One of the big bullet points on my 2012 Wish List of things to do was to run more. When I say “more” what I really mean is “at all” and so, in an effort to be less of a slouching desk jockey, I’ve taken action and began to put one foot in front of the other every other day for 30 minutes at a time. Insert line chart! *

My initial goal was to get into a condition that allowed me to run a 5K in less than 30 minutes, at a consistent pace, without dying. It hasn’t taken me very long, about two weeks, to get to the point where I can finish 3.11 miles in under 28 minutes or so. This makes me wonder what all of the hub-bub over “Couch to 5K” is about when I consider that I’ve been a sedentary bum for years now.

At this point I’m going to try my best to maintain this 5K every other day lifestyle and then ramp it up to logging at least some time during the in-between days as well. If Dick Bavetta can run 8 miles every day at the age of one-thousand and two then I should be able to run a fraction of that at the age of thirty.

* Operation: Move Limbs Quickly actually began the very first day after our return from sunny Florida. I thought I could go for an entire hour. About a quarter of the way in I determined that I was probably not going to live through the entire sixty minutes so I started to walk. There was a great shame. This shame is not reflected in the line chart above because I removed it from the data source used to generate it.

I’m a legitimate Cleveland Cavaliers and Cleveland Indians fan. I was born, in 1981, to a father and family entrenched with the Cleveland sports scene even though none of them had ever lived closer than two hours away from the west side.

I’m just old enough to remember The Shot. I’ll never forgive or forget what Jose Mesa did in 1997. For over two decades, I have powered my enthusiasm on a handful of small events thanks to the bleak history of success for both of my favorite franchises.

I have a framed photo of me, wearing a poorly fitting Indians hat, outside the Tribe dugout with Cory Snyder at the old Municipal Stadium after I won a contest at the gate.

I distinctly remember watching Mark Price win the Three-Point Shootout (In your face, Craig Hodges.) with my cousins in my grandparent’s apartment building in 1993.

So it almost goes without saying that my all-time favorite Cleveland athletes are Mark Price and Cory Snyder. There are other players that have come and gone that I still have a place in my sad little sports heart for: Brad Daugherty, Joe Carter, Larry Nance, Charles Nagy, Hot Rod Williams… Of course, there’s one obvious name left off that list.

I grew up despising with the white hotness of a thousand suns players like Jordan, Pippen, anyone who ever wore a Detroit Tigers uniform, Jordan some more and of course, one name I can’t leave off of this list because on July 8th, 2010 he went on national television and made myself, my family and my friends feel dumb for supporting professional athletes.

I sat down yesterday to start reading Scott Raab’s The Whore of Akron and I finished it, cover-to-cover, in one sitting. I think my speed in finishing the book had more to do with its length than the subject matter. Too much of the book is like the opening of this post. It’s about Raab’s connection to the heartbreak of Cleveland sports.

The book offers bits of brief insight into what was happening behind the scenes during LeBron’s last year with the Cavs and first in Miami. There are interesting tidbits from interviews Raab conducted with Dan Gilbert, Dwyane Wade and some of the staff within the Cavaliers organization. These parts were my favorite in the book and I wish there had been more of them.

LeBron’s last season in Cleveland and first in Miami had so many book worthy moments that are quickly glossed over or ignored completely by Raab. A lot of this, I’m sure, has to do with his very limited access to league and team personnel during his time writing the book. To compensate for his lack of material, he resorts to page after page about his messed up childhood or even more messed up adulthood. It’s a tough sell to write a book about LeBron James called The Whore of Akron and then talk about yourself for the majority of its pages.

If you’re a fan of any of the Cleveland teams then Raab’s story is probably very similar to your own. You’ve experienced many of the same heartbreaks and emotions he has. For an outsider, maybe it’s interesting to read about how much the Browns win in 1964 meant to him or how much LeBron wearing a Yankees hat to a playoff game bothered him. But if you are on the inside, with years and years of being a Cleveland fan under your belt, and reading this book to learn more about LeBron and the reasons he did what he did you’re going to come out feeling no better than you did going in.

