Well, I’m still working on my new blogs based on personal finance and technology. So far, I have about 20 posts planned out for the personal finance one, but I haven’t touched the technology one yet. I’ve been toying with writing my own blog engine for the technology one - not because there aren’t good blog engines out there, but more as a learning exercise (and it would use some of the newer .Net features that the other blog engines haven’t used yet). I’m not sure if I’m going to do that now or not…

I have maybe 3 personal finance posts written, but still need to proofread them before I make them public. My original plan was to not post anything on the personal finance site until I have about 14 posts ready to go so I can queue them up and start writing the next week or two worth of posts. That’s still my plan as of right now, but this is going to be harder than I imagined as far as keeping fresh content coming out. My target is to have one new article a day during the week. I just have to figure out a rhythm and then hopefully it’ll get easier, but I guess we’ll see.

I may go ahead and start the tech site as well with a series of posts about building a new blog engine. I’m not sure that I want to do that or not, but it may be useful and having feedback on the design as I go along would be helpful. Just have to find the time to do that too.

I’ve also been trying to get back into the habit of taking more photos and getting a little photoblog up and running, but I think that one is on the back burner for now. Just not enough time to do everything.

At the end of last month, I paid off my student loans - it was quite hard to write a $14,000 check, but once it was written, I didn’t regret it at all. It feels great knowing they are out of the way. The only debt I have left at this point (other than my primary mortgage) is a second mortgage I got when I bought my house (my down payment didn’t go as far as I had hoped due to closing costs, new house expenses, etc). This one is higher than my student loans ($18,000), but it’s possible that I can knock it out by the end of the year assuming no major financial issues arise between now and then. I may end up having to sell some stuff to make this happen, but we’ll see how that goes…I’m willing to do what is needed to take care of business.

This morning I sent in my monthly payment with a nice little $500 additional principle attached and I’m already starting to feel better. :) Debt free, here I come!

I love Sci Fi Rewind - I haven’t had cable TV for two years now and the one show I wanted to watch, but couldn’t find legally online was Battlestar Galactica.  Now Sci Fi finally has it online for free on Rewind.  BSG may have been on there earlier, but I never found it until this season.  The thing I really like about Rewind is the fact that the commercialsare short and the video automatically resumes once the commercials are over.  I like ABC.com’s quality (particularly the HD feeds - really nice video), but I really dislike having to click the done button once the ad is over…I’m just fine with the ads, but please, show them and then get out of the way.  I’m glad to see Sci Fi understands this.

Wordpress 2.5 / New Theme
I just finished updating this blog to use the new Wordpress 2.5 engine. It’s really quite nice - everything on the admin side is much more refined that before. The upgrade process is amazingly simple - you just upload the new files, run upgrade.php, and in a minute or two (or longer if you have lots of posts) you’re ready to go. While I was doing the upgrade, I decide I would go ahead and update the theme as well. I liked the last theme, but I saw a new theme that looked a little better to me - so I just popped it in since I was already messing around with the site anyway. It is a bit more streamlined than the last one and more my style.

New Blogs
Over the last week or so, I’ve been planning out some topics that I want to blog about. I realize I haven’t been actively blogging for a while now, but part of that is because I can’t decide what I want to include on this blog. I’m always torn between putting all of my thoughts on this one blog or trying to keep them on different blogs so that each blog has a particular topic. The problem is that I would end up not posting at all. So, I have finally decided I’m going to dedicate time each week (and perhaps more often) to blogging in general and I have also decided I am creating more focused blogs going forward. At this point in time, I’m going to start maintaining three different blogs:

AdamByram.com

This blog will continue to be blog that is purely personal - more to communicate with friends and such than anything else. If I have a topic that I want to talk about that doesn’t fit into either of the two new blogs, it’ll end up here.

New Personal Finance Site

I’ll announce the name later once I finish getting things setup and get the initial content loaded, but I’m creating a new site focused on providing personal finance advice / observations for Generation Y. My generation has the opportunity to do great things, but I keep hearing (and seeing) how so many in this generation can’t (or don’t want) to manage money. To me, this is one of the most important things someone can learn. Money isn’t the key to happiness, but it’s one of those things what you need to understand and learn to use to help you achieve your dreams. So I’m hoping my new site will prove useful to people that want to start learning about personal finance, but don’t want to get bogged down in the technical details of it.

New Software Development Site

I’ll announce the URL for this once it’s up and running as well, but this will be the place that all of my software development related ideas will go. At the end of 2007, I started a new job at a software startup and I’ve had many experiences there that I’d like to blog about (as far as what works, what doesn’t, and things I’m learning about). I’ve wanted to do a blog like this for a long time, so we’ll see how it goes, but I think it’ll be fun.

I Tweet
I have also started using Twitter. I seems like a nice way to stay on top of the latest happenings, particularly in the software world. I don’t tweet non- stop or anything, but I try to tweet every now and then. I have my latest tweets in the sidebar of this blog and you’re welcome to follow me on Twitter if you’ve like - http://www.twitter.com/adambyram/.

