Aaron Adams’s Lame-ass Blog

A few weeks ago I promised to write a little something about the iPhone for this page. Since then, I’ve done a lot of thinking about the phone and what I wanted to say about it. I’ve been through a lot of different permutations of my opinion in my mind, and I keep coming back to a central point.

I’m not paying for the damn thing.

The phone is either $500 or $600 to replicate two devices I already have. That’s a steep entry price, but if the phone offered something truly remarkable, I’d be willing to part with my cash. In addition to the cost of the hardware, some kind of service plan, at least, will be required to make the device useful, and that plan will require a two year contract. Blow me. Like hell I’m going to sign a two year contract when I have options for month-to-month service. And, if you want to do more than make phone calls, you’ll need a data plan of some kind, which will also be part of the two year contract. It’s not unthinkable that an iPhone, with all its abilities enabled, could cost $2000 to $3000 for two years’ use. No way.

I wrote a somewhat popular post about Apple VoIP about a month ago. In that post, I compared Apple’s single most popular device of recent history, the iPod, to a potential VoIP phone, and talked about what those two items could have in common to make them successful. During the keynote where the iPhone was introduced, my friend Shawn King pointed out that, as expensive as the iPhone is (for the hardware), the iPod was also criticized for being outrageously priced at its intro, and now Apple sells them as fast as it can make them.

That’s true enough, but there’s an important difference: The iPod didn’t tie users to any kind of subscription service(s) that required a contract and was absolutely critical to the operation of the device. The iPhone does. So in that sense, the iPhone and the iPod aren’t analogous where pricing is concerned.

During the keynote, I found it hard to get excited about the iPhone. The interface certainly is cool, no doubt about it. But what does the phone do that my current phone already doesn’t? There wasn’t anything revolutionary here, just a new interface on the same old stuff. And, I thought at the time, isn’t this what the cell phone should have behaved like anyway, from the beginning? How excited am I supposed to be about finally getting what I should have had to begin with? I’m more angry at the design idiots who live in their bubbles than I am excited about the one group that seems to have gotten it right.

My idea of a great cell phone is easy. I want it to get excellent signal quality whenever I’m in a reasonably populated area. (I’m not aware of any data concerning the iPhone’s signal reception.) And yes, I realize that’s not exclusively a function of the phone. Apple has partnered with the cell service with “the least dropped calls”, which isn’t much of an endorsement. Second, I want it to have an easy to use address book, with Bluetooth sync and iSync compatibility. (The iPhone does this, as far as I’m aware.) Beyond that, everything else means little or nothing to me. I don’t need a camera. Don’t care about a calendar. I don’t like games. I don’t want to browse the web on a tiny screen, whether I can pinch-to-zoom or not. I don’t want e-mail interrupting my life as often as the phone does. Talking on the phone is almost always better than SMS. Etc.

Is the iPhone doomed? No, not at all. I’m sure Apple will sell a ton of them. Just not to me.

A couple of years ago, there was a big movement among Mac-Macs and entitlement nerds who demanded Apple make a cheap, low-end Mac. It would change the computing landscape, they proclaimed. Apple would sell those machines so fast they wouldn’t be able to keep them in stock. They would be so cheap that one would be on every desk in America because, as we all know, the only thing keeping anyone from buying a Mac is the price. And it would just be so fucking cool for Apple to have a cheap machine that such a device should be built on that premise alone.

It’s several years later now. The Mac mini has done well, but it hasn’t changed the computing landscape. It’s not especially cheap. And in a lot of circumstances, it’s not the best bang for your computer buying buck. The things that everyone was sure were going to happen didn’t. The Mac mini didn’t make the impact so many wished it would.

I feel the same way about the iPhone. It will be successful to some degree, but in a few years it’ll be another phone in the giant sea of phones. It’ll probably still be cool, but it will not live up to the expectations so many have set for it. All the Mac-Mac and entitlement nerd energy wasted on this phone could have been better spent elsewhere.

It turns out I was wrong about the idea that Apple’s phone would be VoIP. However, I think the argument I put forward was logically sound, and certainly had more force behind it than almost every argument I saw for the iPhone, which usually boiled down to “because Apple will make it cool”. Although it is generally agreed that Apple did make a cool phone, that argument before the fact was primarily assumption and very little reason.