We spent ten days in Florida, from January 6th to the 16th, and I took a few photos while we were there. I felt like I had a really hard time taking decent photos on this trip. I think the big problem was that I had to use my cheap telephoto lens a lot out of necessity and it’s just not good enough to take quality photos. Anyway, here is a small selection of my favorites:

You can see all of the photos I took over at flickr. They’re broken down into sets by the location they were taken at:

• Key West Lighthouse & Keeper’s Quarters Museum
• Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum
• Key West Butterfly & Nature Conservatory
• Key West Sunset Boat Tour
• Sanibel
• J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge
• Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve

It’s now time for my list of professional and career focused things I’d like to tackle in 2012. This is going to be edge of your seat exciting for most of you so I’ll understand if you need to take a few minutes to catch your breath after each of these items:

• Set Fore Score free. Several years ago I wrote a web application for tracking and monitoring your personal golf performances. Since that time I’ve let it slide to the wayside as more important things, like projects that pay the bills, came along. This year I’d like to either sell off the site entirely or swap it from a limited demo/upgrade system to a free for everyone application.
• Use Amazon Web Services more. I have a lot of programs and processes that would be much better served running in the poorly named “cloud” than on the servers they currently live on. Plus, I’ve always wanted to learn how to use things like EC2 and S3 but never got around to it. [Spoiler Alert: I actually started using EC2 before this post was published and things are going well.]
• More iOS Apps. I’m going to try and get back into iOS programming this year. I would like to release two or three unique apps instead of cheating like I did in 2012 and releasing multiple apps based on the same codebase. It was clear I needed to learn more about Objective-C and iOS programming so I’m working through some books and tutorials to get up to speed (I posted a review of one such book earlier this month).
• Less client work. After eight years, both full and part-time, in the client services business I might be starting to get worn out a bit. Freelancing isn’t the best long-term career solution even when disregarding the fatigue factor. It’s difficult at times to be so reliant on a client base that can dump you at any given moment. I’d like to create more revenue opportunities outside of freelance client work in 2012 to help provide more financial stability.

I’m a web developer by trade but in 2011 I started to get the urge to do some “real” programming again. What I condescendingly mean by “real” is writing software that you compile and run outside of a web browser.

I had brief affair with iPhone Apps last year but I ultimately felt uncomfortable the entire time I was making them. So for Christmas I asked and received a copy of Aaron Hillegass’ Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide.

My bookshelf has six books about C++ on it but they were bought and read back when I was in college. And, for reference, I was a freshman back when the calendar year started with the number 19 so to say that I was a bit rusty probably goes without saying. The Hillegass book is thankfully written for people with little to no knowledge of how C works so I was grateful he spent so much time going over concepts that had collected dust in my brain for so long.

Once you get through the basic C portions of the book things move smoothly into Objective-C and the differences and similarities. If you have any kind of programming background heading in to reading this book it basically breaks down into learning the syntax of Objective-C and making sure you’ve got a handle on how pointers work. Side note: if you want a brief swim in the waters of Computer Science then check out that Wikipedia entry on pointers.

The book itself is composed of 37 chapters of varying length but most of them are between five to seven pages long. This was especially nice because slogging through a programming book, with all of its dense terminology, can get a bit tiresome. Short chapters make progress seem quick and it doesn’t discourage you into taking breaks.

You’ll spend most of your time making command-line tools in C and Objective-C but there are two short chapters on making a simple task management program for the iPhone and Mac. If you’re looking to jump right in and make iOS or Mac OS X applications then this book is the first step in that process. You won’t know learn enough from this book alone to become a full-time application writer but there are other books you can buy after finishing this one to get you on your way.

If you’re a nerd who wants to learn Objective-C and, eventually, start writing iOS Apps or Mac programs then this book is highly recommended.

The Shelly Beach made a list of things she wanted to do last year and I thought I’d try something similar myself for 2012. This list isn’t “career” related so hopefully those that get really sleepy reading about nerdy things won’t be bored. I’ll make those folks suffer through that list in another post.

Here is my 2012 list of things to do, in no particular order:

• Take one photo a day. Either with my fancy SLR or just my phone. Sharing them on the social Internets is optional.
• Facebook. I really don’t use Facebook so I need to either get active with it or just dump it completely. I’m leaning towards a dump because, quite frankly, the whole thing kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies. (Editor’s Note: I knew that word was hyphenated without having to look it up. It appears I don’t need to add “Confirm how smug and smart I think I am.” to this list).
• Survive the Mayan Apocalypse. Or really any other apocalypse be they of Mesoamerican or zombie origin. I think years of playing video games has prepared me pretty well for any zombie scenarios but I’d rather not have to test that theory.
• Write more. I think the word “blog” is stupid when used as either a noun or a verb. So I resolve to write more “posts” on this site and we can just ignore the irony of it all being done on the back of popular blogging software. I want to release a Kindle Single just so I can impress strangers by calling myself an author so I need all the practice I can get.
• Move my legs in a high tempo fashion. I have $90 running shoes, a big treadmill and a FitBit so there’s really nothing else I need.
• Become less bitter about being crushed by a professional athlete. LeBron James broke my heart but 2012 is the year I learn to love again. I’m looking at you, Kyrie Irving. This does not mean I will avoid reading The Whore of Akron though.
• Read more history books. There once was a time when I would read over a dozen history books a year. I feel like one book a month is a nice average that falls somewhere between unthinkable to high school dropouts and pathetic to librarians and I’d like to get back to that spot this year.

