On our way to San Francisco, we left home at noon and got to “our hotel”:http://www.governorhotel.com/ in Portland at 4pm. We checked into our room, relaxed a bit after the drive and to let Havana and Hudson get some away from sitting time and went out to eat at the recently-opened “Deschutes Public House”:http://www.deschutesbrewery.com/brewery/brew-pubs/portland-pub/default.aspx a few blocks away. This was the first real walk we’ve taken with “our new two-kid stroller”:http://www.philandteds.com/dash_index.htm.
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Seven days (five business days) “after I applied”:http://troyandgay.com/blog/2009/03/12/apples-iphone-developer-approval-process/ to be in the iPhone Developer Program, I was accepted. Apple then let me pay them $99 so that I could get a key and install my app on my iPhone. It’s so nice of them to allow me to make software for their platform. Then I had to go through the involved process of making my security key, uploading it to Apple, getting a certificate from them and installing it on my computer and then registering it with Xcode.
I’ve built software on DOS, several flavors of Windows, Windows mobile devices, Palm devices, a few flavors of commercial Unixes and even Apple’s OS X. I have never had to be _approved_ to be a developer on those platforms. I still don’t understand why Apple is so protective of the iPhone and why it makes sense to them to erect barriers to developers wanting to build iPhone apps. I can’t imagine the hoops I’ll have to jump through or how long it’ll be if/when I want to put the app in the App Store.
On Wednesday morning, Illy was slow to eat her breakfast. That’s odd for Illy, she’ll knock small children over to get to food. Then I let her out to go to the bathroom and she had trouble walking a straight line. She refused to come back inside and slowly walked around the yard. We didn’t think much of it until noon when she hadn’t come back in. We found her laying behind a row of hydrangeas and she refused to get up. We eventually coaxed her up and she couldn’t walk without falling down, so I carried her inside and up to her bed to rest. She made her way out into the hallway but couldn’t go any further so she just layed down for hours.
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I’m building an iPhone app and wanted to put it on my iPhone to try it out on real hardware. I discovered that I can’t do this without getting a license from Apple which requires that you log into your Developer account at Apple.com, which I found shocking. You then have to fill out a form and promise to pay $99. Okay, not a big deal and $99 isn’t much. But then you have to be approved for the program. I assume that means they reject people. They reject people from building apps for their platform?! I’ve never heard of such a thing!
I can understand their approval process for selling your app on their App Store, but they won’t even let me make a crappy app and put it on my own iPhone. And you can’t just pay the $99 and get your license immediately. Again, this doesn’t mean they have to accept my app on their store and potentially ruin other people’s iPhones, this is just so I can put my app _on my own_ iPhone!
It gets worse….
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After Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on people making more than $250K I heard a lot of supposedly intelligent people, generally Republicans, calling it a disincentive to make more money and anti-American Dream. These people seemed to believe, or were at least trying to persuade people to believe, that your highest tax bracket applies to _all_ your income. In other words, they’d have you believe that if you’re in the 39% tax bracket, all your income is taxed at 39% rather than just the dollars within that tax bracket.
Media Matters “exposed ABC News”:http://mediamatters.org/countyfair/200903030013?show=1 for publishing an article written by the brainless Emily Friedman implying that it is true, complete with an attorney and a dentist explaining that they are trying to figure out how to reduce their income to $249,999 so they pay less in taxes! And that’s an attorney and a dentist, supposedly educated people. I’d bet that 90% of the country does not understand our tax system. The NY Times economics blog, Economix, noticed ABC News’ idiocy too and “explained how taxes work”:http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/tax-fallacies-explaining-marginal-tax-rates/.
In case you don’t know, if you make more money, you have more money than people who make less even if your tax bracket is higher. Any time you hear someone whining that they pay a lot in taxes, remind them that they paid a lot in taxes because they made a lot of money! There’s no need to feel sorry for rich people… if they don’t like earning lots of money and paying taxes on their earnings, they have an easy way to solve their “problem”: give money away until they’re not rich and they’re paying lower taxes.
The new U2 album, No Line On The Horizon
, is $3.99 on Amazon MP3.
Today is my 12th anniversary of living in Seattle, and one year exactly since my “11th-year anniversary”:http://troyandgay.com/blog/2008/03/03/11-years-in-seattle/. 12 years is a long enough time to live in one place so I’ve been thinking about finding a new place to live to see what that’s like. Because I’ve been thinking about it and talking about it, Gay’s been thinking about it too. For some reason I have yet to figure out, she wants to continue to live with me.
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