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So, I’m connected up through iTunes, registering my new iPad.  I worked a few years ago for a cellphone company, and as part of our website, we had folks register their phones.  There was always a question of how to get the information we wanted from our customers without annoying them with all of the information we wanted, and how to confirm that the information for key fields like serial number was typed correctly.

iTunes iPad2 registration experience: I typed in my iTunes id (gmail address) and password, and got taken to a screen that had my address, my phone number, and my serial number, all already populated.  For everything but the serial number, those fields were editable.  They had my phone number wrong, but I first corrected it, and then actually deleted it.  Not sure I like that they had a phone number for me.  It WASN’T the phone number I gave the Best Buy guy yesterday, or any mistyped variant of it.  Not sure where they got it.  Slightly weirded out.  Really appreciative on the serial number thing, though: that info was amongst the set of common errors when registering cellphones where folks would fat-finger.

I skipped the set of questions they ask (what I do for a living, how old I am, primary usage purpose, etc)…  It always bugged me when our end-users would skip those questions, but here they’re not listed as required: interested in seeing what Apple does with my “non-compliance”.  Oooh, it does require my phone number – not liking that.  Giving ’em the fake number run-around.   Whoever has number 366-2273, sorry: your number also maps to “FooBard”.

Did set up the ‘Find my iPad’ feature.  I’ll trade potential loss of privacy here (explicitly granted, instead of just likely going on anyway) for the reward of being able to find my lost device.

By the way, impressed that the keyboard on the iPad counts the ‘@’ as part of the alphabet keyboard, rather than the symbol keyboard.  Nice touch.

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After too many conferences where my options for staying in the loop with my team were (1) lug a laptop around all day, including powerpack, etc or (2) receive/type emails on a phone keyboard while not being able to get to all of my filed emails (probably solvable with better software), decided to go for the iPad.  Then the choice became: Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + 3G?  There’s a reasonably significant price difference between them, and of course the 3G requires a service plan with a carrier, which usually goes against my cheapskate side.  But this time had a bit of extra cash at my disposal, so decided to go for the gusto.  Because the iPad isn’t subsidized by any of the carriers in the same way a phone might be, there’s not the same requirement to lock-in to a contract.  In other words, pay a bit more for the ability to do 3G, but not locked in to paying month over month necessarily. OK, workable.

Next choice: which carrier (AT&T or Verizon) – you have to determine which when you buy your iPad.  Just like phones (grumble, grumble), the equipment varies based on which carrier you’re going with.  Having an existing contract with T-Mobile (being bought by AT&T) and not being entirely happy with that (lots of dropped calls lately), decided to test out Verizon.

Next choice: how much space – options include 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB.  I don’t intend to use this as a heavy entertainment platform, so opted to go for the 32.  Probably still more than I need.

Next choice: I was at Best Buy, so they wanted to set me up with a Geek Squad policy.  Listened to what they covered, listened to the price ($120), opted to pass.

Out of box experience: you get the thing, it has a 2×2 inch instruction sheet that tells almost nothing.  You turn on the iPad, and it shows two icons with a line between them.  The first is a drawing of the connector for the iPad with a line connecting to an icon for iTunes.  Really?  They’re really counting on knowledge of iTunes being ubiquitous for their customer base.  I didn’t have iTunes on my work laptop (I’m a Pandora fan, and usually listen on my phone rather than eat network bandwidth at work), so installed it.

Once it’s installed and started, with iPad plugged into my laptop, iTunes recognizes the iPad device and starts me up for registration.   Looking forward to fun here – just really amused by the out-of-the-box experience.

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I have a not-so-secret dream to be a clown.  As a kid, I dressed up as a clown for my kid sister’s birthday party.  As an adult, when I temporarily left my software development career, one of the alternates I considered was being a clown.  I’ve done the clown thing at Pioneer Girl events: dressing up, doing balloon twisting, juggling, …  I wouldn’t consider myself good at it, but it does seem to be a theme in my life.

