No sooner than I post about downgrading to iPhone OS 3.1.3 from iOS 4, did I start having problems with my iPhone. I had a good week with no issues, a speedy phone and life was great.

Then last weekend my iPhone stopped waking up. I have it in a dock each night while I sleep on my night stand. In the morning I turned on the phone, but got the black screen and the silver/white apple logo. I figured ok strange, guess it had a hiccup. I waited and made the doc was indeed getting power. It stayed on that screen for a minute and then went black. I tried a full reset holding down the power and home button, still would not go past the Apple logo.

Into the office I went and opted to restore. Of course last weekend iOS 4.0.1 had been released and iTunes was giving me that as my only option. I’m sure I could have forced it to grab the 3.1.3 ipsw file, but I was very tired and just wanted my phone working again. I clicked ok and waited a good hour while it got reset and it copied everything back over to it.

The Positive

I cringed at the thought my iPhone would again be slow, crashing and not fun to use again. To my pleasant surprise that has not been the case. It’s a tiny bit slow on certain things, but the iOS 4.0.1 update actually improved the speed of other items, and everything I wrote about in my previous post is no longer an issue. I’d like to say that will teach me for being an early adopter but I’ll still do it.

My iPhone 3G now has a second life and my imperative need for an iPhone 4 has been delayed a while longer.

When I first watched the keynote a few months back about the iOS 4, I was very excited about all of the possibilities. Then at the end of the keynote I was a bit depressed to learn my 3G iPhone won’t be able to handle most of the new features. When the release came out I upgraded looking forward to the features I would be able to use.

At first it seemed to be working well. Then as the days went on I noticed it got slower and buggier. Craig pointed me to a post that said to reset it 3 times in a row, so I tried that. Slight improvement but only temporarily. I even tried reinstalling iOS 4, and still the issues persisted. This was the first time in owning an iPhone that I wanted to throw it across the room or through a window. Below are the issues I ran into.

Typing
The keys would be severely delayed and act as if they were sticking, making it extremely frustrating to work on the phone.

Maps
This became also completely unusable. The locate feature which worked excellent before, would now take upwards of 2 minutes to find me, and was off several times. The redraw on the maps would hang and sometimes never load.

Mail
Also very slow, when it checked mail in the background it would bring the entire phone to a crawl.

Safari
This was a first ever on my phone. I was loading a website in Safari and the entire phone crashed and reset.

iTunes
Anytime any process was running in the background, especially Mail, iTunes would skip and stutter through songs. It would also hang while trying to move to the next song, it would take a second or two audibly but then the artwork would not change for another 10 seconds and if I pressed the next button again it would completely hang.

All of these were enough for me to say mercy, and downgrade to 3.1.3. I found the .ipsw file from my back up and followed the instructions on Lifehacker.

I have successfully downgraded and restored from a back up I did two weeks ago. My apps all load quickly, no crashing, typing works again and Maps finds me every time and updates very fast. At some point in the future, I’ll upgrade to the iPhone 4.

I knew there was a reason I waited to get a remote starter. I want this!

Barack is Mac, and Pac?

Apparently, America’s president-elect is a Mac user, a Pac Man fan, and likes sticking stickers on one’s laptop. I really dig the pac-man eating the Apple logo. Is that a Speck clear MacBook cover? Commenters: let the Apple/Obama fanboy flamewars fly!

Incidentally, he also uses a Crackberry. And Biden is evidently a fellow Mac user, at least on the road. And as long as we’re on the subject: I met Al Gore briefly last week, and he was packin’ an iPhone. Although, I was so star-struck at the moment, I may have hallucinated that part along with the swarms of solar-powered United Nations black helicopters. DISCUSS.

POTUS uses a Mac (9to5mac.com, via friends list)

Update: Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing Gadgets tackled this burning! hot! politechnical news! earlier today.

(Via Boing Boing.)

For those who know me, you know I’m just smiling from ear to ear.

I just got finished reading on the TUAW about Mars Edit 2.2. I have yet to settle on a desktop blogging application but have been leaning towards Mars Edit for a while now.

