I have a problem.  A #FirstWorldProblem.  I can no longer sync my iPhone with my laptop via iTunes.  And I blame Apple.

I have a 16GB iPhone 4.  It’s upgraded to the lastest version of iOS, and shows 1.8 GB free space.

In iTunes, on my laptop, my music library takes up 6.81 GB of space.

iTunes reports that my phone has about 6.5 GB of audio on it:

This makes sense: most of my songs are the same on my phone as are on my laptop.  However, I’ve bought several albums recently, which makes my laptop library size larger.

When I try to sync:

KABLOWIE!

Are you kidding me?  I have 1.85 GB of free space on the phone, approximately the same songs on my phone as are on my laptop, and yet it takes over 6 GIGABYTES of free space to do a sync?

iTunes has always been a piece of shit – a speck in Apple’s eye, if you were.  If I weren’t so intimately familiar with how software can be (note I didn’t say should be) developed, I’d be more shocked that my situation is still happening.  But it’s apparent that nobody in the iTunes team ever said:

If a user wants to sync, and 95% of the songs and apps are the same, can they get away with having free space that represents about a quarter of their library size?

Duh.

How can one of the largest software companies in the world release a version of one of the most widely-used email platforms in the world that DOES NOT WORK on the most talked-about mobile device in the world?

Microsoft, Exchange Online / Office 365, Apple iPhone.

If it were early – like immediately post-launch – I could understand and forgive some stability issues.  But this version was first released 8 months ago.  The iPhone iOS 5.0 has been out for what, 4 or 5 months?

I’m not doing anything special – just logging in to the website.  I get a “too many redirects” error, consistently and reliably.

I just don’t get it.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide what the title of the post means.  For now, I’m happy to leave it as an inside joke.

Much to report, and yet, not much – I guess it’s sort of like the tides: lots of action, but over the course of a day or week or month, not much changes.  That’s my fault.  Things *could* change, and in fact, in the micro, *are* changing – just not that deep, long-lasting, geologic change.  No breaking up of Pangaea.  No permanent welding of Part A to Part B to make Item C.

Two small items of note: I broke the hell out of my iPhone glass today; it’s probably the last time I take it running, despite the comfort I get knowing that I can check email or take a phone call if I have to.  Bah.  I may be able to get a free replacement, or I may have to pony up for an upgrade.  Dunno.  Don’t really care, I guess – money is boring.

Two: I ran again today, despite running 6 miles yesterday.  I only got 3, but I don’t know why I say “only” – that’s been my standard run up until yesterday.  I didn’t think I would run again today, but as the afternoon wore on I got that itch that I’ve begun to know very well.  I think I’m falling in love with running.  This is a Good Thing.  There are lots of not-so-Good Things that I could be doing, but running is not among them, and the daily dose of exercise and thinking time is (I think) doing wonders for me, physically and mentally.

Work is going both well and not-so-well.  Not so well?  You are stunned, Dear Reader, I can hear it in the way you move your eyeballs across the page.  Sort of a teary-scratchy sound.  Yes, I really need to stop this insane perfectionist streak and actually just write Good Enough software and deploy it, rather than try to write the C# equivalent of Hamlet every time I put fingers to keyboard.  Ah, it’s a curse.  And a funny one, because in many other areas of my life Good Enough is definitely Good Enough.  But now that I think about it, the more important the thing is, the more likely I am to aim for Perfect.  Sort of a conundrum.

Aside from that, it’s sunny; I’ve been spending quality time with friends; the kids are back from vacation; The Pale King by DFW is everything I hoped it would be; my skinny jeans are ever-loosening, and I have had no recent disfiguring injuries of note.  There are things that I would snap my fingers and change, had I the option; but don’t we all.

Sometimes Good Enough is Good Enough, and I suppose we should be happy with that.

I’ve used NuevaSync for some long period of time (a year? 18 months?) to sync my contacts and calendar back and forth between Google Apps and my iPhone.  Now NuevaSync has announced that they are eliminating their free service and moving to a two-tiered pricing model.

Embedded within the press release is this sentence:

Along with the introduction of the new services, we will no longer be offering our original free service.

Arrrgghh.

Okay, let’s take a step back.  Businesses need to get revenue in order to, well, be businesses.  Otherwise they are a collection of hobbyists.  So I applaud NuevaSync (or any company) for realizing that, and not providing services without revenue.

But is this the best way to do it?  Completely eliminating a free service and effectively forcing users to pay or leave?  Giving a 5-day window?  I would be content with a very small subset of the services they provide, and when I get SuperMegaMonoCorp, Inc. off the ground, I would probably be content to use a small portion of the savings we’d make by not having to pay U.S. income taxes to buy premium licenses for my employees.

But the move just appears so abrupt, so boneheaded that it either smacks of (a) desperation or (b) tone-deafness.  Neither is good.  So I will no longer be a NuevaSync customer, preferring instead to browse for alternate solutions to solve my problem.  If a free solution does not exist, I may explore using a manual workaround.

