After a few days of iPhone use, I can honestly say that I am even happier with it than I could have imagined. The first thing I had to do was figure out how to get all of my contacts off of my old phone and onto the iPhone. Previously I had service with Verizon and took advantage of their Backup Assistant to store all of my numbers for me. I did a quick google search and couldn’t find a good solution for performing the transfer from the Backup Assistant to my iPhone contact list. I was able to login to the Backup Assistant website but unfortunately I could not export the data. However, I was able to print the data, though that really wouldn’t help. So I came up with the following method to manually copy all of the data and get it in to the iPhone.

1. Select Print Address Book from Backup Assistant website (popup window).
2. Copy all rows.
3. Open Excel and paste.
4. Format in Excel:
   1. Copy and paste the data into another sheet, this should remove the pesky check marks in each row.
   2. Move phone numbers around into separate columns specified by type.
   3. Use find and replace to replace all instances of “Mobile”, “Work”, “Home”, etc. with blank text, leaving only numbers in each cell.
5. Save the worksheet as a csv file.
6. Open outlook and create a new sub directory under Contacts.
7. Under File menu select Import and Export…
8. Import from another program of file.
9. Comma Separated Values (Windows).
10. Browse to the file saved earlier.
11. Select the sub directory created earlier.
12. Click Map Custom Fields…
13. Map Name to Name, Mobile to Mobile Phone, Home to Home Phone, etc.
14. You can use the Next > button to see how your data will map.
15. Click Finish.

From there you should be able to use the Outlook Contact syncing in iTunes to send your phone numbers to your iPhone. I think that was all of the steps. I didn’t think to write it all down until after I had successfully performed the sync. But then I realized that my work might actually help someone out. Leave any questions or comments below.

The day has arrived! My iPhone was dropped onto my porch this morning and I’ve been keeping busy with it thus far. I ordered it last Thursday and it was delivered just over a week later, so not too bad. I finally got it activated, though I haven’t made or received any calls yet so I’m not sure if it’s really fully activated or not. So far I’ve been working to setup gmail on it, along with downloading a couple of apps (facebook and pandora so far). I haven’t bought a case or screen protection yet, but that should come sometime this weekend. Alright enough with the blogging, back to the iPhone addiction. Send any suggestions my way.

Well I did it. I ordered a new iPhone 3G S last night. Verizon eventually did announce the BlackBerry Tour a couple of days ago, but that wasn’t enough for me. Plus I was tired of waiting and didn’t want to wait even longer for the Tour to be released in the middle of July. At this point I couldn’t be happier. Well I guess I could be if I already had my iPhone in my hands, but that probably won’t happen for a week or two.

I ordered it online through AT&T so that I could take advantage of my company’s 20% service discount. I wasn’t able to get any money off of the phone itself, but I’ll definitely appreciate the $14 savings each month on my bill. Now I just need to decide what case I want to get and place that order so I’ll have it in time for delivery of my phone. Any suggestions for that? I’ve already heard good reviews for a number of products, but it can’t hurt to have even more.

The new iPhone 3GS has been announced and will be released on June 19. Just eight days from now, this slick new device could be in my hands (or on it’s way). I am giving Verizon a few more days to announce something worth sticking around for, and if they don’t I’m really thinking of switching to AT&T so I can get the iPhone. I’ve played with the older ones a few times and really like the way they work and all of the applications available for it. The only things holding me back are the fact that nearly everyone I talk on the phone with has Verizon, and that I really don’t want to use iTunes. Minor drawbacks that I could adjust to in order to have one of the best, possibly the best mobile device out there right now.

In addition to trying my first 5-way this past weekend while in Cincinnati, I also found time to do some other Cincy things. My favorite of which was heading down on Saturday night to the Great American Ballpark to watch the Reds take on the Cleveland Indians. I hadn’t been inside the ballpark in a long time and I was happy to see all of the changes that have been made, especially the new giant LED scoreboard. The picture on this high-def screen is incredible and is a huge improvement over the old scoreboard. Here are a couple of pictures, the first of the old scoreboard, and the second is of the new.

I wish the new picture was from the same angle as the old, but you get the idea. The new scoreboard has amazing color compared to the old one. Notice that all of the old advertising has been moved from the bottom to both sides of the new scoreboard. You can see in the old picture that there is a video screen on the right side, but now the entire scoreboard can be used for video display. In the foreground you can also see one of the new smaller ribbon boards that were also installed throughout the stadium to replace the old and outdated. I’m happy to see that the Reds are continuing to make changes to their great ballpark.

Due to a magically disappearing device, I had to buy a replacement mp3 player. I’ve still never taken the iPod plunge, and keeping the trend alive, decided to go with the Sansa Clip. I enjoyed the missing Sansa Express for a couple of years and since it was no longer available for sale, I decided to go with the next smallest model available. I need to keep it simple so that I can easily run with it. I bought my mom the Clip a year or two ago and I never heard anything bad about it.

