Joe Kueser’s Blog

I worked with a few buds of mine to create a new app called BorrowMe.  The short and skinny…it helps you keep track of the things you borrow, and the things you lend.  We really dipped into the iPhone capability bucket on this one and have some great features in place.  My favorite being the “handshake” to seal the deal, with which you can send an entry for something you are lending to the lendee (is that a word?) with just a couple of taps.

We’re very proud of what we did with this app.  Check it out at the iTunes App Store.

I originally realized that BorrowMe had finally be released when checking out AppShopper, a site that makes it much easier to keep up on what’s new in the AppStore (Thanks, Pedro!)  Here’s the link to BorrowMe on that site:

http://appshopper.com/lifestyle/borrowme

The PDF version of Erica Sadun’s book, “The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK” (link: http://tinyurl.com/4aldd8) is finally available.

I’ll admit, I had some very high expectations for this book. The samples on Erica Sadun’s web site offered a peek into what to expect. Not only does the book meet my expectations, but it impossibly exceeds them.

The first surprise was the first chapter, a great primer for iPhone development. I wish I had this in my hands when I first started doing iPhone development, as chapter one explains some key concepts important to understanding iPhone development. The first chapter alone is worth the price of admission for those new to iPhone development.

The rest of the book is filled with examples of how to accomplish magic in all aspects of iPhone development. Some that you would figure out yourself given enough time, but most true gems. And a few with non-public API calls (use at your own risk).

Check it, out! You won’t regret it.

I normally don’t worry too much about anything political. I just can’t get excited about something that in inherently corrupt. However, what is going on in Washington today is pissing me off.

It’s not so much the bailout. While I would personally rather the government didn’t spend our hard-earned tax dollars to bail out some fat cats that made some bad decisions, I admit that my knowledge of all things economic is pretty limited, and trust that the “experts” will make the right choice. So, while I don’t want it, I could tolerate the bailout.

What I can’t tolerate is all of the earmarks the shoved into this thing. If this bill was so important, and so urgent, why the hell couldn’t our friends in congress just write a bill that did just what it was set out to do; bail out the banks. Instead it’s filled full of crap such as (and I’m not making this up!):

• $6 million for producers of kids’ wooden arrows. (Unless those arrows are going to be used to punish the fat cats, they have nothing to do with the bank crisis!)
• $192 million to Puerto Rican and Virgin Island rum producers! (I’m thinking that this “crisis” probably has those that drink drinking a lot more rum these days, so this one was truly unnecessary. The rum producers will be making a killing anyway, along with the tobacco industry and the beer industry.)
• Some undisclosed amount to…wool research! (Sounds a little dirty)
• $128 million to auto-racing tracks. (Um…why? As big as NASCAR is these days, I’m thinking they can afford to make their own damned tracks!)
• $33 million to companies operating in American Samoa. (Hey, cool!…no…wait…not so cool, but certainly better than rum or auto racing)
• $10 million to small- to medium-buget film and television producers. (I’m not sure what kind of movies $10 million can produce, but my guess is that we just purchased a stock in the porn industry.)
• $233 million as…get this…tax benefits for fishermen who’s livelihoods suffered as a result of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. (This was clearly a way of buying the vote of Alaska Rep. Don Young. I wish I could get a break for my suffering of 20 years ago! As a starving college student, life really sucked about then. I consumed roughly $192 million worth of rum, too, hmmm…it’s all coming back to haunt me now…I definitely need $233 million for my suffering.)
• $3.8 billion (with a B) for health care provisions that force insurance companies to provide mental-health treatment coverage. (While I see a connection between mental health and this bill, I don’t think this bill is the appropriate place for this.)

Why the hell do we let this happen? How can we prevent it?

For those of you that are supposed to be representing us in Washington, shame on you.

(source: NY Post, via Drudge)

Apple has finally opened the AppStore for iPhone and iPod Touch applications.

Not to toot my own horn, but toot toot, I have an app available!  MPG

I’ve also launched a new site to support my iPhone apps.  iPhoneCodeMonkey.com.

Check it out!

