Category: Miscellaneous

It’s an incredible world we live in today. There are so many services to help us manage our lives and data in ways that we could not have imagined twenty years ago. However, I have a major problem that is starting to become quite burdensome.

Here is my dilemma. I use many different services to manage my digital life. I use services from Microsoft, Google, and Apple along with a few others on a regular basis. This did not particularly happen by plan or by choice. I used to develop a lot of software for Microsoft platforms. I had a Windows Phone that uploaded every picture to OneDrive automatically. I went to a developer conference where they gave everyone 100GB of cloud storage for life! In 2011 Google Docs was far more advanced than Office Online, so I ended up storing most of my documents in Google Drive. Gmail also integrates with Google Drive. Four years ago I went back to iOS and bought a MacBook to do game development. I also use an app called ForeFlight for use while I am flying that only works on iOS. Apple’s iCloud synced all of my Photos between the Mac and iPhone seamlessly. iCloud also offers a shared calendar that syncs between our family which works through the iOS Calendar app, but I have a shared Google Calendar that doesn’t sync with the default calendar app. The last piece of the puzzle comes from taking notes/reminders. I had been using Microsoft OneNote. I switched to the Notes app on iOS. When I initially setup Notes, they were stored in iCloud. Now they are stored with Google through Gmail. I am currently trying out Evernote, which has been okay so far. The default iOS Mail app doesn’t support push notifications for Gmail. Trying to share a photo through the Photos app to an email doesn’t offer the Inbox or Gmail app! Arg! It is so frustrating! Everything is separate and isolated. I have notes stored in four different places!

Each service has things that I like. The greatest schism comes from Google. I use Google Chrome and Gmail. They do not integrate well with Apple’s ecosystem (Calendar, Notes, Mail), yet they are superior products on the web. I love using these services. I want to consolidate all of my data, but where should it live?

I believe the key problem here is with platform ecosystem loyalty. If I pick one platform, and all my friends and co-workers use that platform, I believe that all my problems will go away. These companies want to force us into that. Not only do these services fail to work together, they purposefully design their services to be isolated from one another.

How can we solve this?

I am now an adult, here at age 25. I am enjoying my job at Battelle and getting to work on some really neat things. I am starting to lose my inquisitive sharpness and excitement for software development though since I haven’t done much app or video game development in quite some time. I feel truly satisfied as a result of knowing God and developing sweet friendships in our Voltron bible study. I feel that I’ve accomplished everything I’ve set out to do in my life, and I want to use my time to help others and serve. This has truly been the greatest period of my life. I also seem to be at a cross-roads. Most of my life has been focused on my needs and my will. It’s incredibly difficult, yet rewarding to think about others as more important than myself. I seek different things than I would have imagined myself seeking. I simply don’t want anything more out of life, because I am filled up in the most important things. Being married or not, leading a home church or not, studying the Bible with friends or not, I know that it is drawing near to God that fills me up.

Flying is still fun. I flew to Oshkosh this year despite an incredible amount of drama with the annual. A cylinder needed to be replaced, but no one had any stock of that particular model available. It took months of beautiful flying weather for everything to get worked out. Apparently our propeller had never been approved with the Tri-Pacer, yet it had been flying with that prop for over 40 years! I ended up buying a new propeller, and everything worked out to make it to Oshkosh and camp for several days. Approval for our old propeller finally came through several months later. Along with a new magneto and a new vacuum pump, it’s been an expensive year as an aircraft owner. I did get to fly 20 hours within the next month after having the airplane back in service. Flying as the leaves had all turned color in the fall was absolutely beautiful.

Is it time to settle down or is it time to put the foot on the gas? My personality will not let me rest, so I’d imagine putting the foot on the gas is going to happen. Get ready world. Here I come.

Introducing Aero Battery, an application that shows you your laptop’s battery life via the Windows color scheme.  Transitions from green to red as your battery goes from full to empty.

