Ippalily

Since I'm working for a company that is making iPhone games, I've been thinking a lot about the medium that Apple uses to distribute games. Most recently I've been thinking about the quality bar... or lack there of.

Quality, usefulness and fun in an application is not something Apple is moderating. I'm not just talking about the sadly high number of beer and fart apps on the App Store. I'm talking about RSS readers that crash all the time. I'm talking about apps that offer little to no usefulness. Like chat programs that don't have push, RSS readers that don't support image zoom or html, or apps that just don't give a damn about looks and ease of navigation. I'm talking about quality bar.

Since I lost my job in November I have becoming increasing immersed in social networking and online communications. One of the surest signs of this I am now a Tweeter. That's right. I use Twitter. I can't claim to be an early adopter, though I did know about it fairly early on. My mother-in-law is an advanced tweeter for green technology's, government 2.0 and local Sacramento government. She is an early adopter, a highly skilled twitter user, and taught me almost everything I know about Twitter.

So, how bad is it? Pretty bad. I have not one, but four twitter accounts. They all have a good cause, and only one of them is more idle than I would like. As you can imagine, it's very tedious to keep up on all those feeds. I mostly use my iPhone because it would be near impossible to sign in and sign out of every account every hour on my web browser. Checking Twitter hourly, that's normal, right? Anyway, I was using three different apps on my iPhone to manage all the accounts I have. I finally settled on Twittelator because of it's ability to handle multiple accounts.

Themes

I was slightly disappointed. The first thing I noticed was that the default theme was completely different. The second thing I noticed was that you couldn't use the theme on the free version in the paid version. Seriously!?! Why not just put it in the paid version, you already made it! The third thing I noticed was that the three themes they do provide in the paid version are soooo boring. So, you may have noticed by now I was highly UNimpressed with the provided themes.

Multiple Accounts

About once a year I like to sit down and review my household energy usage and graph it out. For my household this means electricity, natural gas, and overall cost. Some folks might also include fuel
oil, wood and in some cases propane. I like to add a graph for overall cost, because often times the price per unit of the utility will change over time. Google Documents is a great free resource that is perfect for this kind of function, and it's what I use. This kind of activity is something I have often done. I think it's important to understand where your energy usage is so that you can better monitor your utility dollars and so that you can live a environmentally friendly life style. The first time I did something like this was 10 years ago: I filled out a PG&E survey listing our household appliances and energy usage and redeemed a refund for a new, more efficient, washer. My parents are still using that more efficient washer today. These kinds of budgeting activities can really help save money. And think of all the energy my parents have saved over 10 years by using the more efficient washer!

I ran across and unfortunate situation on Sunday. My guild The Win, which I help run with 3 other friends of mine, is focused around 10 man raiding. We are usually pretty good about sending out calendar invitations to raids 3 or 4 days before the next raid. This is really great because it gives raid leaders a chance to get a good look at who we have and what other classes we will need. It makes putting the raid together 5 times faster and it's just standard management procedure to let people know what's going on. This last week all of us forgot to do the invite. As such, some of our regulars pick up other raid invites, making them unavailable for raids with The Win, so we had to send invites to people that we didn't know so well. What this means is that these new people were inexperienced and under-prepared for such encounters. We made it all the way to the last boss in our Naxxramas raid, but we just couldn't get him down, partially due to it being very late. So we were stuck putting together an totally fresh raid on Sunday for Kal'Thuzad and Eye of Eternity. Since these are mid level raid instances and it was just two days before reset, I found putting together this raid was about as pleasant as picking up my dogs poop with an uncomfortably thin plastic bag. There just aren't enough well geared competent people available that late into the reset cycle. It's like going to a yard sale at the end of a Sunday: everyone already picked up the good stuff Saturday an hour before the sale started. Don't even bother.

I picked up this Tug-a-Jug for Sadie a while back and she has thanked me every day since. Dogs really enjoy simple food puzzles, for them it's like sitting down and doing the crossword puzzle in Sunday's paper. Most of the time I put her normal food in this toy. What she has to do is get the food past the rope that sits loosely in the bottle neck, the rope is topped with a knot on either side to hold it in place. To help her do this she uses her paw on the rubber knobs around the neck of the bottle to tip the bottle on it's end, and a little bit of food will fall out. The Jug plastic is a hard, durable plastic, that is topped with a rubber sleeve at the neck for easy pawing, and the rope is a very standard rope toy threaded through the neck. It's a pretty durable toy, unless your dog is an incarnation of destruction itself I would highly recommend this toy.