Roblog

I have been reluctant to post anything about my project today to spoil the surprise, but now I can reveal it. I took the day off from work today to spend it filling my daughters' room with balloons for their 10th birthday. There is a grand story behind this to describe all the planning that went into it, but I'm too busy actually blowing up 500 balloons to relate that right now. I'll post various pictures on Facebook throughout the day if you want to follow along. I'll tell the whole story here shortly.

I guess it was inevitable - about 1 year after I got my iPhone, I am close to having my first iPhone app on the App Store. I just submitted it for review this morning, and I should have the results of that review in about 7 days. If all goes well, Anyone will be able to download it to their iPhones.

It's a good app to have as my first one. It's a very simple app that is a companion to the Southwest Houston School Choice Forum that my wife runs each fall. It will list some basic information about each of the schools that are attending the forum, and use the iPhone mojo to be able to interact with that data (e.g. get a map of the school's location, save the designated contact to the address book, call the contact).

If you want a preview, you can see the "support" page I setup for it as part of the details I submitted with the app at:
http://www.robreid.com/SWHSCF/

Perhaps I will reflect on my experience for creating the app sometime soon. It was at times difficult and maddeningly frustrating, but also rewarding. I still haven't gotten over the programmer's thrill of getting something developed and running like you had designed! I expect that thrill will drive me to continue this hobby for a while anyway.

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I think I might be in trouble. We'll see how much in trouble I am when my wife returns from Dallas.

Accenture has a recognition program in which you can be given points for doing a good job. These points can be redeemed from a large online catalog of products - 1,000s of products ranging up to 5,000 points or more (1 point generally equals $1).

I had about 200 points to spend recently. None of the really high-ticket items are things I have to have, so I generally spend them fairly soon after I get them, rather than waiting for my points to build up to a certain level. I also try to select something that I wouldn't normally spend my own money on. That means I get things I really don't need, and sometimes it works out (Wii Lego Star Wars, ice cream maker) other times, it doesn't (Sharper Image wearable air conditioner).

So I selected a "bean bag" this time to replace the ones that the girls had and had recently used them up, beyond my ability to repair them with duct tape. This is a demin-covered one, and filled with foam, instead of little styrofoam beans, so it should last longer. It cost me 110 points, but I knew the high-quality bean bags were more expensive.

It wasn't until later that I realized it might not be a good fit for our home - literally. This bean bag is listed at 4' by 4' by 2'. That is probably about 4 times as large as our previous bean bags. And at that size, it really doesn't fit anywhere. OK, it fits in our living room between the couches and in front of the TV (where it is now), but it fills up that whole space, making it not usable for anything else. It would fit in the girls' room, but then we literally could not walk to the head of their bed. There is no room for it in the guest room or the master bedroom. I might fit in the office, but again it would render a huge chunk of it unusable for anything else.

I suspect we'll make it work - maybe keeping it in the office until we want to use it in the living room. It's big enough for both girls to use at the same time, and I am quite comfortable on it, but it may end up being to cumbersome to actually keep. At least I didn't spend any real money on it.

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I happened to visit the new Accenture office last week. I was hosting a non-client-related conference call, so I used that as an excuse to go over there. It's a neat space that was designed using some new office ideas with a lot of shared, open areas with little-to-no spaces dedicated to specific individuals. I always enjoy my visits there to wander around and admire the new furnishings and modern style, but I also often run into people I know, which is a nice perk.

After my conference call, as I wandered the "halls" I passed a former lead of mine, Laura, whom I respect a great deal. She was feeling very cold and was heading to the coffee area to get a warm drink. I didn't keep her long, since she was obviously uncomfortable and she's always very busy.

The implications of that innocuous encounter didn't sink in for me until a while later.

Continue reading "No place to call Home" »

I saw an odd little oval sticker on the floor of the powder room today. It was a clear sticker, and I could tell it was lying on the floor backwards:

It looked like it spelled "opaads". I picked it up and turned it over:

Yep. "opaads". But that's a weird name for a product. What kind of product is an "opaad"? But then I realized that it was still upside-down:

Ah, OK. Mystery solved, I went back to eating my breakfast.

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Most years, birds nest at the top of our chimney. The sound carries well down the chimney, and it's very pleasant to be able to hear the starlings or mockingbirds from our living room. Yesterday, however, instead of remote twittering, I heard a bird growing louder and louder in the chimney. I knew immediately that a bird had fallen, or flown, all the way down into our fireplace!

Continue reading "Our Temporary Aviary" »

I was doing some menial task at work on Friday - data entry, essentially - when I went to enter the name of "Cain, Nicole". It was supposed to resolve into an email address as part of the process. I moved on and went back to check my work, and realized I it hadn't resolved into a proper email address. I had typed in the wrong name: "Cain, Valerie".

It took me a minute to recognize where this came from - Valerie was someone I had worked with in 1995. I would not have come up with her name if you asked me, but there it was, and I had typed it. It brought back a flood of the names of people that I had worked with back then, people who I had not thought of in years.

I spent a few minutes trying to satisfy my curiosity about some of them. Many were on LInkedIn. So now I'm considering adding them to my network on LinkedIn to see if I might be able to meet them again. They were the group where I had my first "real" job after college, so there is a fondness I have for that job and the people that worked there. I'm not sure what I'd say to them, but it feels like it would be "neat" to say hi.

But I have not yet made the plunge yet of connecting with them. We'll see if I do before our next trip back to the north east this summer, where I would have the opportunity to see them.

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This weekend I completed the first pass at designing a font based on my wife’s printing. I turned out pretty well for not spending any clean-up time on it yet, but there are a few things I still need to fix:

• The letter spacing is not refined
• There are no braces characters
• There are no accented characters (except for the n-tilde)
• I may need to tweak the relative line thicknesses (so that all the characters looks like they were drawn with the same pen)

Even in its current state, Donna’s font is much more usable than the font I created based on my daughters’ 4-year-old printing, since it has all characters represented on a keyboard (except for those braces). It seems a little small, so I may need to tweak that, too.

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My favorite umbrella has been a large, black golf umbrella. It is big enough to cover me in the rain even if the wind is blowing a bit. Even after the tab that keeps it closed fell out, I just used the Velcro strap to wrap around it to keep it closed. Recently, one end cap snapped off of the rib (so that the fabric wasn’t taut right there), but it was still perfectly functional. This past week, however, I had to put “large umbrella” on my birthday list because it broke in a new way.

At first, I didn’t realize it had a new flaw when I grasped it tightly in a rain storm last week while walking from my car to my building downtown. I quickly realized something was amiss, though, when I felt water dripping onto my head even though it was completely under the umbrella. Looking up I noticed my umbrella now had a sunroof! The “wind cap” that is the extra disk of fabric that sits on the very top of the umbrella and overlaps the larger umbrella fabric had separated from the main umbrella fabric and was happily flapping in the breeze. This left an opening right in the middle of the umbrella, rendering it somewhat less useful as a rain repellent. I tried to spin the umbrella around so that the wind would blow that flap of fabric down instead of up, but the swirling wind around the buildings downtown made this impossible.

I tried gluing the cap back onto the umbrella, but it did not hold. It really needed to be sewn to repair it properly, but given my lack of sewing skills and its other signs of age, I didn’t bother to try that repair. So for the next month or two, I’ll be using my emergency backup umbrella I keep at my desk at work: a Houston Astros umbrella I got at a game this past year. It’s actually a fairly decent umbrella for being free, but it’s not nearly the size of the umbrella its replacing.

I posted a few new pictures to my picture catalog yesterday. Enjoy!