When I’m on an airplane, I always like to sit by the window. The kind of people who sit on the aisle just baffle me: sure, you can get to the bathroom more easily from the aisle seat — but you can go to the bathroom anywhere. Most places do not have a SIX-MILE-HIGH VIEW.

Anyway, while on an airplane over Illinois today, I got a good view of the small town of Chenoa. Here is a crappy iPhone picture taken through clouds:

North is to the bottom left. This is the Midwest; the long straight roads run perfectly north-south or east-west (or as perfect as the surveyors could get them in the 1800s, anyway). The roads running from left to right are, from top to bottom: old US Route 66, and Interstate 55. Just north of Route 66 is a railroad track now part to the Union Pacific Railroad. The train runs through the center of town; both 66 and 55 bypass it.

Here’s the Google Earth version, with north at the top:

The old Route 66 is nearly as visible as the much newer, larger Interstate 55 because of the peculiar way Route 66 was redeveloped in much of Illinois. The old pavement wasn’t renovated, or torn up, or anything like that — it was itself bypassed. Here’s a detail of Route 66 just northwest of Chenoa:

The old pavement was removed only where another road needed to cross, or where it was cleared to build the Interstate. Because I-55 in Illinois was built along the 66 alignment for most of its length, nearly all of the towns along the highway have these strips of once-famous pavement now full of cracks and weeds.

The Washington Post reports:

The small town of Front Royal, in the foothills of the Shenandoahs, is taking on what town leaders and many others consider to be the scourge of Virginia.

The council is scheduled to vote Monday on a resolution that would prevent its police officers from enforcing Virginia’s “abusive driving” fees. [...] Under the Front Royal proposal, people cited for driving under the influence would still be subject to the state fees. But those charged with certain lesser offenses, such as reckless driving or driving without a license, would not have to pay. The resolution would apply only to tickets written by the Front Royal police. Anyone charged by the Warren County sheriff or the Virginia State Police, which do not come under town control, would still have to pay.

As it happens, I actually live just outside the town of Front Royal. I will be harassing the Warren County Board of Supervisors, though, to encourage them to adopt the same sensible approach.

Here’s my iPhone bill, all 15 pages of it. Presumably it will see serious adjustments as a result of this, but as my billing period turns on the 4th of the month, I got this one — for pro-rated charges from June 29-July 4, and then for recurring charges from July 4-August 4. On August 4 I will be billed for recurring charges for August 4-September 4, and any overages or special charges posted in July.

The total is $240.33, which I absolutely can’t figure out. There are two phones on the account, on a $100 ‘family plan’ (plus $29 for the second phone). So I should have been charged $36 for activation for the first, $26 for activation for the second, plus $129 for July, plus (($129/30) * 2) + ($129/31) * 4)) = $25.24 for two days of service in June plus four days in July (AT&T actually charges 1/30 of the monthly rate for pro-rated days). This should be $216.64. They claim $12.86 in ‘Government Fees & Taxes’, $155.99 in usage, and $71.48 in ‘Credits/Adjustments/Other Charges’. None of this makes the slightest bit of sense. I think that the total is correct, but really, decent customer service would seem to require something better than your customer saying ‘Well, I think I might not be getting ripped off here.’

Each page pops up a larger version if you click on it.

Page 1

Name and address and so on. Pretty standard, except that their billing system doesn’t know that this is my first bill, and so I will not ‘notice [their] new bill format’, which they say requires less paper. Given that this bill is 15 pages long, I’d hate to have run into their old bill in a dark alley.

(more…)

Nicole and I bought two iPhones on iPhone Day, June 29. I ported my number from my old T-Mobile phone without incident. Nicole was not so lucky.

She wasn’t really trying to port a number at all; her old phone was with AT&T, and she just wanted to keep the same number while moving the whole business to our iPhone family account.

