Category Archives: Life

Eastbound and Down

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May 29th I will be taking flight to the East Coast with a singular purpose, to see you New Yorkers. This jaunt will be followed by a trip down to visit my friends in Washington DC before heading back west June 6. It’s a short trip but I plan to fill it with oceans of fun.

New York City Skyline

I would love to see you all my New York City friends and my Washington DC friends on this trip. I think the easiest way for us to do that is to choose a night to all meet up for dinner, drinks and debauchery. There are only a couple of nights in New York City that this can happen but I will also be free during the day for coffees, lunches, museums, etc.

Take a look at that schedule and let me know when you’re free to hang out. Feel free to suggest things I should do, places I should eat and bars where I should have a drink. As far as New York City, I still have never seen a Broadway show, gasp, and have only been to a couple of museums. So if either of those whet your appetite, let’s make it happen! Looking forward to seeing you guys.

Washington DC and the White House

As far as my time in Washington DC, well I have a lot more of it. So let’s get creative about the time we share together in The District. I’m even tempted to add on a night in Philadelphia but with the tight schedule I have, that might not be possible.

My Rant to Inside Columbia Magazine

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This is in response to an email I got this morning from Inside Columbia Magazine:

I simply cannot believe you guys are obfuscating the unsubscribe options from your emails. This is a violation of MailChimp‘s terms of service, which I am sure you already know.

White text on a white background is a deceptive way of hiding the unsubscribe option as well as your physical address. This is a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. I recommend whoever is running your email marketing read up on the FTC‘s rules. I’ll be as kind as to provide a quick link.

Here also is an excerpt:

Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future.

I’ll even provide a screenshot of what I was sent so you can see the issue at hand.

I would not have unsubscribed, or blogged this situation, had you guys followed the rules. I’ve also informed MailChimp following instructions on their abuse page.

-justin
http://itsjustjustin.com

iPhone 4 won’t update to iOS 5.1

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UPDATE: It’s been fixed! Thanks to my friendly and always helpful Twitter friends @jdyates, @mrfrank505, @ropiko, @richmackey, @josephjaramillo, @Apple9511and @shuether for their suggestions.

Turns out the fix was as easy as using a different computer. Turns out (and I only sort of know what I’m talking about here) the issue came from when I used an iOS jailbreak tool to unlock an iPhone for my trip to Europe and Saudi Arabia. It redirected the activation from Apple to Cydia which is why I got the error message below.

There are two fixes, either edit the host file through Terminal or just do the update on a different computer. Since the command I had to fix through terminal didn’t work, I tried the update on my MacBook Pro and it worked like a charm!

iPhone 4 will not update to iOS 5.1

So I have this iPhone 4 which is in absolute perfect physical shape, only has three months of use yet after around iOS 5 Beta 3, the phone stopped working correctly, the digitizer stopped working reliably. That is, sometimes after unlocking the phone, you could not swipe to unlock, the screen was remapped and a swipe to the bottom didn’t do anything, sliding across other parts of the screen would move the unlock button to a degree but never enough to unlock.

I had to keep this phone unlocked 24/7 or risk having a phone that was unusable. I eventually was forced to buy the iPhone 4S. Since I was running a beta version of iOS and couldn’t undo that after Beta 4, Apple would not honor the warranty.

Do you have any suggestions? DFU restore and regular iTunes restores do not work. I’ve tried numerous times to upgrade this phone to the latest version of iOS 5 and 5.1 with no luck. I have even wiped it from its built in restore feature but that hasn’t worked.

Hopefully someone reading this will have an idea as I am all out of them!

Some New Work on the Horizon

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I haven’t really posted much photography work here in the last long while. Heck, I haven’t really been posting here with anything lately. Life has just gotten that busy I guess. I’ve taken hundreds, maybe even thousands, of photos in the last few weeks for work and for fun. It’s about time I start sharing them with you

Big Ass Fans

This one is actually one from a work shoot I just came from. These fans run at incredibly slow speeds. However, because they have such a massive blade span, they move some serious air, keeping a giant warehouse at a stable cool temperature. Also they are called Big Ass Fans, a name has never been more appropriate.

J Vineyards Makes it Right

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A few weeks ago I wrote about a negative experience my friends and I had at  J Vineyards & Winery in Healdsburg. The short story is that we were part of a Wine Club special event tasting where employees were uneducated about the wines and food pairings, they lacked attention to detail and their guests and the “sparkling only” wine shipment was overpriced and handed to me not with pride but apologetically.

A few days after sharing that experience I was contacted over Twitter and the phone by Carolyne, a representative of the winery. We talked at length about what happened, what should have happened and what will happen in the future. Carolyne was kind to listen, apologize and provide me with the confidence that myself and others will not be dealt the same poor service ever again at their tasting room. Continue reading →