iPad App Review - What I Use

I blogged once before about some of my favorite apps on the iPad, but it's time for a reassessment of what I play with most often:

Kindle - love it.  I read at lunch most days.  I try to find a big book so it lasts a while.  So far I've read A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Gone-Away World, and I'm finishing up Pandemonium.

Zite - I like the news feeds, particularly the programming feed which prevents me from having to pull together my own set of feeds.

Pulse - good for reading the Daily Afternoon Randomness on The Chive.

Facebook - I do most of my Facebooking from the iPad.

Ping.fm/Twitter - I do most of my Twittering from the iPad.

Exoplanet - because you never know when a new planet might show up that you want to emigrate to.

Dropbox - file sharing between all my machines. I use it obsessively.

Netflix - for obvious reasons.

Words with Friends - sometimes I have up to half a dozen games going.  95% of the people on Words with Friends suck.  Kyle is good.  I've met a few people who are challenging.

NS Hex - took me quite a while to figure out this challenging game.

Small World - don't play it as much as I used to, but a solid board game.

Wesnoth - if you like Might and Magic style games, this is pretty much the only one.

Carcassone - good rendition of the board game.

The Game of Life - better than the board game.

Tichu - cards games have better longevity than most games on an iPad.

Kingdoms - my latest obsession.  Incredibly difficult for a game that takes a few minutes to play.

Shredder and iChess Pro - pretty much equivalent for Chess purposes.  I usually lose.

Toontastic - for Eryn.  Teaches story making/structure while allowing her to create her own cartoons.

Food Apps - I like Epicurious (after it got rid of some of its bugs), AllRecipies (not as much depth, but very easy to use), BigOven (GREAT recipies), and Whole Foods.  Pooteewheet can attest I make a wider variety of food owning these apps.

Calorie Counter - down 32 pounds and counting.

Pandora/iPod - music

Star Walk - pretty, and always fun to come back to.  Coupled with the NASA app, these are a nice set.

Eryn Picture Break

Some recent photos of Eryn taken while we were visiting her great grandmother, Nomi, in Buffalo.

Happy Eryn...


Which quickly turns to crazily annoyed Eryn...


Eryn and her cousin(-ish type person) playing chess.  She's not particularly patient when it comes to chess, but she starting to be better than Pooteewheet or myself.  She's been going to chess classes after school once a week, and she can talk about things that make no sense to either of us.  My only hope is to play more Shredder on the iPad.

But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man...

While we were in Chicago and wandering around Lincoln Park trying to find Lou Malnati's, we passed Oz Park.  They have interesting sculptures of the characters from the Wizard of Oz, although a careful look at them gives you the feeling they'd be pretty creepy at night.

The Tin Man.


The Scarecrow, looking a bit more like the Scarecrow from Batman then like the character from the Wizard of Oz.  I like it that he needs a plaque explaining that he's that Scarecrow, as you'd expect someone else in Oz Park.


A closer picture showing him with his diploma of Thinkology (ThD).

Wizard of Oz: They have one thing you haven't got: a diploma. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitartus Committiartum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of ThD. 
Scarecrow: ThD? 
Wizard of Oz: That's... Doctor of Thinkology. 

Know Her? Why, Sometimes I Poker!

My father-in-law invited me to play quarters poker with him and his friends Jerry, Lee, Tom and his brother Lloyd.  I'd done it once before, and it's a good time.  I can accurately relate how the 10 of Diamonds, Queen of Spades game works.  If you have the 10D, you can force everyone to throw back their cards at any point up until the bet on the 7th card (2 down 1 up deal, and then 3 more up, and one more down, for 7).  If you have the high hand, you get half the pot.  If you have the queen of spades, you get half the pot.  Very easy.

The pyramid of quarters game is downright peculiar.  Make a stack of quarters with rows from 1 to 5.  Take two cards.  Two lowest cards (2-3) get half the pot.  Two highest cards (A-K is lower than 2-2.  A-A is highest) get half the pot.  You can trade a row of your quarters for one card by throwing a card.  Angling to be t he best hand, but incrementally paying more.  If you use your last row, everyone at the table (who doesn't fold) pays an extra four quarters (a dollar).  Pot gets big pretty darn fast.

I walked a way a bit to the good and gave all my quarters to Eryn.  I think she came out with $30-$40 in quarters.  She seemed pretty happy, considering I only owed her $4 from borrowing some of her money to pay the ice cream shop with cash.

It's been too long...

