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Another reason to hate time change
I've never been a big fan of switching back to standard time from daylight savings time as it gets dark sooner and the long days of winter are ahead (OK, I live in San Diego and winters aren't all that bad, but I'm more of a late spring/summer kind of person). On the news last night, they reminded us that this will be the last time change in October as next year daylight savings time ends one week later. What problems will this cause? Well, for every device that has time zone information built into it, for example Palm handhelds, they'll either have to issue a software update or everyone (in the US) will have to create new time zones with the correct start and end dates for daylight savings time. Furthermore, all the synchronization software will have to be updated to handle this. Talk about another headache for me. Time zones are enough of a problem in software without them changing.
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Poor emergency response times
San Diego has consistently been ranked as have poor emergency (fire/medical) response times with average response times being somewhere around 10 minutes or so. For a major city, this is pretty awful. We saw this first hand today. We took our dog to Dusty Rhodes park in Ocean Beach (there isn't a dog park near us) and as we were sitting there, I heard a crash, looked up and saw the tail end of a multi car accident on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. Lots of people went over to see if they could help and several dialed 911. The first fire truck didn't arrive on scene for somewhere around 15 minutes after the accident, then an ambulance arrived more than 5 minutes after that (we saw the ambulance come around the park and it took about 3-4 minutes for it to drive around the park with the traffic). Next, the police arrived maybe 5-10 minutes later. It's really a good thing that no one had injuries and there wasn't a fire, because the delayed response could have been disastrous.
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Debug Logging in Shipping Code is not nice
During some development today, I had to install the scanner drivers for my HP 6110xi all-in-one device. Knowing that scanner drivers have been consistently horrible for the Mac, I decided against installing on my main machine (which also serves as my development machine) and instead installed it on one of my test machines. Well, it is really sad to be right in this case. The 101 MB download for the HP scanner included a whole lot of crappy software. As I was debugging my application, I write a bunch of stuff to the Console and as I was watching the Console, I saw lots of stuff like this:
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Learning new technologies (Apple technologies, that is)
For a long time now, I've been wanting to learn various Apple technologies such as Core Data and Bindings. However, it hadn't been until last week when I finally had a chance to start learning them as well as Image Capture Framework. I came up with an idea that I'm excited about and started work on the project last week. Since I'm supporting OS X 10.4 and later, I can use Cored Data and Bindings (bindings go back to 10.3.9 or so). I always have trouble learning new software stuff if I don't have a use for it; now that I have a use for it, I learned both technologies in a matter of days. I'm pretty impressed with Core Data. It works well and I haven't found anything to really dislike about it, yet. Bindings, on the other hand, sounds great in theory, but sometimes just doesn't work how I want it to work. So, I spend a lot of time trying to jam a square peg in a round hole until I give up and go back to the way I did it before. This isn't to say that bindings are useless, they're just not for everything.