I can still read?!?!
So, I had jury duty the other day. Well, I didn’t get picked to sit on a jury, or even interviewed really. But, I did get to sit in a room for the better part of a day that I couldn’t leave.
Oddly, it’s been awesome. The chairs sucked, there was some super-surly South-sider, the men’s room light didn’t really work (might have been for the best), but I was able to re-read most of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Which means, that I can still read!
I’ve jumped into Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good by Sarah Lacy. I’m reading the kindle edition on my iPhone and so far it’s been pretty enjoyable. I really like being able to read wherever I am and not having to tote around the dead-tree version.
I can’t remember the last time I read a book for pleasure, so this is great. Hopefully, this will become a habit like when I was younger, but time will tell.
Hurray for blogger!
I don’t know how common knowledge this is, but the Blogger twitter account just left some great details about dealing with exports in a comment on Craig Burton’s blog. Add in the conversion tools here, and I’m a happy camper about being on the blogger service. Now, I just need to remember to export my data every so often, just in case.
rant: iPhone apps
Apple, the app store sucks. Yeah, it’s a brilliant innovation to have an app store for a smart phone, but I’m over that. You have a serious problem in that you’ve made it so trendy and cool to create iPhone apps, that damn near everyone is doing it.
As a result, there’s a total lack of quality in many of the apps. For free ones this isn’t that big a deal, because well if I get something for free, I’m not necessarily expecting it to rock up to 11. But, when I pay $10 for an app, I want it to freakin’ work flawlessly. You don’t have to agree with them, but here are my rants on the system as it stands today :
- Comments and star ratings aren’t enough. I want to know the percent of the time the app crashes, the percent of the time the application gets uninstalled, and a bug tracker for each app in the store with statistics on time to fix bugs, etc.
- I should be able to return a paid app through the store. If it sucks, I should have 24 hrs to get my money back via some official mechanism. Buying software should not be a gamble.
- Allow bug fix updates to make it into the store faster. I keep seeing blog post after blog post about waiting for an updated version to show up in the app store. It’s a new platform and there will be bugs in software, you need to streamline the process to resolve those bugs for the users.
- Fix the platform. There are precisely 2 hardware devices for these things. How hard should it be to make a stable application for it? I don’t know if it’s issues with the language, the OS, or sunspots, but I don’t care either. There’s no excuse for a memory leak in a user application on a hardware platform of 2 freaking devices.
reminder: include created_at field on database tables
From now on, include a created_at or some other field on every table to make it easy to dump a subset of the database for testing, development.
