…unless someone’s life is in jeopardy…certainly not the case here. At the end of the day, excess leverage (in all aspects of our economy) is to blame for where we are. The real estate markets…15% to 20% appreciation year over year IS NOT NORMAL. Borrowing to fund your daily operations, ie Commercial Paper, is NOT SMART/SUSTAINABLE. Borrowing from others to put more cash into the same system is the definition of insanity. No? What has it accomplished? Assets of all kinds are still severely over leveraged…that has not changed. All this has done is stolen money from the taxpayers and weakened our entire system even more. If we are lucky, it will only be another tax on us.

Don’t believe the hype.

For those of you trying to install Ubuntu on an IBM Thinkpad x22 or X2x series laptop, you will need to hit F6 and then enter vga=771 and then press enter when the installer menu comes up. I ended up finding success using the “Ubuntu 8.10 Alternate CD” ISO. The Thinkpad laptops’ video doesn’t play nice with the Debian/Ubuntu installer, but using the vga=771 flag makes it all good in the hood.

The US TARP (Trobled Asset Rescue Program) was sold as a way for the government to help the markets work out f the ~1 Trillion dollars worth of “troubled” (read: BAD) assets (read: LOANS) that are estimated to exist today. Well in a classic governmental move, they have apparently removed the first two letters and we are now left with a simple “Rescue Plan.”. They are no longer talking about using this “money” to buy the bad loans…maybe now we can buy some car companies. Is this thing on? Yippppeeeeeee

It is interesting, it seems that there are a lot of people that are driven to the top…I think that is probably true of the vast majority of ultra successful (monetarily) people…they are driven by something in their lives and they will settle for nothing. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people like this that are driven because their ego is so big, that it always has to be at the front of the pack (in their mind). Well, I have been running into that quite a bit this week and it is getting to be annoying. But, this post is really about people who put ego before their job or ego before their goal. If you want to satisfy your ego, have a day, just don’t do it at the expense of others.

Should this story be accurate, it would be a great example. Jerry Yang, of Yahoo fame, may have just put the death dart into Yahoo! with his ego getting in the way. The right thing to do for Yahoo! would have been to strike a deal with Microsoft. Yeah, they are evil, they kill puppies and we all use Windows. Sounds like their top “Search” guy just left and is rumored to be heading to Redmond…that will be the straw that broke the camel’s back IMO if it is true. Watch Yahoo! implode because one joker let his ego get in the way.

Gavin Golod, born November 3, 2008 at 3:24pm. Our amazing little boy…

Just made the upgrade to Wordpress 2.6.2 (I think). As sad as it may seem, my motivation for the upgrade was so that I could use the iPhone app to post. It has been so long since my last upgrade…I was still running the 1.5 branch which I guess is pretty old school these days. It is going to take a fewcdays to get everything updated and figure out how to get some of the old features working again…so stay tuned.

Yes, I did write this on my iPhone.

The US Senate is going to vote on a bill tonight that is still being drafted…classic. So, we can’t even see what the hell it is that they are going to vote on…and the vote is supposed to happen at 7:30p EST. Once again it seems that the fear factor is front and center. Our current President and team have proven that if you scare the crap out of anyone well enough, you can get them to give you anything…in this case make them think that Chicken Little is right and that the sky is falling. Are many Wall St. financial companies in trouble? Yes, I don’t know anyone that is denying this today (even though I have a couple of friends that were drinking the company koolaid last year). Why would we, the taxpaying public, just hand them over a few hundred billion dollars? If you own stocks, they are held by a third party, they are not in jeopardy….that can’t be it. Because they are old? I sure hope that isn’t it. Because they have a lot of juice in Washington (Hank Paulson used to run Goldman Sachs)? That best not be it. I just don’t get it. Then again, I don’t get how they operate at 40/50 to 1 leverage.

When I first began working in real estate the rules of the game were pretty simple. You needed at least 20% cash into the deal to buy a house (you could sometimes put 10% down, but you would then have to pay for private insurance to insure the loan for the lender), you needed more like 35% cash into a deal to buy a commercial (5+ units) apartment building. To qualify for a loan, your debt to income ratio could not be more than approx 33%. That means that your gross income would have to be at least three times your monthly liabilites including your new mortgage payment. Commercial loans also had to have the property be able to support itself with the income it generated…or you had to come up with more cash to get to the loan amount the lender would give you.

