I officially have an iBrick (an iPhone that does not appear to be able to be activated by normal human means.)

I’ve had an entertaining series of problems.  I’m still amused, but getting closer to annoyed. 

I picked up my phone last night at the Flatiron Apple Store on the way home from the airport.  It took me 45 seconds to purchase it (no line.)  I tried to activate it when I got home.  iTunes went through its upgrade cycle to 7.3 and then gave me errors that I didn’t have the right version to work with the iPhone so I had to deinstall / install iTunes 7.3.  I did that and tried to activate.  It got hung up trying to check my credit and told me I had to go to an AT&T store to get a pre-authorization code.

I went to sleep, woke up, took care of the puppy, did email, went running, and ended up at the AT&T store at 11:30.  By 12:30 I had a pre-approved credit code – it appears that the Lifelock service I use on my credit reports broke AT&T’s algorithm.

I had lunch at the Rio, sat down in my new office, and tried again.  Now the iTunes store “may be busy.”  Apparently “The Apple” is unhappy with me.  The iBrick sure is pretty (useless) so far.  I guess – per iTunes recommendation – I’ll try again later.

Amid all the iPhone stuff, Apple came out with a new product called iLaunch.  The Onion has the late breaking news at Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product.  (Thanks Dave.)

Yes – I have my iPhone.  No – it doesn’t work.  iTunes 7.3 on my Vista machine doesn’t seem to have the iPhone software working correctly (it keeps giving me an install error.)  I’ve now done the uninstall / reinstall iTunes drill – let’s see if that helps.

Update: Got the iTunes activation working with a re-install, but apparently my credit isn’t good enough for AT&T and I need to go by an AT&T store to get pre-authorization.  My partner Ryan is in the same boat.  How bizarre and unsatisfying.  I guess I’ll be leaving my  house today.

Well – I couldn’t help myself.  I’m sure this has made the rounds already and I missed it in all the hype, but this video basically sums it up.

This is the best product launch I have ever seen in my 41 years on this planet.  Just unreal.  Thanks Kimbal for the link.

We are moving our offices to Boulder.  As of Monday, our new address will be:

1050 Walnut Street
Suite 210
Boulder, CO  80302

Due to the miracle of modern technology, all of our telephone numbers will remain the same.

My office has been in Superior, CO since 2000.  We’ve enjoyed being above a liquor store and a pizza joint for seven years.  While I’ve gotten tired of telling people that “Superior is basically Boulder”, I figured out that it wasn’t really helpful to say “Boulder is superior.”

We’ve traded our pizza joint for The Rio, Walnut Brewery, The Kitchen, Amanti, and The Foundry (our namesake bar across the street.)  If you decide to go for a five minute walk, you’ll pass by a bunch of our friends, including Me.dium, TechStars, Boulder Ventures, Vista Ventures, Kachi Partners, Greenmont Capital, Google (@Last), Confluence Commons, Lacuna, Collective Intellect, Prospect Street, Tango, Applied Trust, Blink Gallery, Paul Berberian and Co., Slice of Lime, Metzger, Van Heyst Group, Ravenwood, Texture Media, Mango, and I’m sure I missed a bunch.  Of course, being Boulder, there is sushi everywhere.

We’ll miss the constant entertainment from our friends at Return Path and StillSecure (who we shared offices with in Superior), but I’m sure they’ll enjoy the nice big juicy offices we’ve left them to expand into.

It’s the end of the quarter again – do you know where your VP of Sales is?  I bet he’s standing in line in front of an Apple Store waiting for his new iPhone.  Amy got so tired of the iPhone noise that she went to Paris (maybe she thinks the lines are shorter there.)  You could just follow along from home and read Scoble’s Palo Alto line experience.  Or you could just wait in a virtual line with Fred and get an unlocked iPhone.

I’m been cuddling my Dash all morning telling it that all will be ok in the world. And the noise about the iPhone is so loud that no one in the blogosphere seems to have noticed that Facebook has been down since I woke up this morning (or maybe they’ve just banned me.)

There are two opposite approaches in the world that most software companies take when talking about future products.  1. Say nothing until the day of the release and 2. Talk regularly about your roadmap.  There used to be a third – “announcing a product but then not shipping it for a while” (anyone remember vaporware?) – but that’s faded into the background for the most part at this point (and is distinctly different than #2.)

Alex Iskold of AdaptiveBlue has a great example of talking regularly about your roadmap up on his post Work In Progress: SmartLinks WebService and Automatic SmartLinks.  I’m very intrigued with AdaptiveBlue and very impressed with the way Alex thinks.  I also love that he’s talking about what he’s working on and asking for thoughts and comments.

Greg Reinacker has done this regularly over the years on his blog, dating back to a post on January 4, 2003 titled News Aggregator.  If you want to see some fun old posts on “thinking out loud and rapidly interating your product”, look at Greg’s archive posts from January to March 2003.

Guys – keep it up!

Boulder is one of the most athletic cities in the world.  Even though I’m a marathoner and can do +/– 2,000 feet on a two hour run, I’m way down low on the fitness ladder here.  The range of sports people play are wildly diverse, including stuff like “I ran up a 14,000’ mountain and back with one arm tied behind my back and all the toes on my left foot taped together while wearing sandals and a bike helmet.”  So – it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone living here that we have excellent shuffleboard facilities in Boulder.

My friends at Slice of Lime hosted a real shuffleboard dustup session with the TechStars gang last Friday.  At the end of it they retreated to a more traditional Boulder experience – having beers on a roof deck on a beautiful night while looking at the mountains.

Amy and I watched The Matrix Reloaded this weekend.  What a great movie.  I love The Keymaker (along with the The Merovingian and The Architect).  I commented to Amy this morning that she was an extraordinary list maker (she is truly the best maker of lists I have ever encountered) and we’ve decided that if Matrix Redux (aka Matrix IV) ever comes out, she’s going to apply for the part of The Listmaker.

With this post, we continue the “Feld Job Board.”  If you are a god-like software architect that isn’t intimidated by the notion of making a real-time system work across 10,000 distributed servers, this might be for you.  Location doesn’t matter, but we are going to do our best to relocate you to Boulder, CO.

If you’ve been following along at home, you know that I’m very excited about a company in Boulder called Me.dium that I’m involved in.

On the heals of their financing, Me.dium is looking for a superstar Chief Architect.  Me.dium is building a real-time representation of all the activity on the Internet.  To build a near real-time system that scales to thousands of servers requires intense engineering at every layer.  The Chief Architect at Me.dium will work side-by-side with the CTO and is the central point of contact for network, systems, database, and application architectures.  Given the volume of data, the complexity of the algorithm, and demanding scaling requirements, this is a unique and challenging opportunity for the right candidate.

If you are interested in a role like this and think you are qualified for it, please drop a note and a resume to [email protected].  If you want to try Me.dium out and are a Firefox user (IE coming soon), just click on my invite code.