Results tagged “cellphones”

According to this woman, who was in line at 3 a.m. this morning at a Verizon store in order to be the very first owner of a Motorola Droid phone in SF, this is "the phone [she's] been waiting for."

Brilliant pop culture blogger FourFour gives us this brilliant montage (which must have required, like, months of work) in which he edits together the myriad moments from recent horror film history in which the screenwriters got lazy and employed the no-cell-signal excuse for why their characters are totally screwed. Enjoy. (See his earlier "not here to make friends" reality TV montages here and here.)

Five months after a liver transplant, Steve Jobs is alive and on stage at Apple's "It's only rock and roll" event this morning. The focus is on music, and the release of iTunes 9, but if there are any huge announcements you can find them here in the next half hour. We're not physically there, but as a service to you we're going to give you a few highlights as we receive them from the fine nerds at Endgadget -- and for the truly Apple-nerdy among you, you can click over there for their moment by moment live blog.

Many AT&T customers, including the legion of iPhone users out there, may be aware of some wonkiness with their wonder devices of late. Dropped calls, delayed voicemails, inability to access voicemail, inability to tweet their Muni woes, etc. It's been a shitty month or two, and it all comes down to the fact that Apple and AT&T struck that single-carrier deal a couple years back, and AT&T can't handle the data traffic anymore. As the NYT reports today (complete with slide show), AT&T is scrambling to expand their network.

Gone are the days of the technology and currency-free oasis of drugs, dust and art both whimsical and questionable.

Hundreds of pages of research on the risks of cellphone use while driving, conducted in 2003 as part of a long-term study that was never given the go-ahead by the government, have been released to the public thanks to the work of a consumer group. The documents include a draft letter, never sent, to then Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta regarding the ongoing risks of hands-free devices. As the New York Times reports: "That letter said that hands-free headsets did not eliminate the serious accident risk. The reason: a cellphone conversation itself, not just holding the phone, takes drivers' focus off the road, studies showed." So yeah... to paraphrase a certain bumper sticker: Get off the fucking Bluetooth and drive.

We're not sure if you've noticed, but as of yesterday, the new cell phone law has gone into effect. That's right: no more talky while driving, unless you've got a hands-free device for your phone. Yesterday, while we were out, law breakers were being pulled over left and right. It's a great way for the CHP to fill up those ticket quotas.

Round 4 goes to Dennis Herrera

Shamelessly pilfered from Valleywag, we came across this footage, above, of Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin frying cell phones at Machine Project's Fry-b-que.

Delay, delay, dealy in the deadly tiger case

What's on the cell phones of those who survived the recent tiger attack?

They still make phone books?

Someone in Vallejo (or San Francisco?) thinks he's freakin’ hilarious flooding 911 with crank calls. The crank caller has been using a donated cell phone, perhaps one that was donated to the homeless (why do the homeless need cell phones?), to call in fake emergencies.

We at the Gothamist network would like to express our heartfelt wishes to the people of Minnesota in the days after their tragic bridge collapse. We're not trying to discount the severity of the accident by making note of it in opposition to our usual -Ist lightheartedness - we just wanted to take a moment and recognize those affected last week.

What with Paris Hilton's release earlier this week and the upcoming celebration of American Independence (sorry, Londonist!), we've been thinking a lot about freedom. Freedom to vote, freedom to choose, and most importantly, freedom to blog. Here are a few things we're happy we've been free to blog about this week.

Here's a roundup of today's news

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend...

With it being 2007, there's a whole bunch of new laws that are either to start right now or will be slowly phased in. Some of them are big deals, some of them seem fairly obvious, and some of them make you wonder what the hell.

The SFPD has put out a missing persons bulletin on a local Noe Valley family, who haven't been heard from since last week.

Remember that bad neighbor dude Bob Bertone in Visitacion Valley who terrorized his neighborhood with loud music, mysterious gunshots, explosions, and lots of junk in his yard? Well, his house caught on fire Wednesday when his water heater ignited a bucket of gasoline that was sitting too close by. The neighbors did a pretty good job of not looking too smirky as they were interviewed. Incidentally, Bertone ran for the Board of Supes in 2000 (for District 10) but lost, and this is the second fire at the location.

There sure are a lot of fans of The Decemberists, judging by the fact that they're about to play tonight and Friday night here at the relatively giant Warfield Theater. If you haven't heard their new album The Crane Wife, we're giving you a chance to win a copy of it plus a 20"x10" lithograph signed by all 5 members of the band. We'd show you a photo of the lithograph if we had one, but just trust that it'll be a collector's item regardless. That's one thing jumping to a major label will buy you: fancier schwag. (Contest ends 10/25; winner will be notified via email.)

