Category Archives: Macintosh

iPhone App Review

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In an earlier post I wrote about how I promised you all an iPhone App review, so without further waiting, here it is. In this review I will be skipping any apps that also appear on my iPad, as I’ve pretty much exhaustively covered those apps, unless the iPhone brings a fresh perspective that I didn’t have with my iPad. Just so that everyone is on the same page, my iPad is a 16GB Wifi only model, and the first generation. My iPhone is also a 16GB model and linked to Verizon, it’s fourth generation. On with the show…

iPhone 4 App Review

  1. Evernote – The recently updated Evernote app is without a doubt one of the single most awesome and compelling apps on my iPhone. The new interface works so much better than the previous iteration of the app on the iPhone device. I am patiently waiting for this kind of refreshing redesign to happen for the Evernote for iPad app as well. Every time I open Evernote, I can’t help but think back to struggling with the very same app on my old Blackberry. The difference? Night and Day.
  2. Photography Group
    1. Camera – The baked in Camera app for the iPhone 4 comes with the device. The controls are very easy and it was a definite pleasure to see that the app does stills and video, and can be configured for either camera, the front-facing or rear-facing.
    2. Camera+ – This app borrows a lot of structure from the plain Camera app. It has a different zoom feature, timed shutter, burst mode, advanced flash handling and a pretty neat focus-fixing gesture system which I’ve yet to really get into. The app also has it’s own “Camera Roll” beyond the plain system one, and this allows you to edit the photos, crop them and apply some pretty cool filters. You can of course export any photos you take from the apps “Camera Roll” to the system “Camera Roll”, so it’s quite handy.
    3. Panorama – I haven’t really gotten a chance to play around with this one, it was free, eventually I’ll get to trying it out.
    4. Instagram – The collision of social media and photography! This app is great. You can configure Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Flickr, Tumblr, and FourSquare all from the app itself. Take a picture, apply one of its old-timey filters if you want, and then send the photo at once to all the services or specific ones you choose. So far very happy with it.
    5. FoodSpotting – This is more niche than Instagram. It works a lot like Instagram but it’s for food in restaurants. You take a picture and you can share it. The only gripe I have about FoodSpotting is the setup for the social services aren’t very clear, it’s nothing like any other app I’ve used and I kept on hitting my head against a mysterious login box until I realized I had to put in my FoodSpotting.com username and password. Oops. Once it’s off the ground, it’s very handy.
  3. Utilities Group –
    1. Clock – The clock app is one of those baked-in apps that come with the device. I almost never review the baked in apps, except for this one case. There appears to be a gremlin that still lives in this app. I have a handful of alarms, and whether the alarm is on or off doesn’t matter. So far it doesn’t suffer from the previous problem of “alarm doesn’t fire”, but it’s odd in that alarms fire even if they are “Off”. I think this app is still a work-in-progress for Apple’s iOS team to work on.
    2. Voice Memos – This app still has a use for really long audio recordings. It’s lost a fair amount of power when Evernote redid their app and added audio recording – so you could technically audio-record right into your Evernote system. I suppose you could use this app and then email the audio into Evernote later, perhaps it’s six and one half-dozen kind of thing.
  4. Facebook – The Facebook app is odd. It’s there for the iPhone but not the iPad. I’ll never understand that. The app works well enough, it’s pretty straightforward and if you have a facebook account, you should get it. I don’t know many people who don’t have a facebook account any longer.
  5. Social Group
    1. Glympse – I wrote about Glympse when I had it on my iPad. The system really shines when you have a 3G network connection or if you insist on running it on the iPad, to have a 3G-to-Wifi bridge as you are mobile. I used Glympse with my mother and she loved it. She thought it was really neat. You send a “glympse” to an email addressee and they get a link they can click on and see your position, speed, and path in real-time. The only part of this app that irks me is the expiration to “glympses”. I would prefer to hand my mother a link that would always work if I was running “Glympse” on my iPhone, she would know where I am whenever she liked. Some people see this as an invasion of privacy, but really, what do you have to hide? Come on.
    2. Bump – I got this free app to share some pictures that Scott had on his iPhone. Bump works well when the datasets are small. If you want to share a LOT of data, like a bunch of pictures in a Camera Roll on the device, prepare for disappointment. Bump really didn’t work out for me. Another app, which I reviewed on my iPad, called Transfer works much better for moving big data sets between iOS devices.
  6. Travel Group –
    1. Trapster – Before the price of fuel went to obnoxiously high levels I used to have a relatively leaded foot when it came to driving. I regularly find myself pushing 76 in a 70 zone and I’ve been caught “Not Paying Full Attention” to speed zones in the past. This app allows you to share socially the presence of speed traps and other road hazards. Since I keep my speed now pretty much below 60MPH to save on gas costs most of the reason to use this app have gone out the window, but I keep it around, it’ll likely be really helpful on long-duration trips.
