3 Books of Wisdom

I just finished reading three books. Today actually. That normally doesn’t happen. I usually read like a freight train. One book and full speed ahead. But for some reason I ended up reading 3 books at once this time.

The Power of Habit

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Little Bets

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Decisive (coming out soon)

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I quite enjoyed all three.  I felt like Decisive had the best points, Power of Habit was the best researched, and Little Bets was more inspirational.

I learned something from each book.

Power of Habit: Notice what you are doing and you can change what you are doing. 

Little Bets: Do little things to find bigger better things.

Decisive: Widen the decision making process and step back a bit. 

I would recommend everyone read all three. If you had to buy one, buy Decisive. Seriously, I have opened it a few times already to look up something when I was making a decision.

(links are Amazon affiliate)

Back at it

After the long and dreary trek in the wilderness of Posterous, I have returned to the promised land of WordPress.  I shall be bloggin much more regularly.

Hello world!

“Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!”

I think those might be the most common words on the internet. Or something about making money from home.  There is something exciting about a new blog, ready to be filled with words which create a personality.

Random Programming Concepts

I am going through another programming book just working on my fundamentals.

Here are some random concepts that popped out to me. 

0 = false

When you declare a varialbe, you declare the type, then the name.

You can put an expression into a BOOL variable. 

Watch out for false positives when testing else if statements.  

ternary operator is the same as a conditional operator
The ternary operator's form is
     variable = (test true or false) ? if true value : if false value

returning 0 in main is returning exit success.  Meaning everything went ok. 

Random Programming Concepts

I am going through another programming book just working on my fundamentals.

Here are some random concepts that popped out to me. 

0 = false

When you declare a varialbe, you declare the type, then the name.

You can put an expression into a BOOL variable. 

Watch out for false positives when testing else if statements.  

ternary operator is the same as a conditional operator
The ternary operator's form is
     variable = (test true or false) ? if true value : if false value

returning 0 in main is returning exit success.  Meaning everything went ok. 

The Internet is Down…

Apple and iCloud went down last night.

Twitter is down right now. 

Amazon is down right now.  

The internet is down.  And we can’t talk about it. 

The Internet is Down…

Apple and iCloud went down last night.

Twitter is down right now. 

Amazon is down right now.  

The internet is down.  And we can’t talk about it. 

How to Return a Lost iPhone, or How I found the owner of a smashed iPhone.

I was driving home today day, and I saw something shiny in the road. I drove past it but something said to me "That is an iPhone."  My cousin had recently had her lost phone returned to her by a stranger.  She had lost it along with her drivers license, and the kind guy had called all the Dances in the phone book in the city listed on her license.  I figured karma was calling my name, so I turned around and sure enough it was a lost iPhone. The screen was pretty much shattered, just like my cousins phone had been.  Unfortunately I didn't have a drivers license to get a name from. 

I pressed the power button and the screen lit up, blank white.  I figured that was pretty much a miracle.  I know it would be on the slide to unlock screen so I tried to gently slide my finger across the shattered glass to unlock it without slicing my finger open.  No luck.  I then tried to hold down the home button to get voice control.  I figured I could tell it to "Call Home" or something, but no luck.  Maybe she didn't have it activated. 

Next step, was I took the iPhone home and plugged it into my Mac.  Amazingly enough it made the sync noise and iTunes popped up with "Lindy's iPhone" in the sidebar.  I could only see the music she had on her phone from iTunes but I knew that if I could sync it to the computer I could get the some contact info.  However, I didn't want to override all my info on my Mac with her's.  

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I quickly made a new user on my computer, logged in, and synced the phone up.  I was worried she wouldn't have, or I wouldn't be able to get the contact info so while it was syncing I opened up iPhoto.  I figured I could use the geolocation of photos to find a "home base".  No such luck, she didn't have her iPhone recording photo locations. 

Luckily the addresses book synced without problems and she had a Mom and a Dad contact so I called her Dad and said, "This is a random call, but do you have a daughter named Lindy? I have her phone." 

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 Turns out she lived a block from where I found the phone.  I drove over there, she wasn't there, so I left the phone in her porch mailbox with a note.  

And that I how you return a lost iPhone when the screen is smashed.