Okay, so I broke. It took twelve days, but in the end I just couldn’t wait any longer to get an iPhone into my life.

I’d rationalised against it for weeks before launch – “the keyboard looks like it needs some work”; “never buy 1st Gen Apple hardware”; “wait for 3G instead of EDGE”. But this thing seemed truly amazing – a whole new experience as far as mobile devices are concerned. Ultimately, I wanted in on the ground floor.

So I’m slightly late to the party, and possibly not adding much at this point (I really haven’t scanned the interblogwebnet to see what others are saying about their phones), but I wanted to write down some first impressions, partly for my own later reference, partly for any of the 5 readers of this site who might not have got their hands on an actual iPhone yet.

Getting the boring stuff out of the way first, yes, it’s amazing. The UI is fluid and responsive – the original MacWorld demo and the existent tutorials aren’t gussied up to make it look any better; it really works like that. It is, in short, a thing of utter beauty, and takes mobile usability to a completely different level.

There are several worries I had which have proved unfounded so far.

Battery life seems good. I’ve been using the phone exhaustively (hey, it’s a new toy) and haven’t run into any “argh, battery low” moments yet. We’ll see how it holds out in the long term.

The EDGE thing is less annoying than I thought it would be – the slight speed problems of the connection are more than made up for by the ease-of-navigation around networked content.

The keyboard is perfectly usable after about an hour of practice. In some ways tactile feedback would be nice, but… I’ve never found the teeny-tiny button keyboards on any smartphones to be any better.

All in all, if I was at Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola or Samsung right now I’d be sick as a dog.

That said, here’s the problem with being Apple. Their products are often so very nearly perfect. You can tell that a lot of very dedicated people have spent a lot of time applying a breathtaking eye for detail. The downside of this is that the smallest details which are forgotten (and there will always be a few) stand out so much more.

So, with the basic assumption that the iPhone is jaw-dropping, here are the niggles I’ve found in the first few days…

*ahem*

So, this site fell a bit quiet again over the last… oooh, I dunno, nearly 8 months. Partly, that’s because I didn’t have much to write about, and (stubborn as I am), I refuse to contribute to the ever-expanding web of wiffle just so that my RSS feed contains some more entries.

But it’s also telling that the last blog post just about coincides with the time that I started planning the infrastructure needed to take Flickr from a 1-language interface to 8, a roller-coaster ride of a project which swallowed a lot of my thought-space and eventually time (I was working 16-18 hour days for the last 3 weeks), but which is finally done, and has been live to the world for a whole month now.

I’m proud to have done that, the minor glitches and post-launch issues (which won’t be discussed here, because this is my personal site) aside.

Immediately post-launch I was whisked away on a whirlwind tour (Paris for 24 hours, London for 5 days, Montreal for 3) during which I lost my luggage, had my camera and credit-card stolen, and spent a great deal of the scant “downtime” in interminable conference calls.

I wound up back in the Bay Area about 3 weeks ago seriously exhausted and disoriented, and have been slowly pulling my life back together since then. Which is where we come to this l’il update, and the (undoubtedly sporadic and random) resumption of me posting here.

In short, I’m back, baby!

I posted this first on flickr, but it’s been far far too long so I thought I’d reproduce it here. There are a few other things I have half-formed posts on. Maybe this week. Maybe…

My earliest memories of America look like this. I must have been 4, and it would be another year before I’d actually visit the US on a holiday in Florida, but I had an overwhelmingly strong image of America that I’d picked up from the television.

Even though it was deeply American to its core, we got a lot of repeated 70′s episodes of Sesame Street on TV in the UK, and one of the features I remember most clearly were the filmed segments about aspects of the “real world” beyond a neighbourhood where the most esteemed resident was a freakishly gigantic talking canary.

I imagine that most of these segments must have been filmed in LA. The difference of it all from the semi-rural English “housing experiment” I grew up in was startling. I dreamed of big, chunky vans and beige garages. And the light (the thing that really made today a “Sesame Street day) – it was startlingly clear, almost painful, but somehow optimistic and beautiful.

My dad was always a big fan of America and all things American, and I think that some of his enthusiasm rubbed off on me. I never imagined though, right up until the moment the offer was presented, that I’d end up living here.

Like any society which is attempting to balance the prejudices, fears, hopes and dreams of millions of people, the US is far from perfect. Too much of the “culture” is based on conspicuous consumption (although the UK suffers from that malaise too); too many people talk of “making their peace with God” whilst failing to make their peace with themselves.

But somehow there’s space here. Space to be what you want to be; just a little more space than I ever found in London. It’s those “Sesame Street” days which really bring that home to me and marry my childhood dreams with my life as it is now. And they make me glad, at least for the time being, to call America (and San Francisco in particular) “home”.

Late, disconnected, reawoken, a little confused.

But here’s something that’s been rattling around my head for a while, and it needs to get out.

Contemporary songs which capture the essence of a particular city. I have a burning need to compile lists of such things.

