Posts Tagged ‘iphone’

Reek of delish

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

People seem to still be downloading iProv, which is cool. The Seattle Festival of Improv Theater is coming up, and I may try to promote it there. I’ve started work on a casual game in the meantime… it’s coming along well.

I’d been away from Unexpected a couple of weeks, and when I came back to play this past weekend I was amused to find a certain photo printed out on the managing director’s desk, with the caption “UP alum Joel McHale gives Dan Posluns a noogie”. It never takes much of an absence for me to feel the nostalgia when I return.

My washer finally got repaired today, nearly two weeks after I first set out to have it fixed. The repairman missed our first appointment because he was sick and I was never notified. He came two days later and identified the problem, but it required ordering a replacement part. He was supposed to come back with it on Monday, but phoned and told me it had arrived busted and they were going to have to order another one. Finally, today, I was able to do laundry again and stop smelling like a hobo.

In the end the affair cost me nearly three hundred dollars, with about half of that just for a new dial control. Admittedly cheaper than buying a new washer, but not enough to keep me from feeling really jilted if anything else goes wrong with it.

The Superbowl was this past weekend, and for someone who’s normally not very entertained by football, I found it enthralling. In fact, the game was probably more interesting than the commercials, which were an unusually paltry crop this year. Some were worse than others, but the one that angered up the blood most was the one that was criminally ignorant of some of the most fundamentally basic geometry:

Someone at the party was following Wil Wheaton on Twitter and I think he summed it up best: “It’s like a million geometry nerds cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

My parents sent me a very excellent birthday gift I meant to blog about some time ago. One part of it was a bottle of the jalapeno vodka my grandmother’s brother brought with him in his most recent (and in all likelihood final) visit from Russia. Unlike normal vodka (which is normally pretty flavourless and used mainly as a mixer), this stuff has a really nice, mild taste to it that makes it great for shots. Plus the jalapeno sitting at the bottom of the bottle is all kinds of awesome.

The other, far more valuable part was a package of slices of the salami obtained from the St. Jacob’s Farmer’s Market, which is more than an hour’s drive west of Toronto. This is an aged, all-beef Mennonite salami that is unlike anything else – I need to keep it shut up in a cupboard or my entire condo will reek of delish. I’ve been rationing it carefully but I’m already more than a quarter of a way through the stuff. My parents had to sneak it across the border (beef is prohibited) when they drove down to Florida for their vacation and shipped it out from there. It took nearly a month to arrive, and I had assumed that it had been confiscated by the post office (since it had a Canadian return address on it), but it was a very pleasant surprise the day when it turned up.

I could use more pleasant surprises! Get on that, blogosphere.

Dan.

Drinks and stories from our youths

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

If I’m understanding the reports on the iTunes  developer website correctly (and it’s entirely possible I’m not), iProv has been downloaded nearly 1,000 times in the 5 days since its release. Primarily in the U.S., but also Canada and the rest of the world as well, including (more surprisingly) many non-English speaking countries. Not bad for an application with a very narrow audience… especially since it doesn’t show up in any lists on iTunes that I’ve seen, so unless you’re searching specifically for it, you won’t find it. I’ve spread the word in a couple online improv communities but I wasn’t expecting it to reach a tenth of that many people, especially in its first week. I just wish I could find out more about the folks who’ve been downloading it.

My attempts to get my washer repaired have been frustrating. I called a company on Thursday, and after spending several minutes setting up an appointment they informed me they couldn’t work on a washer that had a dryer stacked on top of it. So I canceled the appointment, called another company and was grateful when they told me that they would be able to send someone out later the same day, they would call to set up the appointment and the stacked washer/dryer wasn’t a problem.

Only, I never heard back from them. So I hit redial on my phone the next day and called them back to find out what had happened. After much confusion they said they had me in their records, but that I had canceled because of the stacked unit problem. Realizing I must have accidentally dialed the first company instead of the second, I apologized profusely and dialed the other number in my phone, which after another bout of confusion I realized had taken me to the exact same company.

After some furious scouring on the Internet to try and figure out just who I’d been calling the other day, I realized that there were multiple listings of companies with different names and phone numbers but all operating out of the same address, and they were actually aliases for a single company. So what had in fact happened the previous day was that I had phoned the same company twice on two different numbers, with two completely different results. It just seemed they had conveniently forgotten about the second time.

I’ve since made an appointment for Tuesday with what I’ve confirmed is an entirely different company that says they can handle the stacked washer/dryer. Hopefully there won’t be more surprises… I need to do laundry.

I had some friends over last night and amidst a few too many drinks and stories from our youths, I became acutely aware of how much events that are much more significant to us as children than they are to the grown-ups around us can stick with us and affect who we are as adults. Their stories triggered me to tell a story I’d never told anyone before, not because I was embarrassed by it so much as it had never seemed important or interesting enough to tell. I actually surprised myself that I had never told it to anyone before, though, and was in fact so surprised that I want to retell it here before I forget about it again.

Read more tales of awkwardness…

Dan.

Virtual shelves

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

My first application that I’ve written for the iPhone has hit virtual shelves! Say hello to iProv, a handy reference tool for improvisers that catalogues and displays over 250 improv games and handles, organizes them by tags, lets you search, track your recently-viewed and favourites, etc. and even choose a random entry by shaking the iPhone!

