NSLog();

I wrote about accessor methods in Cocoa before. One of the comments on that article implored me to check out Ali Ozer's talk at WWDC. I've done so, and I will now present what I've learned. I'm documenting this for myself, so if my explanation is brief, believe me when I say I understand what I've written. 😉

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I was reading a few articles (like this one, called "Too Much Capital" from BlogShares news, and the thought occurred to me that BlogShares would been one helluva kick ass senior thesis project for a business and computer science person. They could have worked in tandem, developing the entire BlogShares feature set, and had a viable "product" in the end. The business person's understanding of the stock market and the CS person's understanding of the programming side of things would lead to something pretty amazing.

I'm not sure what the story behind BlogShares is, but it's an amazing piece of work regardless of the intent. I haven't gotten into it much - I don't even own shares in my own blog - and I'm worth about $15,000. I just did a stock split for no real reason - the share price was getting too high, perhaps? It's something I'd like to get into, perhaps, but I can't motivate myself to do so.

Anyway, if I were a professor, I'd give BlogShares an A.

I guess sometimes a little lying isn't too bad…

Daria: Well… it's all in your head. You are tall with good muscle tone a full head of hair, balanced features… a good package overall.
Daria: You've been dressing really well lately and you have a tan… just the other day i thought to myself "boy erik is getting cute".

I'll let that one slide. No sense busting her chops for every lie right? 😉

I was bored tonight, so I began work on MailDrop 2.0. Essentially, MD2 (unlike MD1) will follow a very MVC model. It's the easiest way towards eventual AppleScripting, easier document archiving, and a lot more.

Essentially, MVC is "The Right Way™" and our current method is, uhhh, well it's a hack. We learned a lot about how things should work, what we did wrong, and where to go from here. Nick's experiencing those issues right now in FTPeel and, like us, he'll be a better developer for having been through it. Our third app in production, PulpFiction, is going to be nicely MVC as well.

Anyway, I got what I'd say is about 5% of the code done tonight, and it's perfect. It's flawless! It's… purely accessor methods! The view calls a setter in the controller, the controller calls a setter in the model, the controller then says "view, update yourself" and calls a getter in the model for the latest data (the stuff we just set), etc. It all works. Yay. Perfect code. So far, anyway.

I installed MSN today thinking I might be able to sneak a peek at the next version of IE. Unfortunately, I don't feel like signing up for the two month free subscription, so I won't be doing that.

What I will be doing, however, is restoring my old versions of these fonts:

Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Andale Mono
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Arial
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Arial Black
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Arial Narrow
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Arial Rounded Bold
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Brush Script
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Century Gothic
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Comic Sans MS
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Copperplate Gothic Bold
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Copperplate Gothic Light
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Courier New
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Curlz MT
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Edwardian Script ITC
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Georgia
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Impact
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Lucida Handwriting
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Monotype Sorts
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Tahoma
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Times New Roman
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Trebuchet MS
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Verdana
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Webdings
Installed Gaia:Library:Fonts:Wingdings

Verdana and Arial in particular (updated to version 2.9x from version 2.6x) looked horribly screwed up, particularly in Safari (v78, v74, whatever). Luckily I back up nightly, so I was able to "roll back" my changes.

Question: If your phone rang right this instant, who would you most want it to be?

My Answer: The person whom I wish it to be already knows, so I'll have to go with my second choice: Steve, errr, no, Shania, hmmm, wait. Uhhh, my mother, to let me know that she got her flowers. Today is her birthday, after all. I don't trust those 1-800-FLOWERS goons. They already messed up my last order.

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

How cute! 8 year-old Maulin Raval is a certified Microsoft professional. Yes, he's passed his MCP in Networking.

Maulin, who wants to be a computer engineer, has his replies down pat. "‘By the time I am 30, I will be competing with Bill Gates and developing better software packages,’’ he says.

