By around 5:00 pm, with the AT&T store doors shuttered, and everyone waiting expectantly in line, people started to notice that the entire shopping center we were in had lost power. After lots of murmuring in the crowd, the rumor was that a nearby car had struck a light pole and knocked out power around us. After several nervous visits from AT&T store employees out to the line, the store manager came out and informed us that Georgia Power was working on the problem, and they expected it to be fixed at 7 pm. He was very apologetic and appreciative of the time we'd all been waiting. And we all hunkered down to wait again.

Looking back at my Twitters, it was around 5:51 when power magically came back in the shopping center, and people's spirits were again buoyed. Ken and I were around the 5th and 6th people in the store to pick up an iPhone, and the first two out with the goods.

As we came out, the second remarkable thing happened. Everyone exhorted Ken to open the bag with his iPhone in it and show off the package, but shortly after that, three people in line asked me what that thing was I had in my hand. As I showed it off to them, they oohed and aahed at the dual-slide action and asked me for all of the details. On a day when we'd all waited, some since 8:30 am for an iPhone, and at the moment just before purchase, they were still wowed by my Helio Ocean:

Posted by dave coustan at 8:06 PM |

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Just wolfed down a Publix sub, charged up the laptop batteries, and am hitting the internets for a quick update.

Here's a wider shot as well:

I just saw on Twitter that there are 185+ people at the Lenox Mall Apple store [via Sandi] And a UPS truck arrived about 15 minutes ago with what the driver said was "7 iPhones". Not sure if that was an honest statement or just playing to the crowd.

Oh, one other shenanigan, one guy who looked hipstery enough that we assumed he was here for an iPhone was actually just trying to do something in the AT&T store. He waited for at least 20 minutes in line until he realized that he didn't need to be.

I'm counting around 15 people here in line, as of 2:20 pm.

Posted by dave coustan at 1:43 PM |

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The line has picked up here, and a visit from the AT&T corporate folks has firmed up what the rules will be. They want everyone who wants a phone to be physically in line(or have a specific person holding the one space for them). Brandon and his family are working out a contingency plan, and there are now three other folks in line. There's a fifth grader who tells us he gets to use iBooks at school in New York. He's holding a spot for his aunt, and is getting $30, lunch, and a chair from his aunt for the effort. He's expecting a couple of people from his family to come by as well. One of the other waiters came here via the Perimeter Apple Store, which he says was a mob scene and looked like a long shot.

So if you want a good shot at it here in Metro Atlanta, I'd come on down here to the AT & T corporate store on Cascade Road as soon as you can:

3695 Cascade Rd, Atlanta, GA 30331

Posted by dave coustan at 11:46 AM |

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As it turns out, the security guy here is coordinating iPhone release security for all of Fulton County, and was kind enough to give us a quick rundown of what he's heard about the other stores. He says there are significant lines at the Atlantic Station, Lenox Mall, Briarcliff Rd., Roswell, and Camp Creek locations. So it's safe to say we're not at any of those places, but we are within Fulton County. And there's no line here so far except for myself and Ken, Brandon.

Posted by dave coustan at 10:41 AM |

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iPhones one through four will be bought by Brandon and his family. Brandon drew waiting duty in the family, and he and his sisters will all be on the family plan. The AT&T store folks said they'd honor the family buying phones as long as they were in line with Brandon at 4:30. So I'm technically number five, though second in line as far as actual bodies are concerned.

There's an off-duty sherriff here acting as a security guard, and he's super nice and helpful so far. He's waiting in his SUV by the curb. Nobody seems to mind that we're sitting on the sidewalk -- a friend in DC texted that the AT&T store she's at is asking them not to sit down.

It feels fairly safe so far that I'll be able to purchase an iPhone(or several). So I'll reveal where we're at shortly.

Update: I'm getting signal from a free Wi-Fi network nearby while sitting in line, so for now it's pretty comfortable and easy to get other stuff done while I wait.

Posted by dave coustan at 9:59 AM |

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The Earthling team, which pretty much comprises my manager Ken Womack and myself, are heading to an undisclosed location in the Metro Atlanta area this morning to try and secure a spot in line to nab an iPhone for EarthLink. Once we feel secure that we're well positioned to take one home today, I'll disclose that location and let you know what the line looks like, in case you're in Atlanta and thinking about spending some time standing around doing not much of anything.

