iPhone: Sync in Progress: 4 hrs

I have mostly switched over from my Palm TX and Blackberry Curve to an iPhone 3G as my PDA. There are still a few PDA books / medical applications that are either not available for iPhone or that I don't use often enough to justify the expense of moving and thus I'm still hanging on to the Palm TX for now. The Blackberry is history for now. I do miss the Blackberry keyboard (no surprise that the new Palm Pre has one).

I must say the iPhone has been a hit for me. I love the thing; the applications are considerably faster than on the Palm TX and that makes a pretty big difference when it comes to clinics and speed counts. Also, iPhone has some amazing applications that just aren't available for the Palm (like the Netters flash cards, for example). Skyscape has many of the major references that I think I'm going to need for Internal Medicine coming up.

The big down side to the iPhone right now are the intermittent 4 hour "Backing up" times when the iPhone sync's. Yes, that's right, 4 hours. It seems like it does this when there is a major change, such as downloading an e-book. It's not really clear. I called Apple about it, and they had no idea why it was taking so long. The data on the device doesn't take that long to transfer. You could transfer the contents of the iPhone in far less time than that over a USB connection. Apple support made me an appointment with a "Genius" at a local Apple store, and he had the earth-shattering suggestion of removing the data from the phone -- hmmm, well given that he was sure that the backup times would go down after the pictures on my camera roll came off and there was no change in backup time status-post removal of the photos, I wasn't too interested in exploring that path until Apple recognizes what the issue is and provides a fix. These long backing up / sync times don't prevent me from using the device. They are just an inconvenience. Overall, I'm very happy with my new PDA.

Art Camp

Houston has a nice museum district that offers art classes for the kids in the summer. For the past several summers my kids have been taking art classes at the Glassell School of art. They attend fir a few hours in the middle if the day and they love it!









There are several classes for kids to sign up for. They work on painting, clay schulptures, and even cartoons... whatever they are interested in.

IMG_0570_enh

IMG_0570_enh
Originally uploaded by lukner2000

Shopping at the Galleria is a lot of fun for kids and adults. The fun doesn't always stop when you come home. Here are one of my sons and one of my daughters enjoying a lollipop. Houston is a great place to go to medical school, particularly for medical students with families.

Picture (C) 2009 by Ralf B. Lukner.

iTunes Movie Rental -- no go with Windows VISTA

I tried renting a few movies on iTunes for my kids today. My hope was to view them on a Windows VISTA computer which has a nice screen. However, I couldn't get it to work; 3 Apple support people later and still no success. The Apple support people were nice throughout the process, even though there doesn't appear to be a simple solution ... other than viewing the movies on my iPhone, which I plan to try next. It will take a few hours to download those moves, but that's OK. Anyway, it's been nice being on vacation. My hope is study a lot of Clinical Medicine before I start that rotation in the fall.