There you go. Some of it is obviously a bit tongue in cheek; except the part about the zombie apocalypse which I couldn’t be more serious about.

I’ve wanted to sit down and review all of the work I’ve been doing over the last few months as a freelancer. This is mainly for my own personal benefit but if anyone else finds it interesting that’s great too.

August

My last post here was from the beginning of August and since then things have gotten pretty hectic. Any side project plans I alluded to in that August post went up in a blaze of glory almost immediately after it was published because of the additional workload I took on.

One of my larger clients had a shift in structure and the new management asked me to come to their location, one day per week, and work out of their office. It’s a 200 mile round trip commute to get there so since the start of August I’ve only been working from my home office four days a week. This new schedule has forced me to get creative with how I handle incoming requests from my other clients but I’ve held up pretty well so far.

August also saw the launch of a mobile version of the Toledo Walleye website. They had existing Android and iPhone apps at the time but the relationship with their mobile developer was starting to show some cracks and they needed a more flexible alternative before the start of the season. The mobile site has live score updates during both home and away games which is something the now defunct apps never managed to include.

One last website launch in August was for a small apartment complex in my hometown of Tiffin, OH. Country Set Apartments has a brand new site that runs off the same content management system I built and wrote about back in November of last year.

I also dabbled a bit with WordPress by writing a custom plugin for the Scripps Legends Poll. The Scripps Legends Poll is a Top 25 College Football Poll that is voted on by former collegiate coaches like John Cooper and Bobby Bowden. The plugin I wrote helps their staff process and compile all of the votes and publish the results on their site each week.

September

The month of September included another mobile site. This time a mobile version of the Huntington Center web site was put together. There was some discussion about going forward with a full-blown mobile app (starting with something for the iPhone first) but we eventually decided on just the simple mobile site and I think that was the right decision in the end.

I also had a request to do some data collection and manipulation for a friend of mine at The Ohio State University. I probably can’t talk much about what I worked on but it wasn’t something I normally handle and it was nice to do something a bit different for a change.

There was also a brief WordPress plugin project during September. This plugin adds a “Cite this artice” link on every post and page. When a reader clicks on that link they are asked to choose a format (Harvard, MLA or APA) and then are presented with the proper citation for that particular URL.

October & November

In both October and November I was working very heavily for my on-site client and I didn’t take on many additional projects. At the on-site client, I was in the middle of a huge overhaul of their inventory system that tracks almost 10,000 SKUs and over 13 million individual pieces of product. It’s been exhausting.

The only new client I took on was a small jewelry merchant that needed a web-based calculator for their customers interested in getting a quote on custom jewelry. This was a WordPress plugin and came together quite nicely.

I filled in what little downtime I had by releasing a template for mobile app developers to promote their apps and it wasn’t very successful.

December

I finished out the year by redesigning the website for Fraser Clemens Martin & Miller LLC. They’re a local law firm that specializes in intellectual property and technology law. Once again, this was a WordPress project (a common theme in the second half of 2011 for me).

Some of my sports-related iPhone Apps received updates in December as well. I’m going to put a much more focused effort into learning the ins and outs of iPhone programming in 2012 so I can goose my revenue options a bit moving forward.

My “offical” business website was revamped this month for the first time in an embarrassingly long stretch. You can see it at iamjacksdesign.com. Fancy t-shirts and vinyl stickers with the logo will be available soon. Order today. And by order, I mean ask me for one the next time you see me.

There’s been a lot happening lately: I’m working on a new “side project” that I’m really excited about, I’ve been pumping out updates to my iPhone Apps, and my WordPress plugins have crossed some nice download milestones. Oh, and I got old. I figured I’d write a bit about everything that’s happened over the last month in one convenient post.

Old Man

The most devastating development in July was turning 30. See you in hell, twenties, because there’s no going back to the days of my youth now. A nice one-day trip to Cleveland, the city of my sports love, was in order to celebrate my birthday. We went to the zoo and an Indians game where my age was announced to all 27,000 fans in attendance on the scoreboard.

iPhone Apps: Updates, Lites and Sales

A change in seasons means new schedules for dozens of teams that my sports apps support. Luckily, I’ve worked out a nice little system for maintaining the schedule databases and I’m able to push out updates for each state’s app in only a few minutes. All of my current apps were updated and published on the App Store without a hitch and downloads have picked up as a result.

My US Golf Courses app has seen a significant sales decline. I’m afraid a few bad reviews basically sunk that ship. Even with the stagnant revenue I’m still on pace to do ok considering the amount of time I put into it. I also released a new version of the app, cleverly called US Golf Courses Lite, that is ad supported. I can safely say that this has been a money making disaster. I would provide you with a graph of the income the ads have generated but it would essentially be a straight line at $0.00 so I’ll save myself the trouble.