When she initially set up the phone in iTunes, it told her that there was a problem in transferring her number, and that she’d have to contact AT&T customer service; the phone was assigned a new number.

She contacted AT&T customer service using their online support system, which amounts to IRC with a terrible Java client. You’re stuffed into this channel with x other customers and an AT&T support guy. I suppose the idea is that a lot of people have the same questions, and that if you see yours asked and answered in there while you’re waiting, you can save some time.

This would work nicely — or at least not incredibly badly — if the AT&T guy had had any information, or if he had been able to do anything but trigger canned responses. It was one of those conversations like this:

customer1234: Are you a human, or a computer? I don’t think you read my message before sending that canned response, because it’s not relevant at all.

AT&T Steve: Thank you for using AT&T Wireless Chat Support. You will now be disconnected from this session. The chat window will remain open until you close it. For quick answers, make the new AT&T Mobility Help site your first stop. Visit http://help.sbcglobal.net where you’ll find pages of product information to assist you. Again, thank you for choosing Cingular Chat Support.

Ultimately, though, the guy sent a canned response to the effect that this was entirely beyond the capabilities of the chat support system, and that Nicole would have to call on the phone.

Since this was a Friday night, and since the least experienced people tend to work the Friday night and weekend shifts on customer support lines, she just forwarded her old phone to her new phone and decided to wait until Monday.

When she called on Monday, their call-handling system said that wait times were 21 minutes, so she decided to wait a few days and call back later.

With one thing and another, ‘a few days later’ wound up being Tuesday of this week. She was told that the problem was that there was still an AOL employee discount on the line, and that the number couldn’t be transferred with that in place.

Okay, so let’s remove that discount; Nicole doesn’t work at AOL any more anyway, and the discount was about $0.60 a month.

Well, they couldn’t do that, because there was something wrong with their computers. But — customer service win! — they’d call Nicole back Wednesday afternoon to take care of it. The important thing here is that they would call her back, rather than putting the burden on Nicole. As I said: customer service win.

Or it would have been, had AT&T actually called as promised. When she hadn’t heard from them by late Wednesday afternoon, Nicole called them. They were aware of the ticket and were able to remove the discount. At this point she was told, though, that it was impossible for her to transfer her number.

Not that it was difficult, or that it was complicated, or that it was impossible for that particular phone rep to transfer her number, but that it was impossible full stop. She was told to return the iPhone to Apple — paying a restocking fee in the process — and then call AT&T to ‘try’ — their word — to cancel the iPhone account by claiming ‘buyer’s remorse’. Then, Nicole was to buy a new iPhone and run through the activation procedure again, whereupon (she was told) her number would be able to be transferred.

It’s at this point that I took over the process. Nicole was asking them questions, trying to get some clarification that AT&T actually was telling her that she’d have to commit fraud with AT&T and forfeit $60 to Apple (which she couldn’t have, as the return period on the phone had already lapsed) in order to transfer her number; but she wasn’t having much luck. I only heard Nicole’s side of the story, but she was clearly being interrupted every time she opened her mouth.

I called not the regular AT&T customer service line, but the special iPhone customer service line. The guy there immediately said that this business about returning the phone was ridiculous, and that this was all screwed up, and that he wished we’d talked to him initially because what we were trying to do was really very simple. That the next four people I talked to all gave me the if-you’d-talked-to-me-instead-of-all-the-other-people-this-would-have-been-solved-quickly line, I somewhat doubt the actual truth of the statement.

Nevertheless, after about an hour on the phone, we’d arrived at this conclusion:

1. The account needed to be switched from the ‘blue’ (legacy AT&T wireless) network to the ‘orange’ (Cingular) network before it could then be switched from ‘orange’ to the ‘new AT&T’ network. This network doesn’t seem to have a color, but I imagine it’s some kind of mauve.
2. I would need to get a new SIM card for the iPhone, because the SIM card already in there had been assigned to the random number ((540) MAC-HOLY as it happens) that had been drawn from the hat when it had been activated.
3. I should then call AT&T back at (877) 800-3701, which is the general activation support line; they would arrange to do the blue-to-orange switcheroo and to help me reactivate the iPhone and assign the now-orange old number to it.

