Rick's World

Yesterday evening, I left the office and walked downstairs to get in my car to leave. That's when things got interesting...

I walked up to my car and hit the button on my keychain to open the (locked) trunk. I open the trunk and am about to put all my stuff in the trunk when I notice something very odd. Inside my trunk I always have three things. The first thing is a large, fairly expensive amplifier bolted to the back seat. Connected to this amplifier is a 12" subwoofer inside a box connected by speaker cable. The third thing is a bag containing various car-related tools (small air pump, jumper cables etc.) However, today, there were some additional items in my trunk - items that I did NOT put there. And these were items in a closed, locked trunk! What did I discover?

On top of the speaker box was two items. An empty, styrofoam cup with a lid on it. (Clearly a piece of garbage.) This cup was intentionally placed on top of the speaker box. Next to the cup on top of the speaker box was a large rock. (probably around a 5-10 pound rock. This rock looked to be a piece of one of those parking space 'bumpers'. (We have a bunch of broken ones in our parking lot). The third thing, was yet another one of those big broken parking lot bumper rocks placed next to the speaker box. Nothing was missing from the trunk. Just several items added to it.

My best guess as to how these items appeared in my trunk is that when I got back from my lunch break, I must have bumped the button on my keychain that opens the trunk without realizing it. The reason I think it must have happened after lunch is because had it happened before lunch, that empty styrofoam cup would have fallen off the speaker box the first time the car moved. Clearly someone noticed my open trunk and put those items in there as a message to me that I had left the trunk open. Then, once they'd left their 'message', they closed the trunk (which locks it). I would guess this was one of my coworkers who did this. I don't know who it was though.

Whomever you are thanks for closing that trunk! I wouldn't want to get my car broken into. Our office isn't in the best neighborhood.

Sorry for being so quiet on the website lately. I've spent the last several weeks working like a maniac on a little iPhone app. It's coming along nicely and hopefully will be up for sale in the AppStore soon. As I've been working on this app, I've come across a bunch of books that have been a big help in developing iPhone apps, so I thought I'd share them.

The iPhone Developer's Cookbook by Erica Sadun

This was the first iPhone programming book that I bought. It was also the first iPhone programming book available after the NDA was finally lifted. While I did enjoy this book and it was full of lots of useful 'recipes' on how to do things using the iPhone SDK, I can't really recommend it, at least not as a first book on iPhone programming. Mrs. Sadun spends a lot of time talking about how to do things with the unpublished and unapproved APIs in the iPhone SDK. Use of these APIs can get your application refused for acceptance into the AppStore. She does make it clear that this could happen, but I find her heavy use of these 'illegal' APIs a bit concerning. Despite my misgivings about this, it is a VERY interesting book from a hacking point of view. It's very interesting to read some of her tips on how to explore the inner workings of the API. I'd suggest this book for the more advanced programmers out there who are interested in the hacking side of things more than just learning the basics of how to write iPhone applications.

Beginning iPhone Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche

This is the best book I've read so far on programing with the iPhone SDK. I would suggest this book as a good introduction to buy as an introduction to writing iPhone applications. It does a good job of covering all the basics areas you would need to know, including view controllers, using the GPS, using the camera, etc. An excellent book.

iPhone SDK Application Development by Jonathan Zdziarski.

I just started reading this book. It looks like it covers all the important areas of the iPhone SDK. It also covers a few areas that the previous book doesn't, such as layers, network programming and audio. I'd suggest this as the second book to read after the above 'Beginning iPhone Development'.

Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (2nd Edition) by Stephen G. Kochan

This is the only book of the bunch that I don't actually own. However, I have looked over the book and I can certainly recommend it as a good introduction to the Objective-C 2.0 language, which you use to write iPhone applications. The only reason I didn't buy it was that by the time this book came out, I had already learned enough about Objective-C 2.0 that i didn't really need the book. But if you are a beginner at Objective-C, this book will prove very useful. Note that since this book convers Objective-C 2.0 in general, it is also useful to read if you plan on writing applications for the Mac itself. The Mac (as of Leopard) uses the same Objective-C 2.0 language that the iPhone does.

Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition) by Aaron Hillegass

While this book isn't technically about programming for the iPhone specifically, it is still very useful to read. This book is the 'Bible' of Mac programming. If you want to write a Mac application, this is the first book you should buy. The reason I recommend this book for learning the iPhone is that it covers a lot of the areas related to graphically designing user interfaces. These same techniques are used to design both Mac and iPhone applications, so learning them will still be quite useful.

Xcode 3 Unleashed by Fritz Anderson

While this book doesn't cover the iPhone SDK directly, it does cover the XCode development environment that you use to write iPhone applications with. As such, this book will help you learn how to use the tools at your disposal in order to write iPhone applications. It also contains an excellent section on setting up source control for your development projects in XCode. If you are going any form of development, it is critical that you use source control. This section alone is worth the cost of the book.

Save the Ta-Tas!

I'll keep my guns,
freedom, & money...
YOU CAN KEEP THE "CHANGE!"

Two days ago, I happened to go by the car wash place to get my car washed. It's been needing a wash for months, and I finally got around to doing it. In the process of washing the car, I found out that a lot of the little spots of stuff that were all over the car were likely drops of tree sap. After finding this out, I suddenly figured out where those spots were coming from. There is a large palm tree in my next door neighbor's front yard that has several branches that hang over my driveway. Obviously, these branches have been dripping sap onto my car, making all those spots on it. It was time to trim those branches.

Yesterday, I decided to take care of this little problem, so I parked the car away from the driveway, got out my ladder and my pole saw and set to work. I'm there a couple feet up on the ladder sawing away at one of the branches trying to cut it down. After a few minutes of work, I manage to cut through the branch. The branch falls, and proceeds to fall right into my face. The trunk of the branch proceeds to fall and hit me square in my right eye. Like a dumbass, I wasn't wearing any eye protection. Ouch! That hurt like hell! I go inside, take out my contacts and survey the damage. Other than a cut on my lower eyelid, and my eyes being rather bloodshot, things looked OK. Of course my eye itched like hell. I just figured the itching was because I had some dirt or something from the tree in my eye. Being the typical macho male that I am, I didn't think this little injury was any big deal. No need to go to the doctor for this.

After several hours of this discomfort, I changed my mind and decided to get it checked out after all. So I hopped in my car and drove to the nearest 'Urgent Care' medical clinic. Closed on Sundays! Then I drove to the next urgent car clinic only to discover that one is closed on Sundays also. Well this is stupid! A medical clinic isn't much use if it's closed! Besides, I was trying to avoid doing too much driving with my injured eye. I could see fine out of the eye, but it was bothering me, so I didn't want to take the risk. Unfortunately, I didn't have much choice but to do some more driving. I knew of one urgent care clinic that would be open, but it was a good 15-20 miles away. Oh well, I guess I have no choice.

I drive down to this third urgent care clinic, and it's open (It's open 24 hours a day). I check myself in and sit down to wait. After an hour or so, they call me in and take me to the examination room. i then sat there for what seemed like another half hour. Thankfully, they had a little flat screen TV there that I could watch, so I watched TV while I waited. After about a half hour the doctor comes in and examines my eye up close and determines that I have a corneal abrasion (a scratch on the eye itself) as well as the scratch on the eyelid. She said that the eye would normally heal very fast, often within 24 hours, but you had to make sure that it doesn't get infected. So she prescribed some antibiotics in eyedrop form. They also gave me a tetanus shot to make sure i didn't get any problems from the exposure to the tree branch in my eye. Finally, after a lot more waiting, they let me go. They even gave me a note excusing me from work for the next two days, but telling me to make sure that I went to see my regular eye doctor this morning to have it checked out. Because of the fast healing of the eye, you have to check the eye within 24 hours. I went from the doctor's office to the only 24 hour pharmacy I could find and put in for the prescription. I then went home for the night.