    2. StreetPilot – Garmin’s Nuvi interface designed for iOS. I can enter in an address or do a Google Location search and have yet to find something it can’t route me to. This app has vocal turn-by-turn directions and is as “helpful” as a Nuvi. One of the nicest things is that the maps will never go out of date as it downloads map data from Garmin automatically. When I start this app my mind goes back to the Sprint Navigation app on my Blackberry, powered by Telenav. This app, StreetPilot, blows that old Telenav application out of the water. Again it’s night and day. I would never use the Telenav junk because it never worked. So far StreetPilot has not let me down once. Again it’s because an iPhone is a supremely more advanced and better-equipped phone than the Blackberry could ever dream of being.
    3. TripIt – Making big trips, with airplanes and hotels usually is handled somewhat well using Evernote, but not any longer. TripIt is a free app and free web service that enables you to organize all your travel details through one very well designed app. What really blows my mind is the web service provides you with an email address that you can forward your confirmation emails to and the service will automatically extract the details from what you forwarded and populate your trip for you. Incredibly handy. The fact that it’s free blows my mind.
  7. 1Password – I have this app on my iPad, my iPhone and every Mac I own. Without a doubt the single BEST purchase and BEST investment I ever made, beyond buying into the Apple Digital Lifestyle. What makes it shine? Sync with Dropbox. Everything is the same on every device. Everyone should buy apps from 1Password, then use the app to change each site they have an account on with the random generator in 1Password and control them all from that suite of apps. When one site suffers a security breakdown, your loss is microscopic. You lost 1 of thousands of 16 digit random passwords. This app is worth its weight in GOLD. I’m so happy my mother pushed me towards it!
  8. Business Group
    1. DraftPad – If ever you needed just a quick place to jot down some text, this app does a pretty good job. It’s free, it’s very simple to use, and does one thing, taking quick temporary notes, very well.
    2. CamCard – I downloaded the Lite version of this app. It enables your phone to take a picture of a business card and then it scans in the details, does OCR, and populates your Contact List with the details from the card. Very useful. I got the Lite version because I almost never get business cards but when I do, it’s nice to have this as an option.
  9. Scanners Group
    1. Qrafter – This app from Kerem Erkan is free on the App Store and is the BEST QR Code scanner I’ve ever had the pleasure to use. It’s professional, free, and the way it scans, presents the contents of the scan and all the extended features that it can pick up from a QR code is wonderful! There are a few other QR scanners and they are okay, but this one is the top of my list without a doubt!
    2. QR Creator – Kerem Erkan, on his website, also has a QR creator page which has a special mobile rendering on iPhone devices. I browsed to it in Mobile Safari and then made an app-icon-bookmark. You can create custom QR codes and save them to your Camera Roll and print them using AirPrint or send them to someone else via email or even Evernote or Dropbox! Quite nice.
    3. PriceCheck – This app from Amazon.com is a great way to check on local stores profiteering. Just grab an object from the shelf, open this app, scan the bar code with the camera and Amazon will spit out it’s best prices for that item. I’ve yet to use it for more than simply checking on things to see how the scanner worked, but it does work. I’m pretty sure you can one-click order through the App if you set it up with your Amazon login information. That would be too-funny. Especially for Best Buy, Target, and Bed Bath and Beyond. Low prices my ass. 🙂
    4. RedLaser – This works a lot like PriceCheck but isn’t tied to Amazon.com. I have used this app and it’s saved both of us some money and aggravation. There is a scented candle that Scott really likes in the bathroom and it’s a big one, the price tag from BB&B was $22 bucks. He wanted another candle just like it for the bathroom but couldn’t remember what it was called or who made it. While I was in the bathroom I fished it out of the garbage and scanned it using RedLaser. Not only did it find the right make and scent but also found it online for HALF THE PRICE. I then tapped the option button in RedLaser and right there was “email this info” option, I sent it to Scott and minutes later he was thanking me. Don’t thank me, thank that app! 🙂
    5. Color ID – I have what I regard as accurate color vision. Scott on the other hand can from time to time run into trouble identifying colors. This free app is cute, you start it, point the camera at an object and press the shutter button. The phone will calculate the color, give you its “creative name”, its hex code for inclusion on websites, and it will read the color off via voice from the speaker. I spent half an hour identifying all the colors in my bathroom. For anyone challenged with color blindness, this app is a godsend. The only oddity with the app is that it doesn’t like being sent to the background. Once you put it in the background and then call it up again the scanning part doesn’t work. You have to quit the app and restart it. Even with this oddity it’s still quite useful.
  10. GroceryIQ – This app is sort of a scanner, sort of a listmaker, but it floats outside of other groups because it’s different. I like using this app more than ShopShop because the way it’s designed fits better with trips to the supermarket. I love it’s listmaking and check off features. The scanner is quite dumb, and while you can scan an item and put it on the list, it’s just as easy to type it in by hand.

