Sitting in the Apple store on the UWS

waiting for an appointment at the Genius Bar. Hopefully they'll do a diagnostic on my phone and let me know why it loses approximately 1% of battery life for every minute it's turned on....

So it's 1 am and I'm home, after realizing that the Apple Store exists solely for the purpose of continuing the cult. Normal people have social lives on Friday nights, but because I have an iPhone 4, my weekends are routinely spent with the geniuses at Apple's Genius Bar.

What I learned from tonight is that someone could jailbreak their iphone and if there were ever a problem, restore it to the latest OS, then take it into the Apple Store where the geniuses would likely not be able to detect it had previously been jailbroken and where the warranty would still be in effect. This is all in the conditional tense, of course, because I'm not speaking from personal experience.

So the net result of going to the Apple store is that I got some screen protectors for $5.00 from the guy outside (who definitely calls me ma'am now) after discovering that my battery, according to Apple's diagnostics, is functioning properly. The genius told me that those long battery life hour quotes are only good for if the phone is sitting around NOT DOING ANYTHING (like, what good is that?), but that if I'm actually USING it, 7 hours is great. So I guess this "wonderful" phone that multitasks and surfs the net and all that is really not the workhorse one would expect if, say, one has to be out of the office all day and needs to call in, do conference calls, find directions on GPS, send emails ... instead of spending $300.00 on a phone, I shoulda bought a netbook and installed skype or google voice. That woould have been a wiser use of my money than this stupid iPhone. Somehow, I think its main purpose is simply to feed our addiction to the cult so we'll want (or think we need) to buy iPads.

Anyway. I have my phone back, and have installed beJeweled, CNN, and a buncha other stuff. I've also discovered an external battery pack -- SO not good looking, and counter to the sleek new design of the ip4, but something I need to consider if I'm going to be running around the middle east and wanting to tweet or facebook from, say, the Pyramids (assuming there's connectivity out there).

I started this post with something in mind, but I've forgotten it now. Before I went to the Apple Store, I went into Trader Joe's for the first time ever. I think it's a bit more my speed than whole paycheck, although I still love whole paycheck's indian bar... After I left the Apple store I visited RM and his friend H, two people who, while seated and under the influence, soundly kicked my behind in Wii tennis AND golf.

OK, I feel old now. I'm going to bed. But before I do, I'm excited about getting the CD today from my PET scan. It's part of that whole GE imaging thing -- I pop the CD in, the GE program opens up, and I can actually see the PET scan. I guess it's a couple hundred X-rays that, when viewed consecutively, show a more complete picture of your insides -- it's really cool to scroll through it and look at your muscles, then at your organs. It was fascinating. Of course, reading the doctor's report that there's no trace of cancer in my body was good, too.

I'm really going to bed now.