tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87809872009-10-14T13:58:54.818-07:00Blah blah blah. I'm the author of the (sort of) famous "Eric's Ultimate Solitaire." The sample version shipped on a lot of Macintosh computers. Come here to read about what I'm working on and what's goin' on with my family. Also. Things that are funny.Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.comBlogger89125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-76472303199988932702009-10-14T13:41:00.000-07:002009-10-14T13:58:48.274-07:00

I'm never super excited talking to job recruiters. I understand their jobs are hard. But any job where the person is paid based on commissions makes me suspicious of that person's actions. Sales people who work on commission don't want you to buy something and return it, but other than that they get rewarded for selling you things that you keep. It doesn't matter much beyond that. Like whether

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-75049243251557676722009-09-26T23:19:00.000-07:002009-09-26T23:59:23.994-07:00

I paid a company ~$600 to restore a crashed hard drive of mine. It had all our honeymoon pictures and more on it. I'm a lot better about doing backups now... Anyway I need to start gettin' some value out of this rescued drive so here's a story with some pictures from the trip. Kelly and I went to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico for our honeymoon. We have some great stories and pictures. But

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-53353567988384719582009-09-25T21:37:00.000-07:002009-09-25T21:54:56.128-07:00

Hey, my game developer friend, Oliver, just finished a really fun Flash game -- Vector Conflict: The Siege. For you old timers it's like Battlezone (1980), but an order of magnitude more fun and you don't have to drive a tank around. That's BattleZone to the left. I played Vector Conflict on "Medium" and it was fun, but very tense at times. The levels are really well designed. Once you master

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-26186956938613882922009-09-21T11:25:00.001-07:002009-09-22T16:04:44.962-07:00

I just checked Apple again to see if my iPhone solitaire game was approved. I check every 9 minutes. It's said "In Review" the last 1000 times I checked in the past 11 days. I've been dreading the email that would say "Sorry, Solitaire wasn't approved because we don't allow applications to include images of clouds." Or something nutty like that which would mean another round of fixes and

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-63530667542453757962009-09-16T21:06:00.000-07:002009-09-16T21:09:30.106-07:00

I'm working on some iPhone programming and had a question about something. Google didn't turn up anything great so I just searched for help in the Apple Developer Forums. I searched for opengl view tabbarcontroller and the forum page offered this helpful advice: Did you mean: openly view Tabasco

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-5871198466625921092009-09-14T19:04:00.001-07:002009-09-16T10:38:26.606-07:00

Yeast is weird, and cool. At least if you're baking with it. I made bagels from scratch yesterday and they come out really really good. I used our bread maker to do the mixing etc, but I boiled 'em and baked 'em. Anyway, here's the bread-machine bagel recipe. The bagels came out better looking than the picture. Kelly and the kids were napping when the bagels were done. I tried the most misshapen

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-23517694129817563082009-09-09T13:13:00.000-07:002009-09-09T13:21:41.327-07:00

I've been making pizzas with pre-made dough from Trader Joe's in the last couple months. A few came out amazing, but many came out just okay. It turns out our oven is crappy. It's this weird little European one that only goes up to 450 degrees and only has a burner on top. A combination to ensure our pizzas are never very crispy or cooked quickly. Anyway, I was googlin' up some Alton Brown* stuff

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-3932387778882112012009-09-08T22:21:00.001-07:002009-09-08T22:59:33.052-07:00

Seriously. Ad Hoc Distribution? I hate it. I've wasted so much time with it. Apple has such tight control over distribution to iPhones and iPod Touches that you can't just download and install an application on your device. More importantly my testers can't install my game without having things just so. There are all these hoops to jump through to set up provisioning files etc. It's not super

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-33190680125876935632009-09-01T13:50:00.000-07:002009-09-01T14:01:41.668-07:00

Gmail is down so I'm reading my email with the webmail browser for my site. It's not-so-good. Also, apparently GMail filters out the spam that normally gets delivered to me but now I'm stuck reading it. Today's spam highlight: Hey We have hijacked your baby but you must pay once to us $50 000. The details we will send later... We has attached photo of your fume "We has attached photo of your

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-42883813846173209042009-08-21T16:08:00.000-07:002009-08-21T16:30:53.381-07:00

My Palm OS Treo 680 is failing. The case is cracked, there's dust behind the screen and it has lost its mind. Sometimes it just doesn't respond or takes a minute before doing anything. Sometimes it doesn't want to talk to T-Mobile any more. Also. It's a little shaky on letting me send text messages. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Weird. I used this Treo a LOT though. Every day for years.