Well, for the past 6 or 7 years, those ideas have gone to pot. DTI (debt to income) ratios went to 45 or even 55% (smart ). Loan to value? Well, shit, you didn’t even need value. Some lenders would give you 125% financing…woohoo. Carlton Sheets is the shizzy. People seem to think that it is normal for property to appreciate at double digit appreciation year over year…well, it is not. I am not a doomsdayer, I am just someone that is slapping your dumb ass in the face and telling you that you are wrong (if you think it is normal). If you think it is, then you are probably someone who thinks that taxpayers should dump hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars (oh yeah, we don’t have the money either) into keeping an INVESTMENT bank from going under. If your business is failing because you made crappy decisions should you expect someone to cut you a check and say, “do over?” I don’t think so either.

Buying non-performing loans for more than they are worth from Wall St. investment banks is just plain wrong. Let them sell them on the open market like everyone else does. No buyers? Lower the price. Still no buyers? Lower it some more. That is called supply and demand and that is how the true value/price of something is figured out. That one was free.

Part of what is making me so mad is that this does not “fix” anything. This keeps some companies in business….for now. It doesn’t help home sales. Why? Well, there are a few reasons. First, let’s go back to our discussion about how financing has been conducted in the past 6 or 7 years. How many new people were brought into the home buying/speculating market because of the financing that was available? I don’t know the exact number, but I know anecdotally that it was more than there was before. Lenders are no longer making loans with these same underwriting guidelines so many people that were able to get a loan before, now cannot. So, if they want to refinance because they don’t like how their current loan is structured, they can’t. For the record, nobody is putting a gun to their head and saying you have to refinance. And, I am sure that nobody was putting a gun to their head when they bought it saying you have to buy. There is so much paperwork and disclosure documentation that you have to sign in this country when you get a loan, if you don’t know what your payment is and could be in the worst case scenario then you are either 1) a lazy person who doesn’t like to read or 2) someone who can’t read and should not be able to get a loan. In either case it is a crappy situation to be in, but such is life. You live and you learn. I learned that falling off my bike was not what I wanted to do, by falling and crashing a lot. I learned that there were risks in doing things that could result in me crashing my bike or falling off. I lived, I learned. I know this is too “mean” for some people, but they can suck it. That’s right, I said suck it. We have become a society of pussies and I am getting fed up with it. Now, back to my point. If you can’t refinance and you can’t afford your payments you have a few options: 1) Sell your property. Maybe it is worth less than you owe (high leverage financing does have risks), you can cut a check to the lender when you sell or you can not sell it. 2) Walk away and let the bank take it back 3) try and work something out with the lender where they will take less than what you owe (when you sell it or while you live in it ). At the end of the day, it is likely that people will “lose” the property. I am not sure why this is the end of the world for so many people. RENT a house. RENT an apartment. RENT a boat. What is so f-ing wrong with renting something? It is cheaper for just about everyone in these situations, so why is there even a discussion? I am no psycho therapist, but it sure seems like there is an opportunity to treat people for this nonsense. Suck it up, move on, rent a place to live, done. Buying some loans that people like this are not paying on is something that taxpayers should be doing. Certainly not so that the investment banks that own them can get a bunch of cash for them…what a joke…actually, it is so bad that it is not even a joke after it was a joke.

The way loans have been structured has brought many new buyers and speculators into the marketplace. My friend’s paralegal spec’d 2 houses that she just walked from. Another person’s gardener had 3 houses that he is going to have to walk from and he is not even a citizen of the USA. The list of stories is long that I know of. Not to mention the people I have spoken to looking for private or hard money loans. Trust me when I tell you that this is not a problem that only affects people who can’t speak English or that have bad credit. This is affecting people from all walks of life. We have someone lost sight of the idea that borrowing money to life your daily life is not the way to do things…we are all guilty of it. Some, just took it a lot further than others. Some didn’t do it at all (Thank You). The govenment exists to make laws not to dole out money that they did not work to make. Giving money to an investment bank and getting nothing in return, like a guarantee that they will repay any losses incurred plus a stiff interest penalty, is complete BS. It is something that no ordinary person would ever get.

I just don’t get it. Are people that ignorant? I am totally baffled. Guess what, if we need a loan right now on a commercial building, we can get one. Why? Well, because we don’t try and do it with extreme amounts of leverage. Because we can show stabilized rents. Because we can show low debt to income ratios. That is how lending works. Buying bad loans doesn’t make the fundamentals of how people have been buying property in the past 6 or 7 years different. If people can’t get these silly loans anymore then there are a lot of people (in all walks of life) that are now trying to figure out how to pay for what they have. Your house is not a free ATM machine that spits out money every year that you can then go spend on a new car or some other useless crap. You know it, I know it. Jesus.

