jailbreak

I jailbroke my iPhone on Friday, using evasi0n. (Apparently, I am one of many!) The process was fairly simple, and there haven’t been any negative side-effects, so far. I’ve been pretty happy with my iPhone, but there have been a few, fairly minor, things that I’ve wanted to do, but that weren’t possible with normal Apple-approved apps. Now that I’m jailbroken, I can fix a few of these little items.

First, I’ve always wanted to have more useful info show up on the lock screen. I played around with both IntelliScreen and LockInfo this weekend. I’m liking LockInfo a bit more. Intelliscreen can give you access to quite a lot of info on the lock screen, but I really don’t want that much, so LockInfo seemed a better fit for me. Mostly, I just wanted weather info. I always check the weather before I leave the apartment in the morning. Now, I can do that without unlocking the phone. A minor thing, but nice.

I’ve also got f.lux installed, which is kind of nifty. And SBSettings, which is pretty useful. And BiteSMS, which is a bit of an improvement on the standard iOS SMS app.

paperwork

I just spent the last couple of hours cleaning up old financial paperwork. So, if you’re not interested in that kind of thing, move along, nothing to see here, etc, etc.

I’ve blogged before about my continuing struggle to keep up with my Merrill Lynch accounts, in terms of entering the statements into Quicken. For quite a while, I’ve resisted letting Quicken download those accounts, since there tended to be some annoying little problems with that process. So, I kept manually entering them. Well, I fell off that bandwagon at the end of 2010, and had just been letting the statements pile up since. As David Allen would say, I’d gone numb to it.

I used to just have two accounts with Merrill — a catch-all account (called a CMA), and a Roth IRA. Well, now, I have the CMA, the Roth IRA, a traditional IRA (created when I rolled over the 401(k) from NMS), and an inherited IRA (from my Mom). So, that’s really too much to keep up with. Today, I decided to “clear the decks,” as it were, and get everything set up to download into Quicken. I started by shredding a bunch of old statements, from 2008-2010, that were in my filing cabinet. Then, I sorted out the big pile of 2011-2012 statements, and put them away, organized in a reasonable fashion, in the filing cabinet. Then, I set up all the accounts to download into Quicken. The result (in Quicken) is a little messy, but it all adds up correctly, and I guess that’s all I need.

My plan from this point forward is to open each statement as I get them, review it at a high level, then file it away. Meanwhile, the activity will get downloaded into Quicken any time I’m in there, balancing my checkbook, so that will be at least once a month.

I guess the main reason for this blog post is so that I can remember what I did, and when I did it, so that I can review things later in the year, and see if this system is working out. My main goal for this year is to actually look at the statements when I get them, so I can call Merrill if something is wrong, or if I need to change anything. Now that I won’t feel burdened by the need to do data entry every time I get a statement, hopefully I can avoid the temptation to just pile them up without looking at them!

Unfinished Stories

After going for a few months without reading any comics, I decided to spend a bit of time, over the last couple of weekends, trying to put a dent into the big pile of unread books sitting on the floor of my bedroom. In particular, I decided to finally read a few “orphan” books that have been sitting in the pile for, oh, five years or so. I read the first (and only) issue of Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target last week. And I read the three comics that Grant Morrison wrote for the Worldstorm relaunch of the Wildstorm universe today.

I thought that Kevin Smith’s “The Target” got off to a good start, so I’m disappointed that it never got past that first issue. I don’t really have too much to say about it past that; I think it would have been a fun story.

The Morrison Worldstorm stuff was quite interesting, though I’m not sure if it would have really gone anywhere, long-term, or if it would have wound up being a disappointing mess. It would have been fun to see where it went, regardless, but maybe its collapse was inevitable. One interesting aspect of it is that, for an “event” that only resulted in one issue of Wildcats, and two of The Authority, there’s a good bit of writing about it available on the web. I found three pretty interesting articles, one at seqart.org, another one here, and one more here. And all three are from 2011. (The comics came out in 2006.) So there seems to be something about it that has engaged people, even five years after the books were published. I guess that’s the nature of pretty much any “grand plan” stuff cooked up by Grant Morrison.

Speaking of Grant Morrison, I’ve got a couple of other random mini-series written by him in my reading pile: Sebastian O and Vimanarama. I picked them both up at the same time, out of someone’s dollar box at a convention a while ago. And both series actually ran to completion, so it’ll be a nice change of pace to read stories that actually come to an end!

CBG, RIP

I just stumbled across this article by John Jackson Miller, talking about the end of Comics Buyer’s Guide. I had a subscription to TBG (as it was called at the time) back when I was in high school. I didn’t save those issues, as it came out every week, and was mostly ads, so there didn’t seem much point. But there was some good content in there, from people like Don & Maggie Thompson and Cat Yronwode. And some nice covers by folks like Terry Beatty.

