5:45 a.m. at the Apple Store in the Maine Mall

There are about 20 of us lined up along a red-velvet rope in front of the store, two hours before the doors open at 8 a.m. for the launch of iPhone 4S.  Since this is not my first Apple rodeo, I know the drill and am the only person here with a chair.

The scene was very different at my first iPhone launch, the original one on June 29, 2007 at the Galleria Mall in Cambridge, Mass. The store opened at 5 p.m., and I showed up at the mall 14 hours before that. That put me first in line for a great time, including an interview for an Italian TV show that I never saw. Six months before that, at MacWorld Expo, I’d seen the late Steve Jobs–hurts to write that–introduce the original iPhone. I remember with fondness how he toyed with the huge audience like a cat with a rodent. He showed three images, making it look as if Apple was going to introduce three new devices. When we realized we’d been had, that the phone, iPod and web browser would be all in one thing called an iPhone, the roar of delight was electric. Ah, those were the days!

…I was settling in for a leisurely writing session in my beach chair when the blue-shirted Apple team slid open the glass doors and came out to greet us with cheers, awkward hype, and a very organized system for prepping the sales. Each of us in line has had a chat with a rep, providing details of the phone(s) that we are here to buy. This gets us a card for each phone that we’ll present in the store, so I have one for Darlene’s white 16 GB model and my black 32 GB. We’ll both be switching from AT&T to Verizon, which we left four years ago because Verizon didn’t have the iPhone. I’ve been pleased with AT&T’s customer support, but the coverage is just too spotty. Sometimes in my studio in Cambridge I have to move to the window to keep a call from dropping.

So I’m glad that we happened to be in Maine for this iPhone launch. I was so excited that I ended up driving in the rain from Ocean Park to the Maine Mall yesterday at five a.m. I now call this recon. Not surprisingly, I was first in line, pleased with myself until I took a closer look at the poster in the window and saw that the launch was today.

There are now about 30 of us here in line, kept under control by one policeman.  The Apple team are chatting us up like it’s a cocktail party.  Darlene just called from bed to ask how it’s going. Since I have my two white cards, I was able to assure her that I’ll bring home the bacon this time, and she will have her new phone soon. I’ve been trying to get her excited about the Siri personal assistant, but she’s deeply skeptical, because of our uneven experience talking to our 2012 Ford Focus’s SYNC system.

There is something big missing here today, with the passing of Steve Jobs. Someone on Twitter suggested that iPhone 4S could mean “for Steve.” I’ll go with that.

I remember the first time I saw an Apple computer in 1984, when I was living in Wyoming. I was on a business trip to Cody and stopped by a computer store where I was able to type for a few minutes on a what was probably a “Fat Mac,” the 512K version. Compared with the IBM compatibles I’d looked at, the Mac’s screen was gorgeous. The font was elegant, thanks to a calligraphy class that Jobs audited at Reed College, I learned just recently. I was hooked and became an Apple fanatic until a corporate job detoured me to PC Land for a decade. In retirement, it was an iPod that lured me back, purchased at Radio Shack just for curiosity.  Loading the iTunes software on my Dell felt like I was visiting a foreign country that seemed oddly familiar, and beautiful. So I moved back to Apple and have been a happy citizen ever since.

Folks in line are friendly here in Maine, so I’m going to wrap this up and leave my blogging cocoon. Thank you Steve Jobs, wherever you are. I like to think the current New Yorker cover got it right, and that St. Peter checked you in on an iPad for your new digs.

Photo by the second guy in line, Vassilis Siomos

I arrived at the AT&T store on Denver’s 16th Street Mall at 4:40 a.m., and–whaddya know?–I was first in line.  I cased the joint yesterday, when a guy at the store assured me that if I arrived at 6 a.m. that would be plenty of time.  The problem is that I woke up just before 4 a.m. and knew there was no hope of getting back to sleep.  Since I live two blocks from the store, and I could see lines forming across the country via Twitter, I figured I might as well amble over here with my lawn chair and briefcase full of gear.

I’m sitting across from the Paradise Bakery & Cafe, where a single worker is talking and singing to himself as he prepares coffee cakes and muffins for the day.  “Do it right, do it right,” he was chanting to himself earlier as he moved at a manic pace while listening to something in white earbuds.

