I love the iPhone. The design, the features, the functionality—it's as close to a perfect little device as you can get. Unfortunately I can't summon up the same level of enthusiasm for AT&T. Although AT&T agrees that, yes indeed-y, I'm in their coverage area, 50% of my calls consistently have been dropped since the day I brought my shiny new baby home. Some days I'd be better off sending homing pigeons or signaling from the roof with a lantern like Paul Revere.

When I emailed AT&T about the situation, I received a lovely response informing me that AT&T doesn't guarantee "in-vehicle or in-building coverage." This gave me a moment's pause, as you can imagine. No buildings and no cars? That leaves...what? The backyard? Imagine my neighbors' reaction on seeing me at 10 o'clock, chatting with my mom in the middle of our street in my night gown. "Oh, hey ya', Bob! Coverage is great tonight. Love the new lawn gnome."

If I were AT&T, I probably would have put that bit about the guarantee at the bottom of the email, not the top. A defensive stance never goes over well with irate people who have just paid you for a service you can't deliver. Instead, like some political personalities who shall go nameless, they would garner a lot more good will and maybe even some sympathy if they just came right out and admitted "Alright. Yeah, we screwed up. The coverage sucks. But we're working hard on it. Honest. Just give us a little more time."

Common sense tells us it's a waste of time and energy to deny the obvious. Much better to just acknowledge a mistake, take your medicine, and instead spend your energy on correcting the problem. But common sense doesn't seem to have a lot of fans these days. Just look around.
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For the past month or so, I've been playing around in my sandbox with an elastic layout. Things were coming along pretty well, when suddenly I threw a fit over the increasing slowness of my web host, DreamHost. I've been with them for about 3 years and we've had our ups and downs, but lately my patience has worn thin.

The middle of a redesign is probably not the best time to switch web hosts. But considering this is primarily a playground, I've thrown caution to the wind and uploaded the whole darn dev site to Media Temple. I've heard a lot of good things about them and am hoping like mad that they're true.

So a word of warning while this half-constructed heap of code changes home—watch for teetering beams and chunks of falling plaster.

This ought to be interesting.
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I thought if I started acting like a real developer, maybe it would improve my code. So, I decided to install and start using MAMP on my Mac to develop locally. Mind you, this programming stuff doesn't come naturally to me. I had to ask a few questions now and then of some of my developer friends, but eventually I sort of got it working. Now I've got another problem with MAMP. Somehow it's causing very strange problems in Adium, my IM client.

Here's a screenshot of Adium when I first fire it up:

And here's another after just a few moments:

I can't figure out what's wrong. Anyone have any ideas?

It's been a good, long while since I wrote a blog post. Between work and family, there just hasn't been time. I've been super busy for months now, but not without some benefits.

For one thing, I've been learning tons. I've been working on picking up more PHP and delving a bit more into backend Drupal work, as well as doing more accessibility and usability work and learning more about user experience design. I guess you could say I've been branching out every which way.

As a reward for all that hard work, I'm going to DrupalCon in Boston. Although the conference doesn't start until tomorrow, Jon and I flew in for a long weekend to soak up some history and not a little seafood. I can now state pretty definitely that the Union Oyster House has the best clam chowder I've ever eaten, and Mike's Pastry has Boston Cream Pie to die for. Not to be missed.

It might be cold here in Boston, but with good food and four whole days of Drupal learning, it's weather I'm happy to put up with.