Word…

The demand for iPhone developers exceeds the supply and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The going rate for iPhone developers, at least the developers I know and trust, is $125/hour and up. I have some friends who are booked out at $200/hour for the next few months, although $125/hour seems to be the going rate in my network. At that rate, a full-time contract iPhone developer costs $5,000/week and it may take four to six weeks for an application to be developed. Sometimes it will take less and sometimes it will take more. Add to development the other costs – project management, design, QA, and marketing, to name a few. It’s not uncommon to spend $30,000 and up on an iPhone development project. iPhone applications are not cheap.

In this particular case, money is not necessarily the thing I am after, it’s really the excitement and possibility of working on a product I love and use everyday…

Me: Bryan, Look. It’s raining.
Bryan: Why is it raining?
Me: Because there’s too much water in the cloud. And when there’s too much water in the cloud, water drops fall and becomes rain.
Bryan: Why is there too much water in the cloud?
Me: Because water evaporates into the air and eventually end up in the cloud.
Bryan: What is “evaporate”?
Me: ….
Bryan: Why is water falling from the sky? Is there a big hole in the sky?
Me: …. Um, no.
Bryan: Is the sky hard (as opposed to soft)?
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I need to visit some science 101 sites for kids….

I’ve been meaning to set up Subversion for source control on my various projects. After having worked in an environment with tight source controls for almost half of a year, I’ve gotten used to the convenience and peace of mind of having a source control in place. So today I took the plunge and got svn to work with a SVN client, Versions, along with my favorite lightweight code editor Coda, on my MacBook Pro.

Life is good.

First the website on CitiMobile was buggy. Then I found out they don’t service the iPhone. I wonder how much longer I can take their crap before going with BoA or another tech savvy bank in terms of customer-facing applications…

Why am I still banking with them anyway?!

Suspicion leads to misunderstandings.

Misunderstandings bring out the worst in people.
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It’s as if we didn’t already have enough to worry about on daily basis to go the extra mile to be insecured about ourselves to be suspicious of others just so that we can misunderstand each other. Gosh, people can be so annoying sometimes!

Either way, Obama winning is a real possibility. Unless, of course, the Republicans can pull a rabbit out of their behind like they did in 2000… which is also a real possibility…

Amelia is growing up fast — sleeping through the night pretty much within the first two weeks of coming home. We are pretty sure she’s going to outgrow Bryan in a few more months… That’s what happens when a baby gets baked a few more days in the oven…

Bryan sings and tells his teddy bear stories on his spare time. He even prays (yes, prays) during meal (it’s a Christian-run pre-school he’s going to… long story). And his smart mouth is going to get him in trouble soon enough like mine always gets me in trouble…

Farewell, Professor Pausch.

You can credit Grace for this beautiful name.

Stats…
Weight: 7.15lbs
Length: 20 inches
Birthday: June 12, 2008 @ 4:41am (ZzZz)
Name: TBA

All it took were 3 hard pushes… No joke… In fact, she came before the doctors were even ready!

Both the mother and the baby are doing well…

Stay tuned.

So when I decided to take up a “job”, one of my objectives was to find out if what I know is what’s being practiced by my peers. I wanted validation to my methodologies. And I wanted to learn more from others. My new job basically gave me a free reign on most of what I’d like to implement. So I brought with me my methods of client-side development in terms of CSS (and CSS resets), Unobtrusive Javascript programming, semantic XHTML markups, separation of structure, presentation and logic… etc etc. But I still have no idea if there’s more to be learned. Surely there was.

The company decided to hire a technical auditor to audit all the technical aspects of what we do and how we do it. I was thrilled and was really looking forward to learning from this guy. About 15 minutes into my explanation on what I do, I asked if he’d recommendations on how I can improve on what I do. He answered, “Nope. You are ahead of the game. You are doing everything I’d recommend my clients do.”

I was really pleased to be validated by someone who’s job is supposed to magnify and correct inefficiencies and issues. He was surprised I was even using Unobtrusive Javascript programming because so few people even have heard of it, let along practicing it.

