Kyle Seth Gray

Being a complete nerd and Apple Fanboy™, I can't seem to sleep tonight. We already know about the watch, although more features and obviously pricing are going to revealed tomorrow. It's strange, not knowing a lot 6 months after the announcement.

I'm beyond excited for tomorrow. As I've stated previously on different platforms, I've been a watch fanatic as long as I can remember. I don't even have all the nice watches with me up at college, but I'd post a picture of all of them. I've always enjoyed collecting them, finding limited editions, or getting watches that told time in a unique way.

And, obviously, the Apple Watch fits perfectly with my obsession. It's a watch made by my favorite tech company. It's something does so much more than tell the time. But, for some odd reason, I'm still simply excited to be wearing a timepiece made by Apple on my wrist, simply for the look and feel, and the fact that it'll probably be one of the best watches I own.

I can't wait until the event.

Recently I've been doing a lot more on the web, and one of those things is Garrulous.

Me and Brian are working to try and keep to a regular schedule of weekly releases, but as of yet we haven't nailed down a single day for release. This is mainly because of our college lives being super busy, and who knows what happening in between our school and work lives and in between our time zones.

Make sure to check out http://brianhamilton.info/garrulous for all the new episodes, as well as following the Twitter account at @GarrulousFM for all the updates.

There's also a few other exciting things I'll be in over the next few weeks, including a NASA rocket test up in Northern Salt Lake City. I'll be live tweeting that, and making sure to post a lot about that event. Also look out for me on some other productions online.

7 years ago, I got a shiny, black MacBook. I was super (un)lucky enough to buy it right before the switch to Unibody everything. It came with OS X Leopard, iLife 08, and a free iPod touch because of a school promotion.

Oh, and it didn’t have any of this weird iCloud or Apple ID shenanigans.

Along with my MacBook, before the (super fun) times of iMessage, iChat was a thing. With awesome AIM support built right in, and video chat and more. So, along with it, Apple gave you a free AIM account. Exciting right?

That is, until, you find out that it came with a MobileMe trial, that ended, which resulted in a lot of weird glitches and errors over the years. Especially after the migration to iCloud.

Fast forward 7 years, and I’m stuck in a ridiculous situation. That original Apple ID was an @mac.com email address. Foolishly, when iCloud came around and an Apple ID became essential to using your Mac as a whole, I thought I would be fine using this Apple ID for my main iTunes account, (separate from my parents), and my iCloud account.

But it Turns Out™, that you can't change any @me.com or @mac.com Apple ID's:

Note: @mac.com and @me.com Apple IDs can not be renamed. If you no longer use the .mac or .me email address be sure to add your valid email address as an additional email address.

This led to a few things:
1. I don’t have access to that primary @mac.com address. I can't check the inbox at all. And if you send an email to it, it just bounces. I believe this is due to the original address being either a MobileMe Trial, or even worse, a dot Mac trial. (In writing this, I actually just found this kbase article explaining why I no longer have access to it. Third bullet)
2. For a while, all my iTunes receipts were going to this defunct address, vanishing into the blackhole MobileMe once was. Thankfully Apple has made http://reportaproblem.apple.com which makes seeing purchases easier.
3. Errors from my Apple ID not being able to be a ‘receive FaceTime/iMessage at this address’, which recently caused trouble with Continuity

And if I try to change my Apple ID even over to my @me iCloud address, or the actual email that I use, I get this wonderful error:

The best part about all this is the fact that I’ve called AppleCare, trying to see if there’s any possible way for them to switch over the Apple ID. But their advice is basically “Just start a new one, and make all your purchases on there from now on.”

But then I would have to deal with the 90 day limit for switching between accounts if I wanted to download any music/movies from my current account, juggle more passwords, and any resulting pain from trying to receive iMessages, switching iCloud accounts, or transferring over my iCloud photo library.

Maybe there’s some huge technical hurdle that Apple can’t cross to change a simple email address, but it sure is a pain having to deal with some of these glitches. And frustrating that I can’t change it at all. I hope Apple fixes this in the future.

New Years resolutions, it seems lately, have become tasks that are near impossible, difficult, and something that requires a lot of time or money. People want to lose a certain amount of weight or stop an addictive habit. They’ll continue for the first month, like the hundreds that swarm a gym throughout January, and then teeter off through the rest of the year

Some see New Years resolutions as never obtained, whimsical things. My personal goal now this year is simple: I want to read more.

