rob’s blog

People are often surprised to hear that their old iPhone will make their upgrade free or even pay them.  There are a few tricks to helping improve your chances of making money each time Apple releases a new iPhone.  I thought I’d describe how the process works and my recent experience.

There are a number of tricks to upgrading an iPhone in the United States.  Most revolve around the fact that AT&T subsidizes the cost of new iPhones.  So your old iPhone may be worth as much or more than the cost of a new iPhone if you’re up for a two year renewal.

I’ve been lucky to have every model of iPhone break on me at least one time (except the 4 which hasn’t failed yet) and have every phone replaced by Apple.  My iPhone 3G broke twice.  The first was my now well-indexed bit on the white screen of death.  In the second phone, the sleep switch stopped working (a common problem with early iPhone 3G).  Technically, I’m on my fourth iPhone in just over two years.

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Just saw MIA’s Born Free video for the first time.  It contains life-like violence and is difficult to watch.  But it yields a striking combination of sound and imagery with a purpose. Boing Boing has info on the tune.  Amazing how this artist can flex from a $100 music video of her dancing in lasers to a complex short film with plenty of cash behind it.  [watch on vimeo]

Here are two shopped photos of me from my trip to a family gathering on our farm in Eastern Oregon.  My Uncle Kip owns all 200 acres of the beautiful and isolated Sequence Gulch Ranch. I have some great viswo footage of a trip out to the dock in the middle of the pond, which I plan to stich together using the iPhone 4, iMovie app later this week.

Aaron Fechter the President of Creative Engineering, Inc has been reprogramming a working animatronic bear-band set up.  It looks like the company created it for a line of restraunts similar to Chuck E. Cheese.  He’s currently taking cash bids to do syncing or “choreography” for the band members.

The way the performance is filmed and presented are awesome.  Shakey prolonged shots, quick pulls outward.  The overall video quality is low and the colors look a bit washed out.  Everything is blurry and the bear with the guitar has a spooky shadow.   Great media.