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.

Dec 12
2009

Well, I’ve been out of touch with a lot of peo­ple for the last four days, and I thought I’d save some time and pro­vide a place I could link every­one to for a quick expla­na­tion. On Tues­day evening, in the mid­dle of what the weather ser­vice is call­ing our “worst storm in 20 years,” I started hav­ing stom­ach cramps. I won’t go into detail about what fol­lowed, but I’ll skip for­ward to the part where Aditi (my lov­ing and amaz­ingly ded­i­cated wife) packed me into her 4-wheel drive Pathfinder and headed out to Com­mu­nity Memo­r­ial Hos­pi­tal. After a brief sur­vey, I was admit­ted for observation.

Con­tinue read­ing “Where I’ve been this week…”