Eric Snider's (sort of) Boring Blog

On the way to school today Jonah said if he had a wish he would wish for more wishes.

Then he said he would wish for:

That he was a clone*

The middle one there made me almost cry. We've had (grown up) friends who have died in the last few years and it's definitely gotten our whole family, including Jonah, thinking about what happens when we die, or someone else dies. And what does that mean, and what happens? And it's scary.

* Well... cooler than just a clone. A Clone Trooper, like from Star Wars. I asked "Wouldn't it be bad to be a copy of the same person?" and he said "I'd have a lot of brothers."

# posted by Eric @ 10:43 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

The word online from Amazon is they're intending to release an SDK (software development kit) for the Kindle digital book. That means it'll be able to run games and more instead of just being a fancy book viewer. That's cool... Maybe I'll port my solitaire game to it from the iPhone. The performance (aka speed) of the Kindle isn't great, but hey, I've written games for a long time, including on really low-end and ancient consumer devices. So the slow Kindle with it's weird screen should be no trouble!

I'm on a video games developer mailing list and someone griped about how the Kindle and all digital books are doomed to failure since no one wants them. I disagree and it kind of got me fired up, so I wrote this:

I'm not a big fan of the Kindle -- The biggest issue for me is that the contrast of the screen is too low. With that said, I'm a huge fan of digital content. I like real books, but I don't really want to store the books, waste resources on having them printed, shipped etc. It's nice to be able to buy things digitally, including books. The feature of the Kindle where you can buy a new book from almost anywhere in the world and get it almost instantly is pretty fantastic too, for those users who want that.

It's clear that the way audio, video and video game distribution is going is that it will all shift to digital delivery. Physical media just gets in the way. My expectation is that book publishing will do the same thing. I bet printed books will be around forever, printed books are awesome, but the price of those books will be higher than digital versions and in tangible ways will be less convenient (e.g. No searching, harder to share, harder to do research with, wear out over time, don't get updated dynamically). There are a lot of reasons that digital distribution of books will win over customers, especially younger customers who grow up with digital versions of books their whole lives.

# posted by Eric @ 4:22 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Flash forward three months from my sort-of-weird calls from recruiters in India... That all turned out to be legitimate and not a convoluted Nigerian money-making scheme like I was predicting. In fact I'm still working on that project and it's going great. It's an iPhone app, but as is often the case with cool stuff I work on, it's secret.

I'm going to stop drinking coffee. I don't drink that much. Like one cup or less a day. I'm pretty sure caffeine isn't that great for me anyway.

In health insurance news... we still have health insurance. Yay! I got laid off months ago and we have health insurance through COBRA. Thankfully the Obama stimulus somethin'-somethin' pays for 65% of the cost so we pay ~$400 instead of $1200. For a couple days I thought the stimulus money was going to stop so we'd want to switch insurance companies. That's when Kelly found out that no one will insure her where her pregnancy would be covered. Apparently since we have COBRA they don't have to cover pre-existing conditions. Good times. If we didn't have COBRA then I think they're forced by HIPAA to insure pre-existing conditions. So overall we're okay and once again I am super happy about the COBRA stimulus thing. I wish health insurance was easier and cheaper to deal with. We know people who have health problems and who can't afford to have them taken care of. That sucks.

# posted by Eric @ 12:50 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

I'm never super excited talking to job recruiters. I understand their jobs are hard. But any job where the person is paid based on commissions makes me suspicious of that person's actions. Sales people who work on commission don't want you to buy something and return it, but other than that they get rewarded for selling you things that you keep. It doesn't matter much beyond that. Like whether you need it, whether a cheaper product would be as good or better etc.

So in general I make the assumption that someone working on a commission isn't looking out for me. They're trying to maximize how much money they make for their time.

Job recruiters work in the same kind of commissioned way usually. Some are employees of companies. And that's awesome. But most, at least that call me, work on some kind of commission basis. Maybe they get a flat fee for filling a position, or a percentage of your hourly rate if you're contracting etc. I updated my resume on monster.com today and got a bunch of email and calls from recruiters. Overall that's nice. I like to feel wanted. But a lot of the time the recruiters have no idea what I'm good at, what I like, or sometimes what city I'm in. They just want to fill some position and saw a couple keywords on my resume. It's weird.

Today was my first, I think, experience getting a call from recruiters in India. At first I thought it was just someone with a fantastically thick accent who was calling locally even though his caller ID came out weird looking "+40 890 791 13." The number was intended to look like "+408 907-9113," but my iPhone changed the formatting because of the +. I did a quick Google search while we were on the phone and figured out he was calling from India. Anyway, the job he described sounded good, but overall the experience was a little sketchy. I'm still suspicious of the whole thing. I spoke with him, sent him my resume, and then he had his manager call me. Next I'm supposed to get a call from (I assume another recruiter) at some US-based recruiting company.

