Hi all!  Today was iPhone 3G day; unless you were hidden under a rock somewhere, you were probably inundated with iPhone news.  I had a reasonably productive day although as usual on Mondays, my todo list is longer now than it was this morning.  I have this ongoing tension between "real work" (coding, documenting, etc) and "scorekeeping" (mostly emailing back and forth :).

Want to see eight months compressed into eight minutes?  Jason Kottke has a video of the entire Democratic primary.  In case you were, you know, on a space flight to Jupiter or something.

So Alejandro Valverde won stage 1 of the Dauphiné Libéré.  Leaving Thor Hushovd in yellow, by one second, with Levi Leipheimer in third by five.  This is going to be a great race.  Watch for George Hincapie too, he's close.

Congratulations to Ken Griffey for hitting his 600th home run.  I can remember when he was considered the best bet to break Hank Aaron's lifetime homer mark.  That probably won't happen - Griffey had too many injuries, and is now too old - but he's still one of my favorite ballplayers.  Likeable, you know?  Unlike, well, some others we won't mention...

So, to the iPhone 3G: Wow.  Here's the WWDC keynote if you haven't yet watched it; as always, the Stevenotes are amazing for their form as well as their content.  This one actually featured quite a bit less of Steve himself, but was still really well done.  The demos of various apps (both Apple and third-party) on the iPhone were amazing; just a year ago (right before the iPhone was introduced) such applications on a handheld would have been considered impossible.

I monitored the keynote "live" using Engadget; it was great to get such detailed information, but as usual when covering live events the "latest on top" sequence is confusing.  The only way to do this is to have "latest on bottom" so the whole thing is chronological, and then if you want, you can have "keep scrolled to bottom" logic.

Engadget commented separately on several aspects of the announcements: iPhone 2.0 software, MobileMe, the iPhone 3G details, and the impact on GPS manufacturers like TomTom.  (Slate discusses this, too.)

Meanwhile Crave comments on what we didn't get.  Multimedia messaging, cut and paste, video recording, voice command, bluetooth.  A pretty tame list, seems like we mostly got what we wanted!

I loved John Gruber's take: "The iPhone 3G seemingly only has two major hardware additions: 3G networking and GPS".  Reminds me of his classic recounting of the Chiquita IT guy who said of the iPhone: "It has a great user experience, but that’s all."  At least John didn't say "but that's all" :)

Final iPhone 3G note; you might wonder how I feel having just bought my spiffy little Centro.  Well, nothing announced today makes my Centro any less spiffy, or less little.  (See size comparison of Centro to iPhone 3G at right.)  I still have to have Sprint (due to where I live), and I still prefer a "real" keyboard for email and texting.  But I might get an iPhone solely as a portable GPS unit!

In other computing news, IBM's RoadRunner computer breaks the petaflop barrier.  Very cool.  A tad larger than either a Centro or an iPhone, however...

In October 2003 I posted the Joy of Craftsmanship, about my local bike shop mechanic; for some reason it has been linked and referred a lot lately.  It was a cool post and I still take delight in craftsmanship.