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Note: some screenshots are quite obviously simulated. )
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Note 2: this is my first blog post in over three years, feel free to read my ancient history if you like. )
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Note 3: All said and done, the comments and Internet-fame have been awesome. I'm moving on though. If you're interested, check back for more blog entries from me, or check my website at happywaffle.com .) Myself and two compadres,
Ryan and
Mark , are in Chicago (each of us for the first time) to attend
Brickworld , the world's largest Lego convention. Yes we're a bunch of dorks. Yes you totally wish you were here too.
Last night, after seeing Second City improv, we ate at a pleasantly sketchy dive bar in uptown Chicago, where the food was mediocre and the characters were questionable. I definitely had my iPhone while at our table, and I definitely did NOT have it (whoops!) when we were 100 feet down the street.
I raced back into the bar, not even particularly concerned, but it was gone like baby. In less than five minutes, with very few people in the small place, my beloved JesusPhone had managed to vanish into a black hole. Our waitress was sympathetic, and I left a number, but I was immediately glum about my prospects of seeing it again.
So I felt like about zero cents, but then we giddily realized that I had *just* activated the brand-new
Find My iPhone service. Even better, Mark Had a Sprint (yes, Sprint
) USB dongle Giving him Internet access over 3G on historical MacBook Pro Excited to try it out, we hopped onto me.com and clicked the Find My iPhone link.
"Your iPhone is not connected to a data network or not does have Find My iPhone enabled." Well, crap. I guess Are all bets off if the thieving person has the bright idea to turn the iPhone off. Oddly the phone still rang When We Called it, suggesting it wasn't
off, BUT, one way or the Other, It Was Unable to broadcast Itself to Apple so I Could track it down. We sat a message to the phone - "CALL 512-796-xxxx" - But no luck. The MobileMe website Said It Would send me an email When the message Had Been displayed, but no email arrived.
Dejected, we prowled the bar one more time, but it wasn't that big a place and there weren't any places for the phone to be hiding. Game over. We went back to the hotel and I was disconsolate. This morning we checked again with no additional luck, and when Mark tried dialing the phone around noon, it *did* go straight to voicemail. The odds of ever seeing the phone again were slim to say the least.
After lunch, while at the Lego convention, I checked my email...
Holy crap! I jumped back to me.com and clicked Find My iPhone again, and to my absolute shock and amazement, it displayed Google Maps and drew a circle around
Medill St. :
The block was about four or five miles west of the bar. It was too perfect to be a random glitch.
I sent a second message to the phone, slightly more to the point: \iPhone poor sat lost in some random Chicago neighborhood. So we packed my Lego creations, tossed Them in the rental car, and Drove back into town from Wheeling. Mark reestablished His trusty Sprint connection and as we Drove, Every five minutes, I refreshed the location. The phone wasn't moving. It Appeared to Be in a row of buildings on the north side of St.
Medill
Medill Along We parked and hopped out. It Was a Puerto Rican neighborhood. On the south side of the street, an outdoor birthday party Convening WAS, and Some of the Participants eyed three Honkeys Questioningly us. Now at this point I Had no clue how fricking Would we find the phone, did I think I'd find it under a bush? I Certainly Did not plan to go door-to-door, nor did I expect the cops to regard a blue circle around the entire block as sufficient cause for a search warrant. I sent a third message to the phone that I'd been formulating in my head: \d To Our shock, somebody Answered! Immediately I Passed the phone to me, But by the time I Could say hello, the person on the Other Side Had hung up. DAMMIT! I Knew We Were on the trail, But as we walk up and down That block of Medill for the third time, I Had no idea how we'd get any closer. I Picture the Possibility of driving away from the neighborhood around Knowing my iPhone WAS. Than It Was more frustrating WHERE HAVING Had no idea it WAS. I pulled up Google Translate, and sat in 4th message to the phone: "Please return the phone or we will contact the police." The email Confirmations Were Immediately Arriving in my Inbox, Meaning Showing Our Threats Were on the phone's screen in real time. Then
an amazingly lucky thing Happened. I refreshd the iPhone location and the circle
moved
, to the corner of the block, and shrunk in size to maybe 100 feet across. I waited a minute and refreshed again. The small circle had shifted southward down Washtenaw.
\to the left and right, as I approached the intersection.
I clicked Refresh. The circle moved again. It was directly over the bus stop on the south side of Milwaukee Avenue.
I yelled and pointed.
Now, put yourself in the shoes of the iPhone thiever who will momentarily be entering the story. You might have told yourself, \d at your local bus stop, expecting to lose them. And they converge on your location from across the intersection, the bald one with the laptop yelling and pointing at you. You probably think the angels of death have found you.
He sheepishly waved me over. 
\ to giggle.
I shook his hand - Lord knows why I did that - and the three of us walked off. We laughed triumphantly, adrenaline racing, feeling like the Jack Bauer trio. (Disregard the fact that we'd just left a Lego convention.)
I'd been amazed that the phone had enough battery life to make it through the night and still beam its location; the moment its battery was dead, then it would be game over for our little scavenger hunt. I unlocked my phone and saw almost 20 missed calls. And then, at that very moment, the iPhone shut down and displayed the \f finding it like this. We want to pitch a reality show to the Discovery Channel: \e or not, it still obeys the ringer volume - so you can still, regrettably, keep it from playing. Also it's a lighter daintier sound effect than we'd prefer for locating something by sound. Hell, I'd prefer it if I could take pictures, play my iTunes library, and tase whoever was holding it.
- There's no real reason MobileMe shouldn't push the location to us; needing to refresh the location repeatedly on the webpage was silly.
- None of this would have been possible without Mark's 3G USB dongle for his MacBook. The biggest single problem is that you can't use me.com from the iPhone, meaning you can't find one iPhone using another. Hopefully Apple realizes this. 
Responses to some of the comments made:
- The references to race are for two purposes:
First, to be self-deprecating about how little we actually looked like a bad-ass iPhone tracking team;
Second, to establish how much we stood out in this particular neighborhood.
Besides a bit of self-mockery, I don't think I said or implied a single negative thing about anyone's race.
- Yeah, we could have called the cops, and they probably would have yawned. Granted, in retrospect, chasing after a thief isn't the MOST prudent thing to do, but in the moment we had our adrenaline going and sure as hell weren't just going to watch the little circle recede into the distance.
