Daniel Kennett

A Short Story: UPS Blues

Posted in Cars, Models & Gadgets on 25. Jun, 2010 | 1 Comment

UPS Logo

“Ha! Suckers!” I thought, ambling into work at 9:30, pleased at being almost on time for work for once. I’d queued up at silly-o’clock once before, for the launch of the iPhone 3G two years ago. It hadn’t gone well — my store ran out of iPhones before I got to the front of the queue and I wasn’t that far back at all.

For the iPhone 4, I pre-ordered for delivery instead. I sat at work smugly tweeting about not having to queue. You can set your watch by the UPS van here — if your watch is only accurate to 15-minutes, at least — so I was confident I’d have my iPhone by 4pm.

Refresh refresh refresh. Online tracking assured me my parcel was out for delivery?. Refresh. Out for delivery.

Moonlighting in .NET Part 2: What, no MVC?

MVC The biggest day-to-day difference between Cococa and .NET is that, by default, you don’t use MVC. To any Cocoa developer, the thought of not using the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern to build an application should be absolutely horrific. In fact, try and build a simple Cocoa app in Xcode without using MVC – it’s really hard. I’ve honestly no idea why .NET/Visual Studio/etc defaults to this approach.

Moonlighting in .NET Part 1: Living in the Bubble

Bubble I’m a Cocoa developer first and foremost, but for the next few months I’ll be moonlighting as a C#.NET developer, writing version 5.0 of my Music Rescue application from scratch. I actually have version 4.0 in Visual Basic.NET, but, you know — Visual Basic is for chumps.

Writing in C#.NET is an… interesting experience for someone used to Objective-C. This series of posts will discuss .NET from the perspective of a Cocoa developer — what’s good, bad, and just different.

Playing the Game… And Losing

Daniel Jalkut wrote an excellent piece on his blog entitled Only A Game. He talks about how running an indie business is like playing a game — you have to make decisions that you know might make you lose. Unfortunately, that’s what happened to me last year — I made a gamble, and I lost.

Things are getting better. Slowly. Nine months ago, I wrote this post essentially about how I sucked at being a businessman. Since then, things got much much worse. This post is an account of what I’ve been through in these past few months. Everything I talk about was caused directly by the fall in income I suffered due to the my gamble failing.

Why crashing your car on purpose is a smart thing to do… Sometimes.

Stuck in the Snow Many people I know will tell me I’m being irresponsible for doing this myself, let alone telling others to do it. However, I saw one of those people nearly trash £55,000 worth of Porsche by simply letting go of the wheel and hitting the brakes when the back end broke loose, so what the hell do they know?

When you’re dealing with a car that’s losing control, you need to know how the car behaves in order to concentrate on getting it back in check. When you start losing control, you have seconds to react and fix it before you go past the point of no return. If you’re already compensating for your car’s tendency to pull right under heavy braking in the snow by the time it happens and putting in exactly the right amount of steering in to stabilise the car and allow stability control to do its job, you have a much better chance of coming out of it without a dented car or skull than someone who’s thinking “Shit, what’s what crunching sound?! Why is my car pulling to the left? Why has my car lost power?”

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The Performa of my Childhood

Posted in Cars, Models & Gadgets on 20. Jun, 2010 | No Comments

Sometimes you see something that you absolutely must have. The reason might be stupid, but the instant you see this thing you know you have to have it in your life. A few days ago I saw something on eBay that had just that effect on me. Thankfully, I won the auction for only £10 — making it the least expensive “must have” item ever.

Screw this, I’m outta here

Posted in Sweden on 20. Jun, 2010 | No Comments

When I was young, I had the great privilege of traveling around Europe a lot – my father was a freelance journalist and had a lot of work around the continent. That and the fact that my mother was born and raised in France and can speak French as fluently as I can English means that being around people who don’t speak my language is almost normal, much less daunting.

I’ve always wanted to spend a significant amount of time abroad, be it traveling for a year or actually living somewhere. Going from Uni straight into a full-time Indie developer means I’ve skipped that opportunity since I need to be stable enough to actually get some work done. The thought has been at the back of my mind for a long long time, cataloguing the places I’ve visited and whether I’d like to live there. France is too full of French people, and I’ve spent so much time there it’s practically a second home anyway. California, especially San Francisco, is beautiful. Australia is too hot. Sicily is too empty. Venice is too smelly. Germany is awesome. Etc etc etc.

Twitter as a Language Learning Tool

Posted in Sweden on 12. Jun, 2010 | No Comments

If you follow me on Twitter, it’s no surprise to you that I’m moving to Sweden in a few months (if not, um… surprise!). I can’t really go to live in another country without at least trying to learn the language, so my girlfriend and I are doing just that — we attend weekly Swedish lessons.

Now, I’ve already tried to learn a language — French. I learned it at school and my mother is French, and although when I was a kid I hated French and didn’t want to learn it (something I now regret greatly), I seem to know a lot of words. However, what I can’t do is properly form sentences. I’m a step above the AVEY VOU UN CUP OF TEA? level, but the French grammar more or less eludes me.

Graph-tastic!

Posted in Programming/Work on 21. May, 2010 | No Comments

I’ve haven’t been shy about sharing my personal financial difficulties on this blog. However, one thing I was worried about was that my financial troubles were being caused by fundamental cracks in the foundations of my company. The year’s accounts have just been completed, and I’m very relieved to find out that isn’t the case. Allow me to present a graph to demonstrate.

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