This morning, I called in sick to work and made an appointment with my main eye doctor. I went to the doctor and they checked me out. Of course I forgot to bring the eye drops with me and I couldn't remember the name of the drug, so she had to call the pharmacy to get the type of drug it was. They checked it out and essentially diagnosed the same thing - superficial corneal abrasion... In other words, a minor cut on my eye. They told me to continue using the eye drops for the next week or so and to come back tomorrow morning for a quick check to see how the eye is healing.

I'm still using the drops and will continue to use them (every hour!) for the next week. I also can't wear my contacts for the next week (the only real downside). While technically I could take tomorrow off from work on doctor's advice as well, I'm going to go to work. The eye is feeling a lot better today. It still itches a little every once in a while, but is hardly noticeable. Tomorrow, I plan on going to the doctor, and then going to work from there. I'll likely be a little late to work, but I'll be there.

I got lucky and only ended up with a scratch. It could have been much worse. Always wear that eye protection when doing yard work!

A few months ago, I bought and downloaded season 4 of Lost in HD from iTunes. I've been on a serious Lost kick lately, trying to catch up to the fifth season, which just started a few days ago. I watched all the episodes (or so I thought) and finished the fourth season a while back. When the new season started a few days ago, I watched the premiere only to realize that I had missed part of the season finale of season 4. I checked my copies of the episodes in iTunes and noticed a minute or so of the last episode was missing. I thought this was all that I missed. After some checking online however, I realized I was missing the entire last episode of season 4! I didn't miss a few minutes, I missed an entire episode. I thought I hadn't downloaded it. I had backed up the entire season to DVD after I downloaded it a few months ago. So I looked back through my backups and found the missing episode. I copied the episode back only to discover that when I backed up the entire season, I'd only backed up the HD episodes. Whenever you buy an HD episode, you also get a SD (standard definition) episode 'for free'. For every episode except the last one, I had both an HD and an SD episode. Apparently when you backup HD episodes to a DVD from iTunes, it only backs up the HD episodes, and does NOT backup the SD episodes! So, essentially, when you back up HD, you only backup half of what you paid for.

The solution to this is to NOT backup HD episodes from iTunes. Instead, you need to backup the files manually. Right click on one of the episodes in iTunes and select 'Show in Finder'. From this folder make sure you back up both episodes, the regular and the HD episodes. The filenames will be named 'xxx.mp4' and 'xxx (HD).mp4' where 'xxx' is the name of the episode.

Luckily for me, I had my entire iTunes library backed up in Time Machine and was able to recover the missing SD version of that episode. Now I need to go back and re-backup both the SD and HD episodes of the series again. I have one of those problem Seagate 1.5TB hard drives as my Time Machine backup drive, and luckily I've had no problems with it, so I was able to recover the episode... I've since updated the firmware on that drive, so it shouldn't have any problems in the future.

Recently, there have been some reports of problems with Seagate's new 1.5TB hard drive. Unfortunately, I bought one of these recently before I knew about this. Today I found a knowledge base article on their site that lists all the Seagate hard drive model numbers with this problem. To my surprise, I discovered that they have some 1TB hard drives that also have the problem. Unfortunately, I have one of the affected 1TB hard drives as well! So, now I have TWO hard drives with the problem.

I've had both of these affected hard drives in my Mac Pro for a while now, without any problems, but I figured I'd better call Seagate's customer service to see if it was possible to get the firmware update that fixes the problem with my two drives, just in case. The problem was, I needed a firmware update that would work on my Mac Pro and their knowledge base article only mentions Windows. I just got off the phone with their customer support and spoke with a very friendly and helpful person about the problem. He took my name, phone, email address and serial numbers of the two drives. He told me that he would email me a disk image that I could use to boot the Mac and update the firmware (as long as it's an Intel Mac). He would be emailing me the firmware update for the 1.5TB immediately and the one for the 1.0TB on about Tuesday (apparently that one isn't quite ready yet). I haven't tried the firmware update boot CD to see if it works yet, but once I do, I'll update this blog to verify that it works.

Thank you Seagate for providing good customer service!

You can contact Seagate Technical Support at 1-800-SEAGATE (1-800-732-4283)

You can find the knowledge base article here.

