• Worked on a Windows XP SP3 integrated OS deployment installation
• Refreshed all district-wide application sets
• Built customized OpenOffice.org 2.4 installation package (No registration or Quick Start) for all classrooms
• Recorded Promethean ActivBoard training in HD and will be editing footage for online self-paced courses
• Helpdesk software training and workflow redesign
• Implementing print job accounting at additional locations
• Upgraded MSA1500 firmware to active/active controllers
• Upgraded virtual infrastructure from ESX 3.0 / VC 2.0 to ESX 3.5 / VC 2.5
• Replacing network core equipment, upgrading from Catalyst 4006 to 4 stacked 3750s with 10GbE capability
• Implementing extended proof of concept for VDI clients

If there are any of these topics you’re interested in, let me know in the comments and I’ll do a more complete writeup!

I’m completely excited that I have finally (after waiting 3 weeks) made first contact with someone at OLPC, who forwarded my information to someone who can help me directly. It’s just a baby step, but it’s much better than no contact at all.

We’re looking at getting a few demo units. Beyond that, I’d like to get a set for a whole class, and then the sky is the limit. I am so very excited.

I’ve caught up with some old friends recently and it’s revived my interest in photography. I just purchased a cheap 50mm lens, but I haven’t used it much yet.

I recently upgraded to iLife ‘08, which has new web gallery feature in iPhoto if you’re a .Mac subscriber. They also recently bumped the storage to 10GB from 1GB. I love the new gallery, works just like Steve Jobs demoed. This makes for an interesting problem.

I have web hosting through 1and1 for my domain where I have a Gallery installation, it probably has more storage than I will probably use (250-300 GB), and I pay for it anyway to run this domain, website, and email services. The negatives are that the upload utilities are generally bad, and it’s a little unfriendly for people. I also have the .Mac Web Gallery service. It’s 10GB which should be good enough to keep the newest things online, but the best parts are that it looks awesome, it’s super easy to use from my Macbook, and I can upload pictures taken on my iPhone in 2 buttons presses, wirelessly. Lastly, I have a Flickr account. I’ve never used it until recently, but I’ve always been impressed by the community and tagging. The utilities for uploading are pretty easy, and it has passable mobile uploading. If I start to use it more, then I’ll probably have to pay for a third service. Hosting is $10/month and .Mac is $100/year. Flickr is $25/year.

I’m leaning toward using all 3 in some capacity. We’ll see how it goes.

There are a few things you use everyday like maybe your car, mobile phone, computer/notebook, and so on. I am willing to spend more on those things I use everyday if it makes like easier, less complicated, or better in some way. That works for me. However, I don’t spend money on things like cable TV, a DVD library, etc.

It’s also not about showing off or status symbols because I don’t LIKE showing off my stuff, I’m generally too modest for that. I like demoing the technology, not the products themselves.

I really think the iPhone compared to any other phone is similar to the difference between Mac OS X and Windows. The Mac may not be able to do absolutely everything Windows can do, but it does most things in a way that actually makes sense. Sometimes there is a premium to pay for this.

A illustration of the difference: Every phone matches the number of a call to a contact in the address book, and displays the name of the person on the screen. Only the iPhone is smart enough to display “Bob or Betty Newbie” if it happens to match more than one contact. Finally! It gets better, if the last names don’t match it displays “Bob Newbie or Bella Goth.” That Bob Newbie gets around.

Purchase

Shannon and I showed up at the local Apple store at around 5:30pm, and waited in line about an hour before seeing the inside of the store. After that it was very quick and painless. We managed to escape without buying anything else.

Hardware

Included in the box is the iPhone itself, a sync cable, dock (like an iPod), charing brick to be used with the sync cable, and a polishing cloth. The iPhone is like most Apple products, fantastic industrial design. The screen is breathtaking, go see one in person. It does get streaks, but when the screen is on you won’t notice them. I can’t say too much about the battery yet, but so far the battery has had tons left at the end of the day. Shannon hasn’t been so lucky. After watching some videos in the morning and then showing her iPhone off yesterday afternoon, she was down to about 5% battery. Mine was at about 95%, albeit with less usage. There have been some other hints, but I’m beginning to believe her battery might be faulty.