It's been long enough since I really dug into code - other than the bad-touch Java molestation I engage in to strip out guids and xml from corporate apis - that it's taking me some effort to relearn some of the simple things I used to take for granted when I thought like a programmer all the time.  For example...don't f*** around trying to make sense of the stupid PHP under Joomla MVC file structure when locating the style name in the css or any old php file, and then doing a text search, will work just as well (a Ransack search - Windows 7 searching gives me a headache - what the hell were they thinking that I have to "turn on" full text searching for PHP files - they're text!).  Remember that sometimes it's necessary to reverse and put a ! (not) in front of you assertion, or reverse the logic completely so that instead of putting a style on something, you're taking it away (which might be significantly easier than trying to get the cssText() addition correct).  And sometimes it's best just to walk away and rethink the whole problem until your brain ticks over and says "you have an id on all the other elements when they're active.  the issue is this element doesn't get the id initially due to some oversight in the way the software works.  just grab the stupid first child selector you've been playing with for hours and apply the id directly to it if it's missing."  Duh.  I know if you don't code, that might sound complicated, but it's so simple it screams, "you've been away too long."

I am glad I came home to take care of it rather than sitting at the Black Dog cafe in St. Paul all day.  I bumped into one of our R&D scientists there and he asked what language I was working on  - I'm glad he went off to the farmers' market instead of looking over my shoulder.

And don't get me started on how much simple C# I've forgotten now that I'm giving Eryn a few lessons.  I was embarrassed I was even thinking about doing a pop up instead of routing to the output textbox, and that was much less embarrassing than forgetting how to appropriately use TryParse() to check values before we routed them through our prototype calculator/concatenater.  But Eryn is happy.  She definitely understands how the concatenation of strings is different than the concatenation of ints and why we check first if we want to change the behavior based on the type of data we input. We're going to play around with expanding our calculator next, and then adding some logging to it so we can keep our results (and no, I don't completely remember how to write something to disk via .NET, but I'll find it).

Smart Girl!

Eryn wants to know how to code.  I taught her a little bit of Ruby once upon a time (we played with Shoes), but she asked if I'd teach her C# because she knows that's what I used when I did programming for a living (I haven't given her the article "Why We Don't Hire .Net Programmers" to read).  We started out with a simple Console app so we could play around with loops and writing to the console.

int counter = 0;

            for (long i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(i + " My name is Eryn");
                counter = counter + i;
            }
            Console.WriteLine("Counter is: " + counter);

She was having fun increasing the counter value by a magnitude and watching it hop from 5050 to larger numbers.  But after she threw in a million and waited for the loop to end, she asked, "Hey, why isn't the number as consistent as the other numbers were?"  That's right...she intuitively debugged the fact that the int datatype wasn't sufficient to hold the sum of all the numbers up to a million without creating a problem in the output.  We discussed bugs and what a bug like that might have meant if you were trying to write code for the space shuttle.  Fun!

Chicago - Lincoln Park Zoo

While we were in Chicago, we walked from our hotel to the Lincoln Park Zoo.  It was a bit cold for the animals to be out,but plenty of them were visible anyway.  This camel was obsessed with chewing on the chain for his ball.  We were speculating whether it was because he enjoyed how cold the chain was or because he was grinding his teeth.


After seeing the gibbon swinging back and forth with his junk waving in the air in front of us, coupled with the breast feeding gibbon, Kyle told me I should get a monkey of my own.  I disagree.  Smart pets scare me.  And the sign on the monkey cafeteria (where they make vegetable pizzas for monkeys, not where you eat monkey) had many things to say about why only idiots and selfish bastards kept domesticated monkeys.  It was amusing that they spent a lot of time clarifying they were referring to "non-human primate ownership".


Apparently people were VERY concerned when the tigers jumped down into their moat.  The zoo keeper had to put up a sign to assure people this was normal and they shouldn't panic or worry it was going to be able to come up the other side and eat them.


Obviously authorized zoo personnel are Oompa Loompas.


I like this picture.  It was taken through a fake camera with a real camera that captured my reflection in the fake camera, but the real rhinoceros in the real camera via the fake camera's real lens tube.  Makes for a neat shot.


This screams for one of those triptychs where you get closer and closer and closer to the giraffe's face so it feels like he's upset with you.  But he looks a little too simple to be an evil giraffe.


F*** are ostriches ugly and stupid looking.  This sort of behavior doesn't help at all.


This would be part I of the triptych.  I had a very nice picture off just a giraffe ass which could have been picture #3, but I got rid of it as it was in poor taste.  Who really wants to look at that?

Chicago Photos - Things That Aren't in the Zoo

When Kyle, Pooteewheet, and I went to Chicago to see the Burlesque Festival, we stopped by the Lincoln Park Zoo (that's right, we left Eryn at home and then went to the zoo and her favorite restaurant) and wandered around the city in our search for pizza at a local Lou Malnati's.

Goethe, the Mastermind of the German People! No doubt his ability to control eagles was one of his superpowers. There was a nice statue of four people kneeling in a circle at St. Joseph's nearby. Kyle refused to stand in the circle so I could take a picture of him getting a BJ. And obviously trying to create that angle with Goethe wasn't going to work.


