Jan 29
2010

I apol­o­gize for the recent down­time, which also affected the Clip­pable bookmarklet’s abil­ity to work. Dreamhost has been pretty awful with down­time lately, and my attempt to switch to a dif­fer­ent phys­i­cal server resulted in a hor­ri­ble mess for myself and sev­eral clients. I have to say that Dreamhost sup­port was extremely help­ful in repair­ing the sit­u­a­tion… their sup­port is the main rea­son I’ve stuck with them through the 4 hours of down­time I’d had up to that point. I’m not sure I’ll be able to swal­low much more, but we’ll see if things run as smoothly as they’ve promised from here on out.

In other news, I have a new ver­sion of the Songza ser­vice–one that doesn’t require any addi­tional libraries–which I’ll post soon. A cou­ple of other lit­tle projects are in the works, includ­ing a ser­vice that inter­prets nat­ural lan­guage dates for var­i­ous pur­poses. I’m in Atlanta for a week, then I’ll be in San Fran­cisco cov­er­ing Mac­world for TUAW, so it may be a bit, but I’ll be back!

Jan 29
2010

I’m sit­ting at the air­port in Min­neapo­lis, wait­ing for a flight to Atlanta. I’m headed for Big Nerd Ranch for a week-long crash course in iPhone pro­gram­ming. I’ve done a lit­tle, but I think it will be a great way to start from the basics and fill in all of the holes in my knowl­edge. The thing is, I’m a lit­tle torn about the cir­cum­stances; Big Nerd Ranch is pay­ing for this trip and pro­vid­ing a week of classes in order for me to review the facil­i­ties for The Unof­fi­cial Apple Weblog, where I’m a blog­ger. There’s noth­ing innately wrong with the sit­u­a­tion, it’s essen­tially the same as receiv­ing an NFR license for soft­ware to review, except for I can’t give away the license at the end, and it’s worth a whole lot more.

I want to main­tain my “jour­nal­is­tic integrity,” but I’m not sure how this will turn out in the end. Big Nerd Ranch is pretty leg­endary, and I feel like it would be a waste to decline the invi­ta­tion. I also feel like there are plenty of devel­op­ers and would-be devs who would love to have a look at the offer­ings. I just don’t want to be pegged as pro­vid­ing reviews in exchange for any­thing. I’ve always been good about pay­ing for soft­ware I’ve reviewed and con­tin­ued using, return­ing review hard­ware (or buy­ing it, in the case of the ViDock). I don’t want this to be a black mark on my integrity.

This is the plan, then: I’ll be let­ting the ranch speak for itself. I’ll be shoot­ing video and doing inter­views with the per­son­al­i­ties involved, includ­ing Aaron Hil­le­gass, which I’m pretty psy­ched about. I won’t be adding a lot of com­men­tary or express­ing my own opin­ions about the expe­ri­ence. If something’s great, it should come through as great with­out much help from me. I’ve noticed that peo­ple only ques­tion your integrity if you say pos­i­tive things… but I doubt I’ll have much neg­a­tive input in this case.

As I said, this is an oppor­tu­nity I just couldn’t bear to pass up. It’s excit­ing and very gen­er­ous of Big Nerd Ranch. What will be, will be, I guess.