We’ve spent hours glued to the tube, watching the Olympics lately. We’ve Tivoed nearly everything, so we’ve been able to catch some of the lesser known sports like: BMX racing, shotput, badminton, table tennis, shooting, trampoline, and weight-lifting.

The other night we were watching wrestling when we heard a familiar voice… it was Rulon Gardner. Rulon won a gold medal in wrestling and became quite a media sensation. Brett and I met him at one of my conferences where he served as our keynote speaker. Since I used to serve as the onsite contact for the keynote speakers, I got to know them as well as you can in a few hours.

In honor of the Olympics, Brett and I thought we’d share our Olympic moment, which included a headlock by a very strong and fun guy! And yes, I did get to hold the gold medal. Quite nice.

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Brett sent me a link to this innovative and cool stop-animation video, called Western Spaghetti. It’s worth a watch.

Check it out: http://www.eatpes.com/western_spaghetti.html.

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I got this photo in an email today. It made me laugh. I really love rainbows, and you know how hard it is to find the end. Nice play on words too!

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Brett’s spent some time reviewing all the cool new apps on iPhone iTunes Application Store.

Here’s his initial list of best free iPhone applications:

• Apple Remote (control iTunes locally)
• Pandora (streaming tunes customized for you!)
• WeatherBug (obvious)
• PhoneSaber (be Darth)
• VoiceNotes (for recording)
• Midomi (song identification by humming, recording, typing, and more)
• AIM (’bout time)
• Still trying out Loopt (see where your buddies are, relative to you using GPS…)

That’s all for today, folks. I expect Brett will be finding many new cool applications to play with on his iPhone. The three-week wait (since he sold his old iPhone on E-Bay) is over. Praise the Lord!

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Brett and I headed out at 7 a.m. this morning on a mission to snag him a new iPhone 3G. First we went to the AT&T store (where Brett successfully got his iPhone last year). Last year, he was #36 in line. This year, we were in the 50-60 person range. At about 7:20 a.m., an AT&T employee came out and told us they only had 40 iPhones, so we were out of luck. (I’ll refrain from sharing my thoughts on Apple only supplying 40 phones on the rollout day!)

Then we went to the Apple store at West County Mall. The line there was about 160 people when we arrived at 7:45 a.m. We waited. I began my first efforts to Twitter on my iPhone (which I’m not upgrading due to my “everything-works-fine” hacked iPhone on T-Mobile.) Brett and I shared the phone, reading RSS feeds. I checked my email. The Apple store passed out water and coffee. I wished they had donuts.

One hour passed.

Two hours passed. The line slowed to a crawl as something obviously went wrong. We all guessed that the West Coast traffic was bringing the system down.

Three hours passed. I got antsy… and hungry. I started planning the letter I wanted to write Apple on how to better manage their activation process.

Four hours passed. I bailed out on the line and got Chick-Fil-A sandwiches for Brett and I. Yum. Then I left again to do a little shopping.

When I got back from my wanderings, Brett was could see the end of the line. I waited with him again.

Around noon, we were ushered in to the store. (At this time, they were taking 1 person at a time, and there were still about a 100 or 150 people behind us!)

They asked us questions for “elligibility.”

Then we got into another line. I watched some people wandering around, lingering like they were waiting for something big to happen. A fashion-impaired woman walked aimlessly with a euphoric smile, a black phone headset hanging wistfully from her ear.

An Apple store rep took walked us over to a counter by the iMacs and asked questions about our status as an AT&T customer. Photo ID and social security number requested. Brett had to sign. She brought his new black 16GB iPhone G3 and swiped his card. Then, she put his new “machine” into pretty white iPhone bag.

Five hours passed… we were on our way out.

I am convinced I should win the “Tech-Geek Wife of the Year Award for 2008″ for standing by my man for nearly 5 hours, literally!

And can someone tell me: why couldn’t we have done the phone activation on the Internet prior to coming to pick up the phone? Wouldn’t that have made the lines more more quickly?

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