Just got a mac mini at work, and I’ve gotta say its a cool little piece of hardware for the money.  Is there anything Apple doesn’t do right (I know, there’s a list: that hi-fi thing, the newton, their earbuds (and by extension the new shuffle), etc). 

On another Apple fan boy note, Isabella just broke Joanie’s LG Env2, which meant we needed a new phone.  We could have paid Verizon some coin and extended her contract with them another few years, but decided to just break our contract with Verizon and get her on an iPhone.  Being on a shared minute plan will actually save us enough to pay off the cancellation fees and the cost differential between an iphone and a replacement verizon phone in about 6 months.

I’ve got an asp.net mvc app I’m working on, as well as another few iPhone apps I’d like to write.  Also, the format of this blog changed, I’ve consolidated all my hosting under one account.

• I’m still happily married, still have two kids
• I still work at Toolbox.com, still digging it
• I twitter a few times a day, and post here a few times a year.  that’s bad.  I should work on that.
• I have been getting back to working out two or four times a week, but haven’t been on a bike outdoors in way too long.
• I read In Defense of Food, a really interesting look into the ‘Wester Diet’ that I’m trying to follow.  Probably a blog post in its own right.
• I bought an iMac.
• I just signed up for the iPhone Dev program.

Yeah, those last three are pretty significant for me technically.  See I’ve been a windows programmer my whole career.  I’ve written CA-Clipper dbase apps, Win32 apps, MFC, Atl, console, .Net C# winforms, Asp.Net, etc.  I’ve dabbled in php and perl, but by and large, I’m a windows Dev.  So why the switch?

Here’s the thing:  When I come home, or when I get a call from my wife, I don’t want to worry about who clicked on what email in outlook, or surfed by a hacked site with drive by download code.  No thank you.  I’ve played with Apple hardware before, my dad has had them, and I’ve had the odd g5 or mac book pro on my desk at work from time to time, but never as a primary box, and certainly never to code on.

This Mac flies.  The simple tasks that should be simple, but aren’t in Windows, are simple on this.  All my usb stuff works, the backup utility (time machine) is actually fun to use, safari and Firefox work great, and Parallels emulation actually runs windows vista and my quicken install faster than my previous three year old Dell, and lets me code windows apps when I want to.  The Dell has been re-purposed as an edubuntu / ubuntu running a proxy/filtering/firewall solution, sitting in my daughters room.  It runs ubuntu a heck of a lot better than it ever ran windowsXPMCE.

So tonight I was working on an iPhone app that uses the built in accelerometer, but the iPhone simulator, while really useful in other respects, doesn’t support simulating the accelerator.  So I applied for the developer program.  Yes it’s 99 dollars, and yes, I probably won’t see a profit on the next great iPhone app (although given what sells, maybe my stupid ideas aren’t that terrible).  But I figure getting a bit of skin in the game will make me committed to actually developing something saleable, and at the worst, I’ll have a cost of doing business to use at tax time.

step 1: change the desktop background image to a static image of my most important client’s ad.
step 2: put a global exception handler into my program.
step 3: fix it.

Honestly, why would you pick Windows, and .Net to develop a mall kiosk application?  And if you did, wouldn’t you run some tests?  Granted this isn’t life or death software here, but it is the life of this business.

The error up close

Mall Advert Fail

my gamer card

playing with people I actually know makes the game about 3 times more enjoyable. anyway. that’s about it.

Anyway, sorry for the short rambling post, just wanted to blog something.  anything.