So that’s that. Those are the apps on my iPhone that differ from my iPad apps. It’s nowhere near the exhaustive list of all the apps I have, but these are the ones I felt warranted the most discussion and I think other people would benefit from using. I’m open to reviewing other apps, if you are an app developer please feel free to drop me a line or make a comment and I’ll check out your app and give you my honest opinion or even a review. If you find something in my reviews that helps you, please comment and let me know!

iPad 2

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I caught up with Apple’s announcement of the iPad 2 after I got back from Comixlunch with Scott. It appears at least to me to be an evolutionary enhancement to the original iPad device. The A5 dual-core processor is a very good improvement and the cameras are certainly quite nice to have. In many ways it’s as if the iPhone 4 design team and the original iPad design team had a kegger and came out with a really great new design. It seems to be a forward-thinking blend of the two reference devices.

Along with the actual meat of the matter, the silly stuff is also front and center. People moaning and carrying on about “does it come in white?” will be happy. When I fielded some questions about the iPad 2 today one of my coworkers remarked on the devices lighter weight and thinner presentation than the original device. In response I laughingly referred to the original iPad as being made of neutronium and wondering over how we all coped with the agony of the first iPad. I see this next device to be an evolutionary step up from the original iPad. It’s not revolutionary, to do that would require a wholly new form-factor, a new design, a new OS, new everything. If it isn’t that, then it’s evolutionary. It’s impressively better, but it’s still an evolved form of the original device.

So, for those people who are seeking my advice about buying an iPad, here’s the skinny:

  • If the pricetag is the most important thing for you, then go for the now deprecated original iPad. Apple knocked $100 dollars off the price of the device and now it’s really quite compelling.
  • I would seriously avoid buying any refurbished device. I’m quite bearish on refurbished devices. If you can find the extra $50, you really owe it to yourself to get a factory-fresh model and not some repaired victim.
  • If money isn’t an issue then I strongly recommend buying the iPad 2. The speed, the cameras, the new software and the 1080p via cable is quite compelling.
  • If you already have an iPad and it’s working for you, I don’t see any reason to dump your current device and buy a new one. The only caveat to that is if you are planning on gifting your device to someone else, then feel free to buy the new iPad 2. The new iPad itself doesn’t have enough “Killer Features” to warrant the dropping of iPad 1 and rushing out to the Apple Store for iPad 2.

