An iPhone Odyssey: My voyage to technological supremacy
(An editorial note: ComicMixers have no doubt noticed our intrepid crew tends to share certain fannish predilections. Among these is a lust for Apple technology. No less than five of us either ordered or purchased iPhones the day the thing came out. This is the first review; we’ll probably be referencing our experiences in the future. Now we can easily text message each other while getting our Doctor Who fix.)
I decided last week that I needed to have an iPhone. The hype had finally gotten to me, the slick GUI, the web features, all of it. This was further enhanced by my awful experiences dealing with Verizon Wireless and my Motorola RAZR breaking during normal use more than once.
It was no surprise that I reached to Apple in a time of need. Every computer I have ever used on a consistent basis has been an Apple from my parents’ Macintosh SE back in the late 80s to my current MacBook Pro. The thing I believe sets Apple apart from other companies is the concern they have for user experience. This is reflected everywhere from their more elegant operating system to their excellent customer service. The only serious problem I ever had with Apple was my parents’ Power Mac 8100, which had a power supply problem they were unable to diagnose, and plagued the machine for over a year.
The Internet was abuzz with rumors and speculation about how difficult or not difficult it would be to get an iPhone on the first day. I firmly believed I could wait at either Apple Store location in Manhattan and get an iPhone with no problem. However, I thought that waiting outside all day in the heat would be decidedly unpleasant. I turned my attention to Garden City’s Roosevelt Field Mall. It’s an upscale mall with an Apple Store and is the tenth largest mall in the country in terms of space. Certainly they would have room to enclose the line in comfortable air conditioning.
I could not have been more wrong. Standing in line at Roosevelt Field was largely a nightmare. The line was entirely outside on their southern parking garage structure with the overwhelming majority of the line on the top level of the structure, exposed to the elements. The heat and sun exposure got to me, leaving me with moderate sunburn; I was far from alone in that. To treat customers lined up to purchase a $500 item like that is ridiculous. They had space inside and they refused to use it to accommodate us. Mall security defended themselves by saying this was the same way they treated people lining up for the Playstation 3 but those lines were overwhelmingly eBay scalpers.
At 6 PM the lines were gradually let into the store and by 7 I was on my way back to Manhattan with an 8 GB iPhone. The Apple Store had plenty and I believe that one can still walk into any Apple Store in the area and buy one as we speak. Was it stupid to wait in line all afternoon for a product with a seemingly low scarcity factor? Probably, but sometimes it’s fun to be the first person you know to have something cool. I was ready to activate my phone through iTunes and be on my way.
Activation was, unfortunately, another arduous process. The AT&T server seemingly buckled under the strain of all the Mac addicts and stories of long struggles to activate were prevalent. It took my phone nine hours to activate. The iPhone will do nothing until activated so I had a $600 brick until 6:30 Saturday morning.
At that point I could use all of its fantastic abilities except for receiving calls. I was playing around with all of the wonderful iPhone features but every time someone called me I had to dig around in my bag for my old RAZR to answer the call. My number was not transferred to my iPhone until about 11:30 AM Sunday. It’s unclear whether this was a problem with AT&T or Verizon, but it was another inconvenience in a weekend filled with them. Everyone but Apple really screwed up this process and I can’t help but wonder if Apple doesn’t need to be more vigilant in choosing their partners including the malls they choose to put stores in and their cell phone network.
The iPhone, incidentally, is wonderful once it works. I urge everyone in need of a device that does all these things to go buy one as soon as possible. I hear they’re still plentiful at Apple retail locations, although AT&T owned stores by and large sold out Friday night.
Fresh from the set of Transformers, Tyrese Gibson sat down with the boys over at IGN and spilled his guts on how much he wants the titular role of Marvel’s Luke Cage big-screen project. 
They don’t draw comic book covers like this any more. And, well, that might be a good thing.
Here’s a new picture of Harrison Ford and his on-screen son Shia Labeouf from next May’s unnamed fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise (working title: Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods). From the looks of it, the story seems to take place in the late 50s/early 60s and gives us an old and very gray Dr. Henry Jones Jr.
Jane Jewell, Executive Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 
IÂ’m spoiled already. Seven weeks into this column, and I yawn when I see a DVD with Âonly one audio commentary. It wasn’Ât even seven weeks when I succumbed to the ÂCriticÂs Disease, judging each new entertainment against the one I had seen the day, week, month, or year before.
So now I feel I could have been a bit more adamant about the editionÂs charms, especially with this siteÂs readers. Maybe I should have mentioned that the extras come in two categories: the film, and the comic book. And it is in this latter category where the glory of this version truly lies. There are new, lovingly created docs Âeach more than an hour long  on the history of the comic from the 1960Âs until today, and on co-creator/artist supreme Jack Kirby.
I thought it would be pretty darn polite if we created a weekly spot here at ComicMix where we could post the links and contacts for some of the things we cover during the week in our trice-weekly Big ComicMix Broadcasts. Let’s jump right on what went down over the last few days:
America’s First Super Patriot. You can see more & even order issues 
It was great taking with all three creative partners in 12 Gauge Comics’ Occult Crimes Task Force. The Trade pb of the first series is out in stores now, but you can see a lot more on the 12 Gauge Website 
My home-base city of Fort Worth, Texas, has since the 1950s, complicated its countrified essence with a set of class-and-culture bearings that range from the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition – America’s “So, there!” riposte to Khruschev and/or Tchaikowsky, dating from a peak-period of the Cold War – to four heavy-duty art museums of international appeal and influence. The local-boosterism flacks crow about “Cowboys ’n’ Culture!” at every opportunity, with or without provocation. But apart from the self-evident truths that Old Money (oil ’n’ cattle) fuels the high-cultural impulse and that the cow-honker sector finds chronic solace in the Amon Carter and Sid Richardson museums’ arrays of works by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, these communities seldom cross paths with one another.