Overall, I’m on pace to do ok financially with these apps over the course of the rest of the year if things keep at their current pace. I’m not sure I’d dive right into another app idea if one sprung into my head but I’ll leave the door open to the possibility just slightly ajar.

WordPress Plugins

Two of my plugins for WordPress hit some nice download milestones worth mentioning only because my original estimates had between 1 and 5 people giving a damn about them.

WP Word Count has managed to almost reach the 2,500 download mark at the time of this post. That’s especially satisfying to me since the plugin it’s modeled after, TD Word Count, still hasn’t had 2,000 download in its lifetime.

Export Comment Authors passed the 1,000 download figure just recently. That’s not setting the world on fire but it’s nice to know that a lot of people have gotten some use out of a relatively simple little plugin.

Side Project

I don’t have much to say about my new side project yet but I’m sure I’ll write about it here in the future. It involves aggregation, of course, because I’m obsessed with that. There’s also a strong emphasis on making everything 100% automated but I’m not sure I’ll have the time to make that a reality yet. There’s a lot of spiders and crawlers involved and so far, on my local web server, everything is running very smoothly so I’m optimistic I’ll have more to say and show soon.

We went to the Toledo Zoo on Friday to take some photos. It was my first chance to take the 60mm f/2.8 Macro lens to our local zoo since I bought it back in March. I ended up taking over one hundred photos and, as usual, came up with about twenty that I thought were worth keeping. Here are four highlights:

The macro lens is built best for bugs and flowers so that’s mostly what I focused on. Of the twenty photos I ended up finding tolerable, most of them were of that yellow jacket (and a few of his friends).

It was approximately 150 degrees outside on this particular day so everyone was packed into the buildings to escape the heat. Crowded aquariums and reptile buildings are tough places to take good photos so we ended up leaving without a lot of animal shots this time.

I’ve read a few good books lately and instead of five separate posts for each book I’ve enjoyed I thought I would combine them all into one post.

Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor

Anthony Everitt, the author, is well-known for his historical biographies and this one doesn’t disappoint. I liked this biography of Augustus quite a bit except for the push to argue his death was an assisted suicide. There’s not a lot of evidence to support this idea so those parts of the book discussing it are basically glorified historical fiction. It was only one trouble spot for me.

A biography about Augustus probably isn’t the type of book people with just a passing interest in the history of the Roman empire would seek out. Those sorts of people want to read books about Julius Caesar or Marc Antony and Cleopatra but their lives overlapped and intertwined so much with Augustus that there is probably enough in this biography to catch those readers’ interests as well.

In The Plex

Steven Levy is one of the better technology writers around today and it shows in this book. There’s not a lot of computer science mumbo jumbo in here to scare off non-technical readers and yet Levy does a nice job of explaining some of the behind-the-scenes workings of Google’s search engine and other products.

As someone who has given up using Google search for quite awhile now I found a look into the politics and leadership at Google to be very interesting and, to be honest, helped justify my decision to cut back on my reliance on their search products.

Bossypants

Tina Fey’s book made for some pretty light reading compared to my usual appetite for books that are snooty and elitist. I managed to read this in several hours on my iPhone while I was waiting between a wedding and the following reception. The chapters are short and it’s only 288 pages overall.

It’s very funny in parts, slightly amusing in others and there’s a lot of mild humor in between. There’s biographical information about Fey throughout but a some of it is hidden behind jokes or obfuscated for a laugh so you’re never entirely sure what really happened.

Hyperion

I’m a pretty nerdy dude but I haven’t read science fiction of any sort since I was in high school or, as I like to refer to it now, “the good old days.” The only reason I picked Hyperion up was based on a thread on io9 where a bunch of dweebs were rambling on about how it was the best science fiction book in recent memory.

Well, I don’t know if it’s the best sci-fi book of the last 25 years, but the dweebs were dead on that it’s an amazing story. I was totally suckered into this thing. I literally couldn’t put it down which is about as cliche as I’m ever going to get probably.

There are four books in this series, and I knew in advance that Hyperion ends with something of a cliff hanger which required reading the second novel at the very least. So my next review shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

The Fall of Hyperion

The second novel in the Hyperion series was a tad longer than the first and, to be honest, drags quite a bit near the end but I still managed to rip through the entire book one Sunday afternoon.

I don’t want to talk too much about the specifics of the plot of either of the Hyperion books I read but I’ll say that they involve heavy doses of the following: time travel, religion, space travel and robots. It’s like a future version of Lost, a show I still hold silent vigil over its ending to this day, so of course I was into Hyperion. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for finding it to be a bit much, just like Lost, but anyone with a passing interest in good fiction might want to check this series out.