I preordered my Nest thermostat on Day 0. It arrived on my doorstep today. I don’t think anyone has been excited about a thermostat in the last 10 years (except for the guy who finally figured out how to program his after a couple years of not bothering) and I feel a little silly about the fact that I care about a thermostat at all. The timing was right: I wanted a programmable thermostat so I could feel less guilty about keeping it so warm in the Summer and cool in the Winter. We had an ancient a retro model that we rarely adjusted when leaving; basically throwing money away.

The Nest costs a bit more than the programmable models I was researching but it does something none of them will do: it learns so I don’t have to. I’ve lived in 2 homes with programmable thermostats and never learned to program them so they were wasted. With Nest, I don’t have to learn how to program it. I set the temperatures as I go for the first week and it learns how to program for me. If I change my mind or need to adjust things, I can do it at the thermostat, on the web site, or via the iPhone app.

After the installation, the thermostat booted up, asked which wifi network to use, downloaded an update, rebooted, then walked me through setup. It was made to impress and it succeeded. Each step was informative, easy, and made me continuously wonder why all consumer electronics don’t work like this. Connecting the thermostat to my Nest account was a 2 step process: I logged into my account. The site told me it found a Nest and I should go to it if I wanted to add it to this account. A message was waiting for me on the thermostat that asked if I wanted it added to my account. I clicked OK. Done.

I have to assume there are dozens of consumer electronic companies working this sort of setup functionality into their next products. If not, they’re doing it wrong.

I tested iTunes Match on my PC at work and, though I will never really use it, it is pretty cool. Most of my playlists are available and I can listen to pretty much all of my music at work now, if I wanted. I prefer listening to music on my phone at work so I won’t use this much. If I did listen to iTunes at work on my PC, this would be the greatest use of $25 ever.

I planned on using iTunes Match for my iPhone, not my work PC so I went into settings to turn it on. When I did, I saw this message:

iTunes Match Warning

That was the end of that experiment.

I read later that the message is a lie (which means it should not be there) and that your existing music won’t be erased from the phone. However, it apparently prevents you from syncing with iTunes on your PC afterwards, so no thanks.

Besides the obvious limitations above that will keep me from using this, there are a few other things that bother me:

• “Matching a user’s iTunes library in the cloud take minutes, not days or weeks,” Apple says. While this is technically true, over 1/3 of my music was not matched and had to be uploaded. This took days, not minutes.
• Smart playlists based on other smart playlists will not work in iTunes Match. This kills my main playlists on my phone and is almost a dealbreaker. It isn’t a dealbreak by itself but turning on iTunes Match for my phone means I can’t sync my main playlists anymore at all. That is a dealbreaker.
• Adding music (when ripping CDs) doesn’t automatically add them to iTunes Match. Not sure if it runs on a schedule or not but I ripped a CD then added those tracks to my stepson’s playlist and was told that the tracks weren’t in iTunes Match so adding them to the playlist would remove the playlist. Weird and lame.

Also, what is going on with these icons? Steve Jobs must be rolling over in his grave right now. (Note: these are on my work machine, the ‘close left panel’ icon doesn’t exist on my home machine.)

One thing I that might actually be better about the Fire than the iPad is the home page UI. I really like the use of cover flow for all your recently used apps, books, web pages. In my opinion it’s better than Apple’s double tap home screen button solution. In fact I’m starting to think Apple should actually rip off this UI instead of just using the free for all icon layout they’ve used since the iPhone 1. On the iPhone that layout is probably still the best route to go; but the iPad has enough real estate to get more creative with the UI. The Fire is a perfect example of what can be done.

As far as the size goes. It is simply too small to be a full featured tablet. However I actually like the size for book reading books and gaming. I find the iPad is a bit too large for games that use the accelerometer/gyroscope, so I never play those on the iPad. On the flipside I think the iPhone is a bit too small for my old ass eyes when it comes to those kind of games. The Fire splits the difference nicely. The same can be said for reading books on the iPad and the iPhone, one is too large, and the other is too small.

The Fire obviously has tons of flaws, read Engadget or pretty much any review to see a list of them, but there are some things Apple could and should learn from this device. Would I pay $300 for it? No, I wouldn’t. However, if I didn’t already own an iPad $200 is a tempting price point.

Worst new feature: Playlist order is broken again.