And now for the Apple item introduced during Macworld that I thought was much more interesting and consequential: Airport with 802.11n. I am very excited to be getting 100+ Mbit wireless connectivity in my home. I am a compulsive backer-upper (you should be too) and when I’m backing up or archiving a lot of data, 802.11g just doesn’t cut it. Zinging that data wirelessly over the network for safe keeping at high speeds is an exciting thing. Even more exciting was the revelation that USB-enabled drives and storage devices can be connected to and shared directly from and Airport base station. Think Time Machine.

I’m a notebook owner, and I’ve wondered how useful Time Machine would be to me since I almost never have an external USB or Firewire drive connected. How could Time Machine backup my stuff when there usually isn’t anywhere to backup to? Airport provided that answer. When you join an Airport network, the volumes attached to the Airport can be mounted automatically and Time Machine can use them, over 100+ Mbit wireless no less. Awesome. Now I can finally get certain people to (albeit passively) backup their stuff instead of getting grumpy with me when they lose shit. Like it’s my fault. All you IT people out there know what I’m talking about.

All-in-all, when I purchase a new MacBook and Airport base station in a few months, I’ll get infinitely more utility and use out of those things than I will an iPhone. And Time Machine and some of my other backup habits will likely save my butt (and some others’) somewhere along the line. So I’m excited about that.

From left to right is yours truly, John Welch, and Kelly Chappell.

This picture was taken by David Martin at 2007’s Your Mac Life Rocks Expo party, which was a lot of fun. Thanks to Dave for passing this picture along.

A couple of posts ago, I promised to write something about the iPhone and new Airport with 802.11n. And I will. When I feel like it. Recently I haven’t. But I will.

What I do feel like writing about is local history. Damn, how I love local history. I realize it doesn’t appeal to most readers of this blog, but I know someone out there shares my interest. And what I want to write about today is something I recently learned about some of the roads around Bellbrook, Ohio. Stick with the whole narrative, it’s interesting.

About a century ago, Dayton had a street car system named the Interurban, which consisted of tracks and traction cars that went to destinations around Dayton and Xenia. Separately there was… and this is the big surprise, at least to me… another street car system that went from Dayton, to Bellbrook, to Spring Valley! If you’re familiar with the area, you know that’s pretty amazing considering that a century ago, Bellbrook was a remote farm town, and even today, Spring Valley is still remote, although not much of a farm town these days. The idea of a street car system meandering through the country, down the center of dirt roads, past small collections of homes and barns and farm houses, is a pleasing romantic vision, if not reality.

I’m not sure what the name of the Dayton-Bellbrook-Spring Valley (DBSV) street car line was, but it joined with the Interurban where modern-day Wayne Avenue and Wilmington Pike meet, which is now the location of 10 Wilmington Place retirement community, which was, at the time of the Interurban, an insane asylum. From that point, the DBSV line followed Wilmington Pike south to what we now know as State Route 725, or Alex-Bell Road. At the time of the street car, instead of the abbreviated Alex-Bell that we’re familiar with, the road was more properly named Alexandersville-Bellbrook Road, because it went from (duh) Alexandersville to Bellbrook. Indeed, today the road goes from Bellbrook to West Carrollton, which acquired Alexandersville when it was incorporated a few decades ago.

From the 725 (Alex-Bell) and Wilmington intersection, the street car went east through downtown Bellbrook and continued down a section of 725 that is still rural today to the tiny town of Spring Valley, which was the end of the line. My understanding is that in places along 725 east of Bellbrook, you can still see the track bed for the street car. I haven’t been out to confirm that, but it seems likely.

An electric street car system like the DBSV requires, um, electricity. The power plant for this particular line was located at the northeast corner of Patterson Road and Grange Hall Road in modern Beavercreek. For those computer nerds in the Dayton area, you’d know that as a corner roughly across the street form 5 O’Clock computers, and the non-nerds will recognize it as the vacant corner across from the Jet Freeze. I think that site has been declared as some kind of hazardous area, no doubt related to the old power plant.