So let’s start with the easy ones…

Excuse me for a moment while I indulge in a bit of stating the obvious, but I’ve just had one of those moments where I stand back, look at stuff, and say “oh. wow.”

We’ve come a long way on the internet in the past 2 years. So far so fast, in fact, that when you’re living in the centre of it all and incrementally immersing yourself in it, it becomes easy to forget where you came from.

I was thinking along these lines because I was just tinkering with my account on Upcoming.org, adding a new event to the database and subscribing to some others. Having added the event in question, I linked in a freely-available mp3 by one of the bands. That done, I finally got around to adding the feed of my events on upcoming.org to my iCal calendar on my mac. And then I tagged some Flickr photos from Hack Day so that they show up in the event’s entry on upcoming.org…

In less than 10 minutes, I’d told the world about an imminent concert, filled my personal, portable calendar with events which I’ll want to attend, and shown people another angle of an event which happened last week. And none of this required any complex scripts, hours of screen-scraping or data-munging. It was all accomplished with a couple of clicks and a little bit of typing.

I’ve been thinking a bit about geek conferences since “The Future of Web Apps” took place in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, a couple of interesting conversational threads that it inspired.

The first was best summarised by Chris Messina in his piece “The Future of White Boy clubs” (executive summary: “far too many speakers and attendees at these things are white men; how do we change that?”).

The second cropped up in multiple conversations. For a lot of attendees FoWA was an odd conference, because they’d seen most of the speakers giving similar talks before, usually some time in the past 12 months. This isn’t a criticism of FoWA as such – what they built, very successfully, was a cheap, quick and engaging “Best Web Conference Speeches in the world… Ever!” album.

I personally found it very rewarding, but I’m a latecomer to the conference scene, and haven’t done the usual round of SXSW Interactive, Etech, OsCon, FooCamp/BarCamp, etcetera.

One conclusion you could draw from this is that a lot of ‘alpha geeks’ attend too many conferences; that there are only so many things to talk about. But conferences are hugely useful in providing ‘face time’ with creative people from all over the world, and every occasion provides opportunities for new connections and conversations. Maybe the problem isn’t the number of conferences, but the fact that they’re all focussed around listening to clever people talk about… stuff.

There might be a solution to all this, though, and I think I saw it pioneered this weekend on the main Yahoo! campus.

I feel like a failure.

Not because I’ve really failed at anything, but see, I have this enormous backlog of photos, reaching back to May of this year, and I just haven’t got around to adding them to my flickr stream.

Every time I get around to titling, tagging and uploading a few more photos I feel strange that the events depicted happened so long ago.

It is, perhaps, the price of an ever-more immediate world in which current events are photo-blogged the minute they unfold, and every current event is dissected and commented upon in thousands of blogs, as it happens.

We never had a modem at home (the call costs in the UK were ridiculous), so my first serious encounter with the Internet happened when I got to university in 1996. I spent hours in college computer rooms, falling in love with the endless reams of useless information and software which were already floating around the web.

In those days web search was a very nascent industry, and my first guide to the sea of sites was a weird little directory called “Yahoo!”. I was studying English Literature at the time, and natural nerd though I always was, if someone had told me that 7 years later I would land an engineering job with the very same Yahoo!, I would have laughed in their faces.

From Yahoo! I jumped to using Altavista, still owned by DEC at the time. And not long after, I remember the buzz of discovering my first online “meme” – the Babelfish translation service, and the hilarious things it did to texts when you translated them through successive languages and back to English.

Over the past three years I’ve been directly involved in working with all three of those early online inspirations, and it’s been an amazing experience which has taught me a great deal, allowed me to do work of which I’m truly proud, and inadvertently catapulted me 5000+ miles across the globe.

But it’s time for a slight change, and so today marks my first day working on something slightly different – as of now I am the latest engineer to join the talented and possibly slightly insane team at Flickr.

So I hit a bit of a slump over the past month or so. It was partly due to a slow transition of my duties at work, partly due to tiredness, and partly due to the fact that I’m basically a lazy slob.

I always feel terrible where I hit a point where I can’t seem to get things done, although a host of evidence indicates that I’m not alone in this, from sites like lifehacker and diyplanner to the instant cult status of the “Getting Things Done” method.

I think a whole book on getting your act together is a little much – the key for me at least is simplicity in a method. And I’ve finally started to work myself out of the unproductivity hole with a very simple method indeed, so I thought I’d share it.

I wrote this a while ago, and then forgot to post it. Although I’ve since switched to commuting by train, I do occasionally carpool when I have errands I need to run. And meanwhile, the situation on the Bay’s busiest freeway remains the same…

I never get tired of watching the rush-hour drivers toiling in 3 lanes of traffic on 101.

Every day there is a sea of perplexedness, frustration and boredom stretching 40 miles, endless hands dangling out of their car windows or fingers drumming on the steering wheel.

I’ll admit, I’m a little smug, but then I’m habitually sitting on a bus or driving with a passenger and I’m in the relatively supersonic carpool lane. At least until I hit Redwood City.