I forecast that the iPhone 5 will be even less of an evolutionary leap. What more could the device do? Get thinner? Transparency? What new technology could possibly be stuffed into the device to make everyone get all hot and bothered for it? Apple is running out of room to innovate. Saying that, I could be surprised, but it would take a lot to really get me to look at my current iPhone 4 with anything less than utter adoration.

iPhone 4 on Verizon – Delightful!

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While re-reading my old Blackberry / iPhone / Droid post (which is my #1 most viewed page!) I started to chuckle at my May 10th 2010 self versus my February 16th, 2011 self. What has my experience been now that I’ve had my iPhone for a fair bit?

I am in love with this device.

Now I can fall pretty hard for a pretty face, especially when it comes to a new gadget. I categorize myself as a “use it all” kind of iPhone user, the curious geek who refuses to stop fiddling with a device until I have it just so. I don’t go as far as the GPL/FSF folks who want to take a phone and turn it into an Adirondack chair, but I do take my gadgets for pretty intense rides.

So what do I think now? Blackberry is dead. I rescued all the data I cared for out of my old Blackberry device, I wiped it clean and I removed the battery. I haven’t even looked back or even thought of it since then. I imagine in my mind’s eye, a giant crematorium where I open the giant door and start pitchforking all the useless memories and upset feelings and anger and close the door to watch it all burn to ash. I used to fantasize about annihilating my Blackberry. Now that I have my Verizon iPhone 4, I don’t really care to go back there anymore. I don’t care for Blackberry Enterprise Server, or RIM, or any of the other silly things that having a phone with a network endpoint in Canada means.

As I look out now, I respect Droid for its user base and how well it’s progressed. I’m still quite critical that certain manufacturers are keeping their customers from upgrading to the latest and greatest version of the Droid operating system in order to squeeze as much money as they can from them. I can appreciate the Droid, but I don’t espouse it’s use or recommend it to anyone I know. Most people aren’t seeking my recommendations when it comes to mobile device operating systems anyways. One small problem I have with Droid is the kill-switch that Google maintains on the devices apps and the laissez-faire style with which the Droid App Store is policed. It’s too wild and too uncontrolled for my tastes and I don’t think exposing people who aren’t interested in the hows and the whys is a very wise move. These people get it in their head to download something hazardous like a trojan horse and then the show is over.

How about the iPhone? It’s amazing. The devices display, the two cameras, all the apps! It’s kind of overwhelming. There are so many things I can do now, now that I am using a real network with a real device. I can browse the web the way I want to, not the way that my old Blackberry forced me to do. I can read my emails, including HTML emails with ease and pleasure. The network is snappy, nice and quick and about the same speed as Sprint when Sprint was in its heyday. Those days are done, by the way. This device, this iPhone does everything that Apple promises and does it exceptionally well. Everything from fit, finish, to overall quality is as I expect from Apple, beyond my wildest expectations. Of course, every cute puffy cloud does have it’s darker sides as well. There are only a few of those, and mostly it comes down to ringtones, using the iPhone on multiple machines, but beyond that, which none of them are show stoppers. Instead of wanting to throttle the Blackberry devs to death with my bare hands I just want to tousle the hair of the Apple devs who baked these oddities into their device.

Soon I will write a review sheet about all the apps I’ve gotten for my iPhone. Instead of duplicating all the apps that I reviewed already for my iPad (as there is a huge overlap) I’ll only review those apps that are unique to my iPhone and why I chose them. That’s coming up soon, keep an eye out for it if you like my reviews.

