Day 3, the AT&T people on the phone can’t seem to do anything and they’re starting to show signs of fatigue. Be nice to them, it’s not their fault. The “iPhone Activation Line” is basically down, I called this morning (Sunday) and there was a 60 minute wait. I got a person right away at the other number, while not admitting it per se, she had obviously been answering calls from distraught iPhone customers one after another.

As I said prior, Apple’s brand will survive this largely unscathed, the iPhone is just really, really astonishing. AT&T better have some heavy-duty spin ready for Monday morning or their reputation is going to go further down the drain. As pointed out by Harris, who is also waiting for two iPhone accounts to activate, “AT&T has 302,000 employees, get 50 smart ones in a room and fix this.”

I wonder if Apple had a plan for dealing with this or otherwise anticipated it. Something like a breach of contract clause which would free them and the iPhone from the shackles of AT&T? Harris again, “there’s only one CEO in America with the balls to pull that off.” At this point I really hope so.

Thankfully we’re visiting friends at their lake house where internet and cell-phone access is limited. Otherwise I’d probably be at my desk, pressing reload constantly, pissed off and muttering. Sort of like macademic. (wink wink)

Anyway, here we are going into the third day without service, if this thing actually starts working before Monday morning, I’ll be very surprised. Just for amusement, here’s what the email I got two days ago:

Phone service is scheduled to be disconnected on your current phone at or after 8:56 PM EDT on June 30. Please check your email and be prepared to reconnect and activate your iPhone before that time. Please call 877-800-3701 if you’d like to make other arrangements.

Read more of my pathetic iPhone saga.

Day two, as far as I know we now have 2 successful activations out of 8.

The newly successful activation was blocked from doing anything last night and so was essentially a first try this morning. The rest of us who tried early seem to be locked in some sort of iPhone activation queue of doom.

News of the activation problems is spreading:

• This Digg thread, AT&T Activation Clumsiness hurts iPhone, says nothing, but it will have a zillion diggs by lunch. If things don’t get better the entire Digg top ten will be iPhone woes.
• Tuaw: While some sit in raptured bliss, others await activation
• Massive thread on MacRumors forums: iPhone Activation Issues
• Engadget: iPhone activations hosed until morning?
• Plenty more here: iphone activation – Google Blog Search
• Apple support is lit up: Apple – Support – Discussions – Phone

I’m trying to figure out who this is worst for. I’m thinking AT&T, who should be spinning furiously about how the activation problems are the fault of other carriers, the number transfer system or whatever. Their market value is going to get hammered on Monday. Have fun with the brand rebuilding since you’re going to be fondly known as the POS that kept us from using our new iPhones.

I just called the iPhone Activation Line, 877-800-3701, got a recorded message and disconnected. Nice. Also tried 877-419-4500 which put me on hold, I’ll try calling again later.

It is sort of funny how the communal joy of this experience has turned into communal frustration for so many. No, it’s not really funny at all. I want this very expensive, beautiful and fully useless thing to start working.

One of the first things I tried on Michelle’s iPhone was to use Safari to access the local file system. No dice, urls like file:/// yield this:

Getting iPhones turned out to be pretty easy. I got to the Soho Apple store at 4:30pm, the line was about a fifth of a mile, stretching almost all the way around the block, up Greene St, across Houston and back down Mercer St. But Apple was ready, they’d cleared almost the entire line in 45 minutes. Two friends walked into the 5th Avenue store after 8 and walked out with iPhones in less than 15 minutes. The AT&T stores were slower, I walked by the line outside the AT&T store on Broadway at Astor and there were still nearly a hundred people lined up on the sidewalk. Walking home was somewhat nerve-wracking. The special iPhone bag just screamed “mug me.”

What has turned out to be difficult is getting the phone activated. I’m pressing publish on this post nearly six hours after first attempting to activate. Michelle’s iPhone somehow activated right away, and it is truely amazing — totally exceeding my hype-inflated expectations. However, counting six other friends and co-workers who got iPhones tonight, Michelle is the only one who lucked out and got hers to work, all the rest of us are still waiting on activation. One for eight. That’s beyond lousy.

