It's hard to believe that the terrorist attacks were six years ago now. I don't really have any prolific thing to say.

Neil and I finished up the timing chain job on the 4Runner a couple of weeks ago. I've been driving it around pretty religiously since. In fact, I haven't driven the FJ Cruiser in a couple of weeks now, which is the way I'd like to keep it. Not that I don't like the FJ, I just already have 8300 miles on the thing. The 4Runner has its quirks, but one of the best things about a first generation 4Runner is that the top from the cab on back comes off. So Saturday, Neil and I took it off, and now that it's not insanely hot, I'm driving it as a convertible.

My friend Erik came out from LA for the Labor Day weekend. It was good to see him. He's more of a sucker for gadgets than I am. He brought out two new Apple products with him; his MacBook and his iPhone. I was seriously underwhelmed by both of them, which is a first for me with Apple products. I'm not sure if this means that I'm no longer under Apple's spell, or if the products just sort of suck now. I'm going with a little of both.

At this stage, I don't know why anyone would pay the premium for an Apple laptop. It's just another x86 box, in white plastic. I personally think the white packaging looks terrible and is only an invite for people to comment on it. If you're going to do the plastic thing, be safe and go with with black. My Lombard G3 PowerBook still looks terrific, and IBM has kept the faith with the Thinkpads. Even Apple had the good since to make their laptops metal when they originally went with silver as a color. Silver I can stand as a color if it's really metal. I hate plastic that tries to look metal though. Why not just make plastic black?

I played with Erik's iPhone three or four times over the course of the visit. The UI is pretty cool; my favorite feature is the fact that the phone can sense what direction it's being held in, and rotate the content accordingly. I liked the photo album, and the ability to drag a finger across the screen to scroll content. The UI is pretty tight.

What makes the iPhone completely suck is that it's crippled by a completely shitty onboard data radio. The data rates available from GSM suck compared to EVDO on the CDMA networks, and I've read that the iPhone doesn't even have a 3G radio. Even worse, while AT&T advertises here in Arizona that they've spent $300 million "upgrading the network," (I guess buying Cingular was an upgrade), their data service sucks. Of the 3 times I tried to access the web via Safari on the iPhone, I was able to connect and surf only once. All of these tries were within the Phoenix metro area, not in the boonies. (One success in Gilbert, one failure in Chandler, and another failure in Phoenix proper.)

GSM has some really cool features. The idea of being able to carry your phone personality on a SIM card is cool. I have a Cingular Go Phone, and I like the idea of being able to switch my SIM into another phone if I dunk this one in the pool, or whatever. However, CDMA still has better call quality and data rates, no matter what the marketing dorks say.

Less than two weeks, and I'll be in Hawaii. Which will be a first since I was there courtesy the US Navy over six years ago. A friend of mine is getting married. Hopefully it'll do better than my marriage, which also originated in Hawaii.

I'm still playing bass with the psychobilly band. We're going to try and do band photos soon. I'm sort of looking for a side project too. I really want to play rhythm guitar in a hard rock or punk band.