On My iPad
Fraser Spiers, the god of iPad in Education, wrote a great post about the amazing apps out there on iOS and how he’s using his Mac less and less. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m using my Mac less, but his collection of iPad apps intrigues me. And my recent discovery/use of many apps seems to mirror Fraser’s:
Flipboard: I loaded Flipboard for the first time about 2 months ago after watching the Stanford CS193P lecture with the creators of it. It’s an amazing way to browse content from Facebook and Twitter. But more importantly, Flipboard curates great content that I would’ve never found.
Kindle: I’ve been reading more lately, and Kindle is the platform to read digital books on. The fact that I can read a book on my iPad, Kindle Keyboard (recently acquired – that’s another story), or Kindle Cloud Reader and keep everything in sync is awesome. I thought I would enjoy reading on the actual Kindle hardware more than I do, but I’ve found that the iPad is by far the best reader (in my situation)
Instapaper: I’ve been listening to Build & Analyze with Marco Arment for probably a year now, but I finally bought Instapaper a few months ago. I don’t use it as much as I should, and I’m well aware of this. Right now I am in the middle of reading Steve Jobs on the Kindle, though, so that’s taking most of my reading time.
OmniFocus: Everyone raves about OmniFocus. Is it really that good?
Dropbox: Fraser says his “life is in Dropbox”. I’m not there yet, but Dropbox has revolutionized the way I work, particularly with grad school work and iOS Development. I wish I had had Dropbox in college. If you don’t use Dropbox, you’re missing out.
iA Writer: Another app I hear/read about all the time. Might have to check it out.
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Apps on my home screen that Fraser didn’t mention:
Plants vs. Zombies: the greatest game ever made for iOS. It’ll be hard to beat.
500px: Awesome photographs.
FaceTime: Made Christmas morning special, being able to video chat with almost all of my family, even though we were all in different states. Yes, iChat can do the same, but the more mobile experience of the iPad made it so much better.
Mr. Reader: I should probably swap this out with Reeder, but Mr. Reader is good.
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Finally, here’s a screenshot of my iPad home screen. I am in the process of rearranging my apps, and I’m getting close. The use of Folders on the dock is a clever idea I stole from someone. Also, several of my home screen apps are there because I’m temporarily interested in them. Scribblenauts, Lync, and iTunes U are examples of that. (And yes, I need a new background. That one was great for the Christmas season.)
My iPad Home Screen
Caption Please: iPad Camera
When we were in New York City back in November, we went up to the 86th floor observatory of the Empire State Building. We were 320 meters high. And we saw this guy. I had to get a picture of him, and I didn’t care if he saw me, because this is priceless.
Caption Please.
Books I Read in 2011
One of my 2011 goals was to read at least one book every month. Audiobooks (denoted with a *) qualified as “reading”, and since I was commuting a long way in my car for much of the year, I read a lot of books this way. I managed to pull off reading an average of a book a month, and I hope to read just as much or more in 2012. Here’s the list of books I read:
• Digital Fortress* by Dan Brown
• The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo* by Stieg Larsson
• A Scanner Darkly* by Philip K. Dick
• The Girl Who Played With Fire* by Stieg Larsson
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest* by Stieg Larsson
• Sun Stand Still* by Steven Furtick
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* by Rebecca Skloot
• Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller
• Radical by David Platt
• Heaven is For Real* by Todd Burpo
• Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef
Which books did you read in the last year?
Full disclosure: The links above are Amazon Affiliate links, which means I get a small percentage of money from sales made by clicking them. If you don’t want to support that, go directly to Amazon/Google and search for the books.
Will With Trains
Over the Christmas holiday, I had the chance to take some photos of my adorable nephew really enjoying himself playing with his Thomas the Train set. Later that day, I set up my HO scale electric train, and he went crazy over it, thus giving me another great photo op. These pictures are shot with my Canon Rebel XTi with the nifty fifty lens. Enjoy!
Last year I wrote about some goals that I had for 2011. While I didn’t achieve all of them, I did finished reading the Bible through this morning. I am proud of this, but I don’t say it to boast about what I’ve done. I just want to share some of the things I learned through the process and where I went wrong.
There are countless reading plans to guide you through the Bible in whatever timeframe you want. One of the teaching pastors at my church is the president of Walk Thru the Bible, so I chose to go with their monthly periodical called Daily Walk.
The Daily Walk
This little monthly guide has a page for each day’s reading, explaining what’s going on in the story and providing some life application. The small “digest” format makes it really easy to carry around and works great if you use various Bibles (I mainly used my NASB copy and the YouVersion app on my iPad/iPhone). The other format that Walk Thru offers is the Daily Walk Bible:
The Daily Walk Bible
The one disadvantage to this format is that it is an entire Bible, with similar commentary to the magazine, so the dates might not match up in subsequent years (Saturdays and Sundays are typically paired up). That said, I think the content is better, and there are extra days of reflection thrown in. So, if carrying around a heavier Bible with slightly skewed dates doesn’t bother you, I recommend the full Bible. Plus, the magazine costs $10 more.