At this point, it’s worth noting that I, the customer, was getting involved in the distinctions between the ‘blue’, ‘orange’, and ‘new AT&T’ networks, and that I needed to understand the difference between a “Core” AT&T store and a “Non-Core” AT&T store. All of this is utterly ridiculous, but as I am a reasonably smart guy I was able to pull this off, and even to understand what was wrong.

Anyway, so I went to the nearest “AT&T Core” store — not to be confused with Bellcore — and, as directed, asked for Matt. Matt handed over a new SIM card without delay.

By this time it was about 5:30 p.m., so I clocked out of my new part-time job as an AT&T iPhone customer support gopher, and did my normal Tino things.

Thursday morning, it was back to the grind. I called (877) 800-3701, negotiated a lengthy phone tree, and was eventually put on hold. The AT&T hold music is the World’s Greatest Baroque Hits, but it’s being fed by some kind of satellite service or something that cuts out every couple of seconds, replaced with white noise. This sounds like a small thing, but it’s not: it’s maddening. The whole point of hold music is to let you know that you haven’t been cut off; when the music itself cuts off at random intervals, it’s a constant distraction from whatever else you’re trying to do.

When a rep finally got around to me, I verified my identity and explained the whole thing to him again, and told that I was to call this number, give them all the phone numbers, the serial number of the iPhone, and the serial number of the new SIM, and that everything would be handled.

He argued with me. This was impossible, he said, and if-I-had-talked-to-him-first-I-would-never-have-been-told-that etc., etc., etc., etc.

This phone call ended with me hanging up on him while he was delivering another long speech about how this was all my fault, and how they just couldn’t do this, and how I just ‘didn’t understand how things worked’.

I immediately called the iPhone line, and gave them the spiel, including the fact that I’d been told to call (877) 800-3701 but that the people answering that line were worse than useless. Oh-that’s-terrible-if-you’d-called-me-first-etc.-etc.-etc. ensued. Now, the procedure changed. The first thing that had to happen, I was now told, was that the financial responsibility for the account had to be switched from Nicole to me, because I was the primary account holder on the new iPhone family plan. This, of course, required talking to another person, as anything involving billing or finance often does. The helpful iPhone CSR called the financial-responsibility person and explained things while I was listening to the static on hold, and then connected me to the finance group.

The finance girl immediately told me that I’d be charged a service fee of $18 for switching the financial responsibility from Nicole to me. I said that this was kind of silly because the whole point of this was to work around procedural roadblocks that AT&T had put in its own way.

This was a mistake, because it triggered the “we’re doing you a favor” mode in the financial-responsibility girl. “You’re being charged this because this is something you’re choosing to do, okay? You don’t have to do this,” she said. But of course I did have to do this, because AT&T wireless seems determined to get in its own way at every step. I said that I wasn’t in fact choosing to do this, but being told to do this by AT&T itself. While I was saying this, the girl interrupted me to deliver the same message. I think that she meant that I was ‘choosing’ to do business with AT&T at all, and that if I didn’t like that they were going to charge me more pointless fees over and above the activation fees, this was entirely my problem and that I could go to hell. I told her to stop telling me off for trying to do business with her company, and to just transfer the account. The rest of the conversation was conducted with her voice dripping with contempt.

With that done, the next step was apparently to install the new SIM card in the iPhone and to re-activate it using iTunes. I did.

This time, I didn’t bother even trying to call (877) 800-3701, because everyone at that number had been consistently rude, misinformed, and seemingly pleased by customer dissatisfaction. It wasn’t just indifference: they actually seemed to take glee in telling me (incorrectly) that I was Fucked, to put it bluntly. I called the iPhone people instead.

