The iPhone 4 arrived today in Canada. There has been amazing demand, with lots of long lineups and many, many disappointed people. I was convinced I wanted one but wasn’t sure I would actually get one today, given the expectation of limited supply and high demand. I wasn’t really prepared to line up at 3am either.

I did get up and go stand in line at the local Fido store at 8am (they open at 10). The first guy in line was there at 2am, the next fellow arrived at 5:30. The two other people in front of me arrived between 6:30 and 7am. I was fifth in line, and more people started arriving rapidly. By 8:30 there was ten people waiting. The “rumors” said this particular store would have as many as fifteen phones for sale but only three 32gb models. A quick poll revealed that of the four people in front of me only two were buying the 32gb model so I was likely to get one if I wanted one (I did, I was replacing a 32gb 3GS and didn’t want to downgrade).

Nothing like hanging around with a bunch of other fanboys for a few hours debating the positives and negatives of Apple, OS X, MacBooks, and of course the different iPhone models! It was pretty easy to pass the time.

By 9:30 the staff arrived and started to prep the store. Nice people, but you could tell they had a long day in front of them. Fortunately they had a great attitude about it and we had lots of fun chatting them up. Those of us standing in line started getting antsy though, and at least another ten people had arrived looking to buy the iPhone. Other people in the mall gawked at us a bit wondering why were were silly enough to be at the mall well before it opened. Precisely at 10 the first sale began, but of course it takes FOREVER to process these purchases. I didn’t get mine until after 11am then had to wait for activation later this afternoon.

I bet there were at least 10 people turned away while I was there and I bet even more were turned down today. The local news said every place was sold out almost immediately this morning. Once again, Apple will get to publish stats about completely selling out in a matter of hours.

I’ve been playing with it for a few hours now and really love it. Well worth the money and time spent.

Last weekend I travelled to Seattle for Robothon 2009. Eileen went with me although she spent Friday and Saturday at the Emerald City Writers Conference. Why she would prefer to hang out with a bunch of authors instead of a bunch of geeks is a question you can probably answer for yourself.

Unlike 2007, this year’s event was a bit more subdued. The Seattle Robotics Society didn’t hold the event in 2008 due to a lack of enough volunteers to run the event. I’d expected this year to see a big resurgence in interest but it didn’t happen. I hope the people that did get out to the event had fun though, I certainly did.

The only event I participated in this year was Minisumo, with The Thin Man. I’ve been too busy at work to have time to build new robots, and since we were cleaning our house up (to sell it, after buying another house) I had to pack away my workshop. If you recall, The Thin Man placed first in the 2007 event but this year was a different story: two straight losses and I was out. The Thin Man is no longer the “state of the art” in terms of building that it used to be, and its showing its age. The victors this year in Minisumo were students from Mexico with extremely nice robots.

I was busy at the event even though I wasn’t competing. I volunteered to organize this year’s Robo-Magellan contest, an outdoor navigation event where robots have to drive around the park at Seattle Center to locate orange traffic cones. Fastest robot to go from the starting position to the ending position wins. It is really a nifty event, requiring robots of more sophistication than some of the more “classic” games like Minisumo or Line Maze. I’m really intrigued with this event and have started to get organized to build a robot with a hope to enter the event next year. More on this project in an upcoming post.

One of the more noticeable things about this year’s Robothon was the lack of participation. There were probably just as many people watching as in past years, but the number of competitors, particularly from the Seattle Robotics Society membership, was down. There have been a number of discussions online about this phenomenon, its not just something in Seattle but happening in many places and its been happening for a while. The number of explanations offered in these discussions outnumbers the participants and I don’t think there is any agreement about the root cause. I’m convinced its not temporary, but instead signals a need for a radical change in the structure of events like Robothon and maybe even how the hobby robotics “industry” (clubs, groups, etc.) is organized. This includes the Vancouver Robotics Club which I’m one of the organizers for.

I did manage to take about fifty pictures while I was at Robothon, mostly the Robo-Magellan event and a handful of random other things.

I was looking for something on walmart.com this morning. I don’t particularly want to shop at Walmart (I personally think it is a very bad idea to economically support Walmart) but I was looking for an example of 1/4″ automotive pinstripe tape to send to someone via email, and it seemed the big-box-store sites might have what I was looking for. They don’t have it, at least not on their website. I struck out at other places too, seems this kind of product is too trivial to put onto a website. Oh well.

Then I noticed the upper right corner of the walmart.com page containing the message “Welcome back, null. Not null?” (have a look at the picture I included above, and click the picture to see the full size version). This amused me and also reinforced the notion that programming is somewhat hard. The details matter. Or at least they should. Apparently not at Walmart though. You see, “null” is a value that is is programmer-speak for “no value available.” The programmers who create the walmart.com website apparently aren’t clever enough to test for this condition and respond appropriately. Dumb.

Sometimes real-life is so much funnier than any comedy troupe could ever make it. Tonight, during the evening news on television, I caught an advertisement for Ford trucks. The pitch-man was Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel program Dirty Jobs.

If you aren’t familiar with Mike or his program, the basic premise is that he tackles those very undesirable jobs. Some examples include cleaning sewers, disposing of dead animals in a factory, or cleaning portable toilets.

Yep, selling American-made vehicles probably is a job nobody else wants to do.

After a miserable start Microsoft gave up on a silly advertising campaign (and supposedly also a very expensive campaign) to have Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld explain to me why Windows was wonderful. Their next attempt was the “I’m a PC” campaign that was somehow supposed to convince me that it was cool to use Windows. Their latest attempt now tries to convince me that purchase price, rather than coolness, is the primary factor I should use when deciding on a new laptop. Uh, what?

I appreciate value as much as anyone else, but seriously Microsoft is once again missing the boat. I’m sure the Apple execs are laughing (again) at this new attempt. I certainly am. In addition to laughing I’m also quite puzzled why Microsoft seems to be funding the advertising for Best Buy and HP. Whatever.

People like their iPods and iPhones because they feel nice to use. Ok maybe people get them because they look cool. Maybe coolness is why people buy, but that isn’t why people recommend to their friends. When you ask people who have a MacBook whether they’d recommend one, they aren’t going to tell you about price or about coolness. They tell you about the joy of using it and getting things done. They tell you about the joy of having a computer that “just works” for them.

Usability has always been a key thing for Apple and it really shows. I believe this is because Apple creates a cult-like passion amongst developers and users about it. I believe that Microsoft is interested in usability, but somehow they can’t seem to make it work. You can watch Steve Ballmer run around shouting “Developers! Developers! Developers!” but is he really trying to create the passion and commitment to design? Probably not. There is even a famous email from Bill Gates where he bitterly describes his frustration with Microsoft products.

Its almost like nobody there actually gets it, but that certainly isn’t true. There are “islands” at Microsoft where usability really shows (Visual Studio is my best example off the top of my head – it is exactly the right tool for me to write solid software) but the overall consistency is lacking across Windows as well as every other application. I gotta say I’ve never believed you can have real usability without end-to-end consistency, and Microsoft’s product portfolio seems to be a perfect example of that.

I’ve been lucky enough to have been introduced to real usability concepts, and when you understand the science behind that word you can appreciate why Apple seems drenched in it but Microsoft isn’t even in the same neighborhood.