A little background…I live in a small town (which will remain nameless, lest everyone in town will lynch me). The people here are some of the most polite, laid back drivers I have ever experienced. It is not at all unusual to:

• Get stuck behind a driver going 5 to 10 miles per hour under the speed limit.
• Be in line at a fast food drive-thru with full car lengths between each car in front of you.
• Be stopped at a stop light with the guy in front of the line two full car lengths short of the stoplight.
• Narrowly avert an accident with someone driving diagonally across the parking lot.
• Narrowly avert an accident with someone drifting happily across the double-yellow line.
• Have someone smile at you and wave you in to traffic that you are trying to merge into.

So you would think it would be really hard to drive in any way that would get these people into a frenzy. Well, I’ve discovered it, and it’s called hypermiling.

In short, hypermiling is a way of driving that increases your miles per gallon. There are all kinds of techniques to make this happen, and most of them seem pretty logical. Stuff like not accelerating too fast, keeping at the speed limit, taking advantage of gravity and coasting down hills. You can find several articles and tips on Google.

Slow acceleration and going at or below the speed limit are great ways to piss off even the most patient driver.

Using this technique, I managed to get 21.5 miles per gallon out of my minivan, which when driving normally gets 18 MPG. I am hypermiling on my Civic this week, and don’t yet know what kind of results I will get, but I’ve used somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 of a tank of gas, and have gone about 100 miles. It looks like I will be getting between 35 and 40 MPG, where I normally get 28 to 32.

Here’s to saving a few bucks.

No, despite popular belief, the only prescription is not more cowbell. For me, the only prescription is lots of expensive toys.

The fever I gots is the photography bug. I guess that makes me a…

shutterbug |ˈ sh ətərˌbəg|
noun informal
an enthusiastic amateur photographer.

It started with a trip to Hawaii where I took a boatload of pictures. Then one of my co-workers had to go and point me to HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. WOW!

So, I’ve decided I’m going to start up yet another hobby, photography. As near as I can figure, it’s going to be one of the costliest hobbies I’ve ever taken on. Much to my surprise, when I brought the idea up to my wife, she didn’t complain about the cost, instead she said, “Oh, you’d be good at that, and would really enjoy it. That would really be good for you.”

So, wish me luck. Should be an interesting ride.

I’m just checking out MacJournal, a fairly cheap ($22) program that not only allows you to keep personal journals (locked securely on your Mac) but also lets you keep public journals. What we like to call “blogs”.

So, guess what!?! You can post these public journal entries (blogs) to…you guessed it…your blog.

So I’m going to give that a try. If this looks weird or doesn’t work, blame MacJournal.

I haven’t figured out how to use them yet, but apparently MacJournal also supports goodies like smilies ☺ and wiki text as well (not sure what that means yet.)

Looks like you can set tags. It seems to know something about categories, though I can’t figure out how to set it. Maybe it will do that when I upload it to the server.

EDIT: Just tested editing an existing entry from MacJournal as well. Pretty cool.

As I create more entries in MacJournal, it will automatically link to them. That’s sweet.

I won’t bore you with the details, ’cause the numbers I am getting excited about would make a lot of you point and giggle, but there are a couple of stats I am getting pretty excited about.

Of the millions (ok, thousands) of people that visit this site, only 22% are using any flavor of Internet Explorer. Then we have about 75% Firefox, and the rest split between Safari and Opera.

The OS wars aren’t quite as much fun, but still pretty cool. Not the 98% Windows that one might expect. Only 55% Windows, 35% Linux, and 10% Mac OS X.

The tides they are a changin’, my friend.

Anyone that knows me knows that I’m a huge fan of anything Apple. I own a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, and probably half a dozen iPods. I plan to buy a Time Capsule in the near future. I love the idea of being able to back up my MBP just by walking in the room. But, while I also love the idea of Apple TV, I haven’t come up with a good excuse to buy one.

I thought that I had finally found that excuse with the introduction of iTunes Movie Rentals. What an awesome idea! I can sit down, on a whim, and just start watching a movie (after a brief delay while I wait for the download.) Instant gratification! It’s the American way, baby! Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I had been one of the lucky ones. I thought I wouldn’t be afflicted. I thought I had been careful. As it turns out, I had just been naive. At first it was just an irritation, then three bright red marks. Now it seems that death is all but certain. I hear there is hope. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Read the rest of this entry »