I’ve been back from Norway for a couple of weeks, but for the first week was too wacked out from jet lag to do much of anything. I was thinking that were I to do a coding marathon of 30+ hours, skip one night’s sleep then get to bed at a “normal” time, I could do a hard reset of my internal clock. Nope. Didn’t work. Screwed me up (well, more than normal). The trip was terrific, but too short. While I don’t...

Last week I had the pleasure of attending version 1.0 of a new kind of iOS developer’s conference, Renaissance: The Art and Science of Apps. Billed as “the iOS app maker’s conference,” it spanned three days from Monday to Wednesday at the University of California, San Francisco. What made Renaissance so special is that it combined engineering (of course) with artistry and the business of being an app maker. We knew this was going to be...

A couple of weeks ago I participated with “Hack the Future,” in San Jose. HtF brings computer professionals together with a bunch of kids to let them get a better understand of programming, robotics, hardware and so on. You can see me at the same table as Al Alcorn, inventor of Pong. Go here.

On Columbus Day weekend we celebrate “Fleet Week” here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Navy ships in the areatake part in a parade of ships, followed by their smaller counterparts by the dozens. We are treated to a grand air show over the bay, culminating with the Blue Angels. Instead of facing the traffic and parking problems the San Francisco is notorious for, I opted to go out on a boat. This “boat” was a wonderful recreation of a late-18th...

When I reserved my iPad, I selected Apple’s flagship store in Palo Alto for pickup. I had never quite understood the Apple line mentality. After all, most people could just save a lot of time and either order one online or wait a day or two. Now I see the light. Plus I absolutely needed to get a unit ASAP to test my software, Distant Suns. It was already live in the App Store and had over 80 downloads, so I needed to see what others were to...