To answer (e:jenks)' question, yes I'm downloading the iPhone SDK and I'll be trying to start writing iPhone applications. It would really help if I actually had an iPhone, but with a baby on the way, I've really been trying to justify it.

I'm not a very well-paid programmer, as I make less than a buffalo elementary school teacher, and once the little one comes into the world, I might as well have my employer do a direct deposit to my landlord, daycare, univera, whatever infant daycare provider I manage to find, and the bank that does my car payments; after those get taken out, we're eating and buying baby clothes off of (e:inscrutable)'s paycheck, which is about half of mine. I'm not going to complain, because people in some other area of the world would kill for 1/100 of what I have, but the situation has me scared shitless.

I probably will end up getting an iPhone, because I can justify it with trying to earn extra money for my family by developing and selling iPhone apps by whatever mechanism Apple sets up. I'm also studying Google's Android phone development environment, so I can enter something into their contest, which has some pretty lucrative prizes. There's so much crap I have to cram into my head to make money on the side, but the more I can cram into my head better off things will be for us.

Screenshot of estrip on a simulated Google phone

Before I got my job in Buffalo, I was severely underemployed in NC and desperately looking for work.

I wanted to work for this one mobile content divider; they seemed cool, and I knew some people in the company who might put in a good word for me. I also really wanted this one social software engineer position at Apple. I got neither job, and ever since I came up here I always replayed in my mind the "what if they hired me" scenarios.

This week, I learned that the mobile company was laying off a lot of its staff and quitting the area I wanted to stay in. I also read the blog by the guy who got the social software engineer position, and he says the position was pretty limiting.

I guess the point of this post is that it's kinda weird to look back and see the smoking craters of decisions I might have made if my life had gone exactly way I wanted it to, and to feel I'm lucky that it didn't.

Summary of the day.

(e:inscrutable) and I went to the childbirth class at Children's Hospital. We did the whole breathing thing, the whole pillow thing, and the identify-various-baby-hygiene-ointments-and-potions thing. We ate at the Cafeteria, which wasn't awful but doesn't really deserve a Visco-style food porn pictorial.

Missed Bedouin Soundclash at Mohawk Place because the cold I've been having the last several weeks re-intensified and I had to stay in bed. I hate being sick; it always seems to happen when there's something that I really want to do that I can't do very often, like seeing my favorite band perform in Buffalo.

Apparently, after I explicitly told National Fuel to cut off service to my apartment on Richmond on Nov. 1st, they didn't stop billing me.

In fact, they pretty much kept on billing me until Dec. 14th. So between Nov. 1st and now (my last and hopefully final bill from the old place), I've been paying/owing those idiots $300 for the privilege of heating the old place I no longer live in. And they say they "have no record of a cut-off request".

I am so unbelievably pissed right now.

Why can't any utility company in Buffalo get anything right? And where is the copious amounts of money that we pay them going that they can't fix the most basic website/computer/customer service problems?

Clicking Paul's snowflakes.
Like digital bubble wrap
Strangely addictive.