Hoffspace.

Yes. It's real.

Yes. He really says this on the page.

I've been a T-Mobile customer since 2000. Before that I was with VoiceStream, so basically I've been on a GSM based phone for almost a decade. A bunch of months ago, I bought a v1 iPhone from Apple and used it on T-Mobile's network. The only feature I lost was support for the Visual Voicemail - everything else worked with T-Mo's network.

When the 3G iPhone came out, I bought a subsidized handset from the local Apple store and moved my number from T-Mobile to AT&T. That got me 3G support, unlimited mobile-to-mobile for a different set of a friends - offsets losing T-Mo based friends - a much higher price per month, one less phone number (as I had a dual line on T-Mo,) and slightly less coverage. It also got me a $200 charge from T-Mo when my number moved because I had another couple months on a contract for one of the numbers.

I called T-Mo to address the $200 charge by re-activating a line to complete the contract - what I learned from them was more than worth it's weight in gold...

By law, AT&T is required to SIM unlock your iPhone if you pay full price for it because it's a subsidized handset.

I saw this last week and I sort of expected it to go away, but... well, I was way off base.

Mr. T was recently in a Snickers commercial in the UK where he basically fires Snickers bars at a male speed walker, telling him to "run like a man." When I first heard the news story, they mentioned it was being pulled because "Get Some Nuts" as a slogan wasn't going over too well with Brits. I could see that - it's way edgy for the US and certainly cheeky in UK terms - but what followed the viewing "world wide" was a bit shocking...

Mr. T was being criticized for being homophobic because of the commercial...

What the bloody fuck is wrong with this picture?

Talk about outages, I originally meant to talk about a coming trip to Victoria... last weekend. Which means that I've been there and back again - rather than a preview, it's more of a recap...

How was it?

c|net: Microsoft looks to 'Mojave' to revive Vista's image [...] The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista. [...] Veghte is convinced, like others at Microsoft, that despite early technical challenges, Vista's problems are primarily ones of perception. Much of that perception, Microsoft belatedly acknowledges, stems from Apple's successful and unchallenged anti-Vista campaign.

Perception has killed more software projects than technology has. At least in my experience, which has covered a number of technologically superior products that got torpedoed by inferior but better marketed examples.

What I do find moderately amusing is when my iPhone prompts me for a password whenever I try to download something from the on-device App Store... very, uh, UAC like no? Just as annoying yet just as security oriented...

Still think perception isn't everything?

Got one after all.

One of my ongoing gripes about the iPhone, the iPod touch, and Zune product lines are that they don't offer a small, yet useful, feature that the iPod (and iTunes) has offered since 2001: Shuffle By Album.

Thanks to the XNA Game Studio 3.0 development environment and Zune's support of it, I've been able to add this functionality back into my portable media player: my Zune 80.

Bottom line: I still have a v1 iPhone with 1.1.4 software.

Last minute, I told TiVo to grab the All Star game tonight... not that I usually watch it, mind, but seeing as its being held in New York, I figured it was a great opportunity to see Yankee Stadium in it's glory [and in HD].

Every Yankee introduced from past or present? Greeted as gods. Every Red Sox introduced? Booed. Every Red Sox player that was booed? Laughing and smiling because they're used to New York fans acting like New York fans...

Classic baseball, and I haven't even seen the game start yet!

Joystiq: From E3: The new Xbox Experience

Seen the new Dashboard? I've been playing with it for months now... and it's not even my primary job.

Did I mention that we have positions for both Test and Dev?

TMZ: Photos - Elyse Umemoto

Speaking for myself, I have to say that I'm pretty freakin' proud.

For reals!

MSNBC: PERTH, Australia - A man who auctioned his life — his house, his car, his job, even his friends — on eBay said Monday he is disappointed with the selling price.

More proof that we couldn't have "advanced" as a species without having first invented the Internet.

To BillG: so long, and thanks for all the bits.

Xbox.com: Transferring Content Licenses to a New Console - Got a new Xbox 360® console? Great. But maybe you downloaded games or other content from Xbox LIVE® Marketplace onto an older Xbox 360 console, and now you want all that content on your new system. Well, now there's a way to do it. With the license transfer tool, you can transfer the licenses of all your previously downloaded content from your old console to the new one.

This freakin' rules!

Gizmodo: Why I Still Use Windows Despite the Peer Pressure

I can empathize - the Mac in my living room isn't there to be a computer as it's a DVD-enabled version of AppleTV - and it's an entertaining read either way...