Other things I’ve noticed:

• Location-based reminders are apparently only on iPhone 4S. I can set a reminder for a time but not a location.
• I hide all of my unused Apple apps in 1 folder on the last page of my homescreens to keep them out of my way. You can’t put the Newsstand app in a folder so that empty ass bookcase is going to be staring at me every time I visit the barren wasteland of my last homescreen.
• Smart Playlists now update correctly again. Since iOS 4, they wouldn’t live update on my phone (i.e. playing a song on the “unplayed” playlist should make the song disappear from the playlist without having to sync but that didn’t work since iOS 4).
• Playlists aren’t ordered correctly now. Playlists that start with numbers come after playlists that start with letters. Underscores are ignored.
• The new Notifications alone make the upgrade worth it. Yeah, the upgrade is free but still, those old notifications were the shittiest thing I’ve ever seen on a phone.
• The notifications area has weather and stocks, too. Neato.
• If your Apple ID is just a username and not an email address, you’ll have to change that when you first start your phone after upgrading. If you also have a MobileMe address and want to use that as your  Apple ID, you’re going to have some weirdness because you have to use your MobileMe address to sign in to your phone but then your old non-email Apple ID to sign in to the iTunes Store and GameCenter.
• I can’t use iCloud yet because I have a MobileMe account that needs to be moved to iCloud first and I can’t do that yet.
• Syncing no longer disables your phone. Instead of the screen being on with a “Sync in Progress” message at the top, there is just a small sync icon spinning in the status bar up top. Your phone screen will go black if you sync it and let it sit. This caused me to unplug it once in the middle of a sync because I assumed it was finished.
• The messaging/SMS app has greens where the blues should be. Lame.

For the next week, I’ll still be using my iPhone 4 so I can’t play with Siri or the location-based notifications yet. That should be some fun (and/or annoying) features to test. Maybe I’ll even use them later, who knows.  I’m still not in the habit of using Search homescreen to find things on the phone.

[UPDATE: Sean Herrala pointed out that you can add location-based reminders in the Reminder app on iPhone 4 but you have to add it as a Reminder, not a Task. I didn't have a Reminders section in the app, only Tasks, so I added a new section called "Reminders" and then items I added had location-based reminders available. Weird. Sounds like a bug to me.  Also, when adding a location-based reminder, you are limited to locations that are in your contact list. In all of the Siri demos, they say things like "remind me to get milk at the grocery store", I wonder if that guy has a contact called "Grocery Store" or something...]

After joining, the first 4 movies they suggested:
Howard the Duck.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
Short Circuit.
Big Fan.

WTF.

or maybe they forgot that whole “beta” thing and hit the “go live” button a couple months too soon.

here are my notes, starting around September 12, 2009. What a nightmare:

I have 2 backups: my system volume backup and a file backup. The first thing I did was create a system volume backup but then it never ran after the first time, though it said it was scheduled to run every day. It wasn’t listed in the scheduled tasks if I click on a date in the calendar (only the file backup is shown) but if I click the “show all scheduled tasks, it would show up. There was no indication of any reason why the task doesn’t show up in the list when I click a date but does show up when I click “show all”… it says “At 12:04:00 AM every day” as the “schedule”.

So after a week of trying to figure out why that wasn’t running, I gave up and recreated the task.

When I look at the “Manage Backups” page, the file backup was no listed, I had to browse for it.

I activated “Acronis Startup Recovery Manager” but, after reboot, it was no longer activated. I activated it again.

The emails I get from my backups list the location of the backup as “”.

========
a new version was released 2 days after I bought the other version so, a week later, I found this out and downloaded the new version.

a week after that, I installed it. While installed, I got a message to close the following programs: Windows Explorer. Not IE… explore.exe. Not a good sign.

rebooted after installation. “Acronis Home has encountered a problem and must close” error is the first thing I see.

I try to run Acronis from the start menu, get the User Account dialog box and allow it, then get an Acronis error: Acronis True Image Home is not installed. So I unstalled it via the windows control panel, but that didn’t work at all. It did not unistall the program.

So I ran the installation program again and chose “repair”. That appeared to have worked after rebooting.

Acronis now makes a “My Backups” folder for some reason. Eventually (after 2 or 3 failed backup task attempts in ATI 2010) I gave up and let ATI use that folder instead of the folder I had created and used for my backups.

But then I tried to set up and run a full system backup, scheduled for midnight, and it shows up as Status = “Queued” instead of “Idle” and did not run at the scheduled time. Rightclicking the task and choosing “start” does not start the task.

I had to download and run a commandline utility to delete all schedule tasks to attempt to fix this (see http://forum.acronis.com/forum/4214 )

I did this, deleted my old backups (thus wasting the last 2 weeks of labor trying to get ATI 2009 and now ATI2010 to work correctly) and recreated my 2 backups: a system backup that runs at Midnight and a file backup that runs a couple hours later. I used the “run now” checkbox to make the system backup run immediately but did not do that for the file backup. The system backup ran immediately and ran again on schedule. The file backup still said “Queued” the next morning when I got up. It did not run at scheduled time.