UPDATE 1:42pm PST

Another thought. You have to understand what you are getting yourself into when you buy something. That should go without saying when you are making a purchase of the magnitude a home or other real property puchase has. If you don’t understand what the upside and downside benefits and risks are, you probably should not do it. I would liken it to buying Google stock when it was going up 20 or 50 points a day simply because people are talking about it or because someone you know bought it. You don’t know anything about the financials of the company, their technology, their competition, how they are positioned in their market, book value, etc.. You buy it for reasons other than because you have a good understanding of the company and its prospects of doing well. If you don’t understand how real estate loans work, don’t get one. If you are too lazy or too busy or too something to learn about what you are buying and how it can affect you financially then don’t do it. It really is that simple. Whatever other factors you want to throw in are irrelevant. Home ownership or any real estate ownership is not a requirement or prerequisite to live your life.

[tags]Bailout, Welfare, Banking, Wall St, Investment Banks, Paulson, Bernanke[/tags]

Well, I always thought there was a good chance and it looks like the team is Washington is going to make it happen. I hope that everyone at least gets government sposored health insurance too. I mean if we are going to basically buy the financial system in this country we should at least have taxpayer subsidized health insurance as well.

I am starting to feel like Neo after Morpheus pulled the cables out of his head. I am wondering if people are really that ignorant. It seems like people don’t want to understand that there are more than serious things going on that not only affect the financial integrity of our country, but also what you think you have. I guess it makes sense as people don’t want to ask questions when houses are appreciating at double digit rates for 5+ years and they are treating it like an ATM machine that is spitting out free money. Of course, it was ok when that was going on, but now that those silly loans don’t exist anymore for the masses many people are crying foul and pointing the finger at the dumbass mortgage brokers and lenders. HAH.

I like it. But, there are things going on that make this stuff look like “baby shit” to quote Sheriff Buford T. Justice. You see, the governments of the western world were convinced by a man, famous in the economics world, that inflating the money supply of their country a little each year is helpful. I am not going to get into the boring details of it here as there are plenty of texts out there for you to read. His name was John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was clearly a very smart man, and while on some level I can agree with his ideas, they have been taken to the extreme around here lately. What most people don’t think about is where all of the money comes from that they consider to be their wealth…especially that wealth that has been created in the last 5 to 10 years. In a world with a finite amount of dollars, it would have to come from someone else’s pocket. So, think for a bit where the dollars have been coming from that you and your friends have been pulling out of your house or using to move up into a bigger and bigger home.

Unfortunately, there are more and more people that I am coming into contact with lately that are nearing the end of their credit rope. Many reached it last year, but there are people that did not necessarily fall into the “sub-prime” bucket because they had good credit and a good paying job. But, the exotic loans for most of these “prime” or “A paper” borrowers has dried up as well. The last bastion of ATM of your home has been the home equity line of credit. I am afraid that once these dry up, they are going to be in the same boat as the rest of the over-extended borrowers out there.

Anyway, this is turning into another one of those posts that is completely disjointed. My original intent was to write about how retarded the investment bankers are, how much they have screwed us, people in other countries, and how the US government is making the situation much worse. The geniuses on Wall St. are the retards that created this whole mess with their fancy CDOs and MBS products (and others). But, what amazes me at how ridiculous the government reaction has been. They continue to take more and more power and commit US taxpayer money (that doesn’t even exist) to pay for the obscene overextension of credit that the investment banks have committed…oh yeah, and that Fannie and Freddie took part in as well….and a lot of that was generated by their Wall St. buds. So, Paulson just lied through his teeth after asking for the power of the checkbook a month or so ago, saying he would never use it, and then using it Sunday when he announced that the government was taking over Fannie and Freddie…and that we, the taxpayers, will pay as much as we need to to cover the bond payments even if the loans that collateralize them aren’t going to come close to covering the debt service. SWEET.

So, what can you take away from this? Well, don’t act responsibly. Don’t do something when you know it doesn’t make sense. Do something because someone else is doing it and DON”T ASK QUESTIONS. And, if the shit hits the fan, blame someone else, because it is not your fault.

WTF?

[tags] WTF, Paulson, FOMC, Wall St, Credit Crunch[/tags]

Some of you may have read my post on troubleshooting iPhone and Exchange 2003 I wrote up a couple of weeks ago. In case you still don’t know, the iPhone will only work with Exchange 2003 SP2 and Exchange 2007. 2003 NEEDS SP2 to be installed and there is a not so intuitive procedure for finding out what version of Exchange you are running…so check out the post if you are still having problems with your iPhone and Exchange 2003.

I wanted to write up a little review of my first impressions of how well the iPhone integrates with Microsoft Exchange as there is a lot of hype on both sides of this issue out there. First, a little background. I have been using the Cingular 8125 for three or four years now (also known in some circles as the HTC Wizard). The 8125 is a Windows Mobile 5 phone that has a slide out keyboard, large touch screen and uses Cingular’s/AT&T’s EDGE data network. This phone, while pretty bulky, has served me very well for a long time. I could never give it up because the touch screen made using the windows features so much easier and faster. Plus, I had one of the best products Microsoft has going called Voice Commander. If you have a Windows Mobile phone, you will want to see if this thing works on your phone model…it is truly incredible. Combined, this was a winning combination for a long time.

