Sheesh

Earlier start to the day for us today so we were up and out of the house an hour earlier than usual for a Tuesday. While it was nice to start the day off a early, I feel like I had little to no sleep because once again I ignored the voices in my head and stayed up until after midnight. Generally those voices do nothing but get me in trouble, for once it seems they had my best interest in mind - or did they?

Honk ... Honk ... Get Out Of The Way

Because of the early start we were "lucky" enough to commute with a new group of drivers. I have determined that there must be a law out there, unknown to most, that you should commute between 8:15 AM and 8:40 AM if you are a total fucking moron that has no right to be behind the wheel of a car much less driving one at highway speeds or any speed faster than backing out of a driveway.

I swear that every fucking car on the road today either could not maintain the flow of traffic, could not stay in their lane, was a minivan, had handicap plates or placards or a combination of all of those. Now lemme set you straight, I have zero issues with handicap individuals, or those that drive 2 to 5 miles under the speed limit because they are scared or feel it's the safe thing to do, fine - go for it. I just prefer that they get the hell out of my way or at the very least stay out of the passing lane. Anyway, you get the idea so I think that is about enough on the topic because it's only going to get me fired up again.

iOS Update 6.1

So an update came out yesterday for iOS devices to not only add some additional features but to add some stability to the devices. I updated 3 of my iPads with zero issues (2 iPad 2's and 1 iPad with retina display) and one iPhone 5. So I decided what the heck I might as well take care of Cicely's iPhone 4 while I am at it, and because the first 4 updates went so smooth I will skip backing her phone up to iCloud as I normally would. Skipping the iCloud backup process will easily save me a solid 5 to 10 minutes, plus she just ran a backup the night before, so what could go wrong - right? Yea making that assumption was a mistake.

Her phone was unable to do the update over the air and failed both of the 2 attempts so I figured I would try one more time and if it did not work I would just call it a night so I don't brick her phone. Well that last try was the nail in the coffin because the phone once again failed and then fell into a vicious loop of wanting to be connected to a computer to use iTunes to do a restore.

This would have been ok, just painful because I would have had to restore the device to the factory settings and then do a restore over the air to get all of her "stuff" back on the phone. Not to mention that the restore over the air via iCloud takes about 4 to 7 hours because she has so many apps and photos on her device. No luck, the restore failed every time with either a (-1) error or this one other error that was basically the same only a different code.

For the first time in over 10 years we, well Cicely, has an appointment and will be going to the genius bar at lunch to try and get it restored to factory settings so we can proceed from there with an iCloud restore and get her phone back to normal. I have a feeling they wont be able to fix it and will only be able to offer her a replacement iPhone 4 for the $149 they usually offer as an option. If so, I told her to just say "fuck it" and chalk it up as a great time to upgrade to the iPhone 5. So I guess we will see how it goes. She will be armed with my credit card to purchase a new phone (yea I am a nice guy I know) if they are unable to get hers to boot.

Honestly I hope that hers is beyond repair and she has to get the new one, she will enjoy it more I think. Problem is that Cicely is much more froogle than I am so she has no problem waiting on getting a new device. Waiting?? Just the thought of that makes a technology addict like myself twitch with anxiety and nearly have a panic attack!

New iPad (kinda)

So I thought it was nothing more than a rumor but as of this morning it was official that Apple did in fact release a new iPad. I use the word "new" ever so carefully though. Really the device is nothing more than a retina iPad with an available 128 gigabyte drive and an increased cost of approximately $100 for the extra space. The additional $100 is totally worth it for double the space, but I still think they should have done this a long time ago and reduced the prices over the entire product line.

I would much rather see the line-up be offered at 128, 256, 512 gigabytes rather than the current 16, 32, 64, 128 gigabyte models offered. The only real issue I see as they have increased capacities is the amount of space and time it will take to manage backups over the air via iCloud. The initial backup will be a little painful and when people swap to new devices. Every backup after the initial should not be too bad -- well unless you go crazy with photos, video and apps on a daily basis.

Logging Off

That is all for today. I could actually get knee deep into some other topics but I think I have covered the ones that I wanted to and better just leave it at that. For a Tuesday it has been a bit of a "bad attitude" day for me and I hate that. Especially when I am trying all day to "snap out of it" and it's not working. Oh well, there will be days like this and you just have to make it through them without trampling all the people in your path simply because you are pissed-off for no good reason. Don't get me wrong, I said "people" not minivans, tramp minivans all you want!

Photo: Stupid "Recover" Mode