# posted by Eric @ 1:41 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

I paid a company ~$600 to restore a crashed hard drive of mine. It had all our honeymoon pictures and more on it. I'm a lot better about doing backups now... Anyway I need to start gettin' some value out of this rescued drive so here's a story with some pictures from the trip.

Kelly and I went to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico for our honeymoon. We have some great stories and pictures. But overall if you asked either of us we'd primarily say how it was really really humid there. Also. Small towns are boring after a few hours.

We started off in Cancun because it was easy to fly there. We stayed at some big hotel which was okay, but really we wanted to see Mayan ruins and other cool stuff. We exclusively rode on buses from city to city. It was cheap and avoided our enormous fear of driving in Mexico. Plus the delicious (super strong) smell of strawberries was a frequent feature. :) Anyway, we left Cancun for small cities and towns, like Merida. Eventually we finished up all of that and flew to Mexico City.

Mexico City was really fun. Tons of cool things to see. A 24-hour Churros & Chocalate place that h ad been there for like 70 years. It was amazing. A guy on the street was doing cool oil paintings on CDs. There were tons of people, things to see and great food. Anyway, I'll post more stories and pictures another time. Today's quick story is about Merida.

There wasn't a lot to see in Merida. We covered the touristy stuff (I think a cenote and maybe that was it) in a few hours. We were bored and looking for a bakery. Kelly and I like to scout out bakeries and barber shops or weird salons in foreign countries. I don't know why. Although baked goods are good. I mean... they have "Good" in the name, right? And I like to get my hair cut. We didn't find a great bakery, but man oh man we found a fantastic barber shop. See the pictures to the right... This time I didn't get a haircut, but I did ask the barber to give me shave. My barber-related Spanish is not-so-good.

I showed the barber I wanted him to get rid of my whole beard. He had a straight razor which was kind of scary. And I wondered how clean it was. Good times. More importantly... he gave me a mustache like I never had before. I didn't want a mustache but I thought I'd see how it came out. Pretty funny is the answer there. One advantage was that from that day on strangers ALWAYS thought we were from Europe instead of from the US. Cultural differences are weird. Guy with kind of weird beard = From US. Guy with kind of weird mustache = Clearly European.

Kelly liked it. Or at least she said she liked it. I have a conspiracy theory that she actually advises me to dress or shave in ways that make me look crazy so other women won't even look at me. Well, maybe they'd just look in horror. I made it three days before I had to get rid of it.

# posted by Eric @ 11:19 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Hey, my game developer friend, Oliver, just finished a really fun Flash game -- Vector Conflict: The Siege. For you old timers it's like Battlezone (1980), but an order of magnitude more fun and you don't have to drive a tank around. That's BattleZone to the left. I played Vector Conflict on "Medium" and it was fun, but very tense at times. The levels are really well designed. Once you master the tutorial you can play the endless mode and try to get a high score.

What makes the game fun is that there's a good mix of bad guys, and they're introduced gradually through the 10-level tutorial. Plus there are upgrades. Everyone loves upgrades, right? So you shoot a lot of bad guys, that come in waves, and each level is different... then you decide what to use your resources to upgrade or buy.

Anyway, it's fun and free. Check it out.

Also. See if you can buy another copy of my iPhone solitaire game. Maybe create a new iTunes account and buy it. Okay, thanks. Or tell your friends. Okay? Well, I'm worried it's going down in the Card Games rankings in the App Store. :( Gotta finish the free version...

# posted by Eric @ 9:37 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

I just checked Apple again to see if my iPhone solitaire game was approved. I check every 9 minutes. It's said "In Review" the last 1000 times I checked in the past 11 days. I've been dreading the email that would say "Sorry, Solitaire wasn't approved because we don't allow applications to include images of clouds." Or something nutty like that which would mean another round of fixes and submitting the game again.

But no! Some fantastic reviewers at Apple have approved Solitaire. It's not in the store, yet. But from what I know it should appear in the next hour or so.

I'm going to call everyone I know.

:)

If you're stumbling onto this page because you bought Solitaire then please leave me a comment or question. I'm nice. I'll help you. If enough people ask for features or new games... I'll add them. Or make them. You'll see.

Thanks again to everyone who helped me with Solitaire.

Update: It took a few hours but then it appeared in the store. It had the wrong release date though (it was showing the date I submitted it). Is there an "App Store for Dummies" book yet? 'Cause there are a lot of crazy things about submitting apps to Apple... Anyway, I changed the release date as a friend advised and now it's in the new games listings.

Here's a link if you're looking for it: tinyurl.com/EricsKlondike. This link includes my iTunes affiliate info so I'll get 5% extra on sales that use that link. So... feel free to use it, give it out, print t-shirts, use it as your new nickname... :)

# posted by Eric @ 11:25 AM 0 Comments Links to this post