1) My iPhone took better pictures of the eclipse than my real camera.

Note: other people were very good at taking pictures with real cameras (though taking them at sunset and sunrise probably helped).

2) Covering one’s iPhone telephoto lens with aluminum foil and making an offset pinhole leads to some very interesting visual effects, both of the eclipse and the landscape in general:

3) Internal refraction artefacts are a cool way to watch an eclipse.

I’m not sure if it was the light, but I got some cool Sutro fog shadows:

The moon from 35,000 feet over Oregon:

And here’s a blind shot that worked out rather nicely: Dolores, La Lengua, Bernal in late afternoon shadow — and Sutro peeking out from the bottom.

I am unfamiliar with Sailor Jerry — I somehow doubt she is one of Barrett’s Privateers (the best drinking song EVER, rum or not.)

And I have no idea how that bikini is staying on.

Anyway, click to zoom the top image for the full panorama.

(Wait, is that actually Sailor Jerry on the left?  Or is this beverage intended for an unpictured Sailor Jerry?)

I have discovered that Panorama on the iPhone can do rather nice renderings of flat surfaces like walls, etc — I scooted down the sidewalk from one end of the mural to the other, taking about 8 shots to make this one. (For anything with depth, rotating from a single point is required unless you want the multiheaded disembodied syndrome. Damned parallax…)

It now looks like we have some empirical evidence for AT&T’s suck. PC World tested 3G services across the country, including speed and reliability.

In San Francisco, Sprint and Verizon were the most reliable — 91 and 87%.  AT&T?  61%.

(Reliability = “Percentage of 1-minute performance tests in which the service was available, uninterrupted and faster than dial-up speed.”)

The Bay Area seem to be battling it out with Baltimore and Orlando for worst AT&T coverage.

In fact, AT&T is the bottom feeder in reliability in every market listed on this chart. Apple, you need new friends.

And don’t get me started on the AT&T’s idiot coverage down 280 to San Jose. I swear it flips between EDGE and 3G every two minutes. (Not good for streaming audio.)  I think I’m going to buy one of those Verizon MiFi routers to put in my car. And I can velcro it to my belt when I’m walking around the Mission. (Wouldn’t look any lamer than a Blackberry holster…)

OK, so it’s not a scan, merely a dramatic zoom with the iPhone. But given the overwhelming support for al pastor in the burrito scan poll, I figured a short term solution was in order.

Longer term goals for R.I.B.S.  – the Research Institute for the Burrito Sciences — if I get my hands on some liquid nitrogen I could deep freeze a burrito, take picture as I make thin slices, and then turn it into a MRI-like stop-motion movie!

Added bonus – we would have unique appetizers after it thawed out.  Viva Burrito Chips!

Go QuadCamera!  Love the QuadAnimator for extracting the images into a multiframe GIF. Yet more Japanese software goodness.

• app icons don’t change positions when they are updated
• backup no longer take two hours
• podcast show a new “partially played” semi-circle icon, as well as time remaining — hooray!
• the Apple Logo of Death “too many apps for Springboard to handle” endless reboot cycle seems to have been fixed.

Things that are still bad:

• podcast chapters are not shown in the main play screen under the podcast title, just ‘chapter 14/22′.  Check out the enhanced CBC Radio 3 podcast to see why this is annoying.  Why the song title and artist?  Even the iPod does this.  And a bigger font for all titles.
• when I do go into the podcast chapter list, the only indication of the chapter is a tiny little blue triangle.  Please, please, please invert the field and text colors, and don’t make me scroll to get to it.
• still can’t click on phone numbers in calendar entries.  WTF?
• still can’t rotate Mail, yet a graphic in an email will compress text to 4 point.  Come on, guys.
• Safari still crashes regularly.  (Try loading Engadget or Gizmodo…)
• battery life with ActiveSync push is atrocious.  3-5 hours at best, thank god for Fetch + ActiveSync which gets me to at least 12 (which still isn’t acceptable compared to the Blackberry, but don’t get me started on power management…)
• Google Maps can’t handle lat/lon entries.  Thank you for the useful map of the Atlantic coast of Africa (0,0).
• speaking of Google Maps, could you at least show me coastlines / city names / major roads if I don’t have a network connection?  Showing me a green dot in the middle of a blank field is worse than no GPS at all…
• show me new mail summary on the slide-to-unlock screen like you do missed calls and SMS…
• hooking up to car stereos that have USB ports blanks the screen — are you guys NUTS?  Thank you for your two-line monocrome display and useless stereo controls and no album art and no podcasts…

This release really should have been called 2.0.1, since the background notification obviously got pulled and delayed.

New features I want:

• mail overview — let me see all mail in all accounts at once
• stream music to an Airport Express
• WiFi music sync.  Free Podcaster!
• SlingPlayer.  Oh, god, please give me SlingPlayer.  But I fear AT$T has crushed this one.  (Psst, Sling, provision me one, I won’t tell…)

Here’s to 2.2 in December.