Proof that our hotel was incredibly fancy, or cursed. I don't recommend the Days Inn in North Lincoln Park unless you make sure they're not going to give you a room o the east side against the street. If it weren't for all the beer on Friday night, I wouldn't have managed to sleep. Pooteewheet had to go down to the desk to request ear plugs. To name a few of the sounds: people talking, bus revving, bus beeping, cell phone, drunk folks, fire engine sirens, many many honking horns.


I'm pretty sure this is racist in some manner. They don't post signs about Siamese Connections anywhere I've ever noticed in Minnesota.


This is for Eryn. Her hatred of Potbelly is a joke around our house, ever since she had the sandwich with the hot pickle on it.


It was nice of someone to tie all the pieces falling off the bike back onto the bike in a handy carrying tote.


This is cool. They leave the meters up for bicycles. I wonder if they'll do that with the new electronic/credit card meters when those are past life.

Mustard

Why did the one condiment quit trying to ketchup? mustard.

Oh...that's good stuff.  I cleaned up some of our various spice locations in the house.  I found a lot of pepper.  I also found a lot of mustard.  We don't have a lot of brand affinity at my house.  Pooteewheet uses mustard once in a blue moon for meatloaf purposes.  I think we're good for the next 20 years.

Leprechaun Trap

For Eryn's spelling test she chose to make a Leprechaun trap and write about it, using each spelling word twice. In the middle of the night, it almost caught something.

Adult Late Night Skate

I've got nothing against Adult Late Night Skating in Burnsville.  I just wonder who could possibly show up that would warrant "Never know when a surprise guest may come to chill!!!!!"  Five exclamation points!!!!!  That must be some skating-related guest.....  Olivia Newton John or Gene Kelly doing a bit of Xanadu????? Or perhaps just old school Gene Kelly tap dancing on skates?????  I suspect I'll never know.  I can't see myself at the rink without Eryn.

Windy City Burlesque

Kyle, Pooteewheet, and I drove to Chicago last Friday to catch two evenings of the Second Annual Windy City Burlesque Fest.  While it might seem like I have an obsession with burlesque, my purpose was legion:

1.) See Michelle L'Amour, as she wasn't at Midwest Burlesk this year.

2.) Go to Chicago.

3.) See some acts we wouldn't see at Midwest Burlesk.

4.) Have some sushi.

5.) Decide whether a speed trip was feasible for future purposes (we drove back starting at 12:30 a.m.)

6.) Have some beer.

7.) Pick up some beer to bring back that isn't generally available in Minnesota.

Missions accomplished.  It is possible to drive back between 12:30 a.m. and 7:15 a.m., although sleeping in a Ford Fiesta is tricky and you really need a foam cushion cut to fit the seat to door gap if you don't want to wake up with no blood flow to your head.  Chicago is there.  Although Tsuki where we always went for sushi is not.  But all the staff moved to Ai and they still have bento boxes for kids and a great selection of sushi.  I had the tabiko flight (red, yellow, green, black, orange...black is best), a piece of cherry smoked duck on rice, an oyster shooter, a delicious rosemary walnut tuna roll that striped the tuna so every piece tasted different, and a bowl of green tea ice cream the profits of which were sent to Japanese relief funds.

Friday night was....

• beer + dinner
• beer
• burlesque + beer and whiskey
• beer + other

Dinner was at the Duke of Perth.  Good fish and chips, but "all you can eat" is sort of silly given the size of your first plate of fish.  Afterwards we went to John Barleycorn's for a beer while waiting for the show to start.  That's also where we went after the show, although by then we were drinking some Shamrock Shake thing composed of creme de menthe and Bailey's.  Ugh.  You know you've jumped the shark when bright green drinks hit the counter. I did get to tell Franny Fluffer Nutter, who was also there drinking, that we liked her act.  I learned that she does an RPG burlesque and a Twin Peaks burlesque in her native New York.  Those must be amusing.

The burlesque show was fun, although I didn't think it was as good as Midwest Burlesk.  Lula Houp-Garou stood out with her hula hoop act and a dance the second night that involved lying in a bed of glass.  The Stage Door Johnnies were their usual amusing selves with a sort of tin solider act.  Franny Fluffer Nutter was good - you can find her doing her baton twirling and blonde to redhead transition here, although video always lacks significantly compared to the live experience of burlesque.  The Flaming Dames with their ode to music were amusing.  Jeez Loueez brought a lot of energy to the stage with a dance to Prince's Sexy Motherfucker.  Steele Starling was blasphemous with his Catholic priest pole dance to Lacrimosa that ended in an upside down prayer.  And Ammunition...the host described her as an industrial factory wrapped in the body of a girl.  She came out with a couple of Home Depot lamps and a Tron-lightlike corset, and eventually proceeded to use a grinder like you'd expect to see a heavy metal band using grinders, to shoot sparks from their guitars.  But she didn't have a guitar, so she used her g-string.  There's a very short clip of it here...it was much more impressive in person, without the band, and the lights mostly off.

