At home I'm ripping and encoding Sex and the City episodes for Maggie. Each episode takes about 90 minutes to process on our Ubuntu server and this morning I queued up three ISO files with 6 episodes each, so it should be crunching away for just over 24 hours solid.

As a geek I get a certain sense of satisfaction when I actually push my machines. Because I don't play PC games and my laptop is used for web development that doesn't happen all the time.

I've always reasoned to myself that I liked programming because I'm smarter than a computer but it's infinitely faster than me. By combining our "skill sets" we can achieve great things. Maxing out the CPU makes me feel like the computer is living up to its end of the bargain.

Does anyone else feel that way?

Edit: Almost 24 hours at full throttle:

A: Telling your parents you're gay.

Today may well be the happiest day of my life.

So far my only compliant is that an ampersand is not rendered correctly in category list, but that's obviously easy enough for them to fix in v1.1.

I tried blogging using Safari on the iPhone and it worked but was a little clunky. The interface just wasn't built for this resolution, even with the great scaling available.

Anyway, I grabbed my docket and wandered over the road to Joe's Pie and Baked Good Emporium to get some bread rolls to compliment my office-bound soup. It took about 6 or 7 minutes round-trip.

My coffee was still not ready! I got chatting and found out that Epic was broken into last night. Their doors were levered off and the bolts circumvented. Apparently the crooks only took some cash and because they didn't trash the place it meant the Epic crew were serving coffee. However, their second machine was down for repairs so things really weren't going Epic's way.

I asked them to let me know if they found out who burgled them and I'd round up a posse to deliver some tough justice. Vigilante style.

At least the barista told me a funny joke to pass the time:

Q: What's yellow and sits in the corner?

A: A naughty bulldozer.

If you are able to laugh when you're down then how bad can life really be?

Thankfully I had the iPhone so I could browse the web and find the solution easy enough. I leave my laptop at the office during the week. It was the first of what will no doubt be many saves the iPhone delivers.

I also noted that YouTube videos had the "Smurfing" effect again (people's skin tones are blue!) and Facebook on Firefox 3 would max out the CPU. Cuh-wazy!

The solution to this is to roll back to Flash v9; an upgrade to v10 snuck through and it's a bit buggy. This is easy enough to do via Synaptic, which I've never used before, preferring apt and more recently aptitude.

I asked him what he used it for, when he does use it, and it's the typical low-tech requirement of "web and email." And I think his email provider is Hotmail anyway, so it's really "web and web."

Last night I backed up the small amount if data that he wanted to keep (all of his digital photos are on an external drive) and installed Ubuntu 8.04 for him. Unfortunately the installer required 256MB minimum, and when push comes to shove he only has 240MB because the video card steals 16MB. This doesn't cause the installer to bail though because, as far as it can tell, the machine is up to the task.

To help the installer out I switched to the console (ALT-F2) and created and mounted a swap partition. This helped the installer dramatically and meant that it could actually get the job done. I also found in the BIOS that CPU-frequency scaling was enabled, but the installer didn't know how to handle it properly so the machine was locked to 600MHz. I disabled it in the BIOS and it screamed along at its top-speed.

I rummaged around our "bits box" at work and found my old IBM ThinkPad. I popped the back panel off and pulled out two 256MB memory modules. Andrew's machine had room for one more so that got jammed in and now the laptop is much more responsive.

Turning off the Compiz fancy-pants visual stuff made a big change too, making the machine usable, but the extra RAM made it actually pleasurable.

The wireless and sound worked out of the box - it just took me a few minutes to find the external volume control knob.

The combination of more memory (more than double when you consider it's gone from 240MB to 496MB), a pedal-to-the-metal CPU frequency and a decent operating system has meant this old girl has a few more months (years?) of service in her yet... after which I'll definitely be recommending a Mac ;)

Unlike the American consumers, I had no difficulty activating my phone when I got it back to the office. It synced all my contacts, calendars, mail and browser bookmarks automatically, which I expected - I was plugging it into a Mac after all.

The initial applications that are available through the App Store are not that impressive; it's mostly gimmicks that show off the funcionality of the iPhone without providing much real usefulness. Other than the light saber application of course.

So what do I think? My response to that question all weekend has been "it's great!" I do have two gripes, which turned out to be one gripe and one "ahh, I was doing it wrong." PC World has ten, if you want more reasons not to buy an iPhone.

My first complaint is that the QWERTY keyboard you've given on screen in the SMS application has the [send] button right where the backspace is on a real keyboard. That's meant that a few times this weekend people got half-messages when I accidently sent then instead of correcting them. The solution to this problem is simple: send more messages and learn where the buttons are over time.

The second issue I had was with the keyboard again, and takes two parts. Firstly, you can't flip it sideways on some applications (PC World brought this up too). Secondly, because I have man-fingers I tend to type some keys wrong. But I learnt that it doesn't matter! I can type away, making all kinds of mistakes and the auto-correct feature will fix up what I meant. It takes the surrounding keys and works out if you were probably meaning something else. For example: if I want to type "peesentstion" if knows I meant "presentation." Hitting the space bar acknowledges that you want the auto-corrected text so it ends up working really, really well when you know what to do. I spent too long trying to be careful and backspacing when the iPhone would have fixed all my fuxk upd.

See what I did there?

Sure the camera is only 2 megapixel, but Tony takes all my photos anyway. It can't record video, but I only ever record 20 second noise clips when I'm off my dial at a dance party (which I never re-watch) so that doesn't matter.

I am hanging out for a good terminal application to make this complete: where's Putty for the iPhone?

A candidate the people of America can get behind: Cobra Commander '08! At least you know he'd be happy to lead your country to war... just like your current president.

This ties in nicely with the great news that IDW has picked up the G.I. Joe comic book license and will publish their first comic in October, which means it'll be covered in next month's Previews. Unfortunately that meant that Devil's Due lost the franchise, and I really liked what they'd done with the brand. Larry Hama's working on the new series with IDW so that makes me happy.

Now I just need to have a nerd-occasion to wear them. Like lunch.