It all depends on what today's waiting procedures turn out to be, but If the situation allows, we'll take a quick spin around some of the other Apple waiting spots in town and report how it's all shaping up. I'll be blogging photo updates and uploading video to YouTube when I can, perhaps to the Apple purists' chagrin from my Helio Ocean and it's speedy EV-DO data service. Hopefully covering the launch of Apple's superphone via Helio's superphone doesn't have the same effect as crossing the streams did in Ghostbusters. If the next blog entry's "posted by" line shows up as Zuul, you'll know what happened.

Posted by dave coustan at 9:01 AM |

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YouTube released a free, mobile device friendly version of their site at m.youtube.com. I browsed it this morning on my Helio Ocean -- to get there on an Ocean choose Surf, and then hit the right-hand key for "Go" and then type in the URL.

One of the first things you see when you pull up the site is this warning:

"Information: YouTube Mobile is a data intensive application. We highly recommend that you upgrade to an unlimited data plan with your mobile service provider to avoid additional charges."

It's nice of them to remind people that on many phone plans data is metered and costly. This would also be a nice message for Twitter to incorporate into their sign up process re: SMS charges if they haven't already. Nothing to worry about if you're on the Helio all-in data inclusive plans.

Update: Viewing Mobile YouTube via the Helio Ocean again appears to work for free, no additional signup required. There's been a change to the way m.youtube.com works on the Ocean and now it appears there's a required subscription to the Video Virus add-on to sign up. More information here and I will add more as I hear from Helio. Gizmodo has some additional information and describes a workaround that seems to work.

When you click to continue on, you get to a list of popular video clips and a search box down at the bottom. The search box was a little tricky to find the first time, but eventually I got there. I searched for "Chappelle," hoping to find clips from Chappelle's Show. The two clips it returned were Michel Gondry solving a Rubik's Cube with his feet, and a fake ad for a Steven Seagal Lightning Bolt drink. The tags the authors have added to the clips aren't visible in the mobile version, so it's hard to say for sure why these showed up in this search, but likely the authors tagged them "Chappelle" so they'd show up more often. Search regular YouTube for "Chappelle" and you get 5,030 results, some of which do seem to have something to do with Dave Chappelle.

Needless to say, the content choices are pretty limited right now. The "most viewed video" is currently this, a baby laughing. Ah, the wisdom of small crowds. I guess they haven't brought over much of the actual YouTube catalog, though the messaging in the application tells you they're working feverishly on that.

Other than the catalog shortcomings, the overall experience is pretty neat. The video plays clearly and keeps sync with the audio track, and YouTube automatically detects your phone's video player software and uses that to display the clip. It was very easy to use on the Ocean. I'll be interested to read how it works on other phones and devices.

For more mobile optimized user-contributed video sites to try on your phone, take a look at GigaOm's round-up of the options.

Posted by dave coustan at 1:44 PM |

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Thanks to reader Donna Brubach for re-igniting the spirit of Earthling's Battle of the Blogs, an occasional Earthling feature that 's overdue for a comeback. The battle shows you some worthy blogs you might not have come across before and asks you to vote for which one should appear in the listings over there in the right column under "Recommended Sites." Past winners have included What's That Bug and Ask Laptop Freak.

Yesterday Donna suggested Eye On Albuquerque be included in the next battle, and I'm going to work on a special local/hyperlocal blogs battle to put that to the test. Today I'm offering an unthemed and miscellaneous battle between a few of my recent finds. Evaluate each on the likelihood you'll come back and visit them again/subscribe via RSS.

Visit the blogs below and then vote for which one most merits inclusion in "Recommended Sites." Good luck to all nominees and may the most worthy blog win. It has to.

• Paleo-Future - "A look into the future that never was." [via Amber]
• TV in Japan - "This is what TV is like. In Japan."
• Suicide Food - "Animals that desire to be eaten."
• Fist-a-cuffs - "Where drawings are voted to the death and the streets run black with ink." [via Mister Harris]
• Workgrub - "A food experiment at the office."
• Smallist - "Better living through smallistry."

