Yes, you can, and during your three-ways you can watch YouTube, check your email and perhaps order a pizza. No, it’s not Heaven, but it may be the next best thing.  I am, of course, referring to the iPhone. Up until this week I’ve had a severe case of “iPhobia” (an intense fear of Apple products, specifically iPhones).  Of course I had already been suffering from the infamous “crack berry” addiction, but I couldn’t quite understand salivating over an iPhone. Could something really be better than my blinking light with a track ball key pad?!

Recently, I was phased into the notorious iPhone cult currently sweeping our nation and now Pavone. (Actually, Apple was the top device manufacturer in September with a 22.4% impression share.) Despite my fear of this screen with no buttons and certainly no track ball or blinking light, I welcomed the palm-sized opportunity with a smile.

My old Blackberry habits were a thing of the past. Purse dialing contacts at 2am, the soothing “Say a command” request which only seemed to  come on during meetings, my conditioned response to the blink red light and, most importantly, the ability to speed e-mail faster than I can think.

(Rest in peace, Blackberry. I will miss you.)

Before my iphobic behaviors could take over, I consulted my iPhone-using co-workers for tips on how to make the conversion before a meltdown could occur. My fellow co-worker — also a known speed-emailing addict — tipped me off to his new found touchscreen techniques.

(Note to self:  Turn sound on when typing.)

Within a few days I was talking in app lingo and downloading life-changing applications, including those which access my bank account and investments, something called “Bump,” and pretty much every song known to man.  Emails from a year ago are pulled up in seconds and my entire world is now at my fingertips. Someone else’s world is probably also at my fingers, and I’m sure there’s an app for that.

(Blackberry who?)

Yes, my iphobia has faded and a new love has emerged.  In just a week, my phone has a vast new wardrobe including hot pink and lime green skins. After two weeks, I can order food, tour the NYC subway and find the cheapest gas within a 10-mile radius. I have yet to try the three-way capability though. Maybe I can could coordinate one of those with the Blackberry.

I knew I had a problem when I reached 10,000.

I’m not sure how it happened, I just sort of accumulated them over time, thinking I’d need them someday, for some reason. Sure, I got rid of a few here and there, but never with any real regularity. Many of them — well over 1,000 – I ignored altogether, but kept them nonetheless, just in case I ever found time to give them the attention they deserved. And then, in one fell swoop, I got rid of them all.

So how does one amass an in-box with 10,000 e-mails in it? It’s pretty easy actually. My collection dated back to October 2008 and, at an average of just over 50 new emails a day, my journey to 10K happened relatively effortlessly. 

There were emails from employees long since departed and emails from reporters asking for a quote or some information for a story (those were all opened and responded to, I assure you). Strangely, there were over 100 emails from myself and more Google Alerts than I could count. There were 268 e-mails from the Public Relations Society of America (185 of them unread) and a few dozen from Ticketmaster (one of which alerting me to the fact that Led Zepplin was playing at the Trocadero in Philly, ironically, on the day I found it. Wish I had read that one when I first got it back in March.)

I sorted them by sender and began deleting large groups of emails I didn’t need. But after about two minutes, I realized I was fighting a losing battle and there was only one way to win it: Delete everything. I’d heard of people doing that before, but I always thought it was an urban legend cooked up by an overworked and underpaid IT guy who was fed up with people hogging space on the company server. 

I selected every email, unselected about 20 from the last few days which I “absolutely needed” and moved my mouse cursor to the delete “X” on my Microsoft Outlook toolbar. I hesistated for a full five seconds before deciding to scan my collection once again to make sure I wasn’t deleting anything really important. Three minutes later, my cursor was again hovering on the “X” and this time, with one quick click, I did what I had to do.

It took about 10 minutes for the actual cleansing to occur. I sat and watched the little window displaying its work in progress. I began to wonder if I did the right thing and became nervous and slightly nauseous. I decided to walk away and let my Dell finish what I started. When I came back, it was done. No more spam, no more Mirriam-Webster Words of the Day, no more Undeliverable notices from the System Administrator. I’m clean now. Going on two-and-a-half days. Now I have to figure out what to do with the 14,553 e-mails in my Deleted Items folder.

Rumor has it there’s a new search engine on the loose — or about to be on the loose. Its called Wolfram Alpha and it is being billed as a computational knowledge engine which on the surface sounds much better than the traditional search engine nomenclature that we are all accustomed to. It’s also being called the Internet’s holy grail, a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does

According to one article, Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location, nearby towns, other mountains, graphs and charts. College just got a whole lot easier. The real innovation, however, is its ability to work things out “on the fly,” according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. This is mind boggling to me. Start thinking of questions like this you’d like the answers to…

One kink in the armor ironically is a search on “50 Cent,” which caused some issues because the search engine confused currency with the rapper. I’m sure Dr. Wolfram and his boys were laughing their asses off. Back to the drawing board…. 