Well, on the down side, they're now charging so much for cable cars ($5) that no one wants to ride them anymore. On the up side, no one's going to be able to ride them anyways -- at least not today! Cable car service on both the Powell-Mason line and the California line are down all day after alarms went off on both lines, indicating possible damage to the cable.

Shanghaiist probably knows a little more about China than the Chicago Sun-Times. Giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one. The city does to have a music scene. Don't even front like they don't. They also have Dorito bananas and white guys shopping for wives. What they don't have is any more tolerance for jaywalkers.

Sometimes we get burnt out on politics. Sometimes, in order to watch TV, we actually turn on the TV. Sometimes, mainly when Google on our cell phones allows us to lose a baseball trivia bet more quickly than we ever thought possible, we get a little bitter about the vast resources of information on the web. In those quiet, still moments we gravitate towards blog posts that are about nothing more than introspection and personal growth. Antics so Blonde obsesses over her tax return, while Geese gets all in aflutter about the giant hole of suck that is MySpace. Amy LeBlanc gets all blissed out at her boyfriend's birthday celebration, the same as XT. Jennifer at Mental Hijinks lovingly documents her field trip to Pixar, with some more pix over at Kimi's post. Brimful reminds us of why we were English majors and swooned over poetry with her own beautiful post and Joel writes a piece that examines the politics and emotional growth behind receiving the Advocate in a plain white plastic wrapper and makes it cut to the quick. And sometimes, we just want to be left alone.

Then, somehow, despite the rain, we're done with introspection. We want to read totally inaccurate, absolutely false writing and believe it totally. We want fiction. Yes, it's marketing, but we don't care. If it's good, it's good.

Finally, after our cleanse, we're ready to face the world again. Ready to accept Microsoft into our lives, ready to go hiking or talk politics. We're ready for literature, rain and the apocalypse. We're ready and reading for you. SFist Jacob, contributing. "Morning Clouds on Bay Bridge" by Thomas Hawk.

A battle has been raging behind the scenes at Wikipedia. No, it's not over copyrights or veracity or how well an article explains its premise. It's over whether or not the entry on San Francisco's Marina District should include an explanation of the term Marina Girl (and, by extension, Marina Guy). The main arguments for deletion is that it's a stereotype and that the content of the article is heavily biased against the Juicy Couture clad set at The Matrix. But if you look at the standing article at the SFGate, it describes to a tee the Marina Girl without actually mentioning the term:

Today the apartment buildings, shops and restaurants seem to be bursting at their seams with beautiful, young and fit 20- and 30-somethings. The singles scene is hopping on Friday and Saturday nights, with lots of fresh-faced postgrads with cocktails in one hand and cell phones in the other. Union is arguably the best street in the city to window-shop the hours away on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and, a few blocks down, Chestnut has an incredible variety of high-quality restaurants catering to every palate.

The Mission Hipster is a twenty-something self-proclaimed 'artist,' usually seen drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon at dive bars when not riding up and down Valencia on their track bike. They take pride in their relative poverty (though more than a few have wealthy families), working jobs as baristas or bike messengers. Their signature look includes a fauxhawk (male) or short bowl cut (female), aviator sunglasses, an ironic t-shirt, ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors. They can be found in great number at Slim's or the Bottom of the Hill on any given weekend where they prefer the sounds of acoustic guitars played by troubled singer-songwriters and upbeat post-punk-pop. They often avoid the upper Mission on those same nights, complaining that it's overrun by 'slumming yuppies from the Marina.'

Here in the SFist Tech Labs, we're committed to two things: science, and our readers. So we'd never let anything like the debilitating headache we've been going through for the past 18 hours or so keep us from bringing you the links to tech news you deserve. While we read the symptoms on BBC's health page, you can follow along.

All the tech news this week is coming from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, where the giants of the industry are assembled to play the slots, get drunk, and convince you to give them more of your money. In addition to the multitude of cell phones, MP3 players, and increasingly ginormous plasma and LCD televisions, all the giants are making a commitment to downloadable content and video on demand.

Today we visit with an actual professional in the world of blogging, Eric Lin, who writes for Phone Scoop, the place to go for the latest and greatest news in the world of cell phones. Eric managed to carve a nice niche for himself with his mobile phone fetish when other techies we're all about PDAs, which might have helped him survive the dot-bomb in one piece.

We ordered a $100 steak at Olivetto. Bistecca alla Fiorentina, it was described, "Niman Ranch Beef Porterhouse Steak with 'bianca di Spanga' beans and Spinach, White Truffle Butter (for two). $100" We found it a silly idea at first, something a decadent Russian mafiosi would order to celebrate scoring a contrabanded crate of Vertu cell phones; something a young Wall Street up-and-comer from the midwest would eat in a Hollywood movie to depict the corrupt and depraved ways of the big city, before returning to his wholesome father, a teacher and union leader, and his earnest mother, a nurse, and marry his high school sweetheart.