That’s all for now - more updates to come.

I just spent a few hours working on a small iPhone app using the Beta 2 iPhone SDK and thought I would share my my initial thoughts. Keep in mind that this is the first time I’ve tried programming for OS X period and I spend 99% of my time programming in C# with Microsoft’s Visual Studio.

Xcode itself is not even comparable to Visual Studio (I realize VS isn’t free, but even the free Express Editions are much, MUCH better than Xcode). I found out how to turn on the autocomplete functionality in Xcode, but it’s so unhelpful that I may turn it back off since it seems to get in the way more than it helps. I’m so accustomed to intellisense in VS - if you know nothing about a library, you can use intellisense to get up and running in a flash (usually), but not in Xcode. In Xcode, if you don’t know the frameworks you’re using in and out, prepare to be checking out Safari constantly. The whole Interface Builder application doesn’t really make sense to me yet, so I won’t really comment on it yet. The error messages from Xcode have been fairly useful so far, so that’s a good thing. The editor is decent in that it color codes syntax for you and it does have the ability to jump directly to specific functions from a menu (very similar to VS on this one).

Perhaps the bigger issue for people coming from a non-OS X background is the knowledge of all of the frameworks. It’s not nearly as expansive as the .NET framework, but it’s quite different - so you’re not going to be able to just pick up the frameworks and hit the ground running. The documentation on Apple’s dev center isn’t terrible…it takes a little bit to find what you need, but it’s usually there somewhere. The naming convention does make it pretty clear what you’re doing when calling a method, however, this is realllllllly irritating without intellisense. I’m still trying to figure out which classes do what and how to structure the View/Controllers in my application. The sample apps are really helping out there. It does seem like I have to write quite a bit of code for even fairly basic stuff. I just feel really unproductive at this point..I know that’s mostly the learning curve that I’m working through, but I would have thought Apple would have a better developer toolset in this day and age. I don’t think the Objective-C language will be that hard to pickup since it seems pretty logical once you get the syntax for methods and method calls. The frameworks are going to take some time and I’m sure things will still be changing between now and June, but hopefully I’ll get this stuff figured out soon so I can have my little app up and running in the simulator.

I don’t normally blog about random things I see on the internet, but I ran across an article by John C. Dvorak today (The iPhone Is No Desktop) that really annoyed me enough that I have to do this. John is basically saying that it’s ridiculous that people are using the iPhone as a desktop computing platform and that drives him crazy in many ways (10 ways to be exact). I don’t disagree that the iPhone is not a “desktop replacement” in the typical sense, but what bothers me is the fact that he thinks this is important.

In the technical world, so many people still believe the “platform” is the key to everything. There are always discussions about which platform is the best - laptop vs desktop vs PDA, Windows vs OS X vs Linux, Nikon vs Canon, Ford vs Chevy - you get the point. That’s all fine and dandy and I don’t disagree that sometimes there are certain benefits to using a specific platform. But the kicker is that this is a stupid argument to begin with.

People don’t care about the platform. Even if you think you care, you probably don’t when you get right down to it. For example, when I’m using the Windows platform, I keep my current TODO list in Microsoft Outlook. Now that I also work on a Mac, I decided to move my TODO list to an online platform. Sure - I moved to a different “platform” because it made it easier to get to my TODO list from either OS, but it’s not the platform I really care about, it’s the data.

Whether my TODO list is on the web, on my desktop, on my iPhone, or on my physical notepad, the platform is of little importance to me as long as my list is there and it’s accessible when I need it. The platform only comes into the picture when it can better enable me to manipulate my data in ways that make me more efficient and effective. In reality, forget the platform and focus on the data (or on the actions driven by the data) and you’ll see that the platform being the key is a fallacy in this day and age.

Well, I finally decided it is time for me to give Apple’s OS X a try. I’ve been interested in seeing how things work on an Apple system, but I haven’t really had a reason to buy an Apple machine. I still don’t really have a reason, but I do want to play around with the iPhone SDK since I have some ideas I’d like to try out so I used that as an excuse to buy a MacBook.

I ended up going with a black 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo version. It came with 2GB of RAM, but that’s not really enough since I want to run VMWare Fusion so that I can have Visual Studio 2005/2008 running in unity mode as well as SQL Server 2005/2008. So I had the MacBook upgraded to 4GB DDR2 RAM. Apple wanted $400 extra to add 2GB, but I used Crucial memory and did the upgrade myself for a grand total of $111 including tax & shipping. Not a bad deal since I effectively saved nearly $300 by spending about 10 minutes swapping the RAM sticks out.