In the past six months, I’ve been stuck on a single book, reading it on and off throughout my schooling months. Instead of focusing on it, I’ve always found other distractions, like Netflix, but I’ve tried to shake those kind of habits and into something more educational and beneficiary in my opinion.

I’m not sure what amount of books would be a reasonable goal, but maybe something like 2 or 3 a month. The hardest part is finding books that interest me. But I found a fun little “how to read” snippet that says:

If you aren’t enjoying a book or learning something from it, stop reading it immediately. (Flinging it across the room helps give closure.)

With the amount of books out there, there’s no time to read a book that isn’t interesting or fun for you to read. And that’s my goal: to stick to books that are fun, and read more than I have before in a year.

One of the weirdest things about Winter is what it does to you emotionally. The days are blatantly shorter, and they almost seem to just slip away from you. You’ll take a mid afternoon nap, and suddenly it’s 10:00 PM outside and you haven’t even eaten dinner.

As I’ve said in many different forms, this is my first real winter. I’ve never lived in the snow, other than going on cabin trips or passing the occasional patch of snow on the way to California. Utah is a whole different complexity when it comes to Winter. When it snows, it snows, (so I’ve been told).

Meanwhile I’m the kid from Arizona that finds a good deal on some nice boots on black Friday, wears them to work, and show them off to others. To which I get the instant reply of:

Oh… those won’t last at all once it actually snows.

Great.

Either way, despite the lateness of the winter up here, I’m excited in a really weird way for the actual snow. I live next to once of the best ski resorts ever, and there are a ton of places around to go just play in the snow, go snowmobiling up in the canyon, or playing with my sister’s dog.

Traveling is one of the best parts about the holidays. Airports, train stations, and highways are packed with people going to visit their families or just getting away from the city they live in. It’s always interesting to take notice of the technology seen and used by “normals” when you’re traveling. New tablets, a ton of Apple products, and maybe a product you didn’t think was so popular are things that I regularly see.

What’s weird though, is seeing how far behind travel companies, namely airlines are, when it comes modern technology.

This came to light recently after a trip to California with my family. After the trip, my and my sister were flying back to Utah out of Los Angeles Airport. And from start to finish there seemed to be strange things that just show how inefficient travel can be.

One of the main parts where you can see this is just the planes themselves. For a 20 year old, I’ve flown a lot. I’ve mainly flown with Southwest, and a few times Allegiant Airlines since they have great deals between Utah and Arizona. But this time we were flying back on Delta. So instead of having flight attendants reciting us the regular safety thing, which I think would’ve been way more efficient, they instead had a video playing. Which they couldn’t get to work properly.

First: the video starts out, and it plays an ad for Delta Airlines, saying how awesome they are and showing random “positions” within the company. Pans to office cubicles, pans to conference room, pans to important guy in a suit with a stapled on smile. “Welcome to our plane, we’re glad you’re on our plane, our plane is great because of all these people!”

Delta. I’m on your flight. You don’t need to advertise your flight to me. I’m not going anywhere, I promise.

But, somehow, their video playback system decided to start without any audio playing over the PA. So they stop it. And wait.

They’re rewinding it?! A VHS tape? for a brand new safety video?

Ok.

So they finally get it to play again, which makes us watch the you’re-on-a-Delta-Airlines-flight-watch-our-awesome-video-again-about-how-great-we-are video. Which was not really a nuisance, but still: can someone tell me why they’re marketing to people already on their plane? Sure, yes, you want us to come again. But this makes me want to go back to the “ancient” pre-flight check of just having people in the airplane demonstrating the safety features of this flight.

Finally the video gets to the safety part. Which, appropriately, is Christmas themed. Santa and his elves are happily showing me how to buckle my seatbelt and how to use the oxygen masks. So exciting!! And of course, during the video the flight attendants on board show the vests, oxygen masks, etc that they would’ve shown anyways if they demonstrated it themselves.

I think it’s slightly weird to have an advertisement and promo video about flying Delta Airlines when you’re on the flight. It seems a little redundant. Making us watch that, along with a safety video that took way too long to start playing is inefficient in my opinion. Take me back to a Southwest Airlines flight, then I don’t need a video screen and some weird 90’s movie that I can’t even remember. Everyone already has devices to play with and watch movies these days.