This iPhone launch will clearly be a far cry from the circus of the original iPhone debut on June 29, 2007.  I was first in line that day at the Cambridgeside Apple Store in Cambridge, Mass., arriving at 3:30 a.m. and waiting until evening for the store to open.  Now that was fun! The second guy arrived just a few minutes after I did, and the line grew all day long, covered by media and buzzing with a geek-party vibe.  When the cops finally raised the grate to the store, I strolled in like a conqueror, cheered and applauded by Apple employees including one kid who was literally jumping up and down with excitement.  I made this video to immortalize the event.

I knew last year’s iPhone 3G launch was not going to match the original, but I showed up at Cambridgeside early enough to be third in line.  There were massive server problems, so I couldn’t even get my phone to work until later that afternoon.

The second guy in line showed up at 5:10 a.m. He’s just moved from Chicago to Denver for a six-year surgical residency.  This will be his first iPhone. He’s in for a treat.

It’s beginning to dawn on my how tired I am, so I’ll save the ruminations on why I do this sort of thing for later.  The short story is that it’s fun, and that I love the crackling spirit of innovation which Apple keeps serving up to its fanboys.  There is a nap in my future, and this week’s episode 48 of The Kindle Chronicles podcast.  I brought both my Kindle 2 and the DX in case I have time to do some reading.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote took place this morning 1,266 miles from my studio in downtown Denver, but through the wonders of livestreaming and Twitter I beamed myself there for the fun. My excitement about the new iPhone 3GS and new iPhone operating system 3.0 kept building and building.  I was oohing and ahing right along with the crowd, adding my own HyperTweets to the waterfall of similar postings from around the net. Here are a few of my favorite things:

With the coming-soon Zipcar app, I’ll be able to use my iPhone 3GS to reserve a Zipcar in Cambridge, Mass., from one of three parking spaces all within five minutes’ walk from our house.  I could actually do that now, using Safari and the standard Zipcar web site.  But with the new phone, when I get close to the Zipcar I’ve reserved, if I have any confusion about which one it is, I’ll be able to honk its horn from my iPhone.  And instead of using my Zipcard plastic card to activate the unlocking mechanism, I’ll do that with my phone.  How cool is that?

The new compass will be nice, because I have a terrible sense of direction, seldom knowing north from south, etc.  And the improvements to the iPhone camera are huge for me, especially the addition of video.  I’ve been using a Flip camera and loving the ease of taking good video and plugging the camera into the USB port of a computer for upload.  Now the uploads will go directly from my iPhone to YouTube and elsewhere.  And I’m going to love the increase in resolution on the still photographs, because I take lots of iPhone photos with my current 3G model and am very happy with the resolution of the results.   Longer battery life sounds great, thank you. And voice activation, cut/copy/paste, Spotlight searches of the whole phone – lots to get excited about!

I was already planning to camp out at the Cherry Creek Apple store on June 19th, as I did for the arrival of the original iPhone in 2007 and the iPhone 3G on July 11, 2007 2008.  But therein lies a problem.

I tried the Apple Store immediately after the WWDC presentation concluded and was surprised to see I could order an iPhone 3GS for delivery on June 19th, with free shipping.  Well okay.  I’d sort of miss the scene of a product launch and the long wait with a line of fellow gadget-geek boys and girls.  But still, what wasn’t to like about having a 3GS show up here at my Denver home that day?  So I began the order process, which seemed simple and elegant, as only Apple can do.

My expectation soured, though, when I saw a message on my screen that informed me I could not order a 32GB phone for $299 until July 12, 2008 – 23 days after the June 19th launch, because July 12th marks the one-year anniversary of the AT&T contract which I began last year when I bought the 3G on the first day it was offered.  Grrrr.  Nice way to treat your crazy evangelical early adopters, Apple!  Depending on the information I’ve seen around the net, I would have to pay either $200 or $400 more to purchase the phone on June 19 versus waiting for my contract to reach a year on July 12.  So it looks as if I’ll be waiting and grumbling for 23 days, a day at a time.

