The dream that was the second generation Drobo was too good to be true. As you may have read, shortly after I got my Drobo, then they came out with the second generation Drobo that offered faster speeds and a quieter fan, two of the biggest complaints among Drobo users.

When Kevin Rose offered up 100 more coupons for $100 off the new Drobo, I couldn't pass it up again. I wanted to get rid of the noise and slowness my current Drobo offered me.

Now that it has come in and I've had some time to use it, did I get what I wanted? Nope. Here's a small breakdown:

• Speed: I was expecting a far greater jump in speeds going from USB 2.0 to Firewire 800. Instead, I only see about a 30% increase in speeds. Shouldn't I be getting close to 80MB a second of transfer speeds? I'm getting more like 25-30MB. The increase in speed is barely noticable.
• Noise: It's still noisy as crap. In fact, it may be worse. Instead of a soothing fan sound, I get that sound, plus a low-level hum, kind of like florescent lights. Very unpleasant.

Now the question is, do I put up with the new sounds and disappointing speeds? Or should I send it back for a refund? It seems it just was not worth the upgrade.

Sorry I made everyone's feed readers freak out. Since I am a delinquent, I let my Dreamhost package expire and the entire Kevin Cupp online empire was taken offline for a few days. It was sad. I was mostly sad that I couldn't work on my new project, my moblog.

What ever happened to moblogging anyway? It used to be the thing to do when cell phone cameras came out. It's not like people stopped caring about what people have to share. Look at Twitter, Flickr, Facebook...heck, look at the internet. The only thing missing is moblogging. We need another moblogging site like TextAmerica (now offline) which was a social network, much like Twitter, where you could post an image from your phone, people could follow each other and comment on photos. I know there's sites like TwitPic, but it's just not the same, and I don't want to clutter Twitter with that stuff. I think photos would be just as interesting, if not more interesting, as Twitter.

Since I'm not up for tackling the project of creating such a large site, I'm just going to create my own moblog the way I want it set up. So far, it's going well, I just need to put the time into it to make it awesome. I'm uploading by email to Flickr to a pro account I use strictly for API purposes for other sites. Then I use PHP to grab the photos I upload and display them how I want and incorporate Disqus comments for them.

Why not just use Flickr to manage everything? I tend to think of Flickr photography and moblog photography as two different types, and I don't want to clutter my Flickr account with crappy iPhone images when I have nice images from my DSLR on there. Also, only Flickr users can comment. Plus this way, I can make my moblog do whatever I want and look however I want.

This might just be a silly idea and I'll start neglecting it because I was too delusional to see it wouldn't work, but once I get an RSS feed working, maybe put it in your feed reader and I promise I'll try to make it somewhat interesting. And if you're interested in my code, I'll probably give that out as well. Let's bring back moblogging.

I got an iPhone! That's pretty much all there is to say. Now, I'm working on writing some moblogging software for the web. For those of you who remember TextAmerica, it's going to be pretty much like that, where you can take a photo, email it in, and have it show up on your site and people can comment on it. There's a few services out there kind of like that but it's not exactly how I want it, so I'm going to build something out of Flickr's API since they support email uploading, and going to try to use Disqus for comments. I hope to have it up in the next few days. It'll be pretty sweet, at least I'll think so.

Yep, that's how my 2.0.1 install is going. How is yours going?

This is looking like a rare problem. I posted the issue on Apple's discussion boards. I've relaunched, rebooted, re-logged in, tried another computer, nothing works. If I find a solution, I'll post it here for posterity.

UPDATE: Still wasn't able to upgrade through iTunes a day later, so luckily, Taylor just got her iPod Touch in today and was able to download the update just fine, so I just took the 2.0.1 firmware off of her computer and restored it to mine. Janky and not really a fix, but if you're one in the small percentage who's having this problem, find a friend who has the firmware. I'd post it here, but you know, legal issues.

I hate checking voicemail and always have. You call in, the voice lady takes forever to read the timestamp and the number, both of which you probably already know. Then you have to listen carefully while someone tries to gather their thoughts and talk at the same time. Sometimes you may not be able to understand something they said because it was garbled or they didn't speak clearly, so you're left confused or even having to listen again. In a nutshell: voicemail is inconvenient and inefficient for the listener.

These days, everyone has SMS and email on their phones. This is the best way to reach me. It's easy for the sender to enter in their message in a short, concise format, and it's something you can casually do. With a phone call, you're shutting yourself out from the world around you, you're making noise, and if you're the one calling, you're making the person on the other end fumble around for their phone in a quick haste to answer it, and it may even be an inconvenient time.

Text doesn't have to be answered right away. Say you're in the middle of ordering something at Peet's, a situation which would normally be really annoying to get a phone call. You can let them leave a voicemail but then you have to check it, and you also have to listen for your coffee to be ready. Listening to two things at once is difficult, for me at least. With text, you can simply let it arrive and read it when you're ready while still being able to hear your coffee order. Also, college students will understand how annoying it is to get a phone call in class. You can't check voicemail in class unless you're sly, and if you're like me, you want to know what the call was about so you'll know what kind of action is needed. These may not be the best examples, but you get the idea: phone calls and voicemail are inconvenient and non-practical.

I feel like I'm doing someone a favor by sending a text message. It's like saying, "Hey, I know you might be busy right now, so here's a simple message that won't take too much of your time and focus, and you can get back to me at your convenience." People are usually good a returning text messages in a reasonable time frame, so time-sensitive messages should work fine.

Solutions to cutting out voicemail? If someone calls and I don't answer, I'd rather them just hang up so I see I have a missed call and I'll call them back. Maybe cell carriers can implement a "Press 1 to request a callback" type system, where if a call back is necessary, you'll know. A lot of times people call for no reason, making the callback awkward because they're all, "Oh, I just called to blah blah blah, no big deal."

Another solution came out of the recent iPhoneDevCamp. Andrew reported the top 5 apps to come out of the program and one of them was an app that transcribes your voicemails to text:

Brilliant idea. People who still want to stick with the old style of communication can still leave their voicemails, and I can still consume them the way I want to. I'm excited for this app and hope it works well and comes out soon.

With the rise in text messaging, I'm sure cell carriers are loving the extra fees they get to charge, which are quite ridiculous when breaking down the actual size of the data being sent. This is another issue that needs to get resolved, or at least someone needs to show me how these prices are justified. But that's a rant for another time...

UPDATE: Actually, I just got an iPhone, and visual voicemail is so amazing and pretty much eliminates most of my problems with voicemail. In fact, I kind of like getting voicemail now because it's so easy to listen to now. Anyway, this post still applies to the old way of checking voicemail.