Now that I’ve had my hands on it for a couple of days, I can say that it is really similar to the Express I was used to. Though the display isn’t the best, it gets the job done. There aren’t too many fancy features, but that’s not what I wanted. I just want to easily be able to select an album to listen to, hit play, and start running. My one complaint so far is that the Clip doesn’t have an expandable memory slot like the Express had. I did upgrade from 1GB before to 4GB, but you never know when I’ll want even more available. Oh well, it was hard to beat for the $60 price tag.

Oh yeah, one amazing thing was the preloaded music that it came with. I was shocked to find O.A.R.’s “Whose Chariot?” from the November 27, 2004 show at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. Not only was I actually at this show, but I also taped it. However, I think the included track actually comes from the other recording of the night direct from the soundboard. Still pretty dang cool!

One of the fellow engineers on our hut trip just emailed over these screenshots from his GPS unit that was used throughout the hike. I found the data to be really interesting and therefore wanted to share it for all of the nerds out there. This first screenshot is an overview of our hikes. The yellow line is the trail that we followed on our way down, also known as the correct trail. The white line is the path we carved on our way up to the hut after missing a turn, becoming lost, and trying to find our way to the hut. You will notice that we obviously started on the correct trail, split off for awhile, and then eventually found the trail again to complete the hike.

What is even more interesting are these elevation profiles for both hikes. You will notice that both start off the same, but the hike up quickly becomes extremely steep when we lost the trail. We ended up hiking much higher than we would have if we followed the planned trail. After peaking at around 10,600 feet, we went back down to around 10,000 and then finally back up to the hut at 11,000+ feet. The profile for the hike down doesn’t have nearly the same amount of elevation change and is much more consistent. Here are both screenshots, with the hike up first.

I definitely need to get one of these devices. I tried using a watch that I bought from woot.com that uses a pressure sensor to estimate altitude, but it somehow reset itself at some point in the hike. And besides I wouldn’t have been able to download any data to my computer anyway.

Update: I put together an overlay of both of the hikes, so you can easily see the extreme differences between the two:

As I mentioned awhile back, I attended WordCamp Denver over the weekend. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the event, but I was hoping to learn a bunch about the WordPress system. Unfortunately, I don’t think that goal was met, and I think I could learn more in a couple of hours reading online than at the entire full day of presentations. On the other hand, the amount of entertainment in some of the presentations made up for the lack of information.

My favorite event of the day was the presentation by Ben Huh. Ben is the CEO of Pet Holdings, Inc., the company behind the hugely popular blogs I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog and others. Though he didn’t have any of the famous cat pictures in his slides, the presentation was hilarious. I’m amazed at the number of weird ideas he has come up with that have actually worked, and made lots of money too. His MPH theory, short for Mr. Potato Head, is a great theory. He said that they often just plug different pieces onto their websites, even if they aren’t finished. And if they end up not working, they just simply take them out. He related this to what you can do with a Mr. Potato Head.

After lunch I attended the technical track, where I was really hoping to gain some new knowledge, especially from the plugin workshop. Unfortunately very spotty WiFi definitely hampered this. Though I did get some general knowledge of building a plugin from scratch, I was really hoping it would have been a more hands on demonstration. On the other hand, learning about and seeing demos of the newly developed Carrington theme, along with the BuddyPress system, turned out to be highlights of this session.

Even if I was a bit disappointed in parts of the day, it was still an alright experience, and well worth the small fee to attend. They mentioned trying to make it an annual event, and though I’m not sure if I would attend, there are likely many that would.

This may be the geekiest thing I have ever done, but I just registered to attend WordCamp Denver on Saturday, February 28. WordCamp Denver is a conference created for enthusiasts, users, developers, designers, and fans of WordPress in the Denver/Boulder area. If you didn’t already know, I use WordPress to power this website and have really grown to love it over the years that I have used it. I’m not exactly sure what to expect from attending the conference, but I figure that some of the speakers should at least have good presentations and interesting things to say. And besides Kim is already involved with a retreat for the day, so I know I’ll be looking for something to eat up the day.

A few weeks ago I had a problem with my hard drives nearly all filling up. The biggest problem was that the drive my web server is on was completely full, which actually caused Apache to shut down. Turns out I had a really large error.log file from Apache. So once I deleted that file, reconfigured the log file settings to output less, and restarted the server all was well. But I figure it’s only a matter of time before I start running out of space again, so I just bought a new 1 TB hard drive from newegg.com. I’ve been watching both slickdeals.net and fatwallet.com for the last couple of weeks and finally decided this deal was good enough.