It’s all silly and irrational, as a friend pointed out on Twitter.  But I confess to obtaining something like real joy from the arrival of these new iPhones. I was at the keynote in 2007 when Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone.  It was like being at the creation, and I was convinced the iPhone would change everything.  It did.  Now, 40 million units later, Apple is changing the game again with the addition of video and all the other features.  I’ll wait, no doubt about it. And for the first time I won’t be among those getting the first iPhones.  So what?  I don’t know.  It’s like missing the start of a really great parade.  Or arriving late to a tornado.  Yeah, I’ll get one. But it won’t be the same.

Steve Jobs never showed up at the Moscone Center in San Francisco today, disappointing many of us who figured he might come off of his medical leave full of health, to announce the new iPhone.  That was sad, and a bad omen.

By mid-July I’ll have gotten over today’s roller coaster ride from elation to disappointment, and I’ll be teaching my new 3GS to recognize my voice and open the door of a Zipcar hybrid.

Meanwhile, the new Kindle DX is scheduled to arrive in three days.  Amazon likes to surprise us with early arrivals, so maybe it will be here even sooner.  What a week!

PS. I want to thank my sister Stephanie for subscribing to this blog on her Kindle for 99 cents a month. This really tickled me and has provided an extra incentive to post more regularly than I have in the past.  Welcome, loyal reader!  If you have a Kindle and would like to join her, please click here for a free 14-day trial.

I added the free app Pointer to my iPhone, which enables me to control a PowerPoint presentation using the iPhone and my MacBook Air. I haven’t figured out how to draw boxes on the computer screen with any accuracy, but there’s obviously some Wow Tricks to learn with this little beauty.

Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) is blowing my mind with possibilities for Kindle publishing.  I first tried it by uploading A Poet’s Progress at Bennington, made up of my first assignment in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program. It’s now available for 80 cents, which honestly? I’d say it’s is overpriced.  If you can wait a couple of weeks, I plan to take that one down and replace it with a new version that will contain all four of the “packets” I prepared in January through April of 2001, for my first teacher, the poet David Lehman.  This will be a 23,000-word tome of comments on the reading that David assigned me, as well as original poetry.

What delighted me this morning was the realization that I could insert photographs into the Word document, which enabled me to amplify the text with scenes from New Zealand, where I was traveling my first semester of the Bennington low-residency program, and of the Djerassi Resident Writers Progam in Woodside, California, where I spent several weeks finishing a book-length poetry manuscript. The photos will look okay in black and white on the Kindle, and they’ll look even better in full color on the Kindle iPhone app.

Because I purchased the $9.99 Kindle edition of Joshua Tallent’s excellent  Kindle Formatting, I could probably have made my way through this Word document on my own, setting styles for different levels of headlines and section headings so the booklet will look good on a Kindle.  But I emailed Joshua and learned that he can take on the project for his reasonable fee of $60 an hour, and he estimated it will take two hours or less to whip my manuscript into shape.  When it’s ready, we’ll submit it to the DTP and within 48 hours, it will be available on Amazon for purchase for 80 cents. To learn more about Joshua’s Kindle formatting services, click here.  You can also hear him as my interview guest in Episode 22 of The Kindle Chronicles podcast.

Speaking of Amazon, I’m very happy to see that they have lowered the price of this blog from $1.99 a month to 99 cents a month. This means that I will keep subscribed when my 14-day trial ends!  I feel silly spending even a dollar a month to subscribe to my own blog, but I’m here to tell you that I definitely will be receiving that much pleasure each time a post magically and wirelessly travels from WordPress on my MacBook Air to the paper-like eInk screen of my Kindle 2.  This pleasure reminds me of the delight I’ve always felt using blogging software.  There is the text entry box, where the writing gets done, and then there’s the attractive finished product, which I can see using “Preview” in WordPress.  I find that I proofread better when I’m looking at the Preview, so I switch back and forth toward the end of the writing.  And by the time a post hits my Kindle, my words have been transformed yet again, to something more substantive and, somehow, real.

Darlene and I took a walk to Kinko’s this afternoon, so I could do some condo association prep for a hearing we’ll have Wednesday, when a homeowner will appeal a fine related to our building’s Pet Policy.  After the Kinko’s session, we settled in at Peet’s Coffee on 16th Street for an hour or so, reading our Kindles.

With a busy week ahead, it was wonderful to wander through Sunday without a plan and end up so grateful for what turned up.