Unity on iPhone

I have to say, the Unity app for the iPhone seems to be lacking without bluetooth, but the fact that I can just wire it in and run my app simultaneously on a PC desktop and iPhone is amazing.  Seriously cool.  Having to download 22 GB of install because I didn't grab the iPhone/Android/et al packages the first time?  Not so cool.  But that was my own fault.  It's slick to point the app at multiple platforms with so little effort.

Zombies

Eryn has been interested in running faster, so I agreed to train with her, despite that running on the hip with metal in it makes me extra nervous.  I asked her if she wanted to use an application to track her time and progress and suggested Zombies, Run! which I had heard was fun and had a zombie story as the impetus for running.

She was very excited about trying it out and since getting it, she's been encouraging me to go running frequently.  Unfortunately, I felt the need to understand the application and listen for adult content, so for every 30 minutes of walking and running she and I do together, I'm doing another 30 minutes by myself to understand the app better.

Some things I've learned:

1. It's mostly age appropriate.  Not always, but she took the Scoobs growing marijuana and raising urban chickens in stride and that's been the worst of it except for a bit of swearing.
2. The zombies are fast.  You need to run when they show up and you should start right away so you have as much time as possible to outrun them.
3. Zombies don't stop because you pause the application to go into target.
4. Zombies don't stop because you stop the application because you're home.  In both cases, you need to finish evading the zombies first, or it's considered a failure.
5. Running with 165 ounces of detergent in your hand is not efficient.  If it were a real zombie evasion situation, you'd just whip the heavy bottle of detergent at the zombie to slow her/him down and put on extra speed.  In real life, you're pretty sure no one at home will be happy with an extra week of dirty clothes because you were really "getting into the story."
6. Running two concurrent rounds of Zombies, Run! after not running at all in over a year and a half and not significantly since your runner's toe kicked in ten years ago is asking for a lot of very sore muscles. I have a new appreciation for how much effort is involved in truly eluding zombies.

I was excited to see that the app syncs with RunKeeper by downloading and uploading the run files (it might work more directly as well; I'm trying to figure that out).  And we've add a few cemeteries into our running options (real ones) so that it's spookier.  I learned there are Rahns buried in our neighborhood, which is who the school and roads and parks are named after.

I'm a little man lost in a parking lot!

If only I'd gotten a fortune cookie with my lunch, it would have been perfect.  This is from when I saw Scott (The Boss) and Ron walking around the back parking lot at work.  I almost never eat at the counter along the windows overlooking the lot.  So I know it was fate that led me there that day when everything else was full up.

From my window seat, I could watch as Scott and Ron wandered toward the far second lot, then doubled back, then walked in a wide circle around the (rather large) near lot, and then had to go almost car to car to find his car.  I think it took them a good 15-20 minutes of walking which is probably significantly more time than it took them to drive to lunch.

Thumbs Up

It is almost impossible to get both thumbs up for a photo with an iPhone without a timer on the camera.  I tried many times before I finally gave up and had Joe take a picture of me.  One of my leads had a family picture where everyone had their thumbs up.  I saw it right away because I know her brother-in-law and he posted the picture.  So her whole team took thumbs up pictures to share with her.

Ming and the Milkman

Ming and I have been playing a lot of Draw Something lately.  His attempt to draw the word Milkman started out with lots of trucks that said Moo on the side and little stick figures that he erased and redrew several times, and then finally culminated in this, a lactating strongman from the circus.

Father's Day

I had a great Father's Day.  Most of it was spent reading.  But the family got me out to dinner with my sister's family (she's freshly back from Grandma's Marathon in Duluth) and my folks at Christo's in Minneapolis.  I was hoping to see the revamped St. Paul Christo's at the depot, but that will just have to wait for next time, as long as next time isn't on a Sunday.

My wife and daughter gave me two gifts for Father's Day.  I had a hand in giving them a rather detailed list of things I wanted, most of them related to bicycling and science fiction, but they did pick their preferred items.

My new coffee cup!  Keep Calm and Ride On!


My new iPhone case.  Not as bullet proof as that monstrous thing I had before, but I like the smaller case, and the fact that it looks like the Tardis is definitely a benefit.  I can store more inside the phone than on the outside.

I wanted an iPhone...

Felicia Day pointed me at these links via Laughing Squid:

Disgruntled people complaining about their Christmas gifts on Twitter... Compiled by Jon Hendren.

 Below, Jonathan Mann turns it into a song...WTF?! I Wanted An iPhone!!!

Simulator

I'm pretty sure a simulator isn't truly a simulator if it's not simulating everything.  How hard can it be to simulate an accelerometer?  This just seems like more effort than I'm willing to put in while working on a tutorial.

Well...it's not cutting edge...

But I did manage to make the circle colors vary both with an if/else with a modulo, and in a second version using a (mutable) array of UIColor objects.  I feel a bit like I'm back in high school coding class with the Apple II and a sheet of graph paper...if you tacked on iOS memory management issues.  And I learned how to use the cmd-shift-3, cmd-shift-4, and cmd-shift-4 then space then click commands on a Mac to capture what I want.  And I learned Mac users are just as a-holish in many instances as PC developers with their "that's in the documentation, so I'm not going to answer that" and "It's Mac, not MAC. If you can't even do that right, I'm not going to answer your perfectly valid coding question."  These things were not said to me.  I just got to appreciate them in the general postings on the web.

Really?

"Most developers copy and paste methods from the documentation." - iPhone Programming: Big Nerd Ranch Guide.

Because a typo defines a brand new method?  Obviously understanding at least the minimal amount of fn-F5 autocomplete is a necessity.