My least favorite act was probably Serenna Starr.  Her act was much more traditional strip (it involved a very large bowl of sudsy water) than burlesque, and it felt less fun because of that.  While it might seem strange to say you don't go to burlesque for nudity or raunchiness, it's the truth.  Even though Michelle L'Amour bills herself as the "most naked woman."  Unless the raunchiness is truly intended to be over the top fun (the Evil Hate Monkey for instance), it just doesn't belong in a burlesque show.

Smaller

Down 32 pounds since January 15.  Bit of a steep decline, and I'm worried the speed contributed to the kidney stones, but I feel fine, so I suspect I'm not messing up my diet. Bit of bicycling.  Bit of just eating right.  Notice I didn't say "diet".  At the moment, I'm eating sunflower seeds and drinking an Inversion IPA from Deschutes Brewery, so you can't accuse me of starving myself.  If anything, I'm eating better, with more fish, more vegetables, and a consistent variety of fruits.  I think it bodes well for the start of the bicycling season (which I consider to be the Minnesota Iron Man, although I'm usually on the roads for a few weeks before that event) seeing as it's still over a month away.

Ignite!

Update:  Damn it.  Denied.  So much for my shot at greatness.  I'll ponder throwing the whole presentation out here for amusement purposes.

Sunday at about 7:45 p.m. I submitted "How to Create Your Own Stick Figure Cartoon" to Ignite! Minneapolis.  They received over 50 presentation submissions, per Twitter, so I don't know how Erik and I will stack up, but I figured it was worth a try.  I'm not sure if I'm more nervous they won't accept it, or they will.  It's been a long time since I presented to several hundred people.  I'm not sure how I'm going to practice if we get a green light.  I wonder if Klund will ratchet up his assertion that we're pilfering his intellectual content if the low expectations cartoon is in the mix.

The rules are 20 slides, no animation (or similar crap), 15 seconds per slide.  A total of 5 minutes.  We didn't have to have a complete presentation to submit, but it's ready, just in case, and to be sure we have 5 minutes worth of something to say.  We're still considering how we'd handle the (invariably) wild twittering that happens during each presentation.

Kat Hack

Boing Boing has a link to an amusing javascript game where you can dump the javascript in your url and you're playing Katamari Damacy.  Kyle couldn't get it to work, but it worked just fine in Chrome for me (although I didn't try it in IE9).

javascript:var i,s,ss=['http://kathack.com/js/kh.js','http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min.js'];for(i=0;i!=ss.length;i++){s=document.createElement('script');s.src=ss[i];document.body.appendChild(s);}void(0);

Operating Instructions

The full instructions from my digital kitchen timer (sans pictographic language) - spelling is not accidental (on my part):

Sound it makes: PiPiPiPi PiPi PiPi PiPiPiPi!

Instructions:

One. production use. This production can enactment noon break time. study time. hair dressing time. stew wime. sun edition time******and so on.

Two. production function
This production is be read disply maximum countdown capacity of 99 minutes 59 seconds.

Three. use means
1. Press M button to set desired minutes.
2. Press S button to set desired seconds.
3. Press START/STOP button once to start timer.
4. Press M to show with S key to return the zero to reset at the same time.
5. Beenactment time to countdown is "ZERO" second hour occurrence alert.
6. Press "RESET" button to stop alarm.

Four. batteries usr and barter
1. Replace battery whenever reading becomes dim&difficult to read.
2. Usage button G13 type battery.
3. Open the battery door, and take out the old battery, and peg out the new battery plus or minus very put into, and press back the, nome position the battery door.

Dogs will never rule the world...

When I take my shoes and socks downstairs and the dog, Luna, is still her kennel in the morning, ready to go out, she stands up as I enter the room, and looks at me expectantly. Then I sit in the recliner, and she lays back down. I put on a sock and she stands up expectantly. Then realizes I'm not done, and lays back down. I put on the other sock, and she stands up, ready to go. Then realizes I'm not done, and lays back down. I work the double knot out of a dress shoe and she bolts to attention. But lays back down after it takes me more than five seconds. Shoe is going on the foot. UP! Wait...down. Other shoe is picked up, UP! Wait...down. Untying the other double knot. UP!!!! No...not done. Other shoe is finally going on, UP, UP! Wait...no leash in hand. Back down.

This is why dogs will never rule the world. They're two f-ing stupid to understand how shoes work.