Launching in May, Wolfram Alpha is currently being tested by people who sign up on their website to put it through its paces. I sent an email asking to try it out. On the form it had a section for a message in which I wrote, “The worst you can do is say no.” I’m no Internet insider but I am just as curious as the next guy. We’ll see what the response is. I’ll keep you posted.

Google is working on a similar search engine in beta currently as well. It will be interesting to see which one figures how who to handle 50 Cent first. My money’s on the computational knowledge engine — it just sounds better.

Information Technology is a fickle thing at an advertising agency.  You have the “first floor” folks who work in the corporate (read: windows) world, and you have the creatives who live and work in the Mac world.  Keeping them all happy (and productive) is often more complicated than it should be.

A lot has changed in the last few years in terms of interoperability, both from the Microsoft side and from the Apple side.  The former has opened up and invested in Mac development, and the latter has pretty much stared every hurdle in the face and marketed the hell out of its products to it’s ever-loyal fan base.

Even with the economy in shambles, Apple somehow continues to succeed.  They walk a very fine line between being what’s cool, and selling out to “da man.”  There aren’t really any heated battles between the suits and jeans here at the thinkbank, despite my attempts to start a few over the past couple of years.  Who wouldn’t want to beat the crap out of the Justin Long character in the Mac vs. PC commercials?  I’m a mac-primary person and I can’t stand his smug arrogance. There’s always something that brings Mac owners back time and again to buying more-expensive, aesthetically pleasing computers.

From a technical standpoint, Mac’s and PC’s are almost the same now.  A few years ago, Apple made the switch to Intel-based platforms for their computers and essentially blurred the line completely.  You can pick up a Dell laptop and slap OSX on it with a little massaging.  As I type this, I have Windows XP running inside OSX using a program called Parallels.

Managing two technology platforms at the same time means it’s a necessary evil to not only run a copy of Windows, but to maintain a technical knowledge base of both Windows (Workstation and Server) and OSX.  Add to that programs like Quark, Adobe Creative Suite, and Suitcase on the Mac side and Office, billing software, and server systems like Exchange on the Windows side and pretty soon the limited amount of storage space in my brain starts to look and feel like a garbage truck after making it’s early morning collection rounds.

Everything that takes place in the agency from a technical standpoint has to be planned twice.  Once for the Macs, and once for the PC’s.  Will an upgrade to widget A on the server kill email access for Mac users?  What happens to PowerPoint presentations on PC’s?

And then there are the fonts.  Hundreds of them, sometimes thousands of them.  And they get corrupted if you happen to breathe on a string you find in your jeans pocket.

Fonts are the bane of my existence.  I can handle server crashes and BSOD’s and even the occasional “I dropped my laptop down a flight of stairs into a cage full of snarling tigers and I have a presentation in 20 minutes – fix it.”  Fonts, I hate.  ‘Nuff said.

Storage is also a never-ending battle, I would think for any agency.  By their nature, creative files take up a lot of space.  It doesn’t really matter if it’s a small ad for a magazine, or a billboard-sized layout. Once it’s done, it has to be saved as a JPG or similar “universal” format so that the Account Service people can show it to the client.  Let’s face it, sending out a 300MB Illustrator file via e-mail doesn’t work all that well (though people do try it from time to time).

In a standard company, a change can be made (usually) pretty quickly.  When you only have one computer platform to worry about, testing and planning take half the time. Taking a little time to plan ahead is a lot easier than having the guy who’s name is on the building and letterhead looking over your shoulder when something goes wrong.

In the end, it’s not possible to make everyone happy all of the time.  In fact, I try to be equal as much as possible and evenly distribute the pain to both sides of the battle.  Oh, and Mac’s have Blue Screen’s of Death as well – they just aren’t blue.

Ashton Kutcher — a.k.a. “that dude from Punk’d,” a.k.a. “Mr. Demi Moore,” a.k.a. “that guy you sometimes want to punch in the throat” — has made social media history by becoming the first Twitter user to surpass one million followers. He topped a mil late last night after a very public competition with CNN to see who would be the first to reach the milestone.

According to reports, when the win became official, Kutcher was surrounded by his wife, Demi Moore (567,824 followers), Soleil Moon “Punky Brewster” Frey (no idea because I can’t find her account), and Sean “Diddy” Combs (549,616 followers) via phone. CNN actually lead earlier yesterday after making several on-air pleas for Twitter love, but lost by just 1,200 followers.

To put Kutcher’s accomplishment in perspective, consider this: Miley Cyrus has 285,125 followers, Barack Obama has 844,608 followers (and hasn’t tweeted squat since the inauguration), Shaq has 666,339 followers, and Britney Spears has 965,361 followers. It’s worth noting that Oprah has just over 87,000 followers, though she only started tweeting one hour ago (seriously! she mentioned her fledgling twittering efforts on her show today). At that rate, she should pass 1,000,000 shortly after dinner.

It’s also worth noting that God has only 14,684 followers, despite His regular tweets about a hunky Jesus contest in San Fransisco and ridiculous technology (“A battery-powered battery charger! WTF!”). His son has managed just 4,222 followers. I hear he’s more of a Facebook guy anyhow.