Posted by dave coustan at 12:45 PM |

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What are all of the ways you check for and receive new information during the day?

Information overload came up as a suggested focus for group discussion on Monday night at the Social Media Club Atlanta meeting, and I've had it on the brain again since then. Something about this time of year turns my thoughts to that subject. Looking back at the Earthling archives I wrote back in February of last year:

I'm willing to bet, though, that the pang of information overload is something that edge cases and mainstream internet users probably share. At some point, I bet that we've all felt overwhelmed looking at search results (no matter how organized), deciding what to read and what not to read on a particular morning, or simply figuring out where to begin.

It's hard to battle the glut until you know where the glut lives. I think it would be satisfying and useful to be able to create a fairly comprehensive picture of all those sources we tune our brains to each day. This afternoon I put together a short questionnaire to try to cover all of my own usual information sources, to help take a fresh look at what we can do to minimize and control the glut of input. I then asked the questions of myself, and wrote down the answers. It was helpful to get it all out and as I wrote, I saw some obvious things I could be doing that would save time and duplicated effort. It's like a little spring cleaning for your information consumption habits.

I'd like to add to the list of questions, and also find a way to weight them to come up with some kind of scoring that would help compare results from person to person. Visualization tools would be neat too. And I'm going to look around for statistics that already exist about the extent to which each one of these sucks up our time. Am I missing any important areas? Do you know of any other tests like this out there I might look at? I'm guessing Lifehacker.com and 43Folders might have covered something like this. Feel free to take the quiz yourself in the comments, point me to similar projects, or make some suggestions about the shape of it and what I'm missing.

The Questions So Far:
(updated)

1. How many phones and answering systems do you have?
   
2. Is one of them a Blackberry, Windows Mobile Smartphone, Treo, Sidekick or the like?
   
3. How many e-mail accounts do you have?
   
4. Do you read stuff via an RSS aggregator?
   
5. Which web sites do you visit directly each day?
   
6. How many IM clients are you logged in to during the day?
   
7. How much and what kind of mail do you receive via USPS mail?
   
8. Do you watch television daily?
   
9. Do you use a DVR?
   
10. Do you subscribe to a daily newspaper?
    
11. How many individual magazine issues do you receive each month?
    
12. Do you listen to the radio just about every day?
    
13. Anything else? What are the usual sources of extra and overflow?

I've published my own answers below in the comments.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:58 PM |

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School- and company-based social network Facebook just opened up their registration to just about anyone who wants to join. Since I was previously not a facebook-er, I decided to sign up and time the registration process to see how long it would take if you filled in all of the profile fields they give you, giving at least minimal thought to your answers.

Elapsed time: 12 minutes, 9 seconds.

This includes registration, uploading a photo, the full profile, and the required e-mail and SMS verification. At 9 minutes, 54 seconds, I was done with the profile setup. I even put in some fake information to make the process a little faster and not have to think about whether I want my physical address available to friends. That all feels a little on the long side for something that's supposed to be fun and social.

While you can skip as many profile fields as you want, there's no "express lane" path that only gives you what Facebook feels are the best profile attributes to start with. So if you want to shave time off of the signup process, you'd have to go through the whole thing and just pick and choose what you want to answer. I'd love to see something where if you chose, you'd be presented with a few indicative or useful questions to answer, and then you're sent straight to the verification and "you're good" screens. I tend to flail or bail when I get caught in a long profile setup purgatory.

Continue reading "Zero To Facebook in 12 Minutes"

Posted by dave coustan at 3:15 PM |

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Does your sense of humor come across better in person, or in instant messaging? Which version of you is funnier?

Update: The site hosting the poll appears to be slow right now -- please bear with me. If the trouble continues, I'll temporarily turn off the poll.

Posted by dave coustan at 12:59 PM |

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Ingo Haupt, a student at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, is doing a study on the value and effectiveness of business blogs. He e-mailed me to ask if we would help him out by filling out his survey, and when I say we I mean you. I've read through the survey and it's a little long, but it asks some very good questions and I think I'll get as much out of it as he will. So if you have the time and the inclination, please consider filling this out:

The survey.