At this point I’m too tired to be angry. I’m really disappointed that AT&T wasn’t more on the ball with this. I’m upset that Apple locks out all functionality prior to activation. I’m not the slightest bit surprised that Verizon probably had something to do with borking this up.

AT&T’s phone support people are somehow remaining chipper and polite despite an inevitable deluge of iPhone support requests. The last person I spoke with finally admitted that the transfer system was overwhelmed and it was going to be a while. Overall they’ve been a pleasure to talk to, even if they haven’t been able to help at all.

The question arises: Would we have been happier had we been unable to buy iPhones, rather than having iPhones which we’re unable to use. I’m leaning towards the first.

Anyone else near 14th St and First Avenue in Manhattan notice their water smelling funny? The smell is very chemical, sort of like chlorine but sharper and more caustic. It’s not an overpowering odor, the water doesn’t taste bad and isn’t discolored. The odor tends to dissipate after the water has been left to settle for a short while. None of this is normal and I can’t recall anything like this happening before.

I first noticed the smell in our building’s water around 7pm, then again around 10pm at the 14th St Y across the street.  The smell was still in our water at 11pm and also when I wrote this at midnight. I went for a walk at about 11:30pm and thought I smelled the same smell in various pockets around the neighborhood.

I called 311 and ended up filing ticket 1656381 with the New York City DEP.

The easiest way to smell the odor is to fill a glass with tap water and quickly smell it. If you’ve got the same odor, you won’t have to  get very close. The smell does fade relatively quickly. Our water filters seem to have completely removed the smell.

If you smelled this too, please leave a comment including your location.

While updating several machines to CS3, one (otherwise identical) machine would not successfully complete the Illustrator 13.0.1 update. I discovered a solution which I posted to Adobe’s forums, where plenty of other people seemed to be running into the same problem. Here’s the text since their support pages are not especially Google-friendly.

After spending way too many hours beating my head against CS3’s lethargic installer, I finally found a fix for the impossible-to-update Illustrator.

I should note that I’ve installed CS3 on a half-dozen machines, five of those installations were flawless (though deathly slow). The remaining one however, on identical hardware, was a disaster. (all were iMac G5s running OSX 10.4.10)

On this one machine, Illustrator would not update to 13.0.1. I’d already given up on Adobe Updater, so I was running the downloaded standalone Illustrator update. It failed every time at “application.sif”. In reading this thread, one line jumped out at me in the Console dump above: “File to add already exists. Need not add.”

Renaming the “application.sif” file inside the Illustrator application allowed the 13.0.1 update to finish. I didn’t delete the file until after the update finished, but I suspect that would work too.

Here’s the path to the file to rename/delete:

/Applications/Adobe Illustrator CS3/Adobe Illustrator.app/Contents/Resources/AMT/application.sif

To find that file, open the Illustrator CS3 application bundle (control-click on Illustrator CS3 and choose Show Package Contents). Open Contents. Open Resources. Open AMT and there it is. Rename or delete it and try running the update again.

Hopefully this works for more than just me.

CS3 is really an exceptionally solid release, but Adobe seems to have completely dropped the ball on the installer. It’s hard to describe exactly how slow it is when things work right, should something fail and need to be re-installed you can kiss your day goodbye. In this case, I ended up losing the night as well.

The care and testing which went into the applications is badly served by a lousy installer, something should be done about this in the next point release. CS3 should not be stuck behind this abomination for the suite’s entire 12-18 month product cycle.

So the problem I mentioned in the previous post was not exclusive to LiquidWeb or Mail.app. All the issues seem to be related to an upgrade to CPanel which addressed a critical security vulnerability.

A few days after the LiquidWeb problems I ran into similar issues with sites hosted on SwiftCo.

Both hosting companies handled this poorly. Customers should have been notified that there would be an upgrade. Both tech support departments appeared to be caught off guard by the mail problems. While it is impossible to anticipate every potential interaction from a system upgrade, some advance warning would allow for these issues to be dealt with more effectively. Letting us know something was coming would also invite feedback which would help identify problems more quickly and help the companies better prepare responses and solutions whatever comes up.

I came very close to firing hosts and moving sites over this, not knowing the cause of our problems had me assuming incompetence.