From there, the feed wire for the power ran south down Grange Hall Road, roughly down Darst Road and Little Sugarcreek Road, through some open areas, until it intersected a road named the Beer Road. Unbeknownst to many of Bellbrook’s modern residents, there used to be (and maybe there still is) a natural spring in the area of the pioneer cemetery and the Jehova’s Witness building along Upper Bellbrook Road. That natural spring gave someone the opportunity to brew beer, which they consequently sold in both Dayton and Xenia because the Beer Road went between Xenia and Wilmington Pike. After the feed wire for the street car power intersected the Beer Road, it went west to Wilmington, where it provided electricity for the street cars. Subsequently, the Beer Road was renamed… wait for it… Feedwire Road! That’s pretty cool. I wonder if the Beer Road name was given up during prohibition. The time frame seems right, but I don’t have any evidence of that, just a supposition.

Now, here’s another cool part: In a book published by the Bellbrook Historical Society, they included a table of times and fares for the street car service. Get a load of this! It’s a table of fares to different destinations from downtown Bellbrook.

White’s Corner is where yours truly currently lives, the intersection of Wilmington and 725. In fact, there’s a little road there named White’s Corner (which used to be part of Wilmington Pike) and you can clearly see “White’s Corner ATM” from the road. Also, there has been a fruit and vegetable stand there in the recent past with the White’s Corner name. Perhaps I’ll write more about White’s Corner at a later date.

I’m not completely sure about the location of County Line. My best educated guess is that County Line is the current day location of Brown Road and Rollandia golf course, where Wilmington Pike takes a jog northwestward, leaving Greene County and entering Montgomery County.

Roslyn… now there’s a name that has been lost to time. Roslyn was a collection of homes at the intersection of Wilmington Pike and Stroop Road, where today you’ll find some fast food restaurants, a Meijer, and the public library. If you look closely at the street names in the older neighborhood there, you’ll see a Roslyn Avenue.

Belmont is still Belmont, where the insane asylum… I mean, retirement home… is located and where the DBSV line met the Interurban.

Spring Valley is, of course, the tiny sleepy town we still know, south of Xenia.

How long did it take to get from one place to another? How practical was the street car as a mode of everyday transportation? The schedule for street car departures from Bellbrook gives us an excellent idea:

In effect Sunday, April 17, 1904

Cars leave Bellbrook for Dayton at 5:45, 8:15, 10:45 a.m. and 1:15, 3:45, 6:15, 8:30 and 11:00 p.m.

Cars leave Bellbrook for Spring Valley at 7:40 and 10:10 a.m. and 12:40, 3:10, 5:40, 8:05, 10:25, and 11:55 p.m.

Saturdays, Sundays and holidays extra cars will leave Bellbrook for Dayton at 9:30 a.m., 12:00, 2:30, 5:00 and 7:30 p.m.

For Spring Valley at 8:55 and 11:25 a.m., 1:55, 4:25 and 6:55 p.m.

Subject to change without notice.

Judging the departure times and the distances to both Spring Valley and Dayton, it seems logical the the trip to Spring Valley took around 20 minutes, and the trip to Dayton close to 45. That’s pretty good for a century ago.

Draconian sex offender laws are becoming somewhat of a theme to my blog here recently. I found this article at Fox News, which led me to a site with a very frightening story.

Justice4Matt

If this doesn’t send a chill down your spine, you’re inhuman.

This past week at Macworld Expo, I finally had the chance to meet Phil Schiller, the funniest guy at every keynote.

He remembered me right away and he listened politely while I told a story about something that happened some years ago while I was under Apple’s employ. Then we posed for a pic and he shook my hand. He couldn’t have been nicer. And that was my close encounter with Phil.

Like many people, I caught the Expo crud mid-week and just this morning was I able to get some real drugs from the doctor, so I’m feeling semi-lucid right now. Later in the week, I’ll trickle out my thoughts about the VoIP idea I was wrong about, about the iPhone-that-will-solve-all-the-world’s-problems, and Apple’s quiet introduction of AirPort with 802.11n.