Driving down the highway on a cold night, the temperature, -21 degrees Fahrenheit. All of a sudden my radio cuts out. “Did I fuck up my iPhone during that last jailbreak?” I check my phone, it is running fine. The stereo on the other hand, not so much. “Great, now I need a new stereo.”

A few miles down the road, I begin to notice the dashboard going a little haywire. The light with a stick figure resting its head on an airbag keeps flashing, “Is my airbag about to deploy?” I begin to look for an exit, for an ill feeling had been resting in the pit of my stomach ever since I left work and if I have learned anything in this crazy life of mine it is to trust your gut. My luck, there are no exits in sight. I am not even half way through my 30 minute drive home from work.

Snow is flying across the road, visibility is low, and I begin to notice that my headlights are fading. The interior lights are fading, the headlights keep getting dimmer and dimmer, and the car is beginning to make funny sounds. The alternator has failed to do its job, my battery is dead, and now I find myself coasting to the side of the road.

Time to bust out the speed dial, I call a few and my landlord Rick is the first to pick up. He immediately jumps in his truck and makes his way to find me. The cold begins to creep in, I pull out my wool blanket from the back of my car and wrap myself. Yesterday I left home in just a fleece thinking that the weather was on an upturn. I normally sleep in Appleton after band practice on Mondays so I was not ready for the weather to make this turn for the worse. I try to keep my mind off things by taking my 365 self portrait, powncing, and looking for a tow truck on my iPhone. That doesn’t stop the cold.

About 40 minutes go by and finally my ride shows, grabbing my bag with laptop and my bass guitar I jump in a start to thaw. Rick calls the cops in New London to find out what I should do. They tell us to call the Outagaime County Sherriff’s department, who transfers me to Winnebago county, in which I lose due to a drop call halfway through the call. I call back and get transfered to Waupaca County (which was my misunderstanding). So I get back to Outagaime, transfered back to Winnebago, to find out that my car is being towed to Menasha, near where I work. Now that I have everything figured out I found myself at the nearest bar for a well deserved cocktail.

So my mother asked me the other day to give her three reasons she should buy an iPhone and three reasons she shouldn’t.

Reasons For

1. it is made by apple
Apple make some of the best products in their market and are always pushing the envelope.

2. Apple has been good about adding features to the iPhone. They just released an update the other day which added GPS like functionality to Google maps, the ability to rearrange your icons, add bookmarks to your springboard (the iPhone’s desktop), and the ability to send a text message to multiple recipients.

3. It is fun to play with. Flicking through and zooming in and out of pictures, browsing the web when you need a quick answer to some trivia, listening to your favorite tunes, watching movies on a plane, and text messaging with a full keyboard while the whole conversation is displayed on one page.

Reasons Against

1. it is made by apple
Apple is always pushing the envelope so it will be outdated within a year.

2. Apple’s updates are a bit behind the third party applications that require you to “hack” your iPhone. Apple will be opening up their developer platform for the iPhone in February. Some of the functionality will likely be crippled so some the third party apps won’t be as robust as their “hacked” counterparts.

3. It is fun to play with. Meaning that when your playtime may be cut short when your battery dies (only has happened to me 3 or 4 times) or you may get frustrated when you are away from a wi-fi hot spot and have to search the web on AT&T’s slow edge network.

My mother also asked me another very important question which should be answered the same way throughout time.

“So and So wants to get a new (insert apple product), should he/she wait until after Macworld?”

Always wait until Macworld is over if the product you want hasn’t been updated in the last 6-9 months!

Lately I have been rewriting most of the code behind http://1stat.us to accommodate the inclusion of Pownce. In this rewrite I have been shrinking the size of the scripts and cleaning up the code to open it to other features I want to incorporate.

With the new Pownce support you can view your friends public notes and replies inline with your Twitter and Facebook friends status updates. The biggest update is the ability to post to Pownce which until I have more time will only be public notes. Not only can you post to Pownce but you have the option to post the same message to twitter if you like or choose to post only to twitter. (posting your facebook status is a bit far off yet)

Currently If you want to reply to a pownce post it will redirect you to either the Pownce website or Pownce mobile depending on if you are on an iPhone or not. (Again I will change this when I have time).

I have also added a cache so that you can let 1stat.us run it’s auto refresh in the background and it will hold up to 100 of the newest tweets, notes, and statuses until you come back to it. You can do what I do and leave it open in your docked iPhone so you can see if there is any thing new.

Along with the new features I gave 1stat.us a new look. Each site is represented by it’s own color border and links so you can tell where it is coming from.

A lot more is in store for the site so bear with me as I’m doing this in my spare time.