You’re welcome to try it out and tell me what you think.  It’s free 🙂

https://kanno41blog-h5bhfgerathdade0.westus-01.azurewebsites.net/AeroBattery/AeroBatterySetup.exe

I think I’m doing quite well with this once yearly blog.  Oh man, what a year.  Soulfire Software just released SketchBox 360 on the Xbox Live Marketplace.  I’m so humbled by the team with Soulfire and I have so much respect for every one of them.  I am now a Junior at The Ohio State University.  School is back underway and it feels like I’m starting to get used to it or something.  It doesn’t seem to bother me much anymore.  It’s always hard to stay motivated, but the pain will soon end.  Not much else exciting has been going on.  I’ve been living and breathing SketchBox almost all summer long and doing work/school for the other parts.  One might say it is dull;  I think it is incredibly fulfilling.  Nothing can compare to the feeling of accomplishment when we finally finished and released SketchBox.  You learn about things that are more important than one man.  Working with a team of such talent is just awesome.

Well, that’s all for another year!  See ya next time.

I finally found a new theme that looks very nice for this blog.  I’ve got a nice post that I am still preparing about my trip to Phoenix (actually Wittenburg), Arizona in our small private plane.  I’ve got video and other stuff for it, but not nearly enough time right now.  I’m preparing for robotics right now (I’ll have a post about that too), coding and stuff.

I will have more content later.

Hmm, recently I’ve been thinking about what to blog about.  I have realized that this blog is basically for my own personal gain more than anything.  It’s more of a record that I’ll look back to some time from now to realize a distant memory.

If someone reads my blog, good for you, hopefully it’s not too boring or anything.  This won’t turn into a journal or anything, so don’t worry.

This is just a warning before any of you dive into this. This could possibly be different from your political views. If you are closed-minded, please stop and go away now before you waste your time. Lately (for the past year or so) I have developed an interest in politics. You may think this is wierd, but my views are rather conservative. I know right, OMG WTF A RIGHT-WINGER!!11!1! I have read my fair share of radical blogs, heard lots of speeches, watched hours upon hours watching various news stations. My opinions have formed based on me and me alone. I could delve into a whole sphiel about certain issues, but I’ll save that for a later posting. Right now, I am focused on one thing; the internet. It is nothing short of being the most revolutionary form of communication since the telephone. It allows people to express themselves and form a community regardless of location. The internet has brought many people together from all parts of the world. It would seem though that the internet attracts a certain demographic of the populus; people with liberal viewpoints. You can think of it this way, talk-radio is generally conservative and the internet is generally more liberal. Why does this matter?

If you take a poll from the internet and compare it to a poll by, per say, telephone, you would find that the results would be extremely different. Ron Paul, seriously? No. He is getting all of this bullshit hype about him on the internet because of his liberal point of view. This brings me to my next point. Extremest-left groups. It seems to be that it is a race on many sites to see who can comment with the most out-there idea. They blame the president for their problems. Yes, this is going to be shocking, I agree with President Bush on the war in Iraq. I’ll go into that in another posting too. It is ignorant to think that no one will make a mistake. We have to look at issues in retrospect instead of in a tiny bubble. We must think, how is this going to affect the people around us. Moveon.org is pure political propoganda. They want their way and they are lobbying Democratic candidates to go more radical in their ideas so they can have money to advertise their campaign. It comes down to being different. Ususally a liberal idea is one that is different from a usually more stable conservative belief. The internet has brought with it expression. Everyone wants to be popular and everyone wants to have an impact or make a difference in this global linked society. A forum and group I have started has gained over 400 members. Why? It could be luck, or it could be that it offered something a little new and different from other forums. The internet has been the enabler of many to get their voice heard. Someone reads a very radical blog rebeling against everything known to be true, tells their freind about it, they tell someone else and it is belived as truth. I will give an example. Imagine someone made a blog to prove the earth is flat. They tell their friends who tell other friends until eventually people will belive it as fact and deny any notion of a spherical Earth ever exsisted in the first place. We don’t know what is happening in Iraq. How do we know it the person reporting the news has any credabillity or whether or not they have an agenda to hurt a cause? New ideas are not bad, but ignorance of fame and popularity for their own entertainment is just plain wrong. No, there aren’t new liberals that are emerging, they just want us to think that. Well, that’s pretty much all of the unstructured writing that I feel like doing for now. Good night everyone. If you are interested on how out of touch and radical people on the internet are compared to anything else, check out this topic on the myresistance forums (you have to register, sorry, but it’s worth your time) http://www.myresistance.net/smf/index.php?topic=33882