QR Codes

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Today at work I was playing around with my new Verizon iPhone 4 and found a suite of apps related to scanning QR codes. These codes are square speckled two-dimensional bar codes that can contain a surprising amount of information.

I found a great site and discovered that it had a paired iOS app:

QR Code Creator Site: http://bit.ly/dziTfL

QR Code App: http://bit.ly/h97j6H

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should check them out!

So that got us started on possibly weaving QR codes in a lot of our promotional materials. Some of the ideas I’ve entertained revolving around these codes are:

  • History of a building, photos of its construction, where the funding came from and some of the neat things about the building that people might like to know.
  • Raffle codes on the back of WMU game tickets, we insert a random QR that people have to SMS or Email to enter a raffle to win a prize, or something.
  • If these codes are up on billboards, we could provide a full vCard for WMU including admissions, our website, and other contact information.

As I got to thinking about the QR codes, it’s an avenue to enable printed material to have a digital effect, in a way it completes a round-trip for information. The path from digital to physical is usually via printers, and this is a way for physical to cross back into digital. The information technology, marketing, and pure geek factor are all very high – it’s very exciting!

Assigning People to Music

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Here are my top ten played tracks on my iPod “Be A Jackass”:

  1. Hero – The Verve Pipe
  2. Homage to Patagonia – Lemon Jelly
  3. Hooked on Bach – Hooked on Classics
  4. Puttin’ on the Ritz – Taco
  5. Would You…? – Touch and Go
  6. Video Killed the Radio Star – Buggles
  7. Some Fantastic – Barenaked Ladies
  8. Hooked on Classics Part 3 – Hooked on Classics
  9. Hooked on Mozart – Hooked on Classics
  10. Hooked on Song – Hooked on Classics

The first track is easy, I’ve always associated that with Dennis Skinner. I don’t know why. As for the rest, I’m going to have to give them some serious listens in order to find where people belong. I really should find musical selections for every one of my friends and family. So far I’ve got my Mother, my Stepfather, and my Sister. I’ve got to assign music to:

  1. Scott – Glee, Jonatha?
  2. My Father – Something patriotic
  3. Scott’s Mom – Something classical
  4. My Boss – Dar Williams perhaps
  5. Andy Med
  6. Jeffery – Something from the 80’s
  7. Sean – Star Trek Theme
  8. Jeramiah – That section of remix in german
  9. Justin – Maybe a section of Homage to Patagonia
  10. Matt – “I Will Survive” perhaps
  11. Max

And perhaps more people if they ended up calling me.

Ringtones, Music, Themes… People.

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So now that I can create custom ringtones, I want to assign custom ringtones for everyone I know. This is rather tricky. What musical-person pairing should I select? I have the pair for my sister down pat, but for the rest of my friends and family?

This is going to take time.

I’d like everyone to please give this some thought and volunteer what you think your theme song might be. Please share in the comments or if you want it private, email me.

Thanks!

The difference between iPods and iPhones

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Now that I have my new iPhone, I’m thrilled to have it and using it is wonderful. While I’ve been working with it I’ve run into a strange oddity and a workaround for it. The oddity came when I tried to create my own iPhone-compatible ringtones. The creation of iPhone custom ringtones are in themselves needlessly fussy procedure. First you find the music you want, trim it to 40 seconds, then convert it to AAC format. Then you tear it out of iTunes, change the extension from m4a to m4r and then insert that back into the device for assignment.

What gets me about the ringtone creation is how involved and outrageously fussy it is. It wasn’t meant to be this way, the design clearly points to strict control. When Apple makes something easy, it’s ridiculously easy. This is something different. This is capitalism. Apple went a long way to make this obfuscation stick and the proof is in the obnoxious lengths that you have to go through if you don’t want to buy a ringtone from the iTunes store.

