Day 3 started out with me crashing a customer’s Treo. He was complaining that the PhoneCallDB file wouldn’t backup and would hang the sync. So I thought that purging the call history (which uses the PhoneCallDB database) would help out. So, I purged the call history for calls older than 1 week. His device immediately reset and then wouldn’t start up again. After a few minutes, he was able to get it running again, but the phone didn’t work. He kept blaming me and our software and didn’t understand that his problems were most likely caused by a corrupt database which clearly (in my mind and the mind of one of my colleagues) is evident by this chain of events.
Lessons learned: 1. Never touch a customer’s device; let the customer screw up his/her own device. 2. Give customers ideas on how to fix the problems, but don’t have them try the ideas in front of you. Let them wait until they get home so that if they have problems, I don’t have to hear about them.
Before the show I picked up a copy of iLife ’06 at the Apple Store. I knew that I’d pay an extra $0.39 by buying it in San Francisco (8.25% sales tax vs. 7.75% in San Diego), but I easily saved that in gas. I’ve only played with it for a few minutes and will have more to say later. Update went fairly smoothly except I was impatient (install took 45 minutes) so I launched the new iPhoto after it got installed, but before everything else was installed. This seemed to confuse things as my dock disappeared at the end of the install to add the new icons, but never came back. I had to restart to clear things up. Maybe I should report it to Apple and demand my money back because I didn’t pay to be a beta tester 
(That’s a reference to some users I deal with who complain about every little thing and except free stuff.)
I had a chance to walk around the show floor a little yesterday and I just wasn’t all that impressed. I’m not sure if I was just too exhausted to see what was neat or I really don’t care. I played around with a MacBook for a few minutes (the Apple rep at the particular demo station I went to said that he loved our software which made my head swell a little) and must say that the specs on the new machine are much more impressive on paper than in real life. The big way to demonstrate it was faster was to open up a video iChat with multiple machines (of course all were connected over gigabit ethernet, but the point was to show how fast the machine could handle the multiple video feeds). This worked well and apparently doesn’t work with the current generation of PowerBooks. I say apparently because I’ve only been part of a video iChat with more than one person once; that was when the Mark/Space Sales/Marketing guy brought me into an iChat with Seal (the singer); it didn’t work well because there wasn’t enough bandwidth to make it useful. Other than the video stuff, launching applications was a little faster (these were native Intel application), but it definitely wasn’t 4 times faster. This leads to the conclusion that the bottleneck isn’t the processor, it is probably I/O (hard drive), video, etc. I’m now less excited about getting one and can wait without feeling computer envy.
Three days of talking to people sure does wear me out. Good thing I go home today and am only on the show floor for a few hours.