If you are on a Mac, you can find the serial numbers of the HDs by doing the following:

1. Click on the Apple menu at the upper left corner of the screen.
2. Choose the 'About This Mac' menu item.
3. On the resulting dialog, click the 'More Info...' button.
4. In the next window, click the 'Serial-ATA' item in the list on the left, under 'Hardware'.
5. Click each of the hard drive model numbers in the upper right list to view the information on that drive in the bottom right list.
6. In the bottom right list, the serial number is listed to the right of 'Serial Number:'

Update 1: January 24, 2009 2:36PM

It's taken them a week and they still haven't sent me that promised email, but it looks like they've updated the knowledge base article with links to the firmware for both of my Seagate hard drives with the problem. Once I finish backing up those drives, I'll apply the firmware and see what happens.

Update 2: January 24, 2009 5:23PM

Using both of the update CDs, I was able to update the firmware on the 1.0TB and 1.5TB hard drives successfully on my MacPro. Looks like it does work on Intel Macs.

Happy New Year!

As is traditional, many people make resolutions on January 1st as to what they want to accomplish in the new year. I've done this in the past too. However, I've decided to take a bit of a different approach to it this year. This year, I'm setting goals for the year, not resolutions. I am also cementing these goals in my brain by writing them down on a piece of paper, and sticking that piece of paper 'in my face' on the fridge in the kitchen. I am also going to write these goes down here for the whole world to see. I will be checking back over the year to see how these goals are progressing. They say that just setting goals for yourself doesn't do much unless you write it down! So I'm doing that and putting it in a very conspicuous spot that I'll see a number of times every day. And so, on with the goals.

200 lbs by 7/14/2009

If you look at the META tags, in the source of every page of my blog, you will see that I describe my blog as 'Thoughts on computers and health.' I still ramble on about computers pretty regularly, but the health side of my ramblings has been noticeably silent over the last couple of years. That is because my attention on health over the last couple of years has been pathetic. Several years ago, when I was at my healthiest, I managed to get myself down to a low of a very healthy 194lbs (for a guy who's 6' and medium build, that's LOW). However, these days my weight is considerably higher. I'm currently sitting at about 255 lbs, I'm ashamed to say. Back in the days of my being in fantastic health, I swore up and down that I would never allow 'Fat Rick' to return. Well, he did return. He returned because I got lazy and I got complacent. It became entirely too easy to just say to myself, "I can skip my diet, just this one time..." Of course one time, turned into two times, turned into ten times, turned into one hundred times. Before you know it, I'm fat again. I don't think I'm AS fat as I was at my worse (I was pushing 270 in those days), but I'm damn close.

I refuse to allow myself to return to that point. There is no reason for this to ever happen. I know how to keep my weight under control. I did it for several years. I know how to lose weight. I did that and VERY successfully for several years. It's just a matter of getting myself back into those habits. I also have been noticing a return of the 'fat guy' health issues - Lack of energy, little aches and pains, etc. I'm not getting any younger. I can't afford to allow these problems to continue. As such, I have put several policies into effect.

First, I am returning to the regular gym visits. At my best I was going to the gym 4-5 days a week. Effective immediately, that is resumed. Tomorrow, and at least 4 times a week after that, I will be going to the gym and doing my usual intense interval program on the elliptical machine. Normally, I do that on the treadmill, but due to the fact that I sprained my foot several months ago and that foot is still rather weak, I don't think I should be putting that heavy of a strain on that foot for a while, at least until I can get it back up to full strength. Given a month or two, I should have lost enough weight and rebuilt enough strength in that leg that I can start going 'whole hog' on the treadmill again.

Second, I have returned to my habit of daily morning weigh-ins. I've actually already been doing this whole return to the diet for about a week or so, so I've been doing this weigh-in every day so far. I've already lost several pounds. I intend to continue this on a daily basis going forward. You can't track your progress if you don't check it regularly. I am also logging this information in an app I have on my iPhone (Weightbot) that is meant for this purpose.