One of the avenues of “clownship” that appeals to me is that of a Christian clown.  Clowns seem to cause polar reactions.  Folks are either clown-phobic (a few, and often little kids), or are drawn to them and interested to see what the clown does or says.   What a great platform for a whole bunch of things:  for just giving someone the gift of a little bit of enjoyment in their day; for giving a parent the gift of seeing their child light up; for distracting someone from pain, whether that be physical pain in a hospital or emotional impact; for giving someone just plain attention which in some cases is a gift some folks too rarely receive; and for expressing truths in a way that causes folks to look at them in a new light.  I’m really attracted to the concept of gospel clowning, a way of sharing God’s truths in a manner that helps folks look at things in a different manner.  If I just go up to you and tell you God loves you, you’ll treat that as an odd behavior and throw away the message.  If I find a way to show you that in a gospel skit, well, you expect odd things from a clown and might just hear it out.

So….  I’m on the lookout for gospel clown skit inspiration.  Got to do one at our church talent show a few weeks ago, and hoping to use that to seed thoughts in a few folks’ minds to start a little clown troupe.  If you’ve got ideas, thoughts, donations, interest, …  and oh yeah, that prayer stuff, too – all ears.  Or, in my case, all clown feet.

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Marylanders don’t consider themselves as really part of the south, but we’re sure not northerners, either!  It’s 21 degrees, give or take a few, outside today, with wind chill making it feel more like 10.  That’s way cold.  And to make life all that more interesting, our heater has decided to start leaking gas.   The BGE guy wisely decided for us to turn off the heater, to avoid us making our house a bit more accidentally HOT than is advised.  But it’s 21 degrees outside!  Inside of our house isn’t yet that cold, but we’re getting close to 60, and still falling.  [Heater repairman is here now…  no word yet on what the necessary remedy will be.]

At the end of December, we had a plumber out, to fix what ended up being a root ball in the pipes.  Water in the basement, luckily confined to the laundry room, and luckily shower water was the outflow, rather than toilet water.

Last night, my hubby realized our sump pump isn’t working, luckily by observation, rather than overflow.  Looks like some time spent on Monday doing a sump pump replacement, which will have the side effect of causing us to clean out the workroom so he and his dad can actually get to our sump pump without a huge hassle.

So…..  this new year isn’t starting off so hot, from a home upkeep and maintenance perspective.  Now, thinking of cash inflows into the economy, well, we’re doing our part to keep the service and home repair and supplies industry going strong!

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The past day or so have been laden with good, geeky happenings.  First, my family got a Wii for Christmas.  The sheer delight of my kids as they tore off its wrapping paper and shouted ‘Wii!’ in unison was wonderful.  They (and us) have now spent hours playing tennis and bowling against each other.  My younger daughter’s found some way to really scream the tennis ball on her serve: I haven’t been able to figure it out yet.  It’s nearly unreturnable, at least for me, anyway.

Next, I got to reference a teen boy from my church who was griping about wanting to do Unix-like things on his Microsoft laptop to Cygwin.  Now, what makes that even sweeter is that when the youth group was over at Christmas, when the guys had a tech question, they immediately turned to my husband.  No knocks against my husband; he was able to answer their questions, and frankly, does have certain tech areas covered much better than I do.  However, given that they don’t know him really at all, I was a bit peeved that the assumption was that he would be the person to answer the question.  It was nice to toss a technical morsel to at least one of the guys.

Lastly, my Facebook Scramble score went up by 32 points this weekend.  I had held the lead position in my circle of friends for months by some 15 points, but hadn’t been able to beat my personal best.  I beat it, and then beat my new top score, to really annoyingly widen the lead.

So, I’m happily geeking out.  No coding as yet this weekend, though I’ve seen a few headlines in the tech world I want to poke at.  Merb + Ruby?  Two technologies I haven’t played much with have now merged: hmmm…  time to do some poking.