So far, my impression of OS X is favorable. I’ve found replacements for everything I typically used on Windows (except development tools and Quicken) and I’m fairly happy with the way things work. For the first week or so, I wasn’t sure that I was ever going to like OS X, but it’s one of those things that grows on you. I wouldn’t make the claim that a lot of people when they say Macs are easier to use than Windows. I think usability (as a whole) is pretty similar between the two. OS X does have some standards that most applications seem to follow which is better than on Windows, but the big difference is that the “graphic arts” background of historical Mac users has resulted in software developers taking more time to refine the user experience to the point that things are a bit more logical than they are in Windows-based counterparts.

I’m really happy with the battery life on this thing. As long as I’m just surfing the net, typing up blog posts, reading e-mail, and other light tasks, I get fantastic battery life. I have a feeling even playing a DVD will still result in good battery life, but it may not be the 4 or so hours I get now. Time machine seems useful, although I keep forgetting to eject the disk before I unplug the backup drive - so I think I’m going to end up getting the Time Capsule before long, but I don’t really want to spend that money right now.

The one thing that is slightly disappointing thus far is that the MacBook gets a little choppy when playing World of Warcraft with everything maxed out. It’s not terrible and I do realize this machine has an integrated graphics card, but WoW isn’t that demanding…either way, it’s still plenty playable, but it’s just a little disappointing that it’s not as smooth as I’d like.

After I’ve used OS X for a few more weeks, I’ll post my updated impressions, but so far so good.

Today was the first time I have ever changed the oil in my Explorer at home without help.  In the past, I always took it to Ford to have the service done - but I don’t like the Ford dealerships around here, so I wanted to do it myself.  So last time I needed to change my oil, my Dad came up and helped me change it.  His help was basically him doing the work, but me watching so I had some idea of what was going on.  I’ve been overdue for a change for a bit, so I decided to bite the bullet and just go for it today.  It really isn’t that bad - I think the worst part of the whole thing is picking the proper oil filter (there are tons of options out there).

The whole process of draining the oil is simple (just make sure you find the correct drain plug…there may be more than just the oil one and if you pick the wrong one…well…it probably wouldn’t be very pretty).  All you really do is remove the plug, let the oil drain, replace the plug, remove the filter, let remaining oil drain (if any), install the new filter, then just fill it back up with fresh oil.  It is a bit messy, but I would rather spend 30 minutes doing it myself than to spend 1-2 hours (mostly waiting) for someone else to do it - and you can save quite a bit of money depending on how cheap you want to be.  (I think my total costs are about the same as the dealer, but they could be way less if I tried and didn’t mind cheaper materials…)

Overall, the whole process is quite fun.  I think I’m going to start learning more about cars now - they don’t seem that hard to understand…there are lots of parts, but each part is pretty simple by itself.  We’ll see how it goes, but hopefully I’ll learn enough that I can start to work on my car more to fix the little issues that are popping up these days.

So, it’s been nearly 2 months since I last blogged…  I’ve had quite a few things going on in those two months, probably as much or more than when I first moved to TN.  I started remodeling my kitchen - the counter-tops will be delivered on Friday if all goes as planned, then I’ll get the sink in and things will be all good.  I also changed jobs - I went from a relatively huge public company with 55K-ish employees to a little bitty private software company.  It’s been quite a change, but it’s great - it’s exactly the type of job I was looking for and I’m enjoying the people there (although I do still miss the people at the previous employer).  Overall though, it was the right move and I have no regrets.  Anyway - I plan to start blogging a few times a week at least from now on, but we’ll see what happens.

I’ve had my 4GB iPhone for about a month now so I thought I would share my impressions now that I’ve had plenty of time to check things out.  Overall, I’m still very happy with my purchase, but there are a few annoying things:

No Tasklist.  I don’t know why Apple decided to include all of the other PIM applications (contacts, calendar, notes), but decided to leave off a tasklist.  I really miss that feature from my Windows Mobile phone.  Hopefully Apple will add this soon.
Random Crashes.  It isn’t clear why it happens, but every once in a while, the iPhone will freeze and I’ll have to reboot.  Most of the time, I can just use the home button to kill the application and things are fine (although you usually lose whatever data you were updating, if any, when you do this).  It doesn’t take long to reset (maybe 20 seconds), but it’s still a bit of a pain.  My Windows Mobile phone and my PocketPC seem more stable (and I don’t have non-Apple applications on my phone).
No local downloading.  You can browse anything you want via Safari, but you can’t save anything.  I had one time when I really wanted to save a PDF document for viewing later or even e-mail it to myself…but the iPhone doesn’t support that.
No copy & paste.  There have been a couple of times when I needed to take a snippit of a webpage (or even copy a URL) and paste it into a note or e-mail, but at present, there is no ability to copy and paste on the iPhone.
Of coure, there are still the original issues of not having Flash support and no Assisted GPS.

But other than these few issues, the phone really works well.  The photo viewer works great, the call quality has been excellent, the EDGE network in my area is certainly speedy enough for everything I’ve needed, and the battery life is better than I expected.  It may not be the perfect phone, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.