Tretakoff Musings

Like many others who acquired the latest Apple iPhone bauble, I experienced a very un-Apple like experience. First, in true Apple fashion, the 3Gs arrived without any directions, just a "quick start" guide. It seemed odd that such a product launch would not at least include instructions on how to upgrade from a previous iPhone; instead, I was forced to rely on some outdated instructions on Apple's site...which turned out to be inaccurate. So, for a day, I had the world's most expensive iPod Touch, instead of an iPhone 3GS. Finally, after trying the Apple support experience (fail - an hour wait on the phone and no online chat), I turned to AT&T. Much to my surprise, they had a special phone prompt setup to route you to an iPhone expert, who answered in under a minute. He listened, and immediately solved the problem by instructing me to switch the SIM cards...something Apple says " In the US, iPhone 3G includes a SIM and your original iPhone's SIM is not n...

I headed to my local Sprint store this morning to get my hungry hands on the new Palm Pre. Eschewing the local Best Buy, whose inventory for my local store was supposed to be a meager 2 units, I opted for the company owned Sprint store about 10 miles up the road. Before you ask, no I did not wait in line or camp out; I meandered in around 11AM. No surprise, the store was sold out of its 30 units (thought they did say they had them until about 10AM), and expected about 30 more on Monday. But to my surprise, they did have two fully functioning demo units for me to play with, as you can see from the god-awful iPhone picture to the left. After reading Engadget's superb Pre walkthrough , I had already decided the phone would have to completely wow me to make me pull out the credit card and make the carrier switch. I played with the Pre uninterrupted for about 30 minutes; here are my impressions, along with my ratings 1-10 (8 being as good as an iPhone; 9 being better; 10 being truly pe...

Courtesy of John Lettelier: After every flight, UPS pilots fill out a form, called a 'gripe sheet,' which tells mechanics about problems with the aircraft. The mechanics corrects the problems, document their repairs on the form, and then pilots review the gripe sheets before the next flight. Never let it be said that ground crews lack a sense of humor. Here are some actual maintenance complaints submitted by UPS pilots (marked with a P) and the solutions recorded (marked with an S) by maintenance engineers. By the way, UPS is the only major airline that has never, ever , had an accident. P: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement. S: Almost replaced left inside main tire. P: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough. S: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft. P: Something loose in cockpit S: Something tightened in cockpit P: Dead bugs on windshield. S: Live bugs on back-order. P: Autopilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200 feet per minute descent S: Cannot reprod...