A lot is going on for me in the next week. Most importantly, my wife and I are expecting our baby pretty much any day now. He’s officially due on Thursday the 17th. Next, our first wedding anniversary is on Monday the 14th. We’re hoping Baby will allow us to enjoy that day outside of the hospital. Ideally, anytime between Tuesday and Thursday is a great time for him to arrive (our doctor goes on vacation the 18th thru the 21st!).
I guess the last big event for me priority-wise, although it could be the first to occur, is the launch of the iPhone 3G on Friday the 11th. Yes, I will be in line. Karen and I had considered not switching over to AT&T yet, but one of us needs a Nebraska phone number. We agreed it should be me, since she will be home mostly with the baby and more or less just chats with family. So right now, I’m getting the iPhone on Friday. Karen is going to stay on Verizon for a few more months until we get our finances after baby sorted, then we’ll go up to a FamilyTalk plan and get her an AT&T phone. Strangely, she doesn’t seem too interested in an iPhone. :\
With the Baby being the featured event, and me being as geeky as I am, I have a few cool preparations made. Recently, Apple announced the MobileMe service, which allows wireless, untethered syncing of email, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks across all of your Macs, PCs, and your iPhone or iPod touch. We are all ready for MobileMe, mainly to keep our accounts on each others computers synced, and also for my iPhone to maintain synchronicity at all times with my MacBook. Another sweet feature is a drop-dead easy, and I mean stupidly easy, Web Gallery for photos.
The plan goes like this:
- I have a Web Gallery for the baby set up already. Right now some ultrasound pictures and a preggy picture of Karen are in there. When he is born, all I have to do is snap a picture of him with my iPhone, and it will upload in mere seconds to the Web Gallery.
- I have a mass email pre-drafted in my email account. It has all the addresses already put in, and the message is typed out with placeholders for the baby’s vital statistics, such as time of birth, length, weight, etc. This email also has a link to the Web Gallery in it.
- After I get the photo uploaded, I can open the Mail program on the iPhone, fill in the placeholders on the draft, and hit send. Boom! In mere moments everyone we know will have been notified of our baby’s birth (and his name for those non-family members) and will get to see a picture!
Now, if he happens to arrive before Friday, process will be a bit more difficult and longer, as I will have to take the picture with a camera, transfer it to the MacBook, go down to the hospital’s cafeteria to hop on their wi-fi, then upload the picture to MobileMe, then send out the email from the MacBook. Yeah.
Pfffft! I would much rather stay by Karen’s and the baby’s side instead of trekking to the cafeteria! I think my wife and child would prefer to have me there, too.
Hopefully this plan can be executed according to…plan. :) If it isn’t, oh the well, the email will be sent in due time. But wow, how geeky and cool of a story could this be?
We’re getting super-excited to meet our little boy. I’ll make sure to send out an email on Friday with my updated phone number, and my MobileMe e-mail address so you can whitelist it from your spam folders. After the birth email comes out, feel free to call my iPhone (if I have it by then). If you are family, I will definitely answer if I am able to do so. If you’re in the friends category, I’ll try to answer, but don’t be surprised if I let it go to voicemail.
Apple, Baby, Celebrate Good Times, Rant, iPhone