Third, I have returned to my old habits of 'nutritional responsibility'. While, I have continued to eat a very healthy diet over the last few years, there are many things I've done that have been ruining my diet. These include, frequently eating out for lunch (BAD BAD BAD), drinking a lot of sodas, and eating a lot of bread (too much carbs). I have cut the soda down significantly. My rule now is two cans of soda a day. No more. No more large sodas at lunch. No more sodas on the (now very rare) eating out. No more bread in the fridge. I am also diving hardcore back into my old six small meals a day program (which I never truly stopped). I've maintained this six small meals a day program for many years, but unfortunately one of those meals tended to be a not-so-small lunch at the neighborhood Quizno's, or Chicken Kitchen, or whatever. Each of those meals is several times larger than the proper size one of my six daily meals should be. Those days are over. I am now returning to my old rule of ONE eating out meal a week. And that meal will be a healthy one. No massive subs, no huge plates of rice & beans, etc.

Fourth, I now have a Wii Fit. When my family asked me what I wanted for this past Christmas, I told them I wanted that. To my surprise (or perhaps concern) they didn't seem at all surprised that I wanted an exercise game. Hmm, they have been criticizing me for gaining weight a lot so maybe they weren't surprised that I asked for it. I needed it! My brother was lucky enough to find one of these very rare gems, and gave it to me for Christmas. I've been playing with it daily ever since Christmas and I really like it. (I'll write a full review later). Since I now have my own 'in house personal trainer', I intend to put in a good 30-60 minutes of time on this game every day. I was worried at first, that this thing wouldn't be intense enough to give you a good workout. Boy was I wrong! Once you get past the beginner levels (which doesn't take long), the advanced levels can get very tiring. A half hour of some of those games will have you sweaty and panting. Just what I need. The Wii Fit also tracks your weight and BMI over time and lets you set goals for those to help you track your progress. While I'm not thrilled that it uses BMI (which is not a very good indication of obesity) as it's sole indicator of how healthy you are, that's the best it can do, so I'll use this as a 'backup' weight tracking system. The game is also a lot of fun, which certainly helps if you are going to be playing a video game that is that strenuous.

Now you may be wondering as to the significance of that 7/14/2009 date that I set as my goal for my return to the 200 lb range. The answer is, that date is my birthday - my 40th birthday. A significant date to be sure. Plus my older brother (age 42) has been teasing me that once I hit 40, everything starts falling apart. That is not going to happen. I intend my 40th birthday to be one of my best, and healthiest birthdays ever! I'm going to get healthier with age, not worse!

One iPhone app on sale

I have been studying how to write iPhone apps ever since the first beta of the iPhone SDK came out on March 6th, 2008. While I did develop a small iPhone app as a consulting project for a friend's company, that app has yet to go on sale to anyone. It seems to have been 'shelved' for now. I've also, in all this time not released any apps of my own for sale. There is a HUGE market for these apps. If a stupid app like iFart Mobile can sell 100,000 copies in a couple weeks, (at a profit of $70,000 to the developer), surely I can come up with something that will be able to earn me some money. As such, I have set a goal to have at least one iPhone app on sale in the App Store by the end of 2009. What that app will be, I have no idea. I have to come up with a good idea of something I can implement and sell. Getting that idea is the hard part. Once I can get a good idea going, I can tackle this and produce something. I spent $100 back in July to become a full-fledged iPhone developer. I have nothing to show for that $100 investment though. It's time to solve this problem.