What most excited me was the mention of a mobile version of MarsEdit.

Mobile fans take note — Daniel is working on an iPhone version of MarsEdit, and it will be released as soon as he is satisfied with the quality of the final product.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve updated. After my back went out I got into a real funk and just feeling down. I also noticed my energy level was just dropping. This past week I realized I’ve been drinking coffee every single day since I started my new[er] job. For me caffeine will work for a while but then it will actually make me more and more exhausted. This week I’m taking a break from coffee. I’m having green tea and herbal tea only. The other benefit to cutting back on coffee is, I like my coffee very light and with half and half. Needless to say this is a good elimination from my daily routine.

I’ve decided to use iCal to track my health because I have it available to me at work, at home and on my iPhone. It’s very simple, I don’t have to pre-enter information and create databases. I’ve tried Traineo, but it didn’t track food as well as I’d like. I’ve tried Gyminee, and it’s ok but a pain to enter new foods in. I’ve also tried FitDay which also you need to pre-enter foods. If I’m spending my time entering foods, it’s a waste of my time.

In iCal I’m tracking my food for the day, exercise, weight and any other health related items in a separate calendar called “Health”.

I’ll post an update at the end of the week as to how this is working.

I have to document this week, just so I can look back at this in the future and truly appreciate how much I packed in. If you’ve written me, I was supposed to get back to you, I said I’d send you something, please don’t take offense, the week was very, very busy.

Work:

This week at my job we launched a national ad campaign website (not my design), completed the collection of a large amount of materials for a multimedia project, and 3 email campaigns sent out including one which had 27 unique pieces of content that were not dynamic. And in comparison to my boss and co-workers I think my load was lighter than theirs. Even up to Friday night at 6:00 we were still finishing up projects. Wow! I kept saying to people, the weather got nice and the projects just came rolling in.

Personal:

Well I didn’t have much of one until Friday night. Wednesday I took on waking up early. Thursday was semi-successful and Friday, well Craig and I both slept in thinking it was Saturday.

On a fun note. Friday night I met up with a fellow knitter who was thinking about buying a MacBook or MacBook Pro. We met at Starbucks and I showed her around the operating system, answered questions and had her try mine out. She was pretty excited, I told her to think about it, don’t rush. She was making the switch over from a Dell laptop to Apple, and it is a big decision.

This morning I got an email at 7:40, “I’m ready let’s go!”. We met at the Apple store in Danbury at 10am, and purchased her a MacBook Pro 15″. We left it with them to transfer over her files from her old Dell. I headed home and later in the afternoon we met at Panera to go through setting up her email, transferring bookmarks, importing photos to iPhoto and making sure iTunes was all set and running. She’s really excited and I got an email tonight that she’s having a lot of fun.

I’ve successfully switched 7 people from Windows to Macintosh. No complaints.

Goals:

I’m still working on getting up early. Might kick back my wake up time so it’s not quite as aggressive. I want to be successful not insane. As Colin reminded me, “Never give up”. Absolutely true! There’s no time table, no one’s going to punish me and it’s truly a win-win situation.

And… I will be posting on Tuesdays a Weekly Weigh-In, as part of TheDiet. In the sidebar I’m going to keep track of my exercise on Traineo.com. This week I made some much better choices food wise than I have in a while. All in time.

Last but not least, we watched the Transformers movie tonight. It was pretty good, dialogue sucked, but the effects were amazing. I’m such a sucker for cars and driving scenes. Speaking of I’ll be at the NY International Auto Show on Friday for the opening. Drop me a line if you’ll be there that day.

Spaces @ Work, originally uploaded by criana.

I love the new Spaces feature in Leopard, aka Apple OS 10.5.

1) Lotus Notes
2) VMWare Fusion
3) iTunes
4) Apple Mail, Safari and iChat

I’ve gotten pretty quick with using the keyboard shortcuts to jump around screen.

[Update: I stopped using Spaces while at work, it became more of a pain to remember which window had what folder view open and having to move back and forth. I might revisit this in the future with a more concrete plan for each space]