I ran into another issue with my new iPhone. I plugged it into my MacBook and tried to add the newly manufactured ringtone to the device. Then I discovered a rather new and odd limitation. An iPhone apparently fixates on the iTunes library that it first sees, it is with this library that you can turn on “Manage Manually” mode with an iPhone. Any other library locks the phone out but offers you the option of continuing by wiping your device and re-fixating on a new iTunes library. I quickly came up with a great way to beat Apple at this oddity, I created a new iTunes library from scratch (just the directory structure and some key files) and placed it on my Dropbox. Then using the option-key goaded iTunes to start from a different library, pointed it to my Dropbox-iTunes folder and now I have a work-on-any-machine-Manual-Manage iTunes skeleton that allows me to insert homemade ringtones into my new iPhone.

What a long way around for something that should be simple. Apple, if you are listening, the solution is only lengthy and annoying. It’s been paved by your own software and the only piece missing is either a USB memory stick or Dropbox. How easy would it have been to design this with the same vigor that you designed everything else? Eventually your customers find ways around this sort of thing, doesn’t that inevitability mean it’s not worth pursuing in the first place?

Humph.

Being Without

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This past weekend I was without my Blackberry as the number port took through Verizon and the phone was in a box en-route to Kalamazoo through FedEx. It was an odd feeling, being potentially connected through the fail-a-licious Blackberry and then suddenly not having anything. No phone, no sms, no alerts, no twitter. It was rather humbling. There were some seriously good moments of comedy that I was going to share but couldn’t, some of them were:

  • At the GR B&N, they had a sign up for Black History Month and right underneath it a load of product from the BBC.
  • The Apple Store at Woodland Mall in GR, a packed madhouse! It was if it was a fresh release day and people were starving for the sleek and shiny.
  • Scott’s test drive of the car that has caught his eye, the Nissan Juke.
  • Browsing the Pioneer Wine Trail, which runs north and south of Jackson, MI.

Of course, throughout all of this I’ve been impatient for the delivery of my new iPhone. Waiting has been uniquely annoying, especially since FedEx doesn’t really update their package status as well as UPS does, so for the past few days the shipment has been cooling it’s heels in Grand Rapids, until just a few moments ago when it turned out to magically appear in Portage.

I did enjoy myself immensely this past weekend however, got in a lot of mallwalking, bought a few bottles of very good (and cheap!) wines from the Pioneer Trail region, saw the Juke which was exceptionally cute, and had a chance to spend time with friends.

 

What does an Apple Mouse and a Blackberry have in common?

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Today has a bright note of happiness all of a sudden. One of my coworkers came in complaining that her Apple Wireless Mouse couldn’t scroll up any longer. We’ve for the longest time noticed a slow and subtle failure of these Apple Mice over time, suddenly they won’t scroll up any longer, no reason, just bloop, that’s it.

While I was thinking of solutions, out of the blue a fix I remembered for PITA Blackberry Curve and Pearl devices popped into my head. In those devices the pearl can become contaminated with skin oils and hair and whatnot and start camming and eventually cease working altogether. The solution for the Blackberry is to turn the Blackberry face-down, lay it gently on a fresh piece of paper and then roll the hell out of the ball against the paper. This apparently cleans the pearl ball of oil and grit and junk and the Blackberry returns to proper function.

So, would this work for these Apple Mice? The pearl in the Blackberry is nearly identical to the ball in the Apple Mice. So I grabbed one of the “Broken Apple Mice” and got some paper and made it squeak. It actually squeaks, so adorable! Then I plugged it in, and voilà, works like a charm!

So the solution to fixing a scroll ball in an Apple Mouse is to get some paper, turn the mouse upside down and roll it vigorously against the paper for a count of say 10 to 15. Works like a charm!

Enjoy!

