Reviews

When you write something, reviews can make or break your effort.  While I accept this, and I was looking forward to Index Dice being reviewed, I must say that I was frustrated at one of them that showed up.  (I will quickly say that the first review was excellent... he had some complaints, but they were constructive criticism.)

Frankly, the issue is that you should write something helpful to the developer, don't just complain.

He said: "It's not zilch nor it should be compared."

Okay, fair enough.  Although, I didn't promise it would be zilch, I said it was similar to and that the rule customization would allow you to get close.  Of course, in some searching on the internet, the first two rules sets I found online - one was very similar to how I have Index Dice set up, the other was a bit different (and ironically claimed that the game didn't have many variations).  I'm not sure what to think, but since this user didn't tell me what's wrong, I can't fix it.

He said: "It would be great if it had record keeping. Stats."

This is a good point and I agree wholeheartedly.  It's on the to do list...

He said: "It also has very suspicious rolls. Almost always when the pc id down it gets a very hi score."

This is funny, at least from where I sit.  I can honestly say that the rolling mechanism has no idea "who" it's rolling for.  I can also say that the AIs are very simple (I keep meaning to make them smarter) and pay no attention to how many points you have or if you're close to winning. (They do, however, know if you are about to win because you went over the limit.  They will keep rolling at that point until they beat you or bust.)

This is similar to the turmoil about iTunes and the iPods being non-random.  This is a classic example of observation bias in statistics.  The observer is remember some data points better than others, specifically the ones that are more significant.  For example, I thought for a time that it wasn't rolling the dice when you passed, since I would see a four replaced by a four.  When I actually took the time to write down what was happening a few times in a row, I could see that this wasn't the case... my brain had just filtered out what it considered to be the "significant" events and brushed the others under the rug.

So, while I understand that it might appear that the computer has some awesome run at just the right time, I can assure everyone that I have many other things I'd rather be doing with my time than making the game arbitrarily more difficult to play... like adding stats.  

Snow!

It's snowing in Portland now... this may be the first time we've seen this much snow before Christmas since we've moved here.  At any rate, this is also the first time that Allison has really experienced snow (last year was only a dusting just after Christmas, and it had basically melted by the time we went outside).

Fortunately, since we had hoped to go sledding around Thanksgiving, Dawn had already gotten some snow pants for the girls... so we could go out without worrying about getting too cold (although I still held them to only about a 1/2 hour for now).

While we were out there, it picked up again, so it looks like we may have a good amount by tomorrow.

Pictures

Index Dice is live in the App Store

It's live!  I submitted the app Saturday night and Apple approved it last night.  Strangely, searching for "10000" isn't very effective, but searching for "farkle" or "index dice" is (well, of course on the last one).

I was planning to take some time off, and then slowly add some more features, but since there are about 6 other Farkle clones in the app store already, I've started working on the next feature set for release, to try and complete a little bit.

Next up: Scoring variations, since everyone plays different, I want to allow different rules depending on how each person likes to play.

After that: Horizontal viewing, showing detailed statistics, maybe other stuff... I haven't nailed it down completely yet.

We will pie you!

I'm not a big fan of fund raisers... not sure why, since I think they're for good causes.  I think it has to do with never getting anything fun out of them myself when I was younger.

Well, not so with Bryana.  In her first major fund raiser, in which we made her pitch her school's cause to various people around the office and family (instead of doing it for her), Bryana managed to set the record for the largest number of contributions.  As a result, she was one of five or six students that were honored with the chance to put a pie in the face of one of the school faculty.  In Bryana's case, the PE teacher.

So, to cheers of "We will, we will pie you!" (to the tune of "We will rock you")... Bryana delivered a pie to her PE teacher.

All in all, the school raised around $11,000 - which was just a touch shy of the $12,000 goal that they had.  So far, we've been impressed with the involvement of the PTA and the community at Tobias, the kids really seem to feed off the energy of the staff and I think that makes for a better learning environment.  We're happy to have Bryana there!

Birday!

Thursday night, we did a low key birthday party for Allison. Since she's only two, she really doesn't have any internal concept of "friends" and we are busy enough that doing something with just immediate family seemed like a good idea anyway.
When we got to the mall, I started to unbuckle her from the car seat and she looked at me and said "ma birday!" (at least, that's what I heard). I asked, "Is is your birthday?" and she replied, "Yeah!"

