3G Available in Downeast Maine!
When I woke up this morning I was a little bummed out because I had to come to work even though it is a holiday today. No big deal really, and it was my own choice (the snowstorm last week stranded me in Pennsylvania for an extra day, so I was making up the day), but you know how it is when you have to leave on a beautiful day and you’d rather be outside enjoying the day.
Well, as it turns out, I was greeted by an exciting surprise, and I’m glad I actually was forced to adventure out into the world this morning. I got in my car, put my iPhone in the windshield cradle as normal, and pulled out of the driveway. As soon as I got far enough away from my house to escape my WiFi signal range, I noticed the happy 3G symbol light up instead of the normal (and depressing) E symbol. I couldn’t believe it. I immediately pulled over (safety first) and launched AirVideo to try out streaming a video off of my home network (I didn’t actually want to watch anything, I was just interested in testing something that I know wouldn’t work at all via EDGE). So, I loaded up some random video and started to play it. It worked fine!
Ellsworth, Maine in Hancock County now has 3G. I’m not sure if it went live this morning, overnight, or sometime yesterday (I didn’t notice anything on the way home yesterday, but I don’t know if I looked either). However, it certainly was not lit up on Monday while I was driving home, and I absolutely did look at it on the way into work yesterday. I was able to keep streaming that video basically until I reached the head of the Island. At that point my signal strength dropped down to 1 bar, still 3G, but the AirVideo connection failed.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that Mount Desert Island got the same treatment. Or, not yet anyway. I kept that 3G symbol until I reached Hull’s Cove on Route 3, and then the phone switched over to EDGE. I’m assuming that there I’m mainly getting signal from across the bay to some tower in Winter Harbor or something. However, the EDGE coverage continued into Bar Harbor, and even when I was clearly connected to the new tower on top of The Jackson Laboratory.
I’m guessing that they are just rolling it out across the area slowly, and that it will just take a bit more time to light up Bar Harbor. I got word from a commenter, Baughmann, here a few days ago that the AT&T maps showed the Hermon/Levant area with 3G lit up only a few days ago. This was then later confirmed by a number of people who reported actually getting 3G coverage “around Bangor” this week.
So, AT&T, finally. Thank you. I hope lighting up Bar Harbor and the rest of MDI only takes days, not further months. And I can’t really say that you were exactly speedy (I noticed all sorts of extremely rural areas down in Pennsylvania that were lit with 3G on my recent holiday trip), but still… Thank you.
read moreA Goodbye To Brianna
I haven’t posted here in a long while…. Sorry, been busy with work, life, sickness, and the Holidays. I’ll get back to it though. One little project that was a bunch of fun though was this:
Brianna in Maine from glynor on Vimeo.
I wanted to learn a little about iMovie anyway, and this seemed like a good opportunity. I won’t actually use iMovie all that often, but it is good to know about it for when friends and family ask how to edit their home movies. Saying “you should buy Final Cut Pro and spend years learning it” wouldn’t be an acceptable answer, I suspect.
Actually using iMovie was interesting. There are some things about it I really like, especially the ease with which you can put together photo slideshows. In fact, if I have any “remembrance” or “event” slideshow movies to put together quickly for work in the future, I’m absolutely going to pull out iMovie to do it (or at least those sections of the final project). I wish that Apple had a similar “auto-slideshow” function built into Motion, but one that gives you a bit more control actually. Also, the audio ducking support in iMovie 11 was easy to use and worked well, especially for layering crappily recorded interviews over top of music.
Pretty much everything else about it felt clunky though, compared to a “real” NLE. Of course, I’m used to the concept of video layers and being able to easily do split edits and things like that. Precision trimming was challenging, and even though I’m using it on a 8-core Nehalem Mac Pro beast, there were times when it felt laggy and slow (especially moving the text overlays and things like that).
All in all, I’d say iMovie is a wonderful home movie video editor. It is limited in scope, but very well targeted at what the regular home user would want to do with their projects. I like how it hides the complexity of file storage from the user, and many of the text “template” and transition tools are fun and simple. The one thing I can imagine novice users wanting to do that was a bit challenging to figure out is split edits (especially placing a photo overtop of a video track to illustrate the speaker’s point). I could have possibly been “doing it wrong” (thinking too much like a NLE editor), but it certainly wasn’t very intuitive. Otherwise though, it was a fun learning experience.
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