Reading the Bible through in a year is a great exercise in discipline. I got behind many times and had to catch up, and several times it really did feel like a chore. I have developed somewhat of a habit of reading the scriptures, though, which is good. Next year, I either want to read through the New Testament throughout the year (thus taking a slower pace and digging deeper), or I want to do a separate devotional.
I definitely don’t claim to truly *know* the scriptures at this point, since there’s so much to digest. What this exercise did for me, though, was to reinforce the stories that I did already know. On many occasions we would hear sermons at church about a story I had recently read (or vice versa), and I had a better grasp on it as I listened to my pastor teach. So I recommend reading it through at some point in your life, or at the very least, make an attempt to read the Bible more regularly and apply it so that we can represent Christ to the world.
I recently had to move our Lync Server 2010 File Store to another server, and I ran into problems. We had it on the SQL server that was running our Lync databases. That wasn’t particularly a problem, but we noticed sometimes there was a delay when people would dial into a conference. It would take 1 or 2 minutes to admit a dial-in participant into a meeting. My guess is that it was because we have McAfee VirusScan running on that SQL server (as all servers should have some virus protection). This very helpful post pointed me in that direction. It could also have been something with SQL interfering with the file share, but I doubt it. Sometimes rebooting the server with the File Store on it helped, but this was only a temporary fix. And you really don’t want to go rebooting SQL servers, especially during business hours, and when they run databases for other services.
Anyway, so I followed the TechNet instructions (found here) and moved my File Store to a server not running virus scan software. Doug Deitterick’s blog post was even more helpful in this process, since he includes important steps that Microsoft’d docs left out. However, either my server is more stubborn than everyone else’s, or these great articles left out an important step.
Moving the File Store to another server fixed the dial-in conferencing delay issue, which was great. But I noticed later that when I shared a PowerPoint presentation or uploaded a file attachment to a meeting, no other users could download the file. For PowerPoint files, the non-presenters using the Lync client would see this message:
“This slide couldn’t be downloaded. Please contact your support team. Error reason: File not found.”
Those users who logged in with the Web App would see:
“Failed to Download the Slide.”
File attachments gave similar errors, indicating the file was no where to be found.
I called Microsoft, and my support rep immediately had me look in IIS at the Basic Settings of the MeetingContent and MeetingFiles Folders.
The folder was still pointing to my old server. Both linked articles above left this step out. So I changed the directories to the new File Store location and rebooted the servers later that night. One important thing to do after changing this pointer was to run the Step 2: Setup or Remove Lync Server Components in the Lync Server Deployment Wizard. I think this step writes some permissions to the new File Store folders.
This is definitely an issue that Microsoft needs to fix. The server not running virus scan software is locked down pretty good, but my next step is to experiment with alternatives to McAfee, or installing it with certain exceptions. Hopefully this post help some of you Lync administrators out there.
Skydiving at Skydive the Farm
Skydiving was on both my bucket list and my wife’s bucket list, so we put together a skydiving trip for her birthday this year. About a year ago at CocoaCamp, I heard a guy over lunch talk about going to Skydive the Farm a lot, and after a bit more research, I discovered that it is probably one of the best places within reasonable driving distance from us. So we went, and it was awesome.
My instructor, Ryan, had jumped more than 6000 times, and Nikole’s instructor, Big Steve, had jumped more than 3000 times, so we felt like we were in good hands. I don’t know Nikole’s exact numbers, but I took a picture of my stats from Ryan’s Altimaster Neptune altimeter:
I jumped at 14,500 feet, and 63 seconds later (and topping out around 130 mph), Ryan pulled the ripcord at 3900 feet (about 2 miles in a minute!). 189 seconds after that, we made a soft landing. Here’s the graphical representation of my dive.
Here’s the video from my dive, and some of the best pics.
Public Transportion in Greater Atlanta
Ever since I came to Atlanta, I was always convinced that public transportation here is pretty terrible. This is evident to anyone to takes a quick look at the map of MARTA. Just compare the MARTA map to the T map in Boston (I recently went on a family vacation to Boston, and the MBTA has quite and impressive transportation system).
MARTA vs T
After spending a few days in Boston, I began wondering if I really could take public transportation in this urban sprawl of a city. I live in Dacula, GA, which is about 37 miles from my office. If I leave the house at 6:15AM, it takes about 0:45 to get to work. If I leave work at 4:00PM, it takes about 1:15 to get home. This puts me on the road for about 2 hours per day, driving about 74 miles. This becomes kind of a drag, so I decided to try the bus.