It’s a knotty issue.   How do you move from free to paid?  And, when you do move, who pays?  I wonder if NuevaSync explored licensing deals with wireless providers or even The Goog to avoid having to shift the payment burden to the end user.  Or exploring a corporate model that provided additional features to corporations in exchange for a paid Premium service that left individuals with a free plan.  Ultimately I’ll pay (or “we”, as consumers, will pay).

It’s a useful service – it’s been reliable and I haven’t had to think about it much – but it’s just a feature, really, of my overall mobile life, and a small feature.

I know that a lot of buzz has surrounded the idea of “micropayments” – small ad-hoc payments, made effortlessly, for things that we value – but I don’t know that this is the correct future paradigm to bet on, at least in the near term.  And certainly not until the free service landscape shakes itself out.

iTunes has shown that we’ll make impulse purchases for entertainment, at small dollar values.  Will that translate to business or professional services?  I don’t know.  Not in the near term.

Here’s a thought experiment.  Let’s say LinkedIn wanted to charge you $1.99 for connecting to someone outside of your network who has more than 500 connections.  First of all that’s a stupid idea because LinkedIn benefits as more and more people get connected.  There’s no incremental operational cost to them, and they get the attendant benefits of page views, interest, engagement, attention, leadership in the corporate-networking space.

But say they did charge. Would you do it?  No, I doubt it.  You’d find a way around the system to get connected.

I think that there’s some psychic element in play, some aspect of human behavior, that is very important and (at least for me, right now), very hard to pin down about small costs for non-essentials.  It could be societal – a conditioned response – which is what I think a lot of people are betting on.  But if it’s deeper than that – personal, genetic, human – then the whole micropayments future collapses.

Wondering what you think.

This post’s title intentionally given an expletive so you’ll read it.

There, got your attention.  My iPhone’s alarm clock is all screwed up.  It goes off an hour early, which for me means 4:30 AM.  That’s early, pre-bird early, like full-on-REM sleep early.  And apparently, this is a known bug that is affecting iPhones all over the world:

iPhone alarm bug hits as clocks go back in Europe

iPhone DST bug fails to alarm users – in the wrong way

The problem has something to do with screwy witchery in the clock code in the iPhone, which mishandles daylight savings time changes in Europe.  Why that affects me, who, as an American, stopped caring about anything coming out of Europe except Liverpool football and Lily Allen long ago, is beyond me.

The fix?

The bug appears to affect alarms set to repeat; users are advised to set new non-repeating alarms until Apple pushes out a fix.

iPhone, you have been so reliable.  Don’t make me question our relationship.  And stop waking me up early unless you’re prepared to, you know…

Whenever I’ve made the move lately to update the OS on my iPhone, I’ve gotten the message:

There are purchased items on the iPhone “Anthony’s iPhone” that have not been transferred to your iTunes library. You should transfer these items to your iTunes library before updating this iPhone.  Are you sure you want to continue?

Of course not!  Who would want to lose data?  So each time I dutifully synced my phone, and things *seemed* to be transferring:

…but the warning message kept appearing, and I kept cancelling.  Until today.  I’m not the only one to suffer this bogus message, and so I went ahead and clicked “Continue”.

Everything appears to work OK after the restart.  Main apps: check. Music: Love me some White Stripes.  Check.  Data?  Check.

Apple: fix your bugs.

Hilarious – a must watch!

(h/t Alyssa Royse, via FB)

If you would have told me six months ago I’d finish in the top half of my age division in a 5K race, I would have told you you’re nuts.  Yet here I am, the day after my first road race in 5+ years, looking at the results – and I finished 36th out of 82 finishers in my age group!  Woo hoo!  My official time was 27:33, but I was chip-timed at 27:04.

One note for the race organizers: the results page doesn’t format properly on the iPhone.  So – ye gods! – I had to wait until I got to the coffee shop to see my results.  There should be a special place in Heck reserved for web designers whose stuff doesn’t work properly on the iPhone.

Feeling pretty sore today – gluteus medius in particular.  Probably will go to the gym anyway and work out in other ways.  I have a lot of nervous energy to work off, and my goal for the next little bit will be to go to bed exhausted so I don’t have to worry about getting to sleep.

I think that Locavore is a great idea. This little app for the iPhone tells you what foods are in season depending on your geography. It only works in the U.S., but I’ll definitely want to use this when the spring-through-fall farmer’s market season starts up in Seattle.

Locavore is developed by Buster McLeod, a Seattleite and founder of the much-missed McLeod Residence, and is available for $2.99 USD on the iTunes App Store.

Google has released a new version of Reader that is optimized for the Safari browser on the iPhone, and I definitely think you should switch over.  It’s a significant jump up in usability from the original web-based reader.

My favorite upgrades:

• In-place article reading (no page jumps)
• Inline “starring”
• Better finger clickability on common operations

Give it a try!