I deleted the “queued” task and recreated it, backtracking to make sure the “run immediately” box was checked (it is checked by default but unchecked when you change any of the real options, such as making it a scheduled task. Checking that box caused the task to run immediately and it also ran on schedule later.

So, finally, after slightly over 3 weeks, 2 versions, 3 installs, and way over a dozen attempts, I now have both of my backups running correctly.

Unfortunately, I don’t really have much faith in them. How can I really be confident that my backups will actually work if needed when I know how buggy this software is?

I have now rebooted and seemingly confirmed that finally, after all of the problems I had with ATI 2010, now that I have it running correctly, it appears to have solved the initial problems I had with ATI 2009.

Also, the bootable Acronis Rescue Disk does work for me. The System Report didn’t work by itself (failed to save the report) but does work from within the rescue software. That isn’t a big deal but is yet another bug in the software.

Hopefully I’ll never need these backups in an emergency. If it do or if something else pops up, I’ll update this list. Otherwise, I think I’m through.

And then, on October 13, 6 days after I thought I was finished, one of the original problems popped up again: On the home screen of ATI 2010, there is once again a warning that says “Your system is not fully protected. Perform the following operations: Back Up My System”.
So now I am creating a new system backup by clicking on the “Back Up My System” link and creating a new system backup (AGAIN) and scheduling it to run daily, being sure to backtrack and check the “run now” checkbox.

2009-10-14 7:30am That backup ran correctly and ran again when scheduled that night and now the home screen says “Your system is fully protected”. But when I go to the Recovery tab, the backup is not listed under “disk backups” like it should be. I clicked “browse for backup” and added the backup manually. This problem is the 2nd of the 3 original problems I was having with ATI 2009.

I left for the beach and returned Sunday 2009-10-18. Again, had the same message: On the home screen of ATI 2010, there is once again a warning that says “Your system is not fully protected. Perform the following operations: Back Up My System”.

2009-10-21 : I have uninstalled ATI 2010. I give up. I have spent far too much time on this, it would have been less work to just manually recreate a windows backup every day than to jump through all of these hoops only to end up without a stable dependable automatic backup.

I will now go back to using Windows backup automatically and will manually create a new backup from time to time in order to deal with the size issues Windows Backup has. Wasting $50 is bad but I wasted much more than that in labor.

Maybe I’ll try again when an update to ATI is released.

I eventually came up with sirsha.com as my “business” domain. I basically separated my online identity into 2 personalities: a work-safe, technology-oriented side (”Sirsha”) and the NSFW “personal” side (”sirshannon”). There was a blog on each site, among various other things that would come and go as interest and time varied. This separation worked for me because, theoretically, I could drop f-bombs all day on sirshannon.com but still have sirsha.com to show off my geek credentials to anyone who might need my professional services. It was a bit of a pain sometimes because things like music software sat firmly between both business and personal. I had to stick to the plan, however, because I was working as a freelance developer and consultant and there is no way I would direct a potential client to sirshannon.com, which contained such gems as “The Hooker With The Heart of Gold” (spoiler alert: I killed her and sold the heart for crack). Sirsha and sirsha.com were vehicles that allowed me to meet many great developers, learn a lot, and share a little knowledge. If it was an experiment, then it succeeded completely.

And then, in late 2004, I took a full-time job. This drastically cut down on the amount of tech blogging I would do on sirsha.com because my free time was reduced and because I refuse to blog about code I write at work. So my interest and investment in sirsha.com because less and less. In addition to that, my job is in an adult-oriented industry so there is no reason to refrain from dropping f-bombs these days Perhaps in the future I’ll have to try to pretend this job didn’t happen but for now, there is almost no reason to “hide” behind sirsha.com.

And then, several months ago, my web server harddrive failed. I have old backups but not a current one, so setting everything up again would be a lot of work for incomplete results. So I decided to cancel that web server contract and outsource my hosting for the most part. One day I’ll either have all my domains set back up on hosted web app services or canceled completely. Wordpress and other platforms are so easy to set up, I don’t see much of a reason to write my own platforms anymore, or use one that is too much trouble for too little benefit (like sirsha.com’s last platform, Community Server). I’m never going to write the next great blogging platform or CMS so why not use the currect greatest ones? Maybe I’m just getting old, but I think I’m getting wiser

One day I may have sirsha.com’s content available again, either on wordpress or some other platform, archived for the ages, but for now, sirsha.com will direct to this page. Consider it a tombstone. Or a plaque outside a cryogenic chamber.

For those of you that don’t mind non-tech posts and opinions, along with some f-bombs on occasion, please stick around. For those who do mind such things, thanks for reading sirsha.com in the past, I hope we learned a little from each other along the way.

The Gutter : Keep
The Gutter : Ditch

Now go vote.