Summer is officially ended; but you wouldn’t know that here in Florida, where it continues to be hot and humid well into mid-October.  However, the rain is beginning to lighten up into isolated storms in the early afternoons, sometimes at night.

I lost my job with AT&T and was dropped from the payroll on September 21st.  My workload was exported to Slovakia as mentioned in previous entries.  In spite of a dozen or more applications for internal positions, I got one callback, and it was from Atlanta and they chose someone else.

So, I’m now on unemployment, scouring the web and wherever else I can find leads for openings, and I’m simply just not getting any phone calls for interviews.

LegoLand, originally uploaded by jakesmome.

Apparently these are from Legoland in California.

I encountered a bit of a problem when I switched over to Apple’s iPhone.

Before the iPhone, I was using an application called Salling Clicker to control iTunes in the background using either my cell phone or Palm T|X over Bluetooth while I was presenting the slides in Keynote for Celebrate Recovery each Monday night. However, since the iPhone doesn’t support third-party software, I could no longer use Salling Clicker unless I wanted to carry around two or three devices.

Eventually, I did some reading and learned how I could combine PHP (which is included in OS X) and AppleScript (via the osascript command line being called from PHP) to create a web-based front-end for iTunes that I could bring up on my iPhone, and then by tapping on the menus, control iTunes. In theory, I could also add menu items for Keynote as well, but the concept here is to keep things simple. Eventually I could improve this to use graphical icons in place of the text links and be able to fit more functions into a single screen without having to finger-scroll.

So, on Monday night, I turn AirPort on on the MacBook to create an ad-hoc network, connect to it with the iPhone’s wi-fi, then voilà! Instant control!

(I rotated the iPhone for purposes of this picture, it’s easier to tap in the correct location that way ).