Oh-that’s-terrible-if-you’d-talked-to-me-bla-bla-bla. This particular phone call lasted for a little over an hour, with me on hold much of the time. I was told that it would be ‘impossible’ for me to re-activate the iPhone, because I was in St. Louis, and my account was in what AT&T calls ‘the Baltimore-Washington Market’. Apparently, I was told, the SIM cards were all locked — locked! to the market in which they were sold. I pointed out that I’d bought the iPhone in St. Louis and activated its pre-installed SIM card with a Baltimore-Washington account; but then this was only possible (they said) because the pre-installed iPhone SIM cards were special SIM cards that could be activated anywhere.

Were any of those special SIM cards available? No. Could they have FedEx knocking on my door at 8:30 the next morning with one of these special Baltimore-Washington SIM cards? After about 30 minutes on hold while they checked into that: No.

Did they understand that this was ridiculous? To their credit, they did. In a lot of customer-service dealings, you can recover a lot of goodwill simply by acknowledging that your customer is not insane for thinking that your company’s policies are a bit counterproductive.

Anyway, I was told to reinstall the old SIM, read all kinds of numbers off to them, etc., etc., etc. I’m not really clear about what was wrong at this point, and from what I was told AT&T wasn’t either. Eventually I was told that they didn’t know what was holding up this activation, but that if it somehow succeeded we’d have a problem again. On the other hand, if the activation went into some kind of limbo, we were in business because the humans could hijack the process at that point.

I was told to call back in an hour. I did. I explained all of this again. If-you’d-talked-to-me-in-the-first-place and so forth. Reinstall the new SIM, the market-locking thing having apparently been B.S. all along. This phone call took another hour, and the only result was that I was told that ‘experts’ were still actively looking into the matter, and that I should call back — to the (877) 800-3701 number — in two more hours.

If ‘experts’ were looking at it now, who had been looking at it before? I suspect that I know the answer to that, but that it wouldn’t be polite to say. I mentioned that every time I’d called the (877) 800-3701 number, I’d wound up hanging up in disgust; I was told to ask for ‘Roxanne’ — in the world of customer service, nobody has extension numbers, direct inbound dial, or last names — and that things should be handled expeditiously.

As it happens, I didn’t have to call back in two hours, because in about an hour and fifty minutes they called me back to tell me that the experts were still hard at work, and that things should be fixed imminently.

Ten minutes later, they called me again, and told me that things should be working. I was instructed to activate the iPhone in iTunes again, specifying Nicole’s phone number but my social security number. The phone immediately activated with the correct number.

So apparently all along the problem was that someone with access to at least one clue needed to look at the situation and take the proper action. Fine; this is how most things work. AT&T’s real failures here were two:

1. Employing any of the people I talked to via the (877) 800-3701 in any capacity whatsoever. Not only were they not helpful, but at every turn they actively set the process back. They’re so bad, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that they’re all Verizon moles, sent to infiltrate AT&T and chase away customers.
2. Not being able to identify the issue with my account and properly escalate it until after I’d been on the phone multiple times for multiple hours, repeating myself and growing more and more frustrated with AT&T. It appears that once the issue got into the right hands, everything was resolved pretty quickly. I’ll accept a delay while a problem is solved, but I will not accept having to project-manage the solution for a company to whom I’m paying money.

Speaking of which, I expect to have a followup to this when the bill comes. Right now, according to the AT&T website, I owe them either $240 or $68, depending on where I look. I fully expect the activation fees and first month’s bill on this to be fully comped; or I can pay them and then bill them for my project-management services in connection with the activation — which bill is, at my normal rates, a hell of a lot higher than their bill. At the moment, though, their system is far too disorganized for me to tell what the heck is going on.