While in New Orleans for Jazz Festival this year, I used a friend’s iPhone and was pretty impressed with the user interface. But, they still had not released anything allowing for Exchange to integrate. Then comes the announcement that Apple was planning on releasing the 2.0 software for both the 1st and (yet to be released) 2nd generation, aka 3G, iPhones which will provide Exchange/ActiveSync integration. I have learned my lesson many times about being an early adopter of technology and using it on something as mission critical as a cell phone or main computer. This time however, I purchased a mint condition 1st generation iPhone a few weeks after the 2.0 software came out.

Exchange With the iPhone

So, how does it work? Amazingly well. After figuring out that I was not running SP2 on my Exchange 2003 installation, everything worked perfectly out of the box so to speak. I left all of the default settings in the Exchange setup on the iPhone. This means that I am setup to sync email, my contacts, and calendar between my iPhone and Exchange server. Plus, push email works flawlessly.

Sub Mailboxes

I have access to all of my “sub” mailboxes quickly and easily…it simply takes a few seconds to download messages from a sub-mailbox. With Windows Mobile, I would have to dive into the ActiveSync options and configure it to fully sync each mailbox next time it sync’d with Exchange….less than ideal, but it worked. On the iPhone they are right where they should be….accessible.

Layout

Given that the iPhone screen is bigger than my Cingular 8125’s, the amount of real estate Apple can use to display email information is bigger. But, as usual, they seemed to have spent more time designing the layout including font, color, size, etc. The end result is that the information displayed is easy to read, names of senders bolded in large print, subject line bold in smaller print and then the first few lines (how I have it configured) of the email are shown in regular text that is slightly smaller still.

Attachments

This is something that I expect the Apple team will tweak a bit more. All email attachments are found at the bottom of the email, no matter how many replies there are in between. This is slightly annoying if you have a long email thread and someone decided to attach a file to the last one. But, it is not that big of a deal. The bigger item is that I cannot double-click to zoom in on PDF files…making most not readable. In comparison, my 8125 used an application called ClearVue to view PDF files. This application, while allowing for zooming in and out, was buggy, slow and almost useless (because of the speed). ClearVue could not open many PDF files I received for some reason and was not something I spent any time trying to figure out.

I had heard somewhere that iPhones could not read Microsoft Word files…that is not the case. While you cannot modify them, you can read them, zoom etc. The Excel file reading will display individual sheets of a multi-worksheet file, formatting (bold, lines, highlighting) as well as zooming in and out. For me, this is all I really would want.

Contact Integration

Contact integration is pretty good as well. The alphabet runs vertically in small print along the right side of the screen. If you want to jump to a certain letter, you click on it, or close to it, and you then jump to that letter. This takes a little longer than I would like, but then again, I have about 400 contacts. Surprisingly, it is very good at detecting what letter you are selecting even though your fingertip covers about 4 letters. This will probably get some tweaking along the way, but is more than usable in its current form. More importantly however is what you get when you click on a contact. All phone numbers and addresses are displayed, plus a picture at the top, and two buttons to text or add the contact to your “favorites” list. The favorites list is a great way to have fast access to people you call and is accessible from the phone button. You can also easily select a ringtone for a contact via a button. As with most of the iPhone GUIs, you can slide your finger up and down on the contact list to quickly run up or down the list. Tapping or holding your finger on the screen will stop it…cool and functional.

Calendar

Lastly, the calendar function. I don’t really use the calendar function to add things to my calendar from my phone…usually. I typically use these functions when I add appointments to my desktop calendar with alarms. This has been one of the most important reasons for Outlook/Exchange integration on cell phones for me since day one…alarms for events and appointments. The iPhone handles them well. The display of calendar events is decent. It was better on my Cingular 8125 as events and times were displayed on the main screen in a list. You can view your calendar by Month (default), Day or List. The Month display is nice for seeing when you have “free” days. If you have a day with an appointment, it shows up with a dark dot…free days do not. The Day display gives you a nice clean hour-by-hour display of your day…showing any appointments. The List display gives you all of your upcoming appointments listed by day and time…pretty nice.

All-in-all, I give the Apple team and A for their Exchange integration. IMHO, it is better overall than the one found on Windows Mobile phones…and this is coming from a guy who walked away from the Macintosh 15 years ago. While the keyboard takes a little getting used to, I think Apple has the best solution out there right now, especially when you add in the rest of the features and usability of the phone.

[tags]iPhone, Exchange, Exchange 2003, Review[/tags]