In the mall, we had a bag with some presents in it that we let her open. My goodness do kids like paper products...

iPhone programming: 10,000

For those of you who don't know, 10000 is a dice game that a few of us play in the family.  It's something that you can kind of count on us playing at a family gathering, since it only takes six dice and as many or as few players as you can stand.

My brother and I have been talking about what it would take to put the game on the iPhone and - of course - that was one of my excuses for getting an iPhone in the first place...  I really want to program something for the phone.  Consequently, I have finally done something about it and I'm about 1/2 way done with the programming with my brother doing some QA work for me.

I can't say for sure when I'll release it... but it seems to be coming along well, so I hope it'll be soon!

Hobby programming

The problem with hobby programming is that there always seems to be more I'd like to get done then I have time to do. Of course, I suppose that could be said about a lot of hobbies... But things are currently more frustrating than usual. I've got a web site project that's taking longer than I planned and now I keep thinking of other things I'd like to be doing. Many people have written me regarding issues and/or feature requests in TiVo Butler and the new version Eavesdrop has come to the forefront of my brain. (it's actually a tough choice of which one to work on actually, but TiVo Butler may get more atention just because I think the user base may be slightly larger... Or maybe they're just more vocal.)

I have also had an iPhone now for a couple months and haven't gotten a chance to do anything there, either. Oh well...

Eric

Flying with children

We've flown with Allison before, but this is the first time that she's been old enough to get excited about the process. She's been watching the planes with Bryana and myself and getting excited about... well, she has no idea what she's excited about, but it sure is exciting. It really is a joy to watch.

Hopefully, shell sleep well on the plane.

Eric

Emergency rooms and sleepovers

I won't belabor the point, since there is enough emotion in taking a child to the emergency room in the first place that I don't want to relive too much by recounting it. At any rate, our youngest daughter - Allison - was having some trouble breathing and was taken, in turn, to an urgent care facility, to the emergency room (via ambulance) and finally admitted to the hospital all from about 4:00 in the evening on Saturday to about 9:00 at night. (The first hint that it might be serious was when we had only been in the exam room a couple minutes when we heard the doctor say to the nurse in the hall, "I'll see the toddler first." They almost never see you that quickly.) We were discharged just over 12 hours after being admitted to the hospital with a couple of prescriptions and an order to see her normal doctor within a week. All this time, Bryana had a birthday party to be at. That was fine at first, but with the party starting at 4:00 we started to wonder what we were going to do about the time Allison was being loaded into the ambulance.

Without me even asking, the mother of the birthday girl offered to put up Bryana for the night as soon as heard what was going on. And, as it just so happens, Bryana has been bugging us for about six months or so to let her do a sleep over. We keep telling her that she'd have to wait for her next birthday, but this was a perfect opportunity for us to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. We were able to focus on Allison (and trade off sleeping in the hospital room) and we didn't have to worry about Bryana's well being at the same time.

I'm pretty sure that Bryana didn't notice us being gone at all.

UPDATE: Allison seems to have responded to antibiotics (I should have mentioned that in the original text), so the assumption is that an infection was causing the issues. Really, it's kind of a mystery still. Could be asthma... could have been a viral infection that went away on its own... who knows. Still, she's acting fine now and hopefully we're done with that little scare.

Zoo concert

Three years ago, when we got our first Zoo membership, we picked up a copy of the concert series schedule, thinking that it would be fun to go to a couple. Sure, we hadn't heard of most of the artists, but that didn't really matter to us, we just wanted to hear live music.

It never happened.

Each subsequent year, when we renewed our membership, we told ourselves: "This summer it will be different. This time we'll make the time and do it!"

So, here we are... At our first Zoo concert. Finally!

Creative uses of cat toys

Allison is nothing if not creative. She will make use of her environment for her self-amusement (sometimes to our frustration).
This time, the object in question was a cat toy that Dawn bought a few weeks ago. Allison decided that it would make a good see-saw.

She is, of course, chowing down on her main staple: Cheetos.

First post!

I've never gotten a "first post" before...

Anyway, this is an experiment.  I've often had the thought that blogging might be interesting.  I frequently have some family story that I want to share with friends, or a programming tip or snippet of code I want to share.

When my wife got pregnant with our second child, I thought that maybe I'd start one then to document the beginning of her life.  Allison is now around 20 months old, so that obviously didn't happen.

Now, strangely, getting an iPhone seems to have been the catalyst that got me actually started.  I'm thinking I'll be able to write some stuff as I sit at my daughters' classes, or in the middle of the night when I'm rocking them back to sleep.  Who knows?

Only time will tell...