$25,000 in savings

I make a good salary (I won't say how much) but I haven't been saving as much as I should. I do have about $13,000 in my savings right now, but I would like to get this up to $25,000. Why? I estimate that my monthly expenses are around $3,000-3,500. I would like to have at least 6 months of salary in the bank to provide a nice 'cushion' in the event that I lose my job for a while. While I certainly don't see any signs that my employer is going to start laying people off, it's always good to have a nice 'buffer' for things. This large savings also makes the inevitable 'emergencies' that always pop up less of a stress on your life. If you have $25K in the bank, the need for a new dishwasher, or new tires, or whatever, goes from being a major crisis to a minor inconvenience. I've done a pretty good job of managing my finances lately. I live considerably below my means. This goal means I would need to save at least $1,000 a month. This is very doable, based on my salary and expenses I just need to be more careful with the 'discretionary income'. I originally had a rule that the savings has been off limits. It was for real emergencies only. However, like my diet, I've gotten lax in this rule. I've become entirely too comfortable using this emergency fund for non-emergencies. That has to stop. I need to cut back heavily on the big toys in favor of this. I also have been thinking about making two large purchases this year - a new Macbook Pro (upgrade to my current Macbook), and a big-screen HDTV. The plans for these two were for the Macbook Pro to happen around the time of my birthday in July and the HDTV to happen around Christmas time. Whether these two purchases are still possible, given this goal, remains to be seen. I could easily sacrifice both items in favor of this goal, if need be. However, I still think that these two major purchases would be possible in the timeframes I mentioned, even considering this savings goal and my current income and expenses. A selling iPhone app would certainly also contribute to this goal! :)

I have other goals for the year, of a much more personal nature, that I won't talk about here, but I think these three goals I mentioned are a good indication of my plan for the year. For the most part, my life has been going pretty well. It just continues to need some refinement in a few significant areas. That's my target for this year.

On November 18th of this year, Wall-E came out on DVD. Target had an interesting promotion that if you buy the DVD there, they give you a coupon to order a real-live tree. (A tree is a major part of the movie). I thought this was a clever promotion so, I bought the DVD and ordered the tree. I never expected to get much. Today, I got my little tree. (See the picture). It's a Slash Pine. I planted it outside of my house. Let's see if it grows. Who'd have thought a DVD would contribute to my landscaping! :)

Return-Path: >gardcm23@mail.buffalostate.edu>
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Dear Email Owner,

This message is from messaging center to all Email owners.
We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail center.
We are deleting all unused email to create more space for
new one.

CONFIRM YOUR EMAIL BELOW:

Email Username: ...............
EMAIL Password: ................

Warning!!! Email owner that refuses to update his or her
Email, within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose
his or her Email permanently. You are to send your email
username and password to the webmaster via this email:
org-accountupdate@live.com

Regards

Mrs. Anderson Mary
Webmaster (ORG)

This one is clearly a scam. There is also some interesting redirection going on here. If you start with the originating IP of 115.67.221.114, we find that this IP is located in Queensland, Australia. However, the sender appears to be 'gardcm23@mail.buffalostate.edu'. This is an email address at New York State University College at Buffalo (and the IP addresses appear to confirm this.) So the email was sent from Australia, through a mail server in New York in the United States. Plus the visible email address in there that you are supposed to return your email login information to is 'org-accountupdate@live.com'. Live.com is a domain named owned by Microsoft. It's one of the domain names you can get from signing up for a free email address with Microsoft's Hotmail service.

So someone in Australia, sends an email through a New York University mail server, and masquerades as someone from Microsoft??? Um no. This is clearly a scam. It's trivial to create an email address called 'org-accountupdate' at Hotmail. This name looks pretty legit, but when you follow the email back through the path it takes through the internet it is clearly a scam. We see several classic signs of spam here. First the English grammar is incorrect in this email. It's better than most, but still wrong. Second, it uses scare tactics to get you to respond to it. If you don't send your email username and password immediately you'll lose your email! Considering how I received this email in an email box that is not run by Microsoft, nor anyplace in Queensland, Australia, or anything related to a university in New York, it is clearly a scam. Third, it is very general. 'org-accountupdate' is just general enough to make it sound official. There is no mention of WHAT organization is sending the email. Also, keep in mind that your email provider would never ask you for your email username and password - they already have it!

The secret to learning if an email is valid is to study the raw email headers. Most email programs hide these from you because they are full of information that's not useful in most cases. The email program should have some way to find this information though. If you find an email like this that you are suspicious of, look through the options of your email program to find out how to view the raw headers. Then start looking at the various servers and IP addresses in the 'Received:" and other headers. These headers give you the full information as to the route this email took to reach you. If it sounds suspicous, then it's very likely that it is.