All information will be kept confidential, but if you include your e-mail address Ingo will be raffling off some $25 Amazon.com gift certificates to the participants.

Posted by dave coustan at 10:21 AM |

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In an effort to expand our reading horizons, yours and mine, I'm offering a poll wherein I'd like you to look at two blogs of my choosing, and vote for the one you think you're more likely to visit again. The winning blog will also earn a limited run in my "recommended sites" list on the right.

Today's combatants are the Official LAPD Blog (yes, that's Los Angeles Police Department) and "What's That Bug", which answers a reader e-mail each day asking them to identify an insect. Note: WTB is gone fishin' until mid-June, but you can scroll through their past work to get a sense of what they do.

Please familiarize yourself with each combatant and then vote below:

There are no real losers here, and I'm only picking blogs I like for the battles. I'm leaning towards finding unique types of content that are well-suited to being updated daily.

If you know of a smallish or not-well-known blog you'd like me to feature in a future Battle of the Blogs, please send me an e-mail. I'm always on the lookout for good stuff.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:59 PM |

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I'm putting this in the "experiments" category because it's a first for the site. Part of my to-do list for Earthling included offering poll functionality so that I can ask you readers what you think of things from time to time.

I looked at three free, off-the-shelf polling options -- Blogflux, Dpolls, and the one you see below, Quimble. I liked Blogflux for its simplicity, but it didn't seem like you could see total number of results, only percentages. DPolls turned me off because it seemed to be offering too much. I'm not looking for social networking, just a poll. It made me choose from a list of categories, and my poll fell into none of them. One thing I like about Quimble is that it allows me to let you create your own options. So if the choices I've offered don't quite cover your opinion, add your own choice in there. You can vote simply by clicking a box, or you can add your own choice by clicking "Discuss the poll at Quimble."

Please vote on whether you'd like the current header image up top (the thing that looks like a surprised robot face) to stick around, or if you're ready for a change. If you have any thoughts about the polling software, or poll suggestions in general, add those in the comments. You can comment here on Earthling or over there. Also please let me know if the software acts funny at all for you -- this is my first time trying it out.

Note: Poll is closed! This is just a screenshot.

Posted by dave coustan at 10:39 AM |

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I recently wrote about Riya.com, a new photo sharing and storage site that has face recognition built-in as a main part of its appeal. I've been fascinated with face recognition since I first learned in college that it might be a specialized and discrete type of image processing in the brain. That blew me away. I don't know what the current state of the field is, but at that time there were many researchers who believed it to be distinct from other types of object recognition. Prosopagnosia is the name for the inability to recognize the identity of people based on faces. According to the Agnosia Cognitive Primer:

Patients can identify facial parts, recognize a face as a face but with no recognition of the person. In severe cases, patients can not recognize their own face.

We know about this in part because there have been patients who have lost their ability to recognize faces after suffering a lesion or loss of activity in a very specific part of the brain. Here's a site devoted to research on face recognition, especially as it relates to computer work.

Does it have a face?

Knowing just enough to be dangerous, I wanted to put Riya.com's face recognition to the test. Since it's in beta and I didn't want to mess up the experience for others, I asked the good folks at Riya for permission before I started to mess around with it. They agreed to let me have at it, with the caveat that I understand that non-traditional uses of it would probably yield unpredictable results.

Read on to hear about the game I like to call "Does it have a face?"

Continue reading "Educating Riya"

Posted by dave coustan at 3:48 PM |

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Before I attempt any experiments of my own for this site, I hereby bow to one of the kings of online shenanigans, Rob at Cockeyed. I first came across his site over a year ago, when someone forwarded Price of a gallon to me. It turns out that even at five dollars a gallon, gasoline would be one of the cheaper liquids around.

Another one of my favorites is his test of batteries from a series entitled "What's Inside?" Here, Rob answers the age-old questions of how much juice is really inside a battery for practical purposes, and whether you're better off buying brand-name or generic.

His pranks are worth looking at as well, unless you're easily offended by humor at the expense of nameless others.

Posted by dave coustan at 5:27 PM |

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