Activation

Activation was relatively quick and easy for me, on first connection with my Macbook. iTunes walked me through creating my AT&T service account and porting my number over. Within a couple of minutes, the iPhone was ready to go. Shannon’s iPhone took about 5 hours to activate, which was a little disappointing for her. The iPhone is completely unusable without being tied to an AT&T account though iTunes.

Setup

After the iPhone is activated, you are able to setup data sync settings. For example, you don’t need to sync your entire address book or all of your calendars (if you use iCal at least). Email setup is as easy as picking an existing account setup from Mail. Other sync options are exactly the same as an iPod. I’ve already got mine setup just as I would want it. I’ve done some reconfiguration work on my email accounts so I get most of my email without the garbage.

Interface

Just awesome. It works exactly like the videos on apple.com. THIS is the reason to get an iPhone. I love unlocking my phone. It blows away any other phone you have used, ever.

Keyboard and User Input

Because of the nature of the iPhone, this section is very dependent on the interface. All of the touch navigation with buttons, sliders, etc are just brilliant. Very easy to work with, and all the controls work just as you would expect. Keyboard input is.. interesting. I’m very undecided so far. The first few times I tried to use the keyboard I was completely frustrated. I’m getting better now, however. While the system does correct your mistypings automatically, there are some fields that it doesn’t check such as a Google Maps search or address input.

Phone

Contacts are good, way better and more complete than any phone you have ever used. The true mobile version of Mac OS X’s Address Book. Visual Voicemail works just as advertised. This is huge for me, I absolutely hate checking voicemail but think I can use this.

Mail

Works well. No major complaints. It does not contain any kind of spam filtering that I can tell, nor does it bring over your rules from the Mac OS X Mail application. Also, as far as I can tell, there is no way to bring any pictures emailed to me directly into the Photos area of the phone to sync into iPhoto later.

Safari

This is the major feature that made me want the iPhone. I really haven’t used it extensively yet, but so far it’s just as advertised. It is a full desktop web browser in your pocket. I don’t like that iTunes synchronizes your entire Safari bookmarks, or not at all. I’d rather it just back them up. My browsing habits on a mobile phone and my habits on my desktop/notebook are different. Plus, I have tons of bookmarks that are a bit uncomfortable to scroll through every time I want to find a site. I plan on just having a few daily bookmarks, and using my del.icio.us account for the rest.

iPod

Just like an iPod, only better. Coverflow is pretty neat, but I can find the music I want faster using the list. I look forward to listening to more podcasts, it seems easier to do it from the iPhone. Enough about music, the real killer app for the iPod is video. I’ve converted a few movies with Handbreak and they look fantastic. I just don’t envision many times I will be sitting around with enough time to watch a movie. The movies I’ve converted are about 1-1.3GB per movie. I am using the iPod settings template, which is 1500kbps, plus 2-pass encoding.

Pictures and Camera

The camera is pretty simple. Open it, press the picture button. It’s a 2 megapixel camera, and looks decent for a phone camera. There’s no movie support. All pictures you take go into the Pictures application. The Picture application sorts everything into albums, and you choose which albums from your system are synchronized. An odd problem I found is that when you sync the iPhone, iPhoto wants to download the photos you’ve taken. If you don’t erase the camera after import, it wants to download the same pictures again on the next sync. If you do erase the pictures, then they won’t be on the iPhone to use. My workaround for this is to create a smart album that looks for the “Camera Model” of “Apple iPhone” and have this album sync with the iPhone. It works well so far. It seems other pictures are scaled down when synchronized with the iPhone, so they don’t look really great zoomed in too far. It would be interesting to see a 10 megapixel picture and how far you can zoom in before it looks pixelated.