So that made my day. Now I know I am actually up to par with the top ranks and I should probably raise my rate.

Grace is doing fine — still walking and bouncing (figuratively speaking) around with lots of energy. She’s been on her nesting mode for a couple of weeks. So this should give her an extra week to tidy things up before the little one is fully baked (or over baked?).

As for me, here’s a poem rigged from Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” that describes my situation best:

The nights are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And thousands of images to go before I sleep,
And thousands of images to go before I sleep.

I named this poem “Stopping by Lightroom On A Humid Evening.”

Fuji S5 (and previous generation S3 and S2) owners have a saying that “it’s not the number of shots you can make, it’s the quality of shots you capture that matter” And this trip has certainly made that philosophy sink in that much more.

When the D300 and D3 came out, I asked myself if I’d upgrade to them had money not been an issue. Though the D300 is a really solid camera, I now no longer believe the D300 being an upgrade because I just like the files that my Fuji generates more (the film-looking grain, excellent white balance, incredible handling with high ISO… etc). I’ll probably get another Fuji if they ever made a full frame camera. Until then, my next move would probably to get another S5 so I don’t need to swap lenses as often on the field or during sessions.

About two and half hours into the delay, my cart passed the San Antonio station where the suicide occurred. I saw a couple of workers in white full body anti-contamination suits still cleaning up the tracks. Though there was no sign of blood or body parts, bright colored, official-looking plastic bags with “stuff” inside of them were still visible from where I sat. They were probably bits and pieces of human remains.

One passenger complained those who chose Caltrain as a method of suicide were very inconsiderate. They cause enormous delays and inconveniences for others. But I guess death in any situation, suicide or not, is an inconvenience for those who are involved.

On the whole trip home I wondered if it was harder to commit suicide or to live with what life has dealt us. Choosing to commit suicide is just so counter intuitive to nature that when what all living beings do in the worst of conditions is trying to survive. Have we humans become so arrogant against nature as to defy what all living beings have the innate ability to do?

I can only keep wondering.

So I finally got to meet ????????Sebastian in person after having read and left messages on each other’s blog for seemingly eons (in blogsphere time, that is). We had a series of very interesting and only-if-we-had-time type of conversations over dinner in San Francisco. How I enjoy intelligent conversations…

On my new “job”, one reason I took the job was so that I could finally jump into Flash and Flex full time. But all that hope is all but gone now. Due to the relative shortage of qualifying candidates the company needs to develop the project using Flash/Flex, they’ve decided to switch strategy to meet the internal deadlines using JSP, CSS, Javascript, Ajax with a dash of Flash. It’s good and bad news all rolled into one. On one hand, I am glad they made the call because this means my existing skills in CSS and Ajax would make the development process a lot more rapid. But I am also disappointed that I won’t be leveraging the project to further develop my Flash/Flex skills. But I guess this is all good considering the baby girl is arriving anytime this week now… Lack of sleep makes learning new things an impossible task.

Also, given my relatively unique combination of skills and experience in interaction design and programming, it seems like both the design and tech teams are trying to leverage my strengths to their own advantage in all-but-invisible company politics. OH Crud…

Then came Thursday morning — just another normal working day for me. But that morning almost became a traumatic day for me as I, along with dozens of other Caltrain passengers, witnessed someone almost got run over by the very Caltrain I was supposed to catch for work. Luckily the train missed him by about 1/3 of a step, ending up clipping him on his right temple (at which spot blood seemingly came pouring out nano seconds later). The train would’ve crushed him if only he’d accidentally stepped into the track 1/10 of a second earlier….

The blow knocked him almost unconscious. Unable to stand straight, he almost fell towards the track, which would have been fatal. Fortunately a couple of cyclists were close enough to drag him away from the train, which was just about to come to a complete stop. Everyone was shocked and froze as if nobody believed this was happening — me included. I called 911 and was told by the dispatcher that a flood of calls also came in at the same time about the same incident.

