Planet Abell

Update, Feb. 19, 2010: I review the Slingbox iPhone 3G app on Epicenter: " Hands On With the Slingbox 3G iPhone App: Ahhhhhhhhh… " For me Independence Day came a day late but not a day too soon: like my forefathers I have exercised my right, my duty to throw off the shackles of terrestrial television. That is to say, I finally got my Slingbox iPhone app working. It took a long holiday weekend to get to this task, even though I was among the first to buy this shamelessly overpriced bit of software. My love affair with the Slingbox and all that it represents began at the discount table of a Staples many years ago, where I scored what is now an ancient device which seemed to offer greater freedom than proprietary alternatives which were in great numbers then, particularly one from Sony. My model SB220-100 has served me well, as has the company (in the main); last year, when the device was well out of warranty (even if it ever was for me) they sent me a replacement power supply ...

Mad Men is one of my favorite shows, so much so that I don't even trust it to the perfect television nanny that is TiVo. The series is an iPhone obsession I treat myself to for my Metro North commute, which runs parallel to the Ossining-to-Grand Central Terminal route Don Draper take when he bothers to go home (which isn't often, as it happens). I don't need to explain the obsession to people in the know. But I have some personal reasons, too: It takes place at a time in my native New York City that was a Golden Age, during the afterglow of World War II when the Greatest Generation was giving way to a bunch of Boomers who would shepard this nation to a period of great prosperity and fairness. It was the Boomers who decided that Gays were not "perverts" -- as described by one Mad Man -- and who changed the world just enough so that a black man who's greatest realistic aspiration might have been to operate an elevator at Sterling Cooper could now imagine bec...

I did a couple of appearances on MSNBC Saturday morning -- I was meant to do three, but the car they sent for me (I love saying that) was late. The subject was Friday's release of the iPhone 3G, which required me getting an iPhone 3G, which took more than six hours and which I chronicled on Twitter . The talking head thing was all new to me, but the experience is not unfamiliar to the smallish crowd of local regulars: you are well dressed only from the waist up (one woman actually wore shorts) and you sit in the green room chatting amiably with each other, including your on-air adversary if you have one. Every once in a while somebody comes in and says, "You're up" and you are led to a sound-proof room with a chair and a table and a light in your face (think: film noir police station interrogations). There is a camera pointed at your face, you are told by the control room the name of the person whom you will greet in the next few seconds as if you are old buds and th...

From the tuaw.com liveblog at the iPhone line at the 5th Avenue (NYC) Apple store: 4:18. The line goes back to Madison Avenue, all the way around to FAO Schwartz. Stretching from one expensive toy store to another.