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Our company is organizing one of those grab-a-gift-from-the-table gift exchanges.  My client’s office is arranging one, too.  I’m not allowed, for ethics reasons, to give anyone a gift at my client’s office.  But somehow swapping $20-limit goodies works, since I don’t know who specifically will get it?  (Yep, I looked it up in my client’s online ethics manual: if I don’t know who I’m giving it to, it’s completely ethical.)

Seems like then I’m not giving to make someone’s day brighter, since I have no real idea who I’m gifting to or what they’d like.  Forgive my Scrooge-i-ness, but it seems like then I’m giving so I can get something from the table.  Something which someone else has no idea whether I’d like.

I can’t help but thinking we’d be a little more in the Christmas spirit if we all just put cards on the table that said “I put a coat on someone for you today”, or “I gave someone dinner in your (non-specific, ethically pardonable) name today”.

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As the Washington Post reports that McCain’s chief of vetting only interviewed Sarah Palin the day before she was tapped as vice president, I wonder whether McCain’s maverick nature has bit him too hard.  The disadvantage to being a maverick is you forge your own path – the one that others haven’t seen, or if they’ve seen it, have viewed it as too hard, too dangerous, or just unwise.  I happen to view this choice as just plain unwise, as spur of the moment, as foolhardy.  I’m female, I’m Christian, I’m what some would argue as middle class (hey, we make less than $5 mil a year, anyway), and I was an undecided voter.  Until he picked Palin, that is.  He had multiple women on his advisory team who would have made better picks (Whitman being my preference over Fiorino).  There are multiple women senators, other women governors, current women Cabinet officers: any of which I’d have looked at more seriously than Palin.  A relatively rookie governor from Alaska, which could hardly be described as a state wrestling with most of the same issues as others, whose previous experience was as a mayor of a 9000 person town.  My university has a bigger population than her town did, and as much as I respected Dr. Hrabowski as a leader, my veep choice he wouldn’t be.

McCain’s choice demonstrates his inability to do several things: listen to his vetting team, select people appropriate to accomplish his vision, and convince the rest of us of his choice.  All of those I see as key markers of him, not just of her.   I’ve seen various comments that suggest the Dems put their inexperienced candidate at the top of the ticket, and the Republicans at the bottom.  But what I’m seeing indicates that the Dems seem to have made a wiser pick for veep, which makes me much comfortable with their TOP of the ticket than does the Republican pick.

And by the way, for those in the Christian right who are applauding their issues coming front and center: when the candidate is only there to front those issues, and not any others that the American people cares about, it just yet again separates Christians from the concerns of the rest of America.  I agree that (some of the) Christian right concerns deserve far more discussion and focus;  I just don’t think they are the exclusive issues for the American populace, and I’m concerned to see Christians cast yet again as way outside of the fray.  We are called to do God’s work in the world.  That only works if we’re involved IN the world, as was Paul and the apostles, not trying to stand completely outside of it.

I don’t see McCain recovering from this, in my personal selection process.  I had been undecided: both candidates had their plusses and minuses.  But now I see myself needing to vote against McCain, against what I see as a pandering selection, trying to please both women and the conservative Christian right with one candidate who covers all the check boxes.  Except for the ones that would cause me to see her as viable to fill the role of Vice President, to have some ability to step into the highest office in the land should that become necessary.  And that is a horrible mark against the man who would like me to check his name in the ballot in November.

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Sitting here, waiting for laundry, packing for camping.  Discovered an amazing food/beer pairing this evening: Fordham‘s Summer Forecast seasonal beer (“sunny, hazy, with a chance of raspberry”) and a pink snowball cupcake (discussion of the delights of pink snowball cupcakes here, though mine were Walmart knock-offs).  Grownup bed-time snack delight.

Confession: I had another pink snowball after the first one, so delicious when paired with the beer.  It didn’t taste as good on its own tonight, though I think that’s just a statement of how good that pairing was, as I’ve enjoyed the beer on its own before.

Second confession: I would love to go to the Great Grapes Festival in Annapolis next weekend.  Taste a little wine, check out a few food demonstrations, listen to some music.  I haven’t disclosed that confession to my husband, which means this is something of an unfair check to see whether he reads my blog.