Monday, March 30, 2009

The Contraditions of Life: This Diehard Apple Girl HATES the iphone!

So we are a blended family. Well, no, not that kind of blended family. We are a blend of computer platforms over here. It is very he said, she said when it comes to computers. I am a diehard mac girl. My boy, well he is a PC. We get lots of humor out of those mac/pc commercials. He hates that the mac guy is so much cooler than the pc guy but since I am so much cooler than SJ it makes sense to me.

When it comes to cellular devices we are absolutely on the same page. The blackberry rocks and the iphone is for people with too much time to diddle around. We have had an iphone since last October and we both have refused to use it. Don't get us wrong, we tried but it was so user unfriendly for us that we both went back to our blackberries. All I want out of a phone is for it to tell me where to go, what I need to do, and who is trying to contact me. While I love toys, and yes that is what an iphone is, I would love to have the toy aspect of the phone in the background as opposed to the functionality of the phone in the background. I hate that I have to click through 3 or more screens to get to my email. I hate that my homepage can't just tell me briefly who are the last two emails from and what are my two next appointments.

So I trotted off to the Apple store today convinced that I was just using the phone incorrectly. The answer to ALL of my questions was "sorry that is beyond the capabilities of the iphone." My absolute favorite stumper for those Geniuses was the following:

When I put something in my iCal on my laptop I usually invite my husband so he can then accept the event and put it in his calendar and I invite myself so I can accept the event. Viceversa. When he makes travel arrangements he invites me so I can plug it into my phone. So this morning I plugged something into iCal on the computer, put myself in the attendees box and sent the email. When I got the email on my phone the text said to open the attachment to add it to your calendar. Yeah, all is well until I tried to open the attachment on the iphone. It wouldn't open it. When I presented this problem to those people at Apple they were puzzled and then one of the Geniuses went in the back to further investigate this problem. She came back with this:

"While the blackberry is able to open .ical files, the iphone is not currently set up to open .ical files." My response was, I hope the irony is not lost on you that ical is an Apple program used on both Apple computers and phones. The real reason....is that Apple wants you to pay for mobileme service which does all this for you. Yep, for something like $99/ year. Well next time I feel like dropping $99 to solve my problems I am going to be buying a new Blackberry Curve since it seems to work better with my mac computers. If anyone out there has any constructive advice for me I'd love to hear it...

Thursday, March 19, 2009

A tricky fit

Okay so with summer approaching I am once again deciding that this year I will finally have a swimsuit that fits. I have a disproportionate body so I need to buy separates. Ideally I need to find tops that come in bra sizes to accommodate what God has given me. After searching online endlessly last night I found that women like me are best served in the UK and Australia. While I don't mind paying for shipping for an international order, I wonder if it will be a problem if I need to return it. As we all know, finding a swimsuit that fits is like a needle in a haystack. For what it is worth, all I can seem to find with US online retailers that comes in bra sizing is stuff like this....

and frankly I am just not that kind of girl. Any suggestions out there? I am sure I have missed something major. Please help!