Lemay, Missouri is what you might call — what many people do call — a hoosier suburb of St. Louis. In most of the world, hoosier means someone from Indiana. In St. Louis, it means a certain kind of shiftless, belligerent urban/suburban white person that a lot of people mistake for a redneck. Hoosiers are not the same as rednecks, but the differences are subtle and hard to spot without a lot of practice.

Because of this, I generally avoid Lemay: but they have a Steak n Shake restaurant there that hasn’t been molested by the company’s bad ideas about renovation, and so tonight Nicole and I went there for dinner. It’s still got the flashing lights all around the roof, though about 80% of those bulbs are now burnt out.

(This and other pictures of this Steak n Shake available here.)

Anyway, as I said before, Lemay is a pretty low-class place. How low-class is it? It’s so low-class that while we were in there, some jackass broke the window of my car and stole my camera.

I was sitting next to the window, just behind the rightmost bollard in this photo:

The car was about 20 feet or so further behind where the photographer was standing. I’m pretty sure I saw the little cocksuckers who did it, too. At about 8:20 p.m. — at which time it was still very bright outside — two guys walked diagonally through the parking lot. One of them was a rangy-looking black guy who looked to be in his early 20s, wearing a do-rag with a really odd giant polka-dotted baseball cap over it. I remember him not only because of the ridiculous hat, but because he spent a lot of time glaring at the Steak n Shake as he was walking through the lot. I’m sure you’ve seen the look; you get it from hoosiers and hillbillies too, but the Young Black Male has really perfected it — a look of pure malevolence, hatred, and menace, a look that probably does more to foster and reinforce white racism in the U.S. than O.J. Simpson ever did. I call it the ‘Kill My Landlord’ look, after an Eddie Murphy SNL sketch from the 1980s.

This is a close approximation of the Kill-My-Landlord Glare, from the cover of the Washington Post magazine in 2004:

This is a picture of Ralph Chambliss, a.k.a. ‘Blyss’, who is allegedly the “King of D.C. Rap”. When he was photographed by the Washington Post, he chose to look at the camera like this. To judge from his demeanor, it’s not good to be the king. What the fuck? I mean: what the fuck? I know that young black men have a hard time of it, but part of that hard time might be the result of looking at people like this. The rap world loves conspicuous consumption, and maybe this is just another example of that. After all, if you can manage to go around looking at people like this not get your head kicked in, you’ve got to be one tough motherfucker.

Anyway, as a white guy I’m pretty used to being glared at by a certain type of young black guy, so I didn’t think much of it.

Hat-and-K.M.L.-Glare Boy’s companion — who only registered on my consciousness as being there, I didn’t really get a good look at him — split off from him as they walked through the lot. Hat Boy walked behind the four or five cars parked there, more or less across the field of view of the photo above. Didn’t-get-a-look-at-him Boy walked between the right side of my car and the car next to it. When we came out 30 minutes or so later, the window was broken. My camera, which had been sitting on the console between the front seats, was gone. A few other things had been tossed around in the front seat, but as the camera was the only thing in the car worth more than about $10, that’s all they took. The camera was worth about $300, the memory card in it about $100, and replacing the window is about $300 more. And this assumes that I won’t be repairing the gouge in the doorframe where they stuck a screwdriver in to break the window. This would likely be ridiculously expensive, so it’ll just stay there as a reminder to me to be less trusting.

So I’m out about $700, and these little jackasses will get about $50 by pawning my camera. And the next time I see young black men glaring at me, I’ll be a little more likely to assume actual menace, instead of just idiot teenage posturing.

I must preface this by saying that I really do like the iPhone; it’s the best phone I’ve ever had, and, when one discounts the iPhone’s advantages of connectivity and size, the second-best PDA I’ve ever had, after the Newton.

That said, the thing continues to piss me off. Today’s chief annoyance comes from the headphone jack. As you may have read, the iPhone uses a standard headphone jack, which means that any normal mini-headphone plug will fit.