I wrote it as a feet-getting-wet project for the iPhone, which is part of the reason it’s free (the other main reason being that it’s based on free material). In addition to writing the program itself, I’ve set up (and most significantly, written documentation for) an infrastructure to allow the improv community to help collaborate on the program’s contents, and that’s over at http://iprov.sourceforge.net.

If you own an iPhone, please check it out even if you aren’t an improviser, as I’d appreciate both the stats on the iTunes website and the feedback from you.

Otherwise, life plods along, with a couple minor detours. I’ve been having trouble sleeping, which wasn’t helped one night when I was called at 4 AM to liberate an intoxicated friend from the police station (I was sleepy and there was a ton of reverb where he was calling from, so when he first called I thought it was from beyond the grave). It was a DUI and thankfully nobody was hurt, but it’s the first time I’ve ever been called into that sort of service so that seemed noteworthy. I also went to a cool fundraiser/cocktail party for a friend’s dance troupe… I normally find any sort of dancing pretty intimidating so it wasn’t until the bar had received a significant donation from me that I would even consider sharing the floor with the room full of “professionals”.

I’m annoyed by things that are breaking in my world. Ever since the chains on my tires snapped during the recent snowpocalypse, my right-front tire has been making a quiet grinding noise against a piece of metal that won’t stay put. I’ll get it looked at the next time I’m in for service, but for now it’s just troublesome. And now my washer has apparently broken… it quits half-way through the rinse cycle, leaving my clothes soaked and still a bit soapy. I have better things to be spending my money on… although most of it is sitting in savings anyway, waiting for the spectre of the assessment that’s supposed to happen on my condo to actually materialize.

Just the other day I opened a money-market account at the suggestion of a helpful bank teller (who also scored a nice referral fee). It apparently has all the liquidity of a savings account (so long as I don’t withdraw more than 5 times a month, which is fine, seeing as I have yet to withdraw from that account even once), but with a rate that floats about a percentage point higher. I feel stupid for not knowing about this kind of thing already.

Dan.

Fishburp

Monday, September 8th, 2008

It’s been hard for me to keep up the writing, as I’ve been so busy lately with Rocky Horror. The show is coming along just fine, although I am still dealing with my vocal insecurity. We had our first run last week and it took three evenings to get through a show that’s less than two hours long, but we managed to seal up most of the holes while doing so and hopefully things will start to run smoother as we head toward opening.

I’m still doing improv when I can, but it’s pretty much down to one day a week (usually Saturdays). Once Rocky opens I’ll have more time during the week, but probably won’t be able to do any improv until it closes. (Maybe a couple of Sunday evenings… if I go from my matinée in Burien to the Market Theatre in Seattle.)

AT&T cut off the service to my iPhone the other day due to my outstanding balance. They didn’t have an open call-centre (at least not one that I could reach from the automated system they shaft you to whenever you try to dial out), so I was forced to shell out a doozy of a credit card payment over the phone and wait for them to restore service “within 30 minutes”… after waiting for over an hour I gave up and went to sleep.

The next day I called them on my mercifully reconnected phone and politely explained that I had no problem paying my bill if they would be so kind as to actually start sending them to me. I knew they had my correct address because I had received a piece of mail two days ago – I had assumed it was the bill I’d been waiting for (I was originally going to wait until the weekend to open and pay it), but it turned out to be the notification that they were turning off my phone. When I asked the agent if I would start receiving my bill now, he replied with “definitely”, but when I followed up with if he could tell me why I hadn’t received one yet, he responded that no, he couldn’t. They were accommodating enough and reversed the $36 reconnect charge without a fuss, though. I’m not thrilled, but I still prefer them to Helio.

I have been taking fish oil pills to help protect my voice… after a few weeks it’s supposed to assist in keeping the vocal cords more lubricated. Don’t know if they’re helping or not, but they make me burp, and each burp has the taste of fish, so I don’t think I’ll be keeping up this regimen after the show closes.

*fishburp*

Dan.

Manage my expectations

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

Well, I finally have the new iPhone and while not the work of pure divinity one might expect, it’s worlds better than anything I’m used to with my old Helio. I don’t even feel that badly that it’s costing me $20 more per month after adjustments to my account in order to get a decent amount of text messages (which were included for me before).

Read about my adventure in purchasing the iPhone

Improv last night was interesting… we were short-staffed for Theatresports so the teams only had two people on them. I was partnered with the talented and skilled Jeremy Richards, which was great, except I think I wound up letting him carry us more than he should have had to. I don’t think there was a problem with our scenework and the audience seemed amicable enough, but it was still kind of an off-night for me and I made some weak choices. In spite of that, though, I really enjoyed the two-person teams, and how it took away the element of choice: you’re always out there performing whenever it’s your turn, so you have less time to think about what you’re doing and don’t have to worry as much about balancing the performers.

I went Friday to see friends performing in South Pacific at Snoqualmie Falls Forest Theater (where I’ve performed in Shakespeare shows as recently as a couple summers back). I was disappointed I missed the opportunity to audition and play with them, but after the long drive out there and thinking about how much time I would likely have been spending in that Quonset hut again I figured that I’m probably better off just camping with them a couple of weekends anyway.

My audition this past week was okay, but could have gone better… I had unexpected breathing issues in my song. I really hope I get called back, but I got a fortune cookie the other day that told me to “manage my expectations”. I’m used to fortune cookies not giving actual fortunes out, but it’s the first time any foodstuff has directly advised me against hoping.

Dan.