Faith

The iPhone 3G has been unlocked! All praise and honor due to the iPhone-dev-team!

That said, there is a cost to living on the technological frontier. You can't always do everything you want because not everything is available—or even known to be possible. So for us early adopters, we buy on faith.

Five months and five days ago, I stood in line for 7 1/2 hours to get a new iPhone 3G. My move to Spain was still planned then, and I knew the consequences. I can't take it abroad…as is. So I stepped out on a limb and bought the godPhone in hopes that faithful hackers would pwn it in time.

Six weeks and three days ago, I bought a plane ticket bound for Europe. The schedule is such that I'll land on The Continent on December 29th. As it stood when confirming my flight, I will be iPhone-less.

One week and five days ago, I cancelled my AT&T service, effective December 29th. I'm stepping into the great unknown world of a cell-phoneless existence. There was still only the veiled hope of a 3G unlock so I could use my iPhone when I get abroad. But my cell plan was cancelled on faith. (Without the fabled early termination fee, by the way. Just move out of AT&T's coverage area.)

But today dawns a new era of hope: 

A new star is seen in the eastern sky!

Unto us a hack is born.

Unto us a pwn is giving.

And the overnment will be hot upon his trail. 

His name shall be called Wonderful Communicator, Mighty iPod, Everlasting Battery (sic), Prince of Pwns. 

And you are to give him the name, yellowsn0w, because he will save people from their cell-provider.

A Different Google Reader

Google recently added the ability to read scanned PDF documents. This is impressive because it's one thing to show a picture of text and another thing for a computer to understand what letters and words are represented there. As mentioned in this article, this provides a poor man's way to get high-end OCR (optical character recognition) done on a scanned PDF one has. So this is my test of the effectiveness of that technique on a document I would love to have in text-form.

I'll update this post if/when the Google bot gets here and indexes the PDF. Thanks Google!

11/28/2008  EDIT: It took a couple weeks, but Google came through with it's Optical Character Recognition flag waving high. Here's a copy of the Google Cache which OCRed this scan of Bluspels and Flalansferes (1939) by C. S. Lewis. But oddly, the OCR/Cache ends mysteriously at just a paragraph (in each column) into page 14. What happened to the rest? Is the Google bot in the process of recognizing this as I type? Time might tell…

Pavlov's Ringtone

How To Hate Music:

1.)  Get a phone with programable ringtones.

2.)  Set the beginning of your favorite song as the default ringtone.

3.)  Use this phone for work.

4.)  Work a lot. (Make sure your work includes people you don't like or want to talk to.)

5.)  Begin to hate getting phone calls.

6.)  Begin to hate the beginning of your favorite song.

7.)  Instinctively cringe X% of the time when shuffling through your favorite playlist.

8.)  Choose second favorite song and repeat from step 2.

QQ

For Immediate Release

Contact:

Ryan Wright

[this blog]

that email address --->

Ryan Wright, literati and blogger extraordinaire, invents an emoticon for eye-rolling.

I, Ryan Wright, hereby invent (actually, I invented it in December of 2006) an emoticon for eye-rolling:

QQ

This is long overdue! How many times have we all been in an IM or writing a forum post and needed to express sarcastic underwhelmment, but been stuck without an eye-rolling button on the keyboard? This problem has plagued mankind for far too long and I am happy to share my innovative solution with you, dear blog reader, right now. Go forth, dot your I's, cross your T's, mind your P's and roll your QQ.