That is, any mini-headphone plug that has an extraordinarily slim shank. will fit. The headphone jack itself is pretty standard, but it’s recessed into the body of the phone:

When I try to plug my very nice and fairly expensive Shure headphones into it, this is what happens:

Similarly, I can’t plug in my car cassette adapter or anything else. (And the car adapter that plugs into the iPod dock connector on the bottom will charge the iPhone, but will not get sound out of the thing without shutting off the phone functions; the iPhone refuses to work except with new, specially-shielded car RF-modulator adapters. Which, of course, don’t exist yet.)

I can listen to the iPhone using the tinny built-in speaker, or using the Apple-supplied headphones, or not at all. And the Apple-supplied headphones are not a particularly good choice as they seem to block no outside noise whatsoever.

According to Apple, the reason for this design idiocy is to anchor the plug, so that it’s impossible (or at least more difficult) to snap it off in there. Fair enough; I’ve done this only about twice in my life, but let’s allow that the iPhone’s headphone jack is very delicate and must be protected.

Why, then, did Apple not supply an adapter with the thing? And if getting one free is too much to ask, why is it impossible to buy these adapters? AT&T stores, unsurprisingly, have never heard of the thing. Apple stores report that the sell out of the adapters as soon as they get them in.

Of course they sell out of them, because you can’t use decent headphones, or listen to the thing in the car, without one. If they’ve sold a million iPhones so far, I’d figure that there’s a market for about… a million adapters. Maybe more, if people want to leave them on the end of their headphones, car adapters, etc. rather than carry them around with their phones.

And yet they are effectively unavailable. Amazon lists them as ‘Usually ships within 4 to 6 weeks’. Apple will sell me a Belkin adapter and ship it in ‘5-7 business days’, or one of the Apple-branded adapters for twice the price in ‘2-4 weeks’.

What. The. Fuck. There’s a failure here in that Apple decided that the iPhone should have a non-standard headphone jack — because that’s what it is, ultimately — in the first place. But presumably there’s a reason for this.

The more serious failure here is in the fact that Apple cannot supply this adapter that they alone created a need for. I didn’t buy one when I bought the iPhone because I didn’t realize just how tight the fit was for the headphone jack; I thought that I might be able to fit at least some of my headphones in there (and one Sony pair does fit, but only barely, and after removing the strain relief on the cable, and the right ear tends to cut out because the plug isn’t really in there all the way), and because I plan to buy a pair of good iPhone-optimized headphones, with the microphone and everything, and didn’t want to buy an adapter I wouldn’t need. Apple, on the other hand, had to be in possession of the knowledge that nearly all headphones wouldn’t fit, and chose to just ignore this fact. Eh, Steve!

There’s an article here about ‘identity theft’, particularly as it relates to the widespread use of Social Security numbers for everything. OBiPhone: the jumping-off point is the fact that you have to type your SSN into iTunes to activate the iPhone. See, sooner or later, all topics come to the iPhone.

Anyway, in the middle is this:

And so what has been the legacy of the government ignoring its own advice and the advice of leading computer experts [to not use the SSN for identification]? Precisely what the CPSR predicted: identity theft is now the most prevalent complaint received by the FTC, and it’s America’s fastest-growing crime. Unlike a video game that just eats your quarter and says “GAME OVER,” a stolen identity can ruin your credit score, drain your bank account, endow you with a lengthy criminal record, or grant you an entry on the no-fly list. More troubling, identity theft can be a one-way ticket to a world in which the bits on some agent’s computer screen matter more than your own testimony, a world in which the term habeas corpus is a lexical artifact rather than a constitutional guarantee, a world in which your physical self can be suborned based on what is believed about your virtual self.

So imagine that someone gets hold of the nine digits of my Social Security number, and the PIN for my ATM card, and my Visa and American Express numbers, and my phone number, and my mother’s maiden name.

A person in possession of that kind of information could cause me a lot of trouble.