I let my subscription lapse at some point, but I picked it up again and read CBG faithfully for quite a few years, before letting the subscription lapse again a few years back. Even though I hadn’t been reading it lately, it’s sad to see it go. I actually think I learned a lot about a number of subjects unrelated to comics from CBG, mostly from Don and Maggie’s writing. CBG was always very well-edited and well-written.

I see that Maggie is now writing for the Comic-Con blog. And other former contributors have also been blogging at various sites — John Jackson Miller has The ComiChron, Mark Evanier has News From Me, Tony Isabella has his Bloggy Thing. So I still get to read stuff from some of the best writers who appeared in CBG over the years. But I’ll miss the good old hard-copy version.

inbox zero

I always feel compelled to write a meaningless blog post every time I get my inbox to zero. So, here it is: I got my e-mail inbox at work down from about 400 messages to zero today. Everything’s been tagged and filed, or deleted.

My personal email inbox is up to 600 messages though. I cull stuff out of it periodically, but I haven’t gotten around to *really* attacking it in quite a while. Maybe that’s a project for next weekend!

constraint validation and polyfills

I really like the idea of the constraint validation stuff that’s built in to HTML5. I’ve never actually used it though, since it’s not going to work in older browsers. We tend to use the standard ASP.NET validation controls on most of our projects at work, and they’re certainly usable.

The article I linked to above has a section on a couple of options for polyfills, allowing the constraint validation to work with older browsers, though, so maybe I’ll give that a shot the next time I need to do some serious web form stuff.

Bullseye

The main product of the company I currently work for is a hosted store locator and lead manager service, named Bullseye. We’ve been concentrating on both improving it and marketing it recently, so there’s some fairly interesting things going on that I thought I would write up. I’ve mentioned some of these things previously, but I thought it might be useful to have a single consolidated post with some pointers.

We have a Facebook store locator, which you can find at https://www.facebook.com/BullseyeStoreLocator. The Facebook locator was an interesting project. The first iteration was outsourced to an external developer, and was completed before I started working for the company. Due to some major changes in the way Facebook supported app development, we had to do a lot of work on the Facebook locator in mid-2011. I did a pretty major rewrite of it, using the Facebook C# SDK (which seems to have moved to Github, and gotten a nicely redesigned website since I last looked at it). Since that rewrite, one of our other developers has been working on it, mostly adding new features. The most recent new feature is one that allows you to attach ‘like’ buttons to individual locations in the returned results, linking them to individual Facebook pages for each location. It’s described in a blog post here.

We also now have a Drupal module that allows you to easily implement a store locator in any Drupal 7 site. (I’ve blogged about this previously.) It’s still a sandbox project under my drupal.org account. Cleaning it up and getting it ready to be promoted to a full project is on my rainy-day to-do list. (I’ve done a bit of work towards that goal, but I still need to do some more.)

And we now have a way to import and sync locations from Salesforce into Bullseye. This was another component that was initially outsourced. I’ve done some maintenance work on the project, and it’s pretty interesting. We’ve implemented a way to filter the results that we pull in from Salesforce, using serialized LINQ expressions. I was initially leery about this approach, and there are still some things I don’t like about it, but if you need to abstract out and save complex filter conditions to a database, I guess there isn’t a better way to do it than this. The one difficulty is that it’s fairly difficult to read and comprehend the expressions, once they’re serialized, so it’s important to keep track of the original LINQ expressions, for reference.

CoffeeScript

I wanted to take a break from my usual .Net and Drupal stuff for a weekend, and try to learn something new. So I started reading Jump Start CoffeeScript today. CoffeeScript is a language, somewhat similar to Python in terms of syntax, that compiles into JavaScript. In theory, it makes JavaScript easier to use, and easier to read. I’m not entirely sold on it yet, but it’s interesting.

The book I’m reading is supposed to be a quick start, that you can get through in a weekend. It walks you through a sample application, an HTML5 game. I’m finding the sample code less useful than I’d like. It’s mostly drawing on the HTML5 canvas. I think I’d rather see code doing more typical stuff that you’d see being done on a typical web site. It’s hard to relate the canvas stuff to anything I’ve actually done before.

That said, it’s a pretty well-written book, and kind of fun. I had hoped to finish it tomorrow, but it looks like I need to take a trip into NYC tomorrow, and I’ll have company, so I won’t be reading on the train. And I’m working on New Year’s Eve, but maybe I can finish it on New Year’s Day!