NSLog();

Please pardon what may be a fairly lengthy note.

Since last July I've been paddling around in a dark green Tarpon 120. My first few trips included fishing my local "pond" (I grew up on Lake Erie, so "Lake Ida" is not much of a lake to me). I paddled around my apartment complex pond. I played around in the ocean (practicing wet entries). Eventually I fished Key Largo with a Tarpon 160 and a Scupper Pro TW - very fast boats in their own right.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 1237); »

My brain has unusual thought patterns when I'm tired. Today, for example, after I got my speeding ticket I remembered that 0-15 MPH over the speeding limit gets you 3 points, but 15-30 (I think) gets you 4. 15, you'll note, is included twice, but it'd be rather inaccurate to say "16-30" because then if you were going 15.63 MPH, you'd get off scott free (unless you round).

I began to think of people who'd whine about their grades, saying that an "89.6" is the same as a "90" and that they should get an A, while my stance has always been "nope, you fell short, by probably at least one question somewhere during the course of the class."

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 234); »

So, I went back to Mud Creek today. Caught nothing. Zip, zilch, nada. Saw a redfish or two but couldn't cast to 'em. Paddled about three miles straight into a wind that was strong enough to troll simply by drifting.

Yeah, fun stuff. 🙁 I'm going out tomorrow morning near Southern Boulevard in with Mike vG. We'll see how that goes… If I can get to Home Depot and buy some gear, I may be taking the T140 out! Hmmm…

Did find a rather nifty "back hole" that may contain redfish. A good picture is in the extended entry.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 431); »

Question: How many friends have you ever made into girlfriends or boyfriends?

My Answer: I suppose that if the answer is greater than zero, you should give yourself an award. Nobody else will. 🙂

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Question: What's your favorite music video?

My Answer: Losing My Religion

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Question: Do you invest in the stock market?

My Answer: No, unless you take "invest in the stock market" to mean "own a few shares of one company's stock." I would invest in the company below, though:

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Question: Do you abuse or ignore return policies?

My Answer: Nope. I just make darn sure what they are before I buy, and if I'm not comfortable, I don't buy the product. This rarely applies to software - that's what demo versions are for - but I know that Circuit City has a 30-day return policy that is widely abused by many. I think it's immoral to use something and return it. It's lying. At least sell the thing on eBay and take a small hit.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

I own a software company. In two places - at the time of purchase and when the license agreement comes up - we state that we don't offer refunds and that we don't warrant or guarantee that the software will do anything of any consequence. Pretty standard disclaimers, really. Boilerplate.

Occasionally, a customer asks us for a refund. Sometimes the customer asks us for a refund five minutes after writing to us for support. Most often, the software isn't failing due to a bug, but to misuse or customer ignorance. It's frustrating - especially when the credit card processing makes giving refunds a negative income in the end - to have to handle these customers. You'd rather help them to use your software, not refund their money and lose them as a customer.

I've yet to find the best answer. We sell commercial software via the Internet. Once you register, you've got a registration code that we can in no way force you to stop using if you get a refund (or, worse yet, a chargeback via your credit card). We want the chance to help every customer, to fix every bug. Some folks don't believe that's an allowable thing. 🙁

Met up with Thong Boy Bung just before 7am and were in the waters of the southwest corner of the Mosquito Lagoon by 7:02. Around 2:30 we exited the water and loaded our kayaks onto our vehicles.

That's about all there is to it. 🙂

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 442); »

Question: Do you have a .Mac account? Do you use it? For how long have you had it? Will you renew?

My Answer: Many questions, but easy answers: yes, yes, since they became available, and yes.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Today I attempted - I kid you not - uploading an iPhoto album twenty times to my .Mac account. Each time between one and five pictures would not show up at all. The definition of insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting a different result. I suppose I was insane 19 times today.

Eventually, I looked at the page source and saw this anomaly: WIDTH=4.937238e-37 HEIGHT=4.937238e-37. Uhhh, no. A later error was made in the JavaScript code that powers the slide show (the size was set to 1, 1).

Correcting these resolved the issue with a photo not appearing at all.

Question: If your wife puts on 100 lbs since marriage outside of childbirth, what do you do?

My Answer: I tell her to get her ass in shape. 🙂 This one will no doubt piss people off, and I realize I'm not perfect by a long shot, but physical attraction is important as is sharing activities. If my wife goes from 125 to 225, odds are both will decrease. Hopefully, though, I'll choose well enough that I won't have to worry about it. The woman I'd most like to marry wouldn't let herself "go" like that, regardless of what I thought.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Question: Do you miss resource forks for hacking your Mac's UI?

My Answer: Not really. I was quite the ResEdit hacker, but packages are incredibly easy while remaining fairly impervious to newbie's wanderings (and ignorant, unknown attempts at sabotage). Packages allow you to replace TIFFs or sounds, and finding them is usually rather easy ("sendMail.aiff", "STOPicon.tiff", etc.). Plus, for application development, you can't beat packages! B-)

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Every month (since February 2003) I post my site's referral search terms (not what people search for on my site). It's an interesting peek that illustrates "how people are finding me." Here's February's…

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 195); »

Joel has some thoughts on beta testing. Of course, as is usual with Joel, his advice is only good in small percentages. About 15% of that article is useful to me - 1500 beta testers? Pshaw, it'd be great to have 1500 users sometimes! We're a small company, after all, and while Fog Creek is as well, it's clear we're a teeny bit smaller, eh?

Useful article, again, but in varying percentages to varying people.

PulpFiction 1.0 will be releases [eventually | soon], and we already know some features that we'll include in version 1.1, but essentially we plan to have a small, good pre-1.0 beta test, and then simply listen to feedback for our 1.1 release. This doesn't mean that 1.0 won't be any good - it just means that we don't want to include features that won't contribute significantly to the usefulness and practicality of the application.