But would he have stolen my identity? Not at all. I’d still be Tino, and he’d still be the same person he was when he started. He would merely have a small amount of information that would enable him to convince gullible people and institutions that he was Tino.

Here’s the thing: why is this my problem? If a fraudster manages to convince my bank that he’s me, and they give him money and charge it against my account, it seems to me that the situation here is that the bank is out the money. He’s not me; the bank isn’t authorized to hand my money over to people who are neither me nor in possession of a check signed by me.

The first step in solving the problem of ‘identity theft’ is to call it what it is: not ‘identity theft’ but a failure on the part of the bank (or whatever) to detect fraud. That the information that was used to defraud the bank is information that pertains to me isn’t at all important; at most, I should just be asked to sign an affidavit that I wasn’t the person doing whatever was done, and that should be the end of it. If they’ve got video footage or a signature, they shouldn’t even need the affidavit.

I wonder what would happen if a grifter set up a fake bank branch, authentic-looking down to the half-dead potted plants, and took deposits from people who thought he was the bank. Would we say that the bank’s identity had been stolen, and that the bank was therefore in for a hard time of it? No, we’d say that the poor suckers who fell for the scam were the victims of fraud.

So why is it that we say that I am a victim, and not the bank, when the bank is defrauded?

I like the iPhone, I really do. It’s great. But as I use it, I keep coming across these things that suggest that there was no, or nearly no, actual user testing of the thing.

When you play videos in the iPod or YouTube apps, they play sideways; that is, the bottom of the movie is on what is normally the left side of the display. You have to turn the iPhone 90 degrees.

This is better illustrated with pictures. The iPhone is normally used like this:

When watching a movie, you turn it 90 degrees counterclockwise, like this:

You’re not given a choice; the video only plays sideways, no matter which way you hold the phone.

This isn’t the problem. The problem is that the video is upright only when the phone is rotated counterclockwise. If you look at the sideways picture (clicking on it pops up a bigger one), you’ll note that holding the phone like this means that your left hand gets in the way of the headphone wire.

It would be better if it played the video rotated 90 degrees the other way. When you hold the phone this way, the headphone cable is above your right index finger, and behind your right thumb. It’s not in the way at all:

In fact, it’s easier to hold the thing this way than with no headphones, because the headphone plug takes some of the weight of the phone.

This can be fixed pretty easily in software, but it’s still kind of surprising that Apple didn’t spot this in the first place. Any user testing at all of video playing with headphones on would have turned this up in about ten seconds.

You know, if the iPhone had a usable ssh client on it, and drivers for my folding Bluetooth keyboard, I wouldn’t really need to carry my computer around at all. I could do everything just from the phone.

Theoretically this has been possible for a while with my Treo — the little keyboard works with it, and it has ssh — but the web browser was so painful that I’d still have needed the computer.

The external keyboard would be a must, though, because the iPhone keyboard really only works as long as you’re typing English words and can take advantage of the autocorrection.

The iPod app in the iPhone does have a sleep timer, it turns out. It’s just that it’s so well hidden that I’d never have found it without clues from elsewhere.

To set an iPod sleep timer:

1. Enter the Clock application
2. Tap Timer in the bottom right-hand corner
3. Set a time using the odometer thing
4. In the ‘When Timer Ends’ menu, instead of an alarm sound, select ‘Sleep iPod’
5. Tap Start.

I had looked in the timer section of the clock app before — on the iPod, sleep timers are also set through the Clock menu item — but because I hadn’t explored the alarm-tone picker, I hadn’t spotted the ‘Sleep iPod’ option. Silly me, thinking that a menu wouldn’t logically contain 23 options all meaning ‘make noise’ and one option meaning ’stop making noise’.

Note that you cannot tell the iPod to start playing at a certain time. Though the Alarm function of the clock allows you to be awakened by any one of Apple’s canned ringtones, it won’t let you pick one of your own songs as the alarm sound.