YouTube, Stocks, Weather, Clock, Calculator, and Notes

YouTube is okay. There’s only a small fraction of the videos on the site available through the YouTube application so far. I think Shannon has sent me a link to just about all the decent videos available! Stocks and Weather are just like their Mac OS X widget counterparts. The only added feature is that you can ‘flick’ between different locations. Clock lets you compare different timezones, set an alarm, time things with a stopwatch, and set a timer. It’s decent. The cool thing I found is when you are setting an alarm or a timer the way to set the time is like a slot machine. You spin a wheel to set the time you want, a very nice touch. Calculator is almost too basic. It has the normal 4 operations and thats it. Notes does what you would expect, but it doesn’t synchronize with your computer, so the notes just sit there! Rumor is that the notes feature in Mac OS X 10.5’s Mail application will be able to sync with the iPhone when it’s released.

Maps

Full Google maps in your pocket. Another awesome reason for an iPhone. Look at the videos I linked above to see it in action. It works great, no complaints from me.

Complaints I’ve Heard

I’ve heard two large complaints from the major technology writers: Battery and AT&T’s data speeds. To me, so far, both have been a non-issue. The battery has been fantastic so far, and the internet browsing speeds haven’t caused me any trouble or frustration. We’ll see if I change my mind.

The Future

I don’t feel there are too many rough spots, if any. They either polished the heck out of it, or took a feature out altogether. I get the feeling that Apple is going to put tons of work in the future with new features, especially to integrate tightly with Mac OS X 10.5. I can’t wait for a true instant messaging client, and maybe even voice over IP.

After not having anything to post about because of my blog format, I’m going loosen up a bit more and post on other topics. I’m not sure how far I will go with it, but I’m not going to hold myself back so much anymore.

I hope to post some thoughts on the sessions I visit each day, so look out for those.

Update: I think I will post results and new ideas from the sessions when I get home instead of trying to do it here in the hotel. I also updated all the handouts to the newest version of the slideshow tonight. If you saw the session and have comments, leave a comment on this post!

LDAP configuration was easy to initially configure, but took some research to properly setup. I now have an Active Directory group that provides instant messaging access, and I can use other groups to automatically organize users so there is no need to manually manage contact lists. I also have disabled the users ability to add other users to their contact lists to keep user groups isolated.

To test the new service, I used the Spark client inside the Technology Center to see how it would work on a department scale. Everyone seemed to like it, but doubted the overal usefulness of an instant messaging service to a department with close physical proximity.

After seeing the service working well, I switched into deployment mode. I had to make the instant messaging service automatically deploy for users who needed it. The clients must automatically sign on or it doesn’t work. After doing more research, I rolled out the Pandion client to my department officially. I created a custom MSI with preconfigured settings and deployed using group policy.

Pandion includes the unique ability to use integrated Windows authentication. The client loads automatically on logon, and signs on automatically using the credentials of the users domain logon. Wildfire required a 3rd party patch to enable this functionality. Be aware that the patch I linked is only for version 3.0+ of Wildfire.

Soon after rolling out the client to my department, someone saw the client and really liked the idea of instant messaging. So last week I deployed it to another department. I have not received any feedback at this point so I don’t know how well it is going. I will post again once there has been enough time to do a proper review of instant messaging here.

I didn’t get very far. To get Fusion working at this point as intended, you must do a CD install. I’ll probably do that at some point, but.. what a bummer.

The “New Virtual Machine” wizard was a bit too friendly for me, and didn’t offer any custom or advanced choice. It felt like the old Virtual PC for PowerPC Macs. No option to connect a template drive to the new virtual machine like I can do in VMware Workstation. Oh well, I thought I would just create a blank drive and edit the virtual machine once it’s created.

Nope, the virtual machine configuration editor is essentially useless. All the options “will be editable in a future release.” No way to attach my template VMDKs. It appears that I could edit the VMX file manually, but that’s a lot of extra work! You also get a warning about debug mode, which was enabled on VMware Server.

I plan to use Fusion in my presentations instead of bringing an extra notebook to connect to the projector, I hope it becomes more functional before mid February!

Update: I took my blank VM, renamed the blank VMDK file and replaced it with my template Windows XP VMDK by renaming the template to the old file name and placing it in the virtual machine’s folder. I booted it up and it worked like a charm.