The fire fighters were the first there at the scene along with its own medic unit. Then the police came one after another (3 on motorcycles with 2 others in 2 separate cars). The ambulance, of all services, came the last — looooooooong after the fire fighters arrived. Caltrain also dispatched a supervisor almost immediately, arriving after the ambulance.

It was a shocking experience that reminded me of the collapsing of the NYC Twin Towers on 9-11, of which I also witnessed as the towers crumbled…

I learned a few useful things having watched the entire event unfolding: (a) Fire fighters are awesome. If anything, they need more funding, not to be cut back! They were the first responders and the very last to leave besides the Caltrain supervisors. (b) Police weren’t really all that helpful except to be there to “investigate” what happened. They showed no urgency nor sympathy towards the person who was injured (as I saw a couple of them were even smiling and laughing as they rode away on their motorcycles — the little respect I had left for the cops was diminished that much more). (c) Look both ways when crossing the road, train track, whatever… (d) Humanity usually shows its best side at the worst of times. (e) Life is fragile. That very well could’ve been me.

Then came Sunday. Grace scheduled two photo sessions for me almost back to back. Now I have around 5,000 photos (along with ones from Missouri) to post process in the coming weeks… And the baby is coming…. and the looming deadlines of the new job… Oh, life…

So what have I learned from this trip?

1. Midwest Chinese food sucks no matter how much the locals rave about it — it ain’t Chinese… It’s… Frankenstein Americanese food…

2. People who are serious about guns and treating them as sporting equipment make tremendous financial, emotional and physical investments in the sport.

3. Action pistol is an expensive sport — each round of bullet costs $0.30 (more if custom made). And on an average practice shooting session, one can go through 700 to 1,000 rounds — that’s each day times almost seven days a week.

4. Based on what I gathered, action pistol sport is 10% skills and 90% mental, just like many competitive sports. They say you can only learned so much on the skills, and the rest is all in the mind.

5. Most shooters I met are great people — not the “red neck” image I’d stereotyped them as. But that changed when I heard the speech from the president of NRA on the last night of the event. He made a few comments about NRA, guns and politics that made me shake my head a few times even among a room full of gun owners…

6. Missouri does have a NPR station. But I guess it doesn’t get enough funding to have all the good stuff that other big cities enjoy. Instead, it plays classical music most of the time for which I mistakenly wrote it off entirely as a NPR-less state.

7. Driving on gravels can feel like driving on ice sometimes — when it skids, the car may or may not stop…

8. There’s a place for big gas goessling American trucks, and that place is called the American Midwest. And I don’t mean it in a sarcastic or negative way. When my client wasn’t practicing shooting, I took some time off to drive around “the woods” in the more rural areas of Missouri. And I soon realized those were no place for luxury gas-friendly Toyotas or Lexuses… Those were some rough roads with car-unfriendly conditions. And by being big, cheap(er) and possibly more capable of standing up to abuse, American trucks would fare well there. And indeed 90% of trucks I saw there were American — and they are huge and mighty.

9. For whatever reason, gas prices in Missouri was just as expensive as California.

10. Australians have far superior gun control laws than those in the United States. Americans could learn a few things from the Australians on gun control.

I enjoyed the trip, enjoyed seeing more nature, and enjoyed the learning experience. I look forward to processing 3,500+ images I shot there in the coming days…

Hit the link to read additional notes on this image at Flickr (mouse over the image once at Flickr to see the notes).

A few interesting observations I made in the first 3 hours of arrival:
1. Interesting signs are everywhere!
2. Local radio stations have more country music than anything else combined.
3. Local car mechanics advertise not only to fix your car, but also your tracker on the radio!
4. I couldn’t find NPR on any of the local stations. The only thing closest to it is some feminist station talking about all things Girl Power (or at least in the 2 hours that I tried listening to parts of it).

So tomorrow is going to be a full day at the practice range… Bang! Bang! Bang!*

*Good thing my client offered an old pair of her ear muffs to me…