The most convenient bus route for me is the Xpress GA 411 route. The bus leaves the Mall of Georgia at 6:30 and drops me off in Midtown Atlanta a little bit before 7:30. I have to leave my house at 6:15 and drive 7.1 miles to the bus stop, and then I have to walk 0.8 miles from the midtown bus stop to my office, arriving to work at roughly 7:40. I then can leave work at 4:40 to catch the 5:00 outgoing bus to arrive back at the mall at 6:10. Then I drive home and arrive around 6:20PM.
I wondered just how much time/money I lost/gained by doing this experiment. So here’s a summary that takes everything into account:
Note: I take the BMW to the bus stop so that my wife puts more miles on the Honda to save gas. And she prefers the Honda anyway because it is an automatic.
| No Public Transportation | Public Transportation | |
| MPG (2011 average) | 30.4 | 23.48 |
| Round trip in car | 74 | 14.2 |
| Gallons used per round trip | 2.4342 | 0.6048 |
| Gas price/gal (7/26/11) | $3.72 | $4.02 |
| Average gas cost per round trip | $9.06 | $2.43 |
| Round trip bus ticket | $0.00 | $7.00 |
| Total Cost | $9.06 | $9.43 |
| Time spent away from home | 11 hours | 12 hours |
On the surface, it looks like it’s not worth it, because it costs $0.37 more to take the bus, and it takes another hour out of my day. If you dig a little deeper, though, there is more to it than just finances and time.
- Because my wife would be taking the lower-cost Honda to her work, that saves $0.76.
- In mileage and wear-and-tear on our cars, we are putting 1.2 fewer miles per day on the BMW and 58.6 fewer miles per day on the Honda. That has to count for something
- Taking the bus frees up time to do stuff on the bus that I’d normally do at home, like read (or maybe develop iOS apps?!). This isn’t a 1-to-1 match on time, but it’s definitely worth some value.
- (Update) I forgot to mention that riding the bus also adds an automatic 1.5 miles of walking into my day.
I really enjoyed the “public transportation experiment”, and I’d be willing to do it regularly. After going through it many times, my opinion may change, but it certainly reduces the stress of driving a car for 2 hours every day, and it’s an environmentally responsible thing to do. When we move closer to the city (hopefully soon!), if bus stops are conveniently located, then I might consider taking the bus 100% of the time. And who knows, we might be able to get rid of a car also!
Henry Ford on Learning
I came across this quote while reading my devotional from June 9th (yeah, I’m slightly behind).
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”
-Henry Ford
That’s pretty brilliant, and a motto I hope to keep. The devotional had an interesting perspective, saying that we can learn so much from older Christians. God worked in previous generations’ lives (see Psalm 44:1-3), and we can learn from older folks’ experiences.
On Learning…
Over the past few months I did a little bit of iPhone programming at work, and being such a novice in the area of Cocoa programming, I looked around for a more focused selection of podcasts to listen to during my long commute. I came across the Build & Analyze podcast over at 5By5, which is hosted by Dan Benjamin, but the majority of it is Marco Arment spewing his thoughts about iOS programming, coffee, and life in general.
As I listen to each episode, I’m figuring out that in a lot of ways, Marco thinks a lot like I do (or at least how I want to think). I may banter about more of his thoughts in future posts, but for now, I couldn’t agree more with his stance on learning and putting yourself in challenging situations in the Desk and Balls episode. When he was coming out of college, he talked about how he thought he knew everything, but his first job quickly showed him that this wasn’t true. That moment for me, however, was when I got to college, and Georgia Tech showed me that I didn’t know anything (and I didn’t know how to learn, either). Fortunately, I eventually learned how to learn by the time I graduated, which is what college is really all about.
Marco goes on to say that his first job kicked him in the butt, and he was surrounded by people that were so much smarter than him. He was able to learn and absorb all kinds of knowledge and techniques about writing code that he didn’t already know. I love this mentality. While my job probably isn’t as challenging to me as Marco’s first job was for him, it’s still a challenge and I learn new things every day, and I am surrounded by a lot of people that are a lot smarter than me. Also, this concept is one reason I attend CocoaHeads and read blogs about programming that are way over my head, because being around those people and thoughts grows my own understanding of the Cocoa programming world.
Unrelated to careers and programming, though, I recently had an experience that kicked me in the butt, but it forced me to learn. My church small group leader asked me to lead a discussion on Galatians 3 and 4. I’ve been a Christian for a long time, and I’m familiar with Galatians, but I don’t think I’ve ever read through those chapters to really study them (except for when I read through the Bible in high school, which was way too long ago to count). It was essentially all new material to me, other than the premise that we are saved by faith and not by works. Studying Galatians with the mindset of leading a discussion on it forced me into a very uncomfortable position, but in the end, I learned a lot about these two short chapters and how they related to the rest of the Bible. The people in our small group are way smarter than me, which put a lot pressure on me, but in the end, I really enjoyed my preparation time, and we all had a good time discussing our perspectives on these chapters. I hope to keep studying the scriptures on my own in a similar way.
What challenging situation have you been in lately?
