Jace Cole (dot) com

Amazingly and as promised, Apple has released the iPhone 2.1 firmware through iTunes this morning. The iPhone 2.1 contains the following updates as listed by Apple:

• Decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
• Significantly improve battery life for most users
• Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
• Improve email reliability, notable fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
• Faster installation of 3rd party applications
• Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes if you have lots of 3rd party applications
• Improved performance of text messaging
• Faster loading and searching of contacts
• Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
• Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
• Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
• Genius playlist creation

What’s even more amazing is they actually call out all the flaws I’ve been seeing,  rather than the standard line of “Bug Fixes”.

I’m installing now … I’ll give a full report after a few days on the new firmware.

After a long stint of working various sales and business development activities (aka the beach) I am finally moving back into a consulting and delivery role.  Starting next week I’ll be working for a client in North Carolina where our team will be augmenting and helping transform the client’s IT business analysts.

A bit of a stretch from the user centered design arena but still in the heart of my core competency area of design and analysis phase of Systems Development Life Cycle SDLC.  I’ll be working with this client through the end of March and what promises to be at least 4 days of better winter weather than the chi-town.  We’ll see what type of havoc mother nature will bring this winter with the travel in out of our favorite airport: ORD.

So I need some help from the tech world of my 22 average monthly blog readers.  We are trying to transform this team of sharp industry BAs and I’m just the person to help do that.   Do of any of you have any good suggestions for methods or traning that you’ve built or that can help ramp up a code junky turned BA?   I’m looking for things to build and strengthen typical BA skill sets.   I’m going to be creating training modules for requirements gathering, analysis, and management,  best practices for use case development,  tips on how to collaborate and work with offshore development teams,  unit and user acceptance testing methods, process mapping, and any other key components that make up a truly rock star BA.   Please, if you have any good suggestions, visions, materials, tips, shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment.

How much longer until they charge us to use the lav?

United to stop free meals in coach on overseas flights — chicagotribune.com.

Our Campbell Ave. After the Storm!, originally uploaded by JaceCole.

Last night was a crazy hurricane coming off Lake Michigan, with 95 MPH gusts and raining sideways … here is the aftermath on our street. Luckily the condo is doing fine, no damage to building. The car that was under this tree didn’t fare so well.

Great news for me and traveling with my new favorite airline!

It’s the dawning of a new age, folks. In-flight Wi-Fi is slowly rolling out across domestic airlines in the US and Delta is looking to capitalize on it by outfitting their entire domestic fleet of aircrafts with Aircell’s GoGo service

Very good news for business travelers and anyone who needs to defeat the boredom of the sky.   I can only think of the things I’ll be able to do now and be productive.   Maybe a reason to leave even earlier on those Thursday home days??

Will be interesting to see how they handle content filtering,  I don’t want to watch the middle aged man next to me looking at porn.

Great news Delta!  Thanks for confirming my choice of airlines.

Very excited to arrive home to O’Hare today to fine the CTA Blue Line operating from the ORD station 2 weeks ahead of the scheduled slow zone work shutdown!

Nice work Ron Huberman!

No slow, expensive and traffic filled cab ride home for me tonight.

I’m rocking the new Wordpress app for the iPhone! Now I can blog from anywhere… Like right now I’m sitting on the toilet at my hotel in Atlanta… kidding

But seriously cool app, hope they develop some moderation functions soon. Right now you can just write new posts.  Big thanks to Jon Wilbur for pointing out how to get the app to work for root domains,  a bug that wasn’t quite worked out in the first release.

You can also add pix!

MobileMe finally has become stable enough to play around and get a good feel for what it has to offer.   Although stable (meaning I can access me.com consistently) it’s still not working 100% ,  I’m having partial contacts sync and missing contacts on my iPhone.   Overall though, MobileMe looks really nice though lacks functionality in some key areas. My impressions were that it was more along the lines of a final release product, not something more of a beta…   Apple has been running .Mac for years,  seems somewhat surprising Cupertino did not nail it on the first try.  I am hoping to see an updated release with performance improvements and additions to missing functionality very soon.

The biggest disappointment in my opinion is the lack of integration of personal domains.  I would love to be able to have the true “Exchange for the rest of us” experience with the capability to bring my own domain e-mail.   Similar to the service Google Apps is offering for domains.
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Woke up at 02:55 AM this morning CDT.  Stood line with my friend and neighbor… to accomplish the mission:

Unfortunately AT&T was only selling 1 per heart beat, so P is going to have to wait a bit for his 8gb (I’m going to head to the Apple store in about 30 minutes)  …  and iTunes activation is still down.  So I can either wait,  or try to jailbreak / unlock now.

I’m blogging live now from outside of Chicago’s AT&T Fullerton Ave store.  I woke up at 2:55a by the sound of my coffee make grinding and brewing me a pot of joe.  I’m now in line , waiting for the big day … taking delivery of my iPhone 3G.

3:32 AM:  I arrived here about 3:10 AM to find about 10-12 other people in line.  I’m currently at the end of the line but I’m sure that won’t be my position for long.  When I woke up this morning the first thing I checked was MobileMe,  I was able to login and view e-mail.  I thought this time would be a good time to get my account up to date and get everything to the cloud.  Apparently Me is down again.  Looks like a rocky start for MobileMe.

5:33 AM:  McDonald’s trip necessary,  my friend and niegbor BJ arrived about 20 minutes after I did.  We’re sitting together trying to take inventory of what everyone ahead of us getting.  We’re bankingon AT&T getting about 40-50 units.  There are about 12 people ahead of us so we should easily get our choice of my white 16gb , black 8gb unit and BJ’s black 16gb.  It’s been rainy here like crazy,  glad I chose this store,  the sidewalk has a covered canopy.  NO ONE will rain on my iPhone parade

5:45 AM:  MobileMe is now online,  I was able to sync my contacts and calendar to the cloud!

5:50 AM:  AT&T staff has arrived,  acitivity in the store,  T-130 minutes

6:15 AM:  The Starbucks next door to the AT&T store just had a barista come through the line pouring free coffee.

8:55 AM:  I’m home with my new white 16gb iPhone 3G …  iTunes activation is down.  I guess Apple didn’t learn from last years mistakes.  AT&T could not activate the devices,  I can’t activate it at home yet,  have to wait until it is restored to “play” … or I could just jailbreak it now.