Ahhh, the disillusionment of youth. By age 30, Bill Gates was still stealing ideas (and code) from other people. Oh wait, how old is he now? Hrm…

I had a conversation with a friend today. A conversation I'm sick of having. A conversation about how I constantly seem "upset." Truth is, I am. The rest of the truth: I'm only upset with myself.

I've got very high standards for people, and even higher standards for myself. Yes, this means I'm constantly let down - by myself and others - but it also means I constantly expect more from myself. I'm constantly pushing myself to do better.

Sometimes, especially around those for whom I care a great deal, I push myself even harder. When I fail - quite often with my standards - I get upset with myself. The downside is that this can be perceived by the friend as being upset with them, and then I get upset with myself for making them think I was upset with them. It's a vicious circle.

I need to trust my friends to tell me when I've upset them, and do a better job of keeping my "Erik, you fucked up"s to myself a little better. I won't lower my standards - I can't - but I can change how I react when I fail to meet them.

Blast is an interesting word. You can have a blast. You can buy a game called "Worms Blast" which is actually nothing like Worms Armageddon, a pretty awesome game. Speaking of games, E3 is going on this week (I guess) and Rob and I watched the Doom III .avi today with VLC. It looks awesome. I hear it's only single-player, but even if it fails to pack in an awesome multiplayer mode, it should still be "a blast." 🙂

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I changed my DirecTV subscription today.

1. I ditched the Playboy channel. They started charging me - I've had it free since I signed up last January or so (was it really that long ago?). So that's $16/month I wasn't paying and now won't be paying.
2. I ditched HBO and Cinemax. $12 and $11 each. I never seem to watch much on either of those stations. I've got a whole lot of DVDs that I can watch instead.

I'll sign up (again) for NFL Sunday Ticket when they begin offering that for next year. I figure that will be soon. I retain basic channels + DirecTV "Premium Plus" ($39.99/mo, including my local channels). I also kept my $4.99/mo TiVo service charge. In short, my bill dropped from about $85 to about $45 ($12 + $11 + $16 = $39). Plus the outrageous "entertainment tax" that FL charges.

Less than a few hours hold and we've already gotten our first review of FTPeel. My favorite part?

Then disaster struck!

I should have stressed it in my earlier entry, but FTPeel is pretty rough, even by "public beta" standards. After all, Safari seems to be setting the tone for public betas these days, right? 🙂

That having been said, Clint raises some good points, and certainly ones we'll be addressing. I'll talk about them more in the bigger version.

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I just got the report from eSellerate regarding Freshly Squeezed Software sales. Our sales rank, by month:

Date From       Date To       Rank
----------      ----------    ----
06/24/2002      07/11/2002      11
07/23/2002      08/16/2002       6
08/23/2002      09/12/2002       5
09/23/2002      10/10/2002       8
10/23/2002      11/13/2002      10
11/25/2002      12/12/2002       9
12/23/2002      01/09/2003       4
01/23/2003      02/14/2003       7
02/24/2003      03/13/2003       1
03/24/2003      04/10/2003       3
04/23/2003      05/15/2003       2

In other words, our best three months have been our past three. I'm happy with that. We still enjoy what we're doing and we're still gonna work hard to get more products out there. It's about the fun, the experience. Of course, that doesn't mean we don't want to do well. 🙂

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Just documenting that for myself. Nothing to see here.

I'm not very comfortable today in my clothing. I'm fidgety, I'm shifty, and I can't seem to get situated properly. It doesn't itch or anything - it's just not bunching in the right places or anything.

So I'll take off my clothes. Ahhh, much better.

Note to self: put clothes back on before checking the mail.

Dictation happens all the time. My users are dictating features for FTPeel to me. I dictate flight schedules for a friend who's flying in to see me at a wedding (not my own), etc. Dictators exist, too, and some of them are removed from power by force. Some we just hope die soon (Fidel, perhaps?). All told, dictate has a rather negative connotation. Kinda flies in the face of free will doesn't it?

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