Facepalm to Headdesk

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I’ve been doing the same thing for about a dozen years. I’ve seen personalities come and go. They have grand designs in the beginning but almost always end up doing some rendition of a perp-walk at the end. I started in what could be described as a maelström of confusion and a general state of DIY-clunkiness. Now I’m not going to actually name anyone or any definite thing, those that know me and know my long-standing straw-men will know exactly what I’m talking about in this article, it’s a metaphorical story after all. If you take an exception to what I write here, then perhaps you should do some of your own personal introspection. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Imagine buying a car, the place where you buy it has only one dealership in the entire world and you are in luck, it’s only a mile away. Everything you could ever need is hosted by the car company, by the dealership – everything! They’ll sell you the car, they’ll service it, they’ll help you find things to stick to it to make it better – it looks wonderful on paper.

When you walk into your new apartment, you see the car in the driveway and it looks quite unusual. It still has a car-like shape but the fresh weld-points where unusual non-car-like things and things that perhaps might go on a car if designed by a desperate mechanic appear. You find out that the paperwork from the dealership is burnt in some places and has unthinkable stains in other places. The car runs, sort of, but every once in a while it shocks the passengers and makes them visibly tremble. Years go by, you trade in the DIY wreck and over time you get the impression that even after buying a new car from the dealership and agreeing to play by all their rules that they really are quite occupied doing other things. One day you wake up, blink and rub at your eyes and notice that there are lots of other cars parked in your neighbors driveways. You’ve fought tooth and nail and you’ve got a premium luxury vehicle that carries your passengers on a cloud of happiness and you are quite satisfied as long as you only see your driveway. If you look around you notice Trabants and Yugos and Horizons littering your neighbors driveways and you don’t understand how so many people can fit in such awful vehicles and you just stop thinking about them. You have faith that somehow life goes on for everyone, whether they are being stuffed into a Trabant or a rusted-out Horizon.

Your dealership has expanded now, not only does it do cars, but everything else. Not only should you use the dealership, but your told you must use the dealership. You notice a crack developing in your driveway, and the new paving company is the dealership. You let them know the crack is there and growing and then you don’t hear anything from them. Years go by, four of them, and then after having enough you walk down to city hall and you complain about the dealership, the next day the entire crack is gone, and you notice the color of the pavement is different and then that feeling sets in. Something is wrong. You are finally happy so you shut your trap and hope you don’t have to wait another four years for help.

Over the intervening years you go to the dealership, you suffer little wounds each time you walk in their doors, after a while, and since nobody else is yelling loudly, you imagine that the rather lousy dealership is just how things are and your dissatisfaction melts into a kind of muddy attitude. Your once springy step is now pretty much a dreary trudge. Life goes on. The dealership remains standing tall, and then you notice that your sink trap, which you’ve asked to have looked at, has remained ignored for three whole years and some time. You’ve made do, you’ve gotten your work done, the sink does work but not exactly how you’d like it to. The dealership really doesn’t have doors anymore, it took wire cutters to its phone lines and the postman has no idea how to get in to make deliveries. The only way that you can communicate with the dealership now is with a tattered clutch of semaphore flags. When you grab your manual and your flags and try to get messages to the dealership, you feel foolish and that perhaps you’re just wasting your time. You’d put the flags in a foot locker and forget all about them, but you need the dealership, so you continue to make foolish motions knowing that nobody is probably looking at you or your flags.

I used to be angry with the dealership. I used to rail against them, question their professionalism. I’ve even entertained the thoughts in my own head that perhaps the dealership is just simply incompetent and they can’t help themselves. Now I just find myself alternating between facepalm and headdesk when face to face with the dealership.

Somewhere deep down, with all this nebulous awfulness, you suspect that caring too much, being too involved will eventually make you sick. You start fantasizing about getting in your luxury car and never leaving it again. Never thinking about the sink trap, never thinking about the driveway, just losing yourself in the light-blue-and-smiles happiness of being inside your luxury car. That if you wait it out long enough in the utopia of your own making, that somehow the dealership won’t be there anymore and you can get out of the luxury car and start making progress again.