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-44107917475168543722009-08-20T10:28:00.000-07:002009-08-20T12:05:13.766-07:00

I got some email from someone at DeMatteo Monness a month ago. They're a "a boutique primary research firm and full service broker-dealer serving the institutional investment fund community." They were looking for someone with expertise in the things I know about (board games and porn?*). I spent 20 minutes with my initial contact there talking about my experience, what I know about the things

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-92142833844940716992009-08-04T15:00:00.000-07:002009-08-04T16:05:54.497-07:00

Our old camcorder stopped auto-focusing. And it doesn't have manual focus. It's kind of "Random Focus" now. Theoretically we could run around and change the distance to what we're recording to put things in focus (or yell to the kids "Run, fast, closer!"). But then it would react to that and refocus on something random ("No, stop, okay go way back! Go go!"). Kind of a Schrödinger's cat deal.

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-12457267502115598252009-07-16T14:06:00.000-07:002009-07-16T14:15:12.182-07:00

When I'm working I listen to music with the web site Pandora. You create a free account, pick some songs or artists that you like and it makes music channels based on those. It's a cool way to find bands that you've never heard of or forgotten about. I kept hearing that they were going to go out of business. Because it costs them money to play all these songs for free. They pay fees to the music

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-29058315537726021162009-07-12T19:20:00.000-07:002009-07-16T14:05:49.066-07:00

We bought a citrus juicer, like this one. I think exactly this one. It looks like the Alien from the movie Alien... Or maybe like ET. It gets bad reviews on Amazon, but we paid $1 for it from a neighbor. It's been awesome for juicing lots of lemons. And since lemons are falling off our tree like rain it's helping a lot. We're drinking a lot of lemonade and eating lemon sorbet* between all meal

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-22981491527105111802009-07-09T21:44:00.000-07:002009-07-09T22:25:15.528-07:00

Andy's done a ton more fantastic art for my iPhone Solitaire game. The game is starting to look really good. It's been cool working with Andy. He's in Hong Kong so we end up talking when it's morning there and dinner-time here in California. The coolest thing is I wake up in the morning and there's new art! Nice.I'm working on the Settings screen now. It's all custom-drawn in Open GL instead of

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-25182205204201330092009-07-04T15:37:00.000-07:002009-07-12T19:42:32.799-07:00

1) Kelly bought an inflatable (but kind of hard-core) pool for $30 used (it turns out it was $150 new + all the chemicals and more came with it). We set it up in the back yard. I thought it was an "8 foot" pool. But it's 13 feet. It's kind of huge considering our small back yard. Anyway, it's fun. I get to do all the cool stuff my dad did with our pool when I was growing up. Like use the cool

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-10975101547083709242009-06-24T21:34:00.001-07:002009-06-24T21:41:43.812-07:00

I'm a big board game geek I don't like boring American games like Sorry, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit or Candy Land... I like designer/Euro games that are really good. Like Ticket to Ride, Diamant and For Sale. Since I'm a board game geek I like to learn about board games. I like Scott Nicholson's Board Games with Scott . Check it out. Scott's really funny, plus you'll learn about some cool games.

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-78590323055399437842009-06-23T14:37:00.000-07:002009-06-23T15:26:52.809-07:00

Kelly's Kindle 2 Kelly's Kindle 2 (e-Book from Amazon) is broken. Well, the screen is broken. The upper-right corner looks all jumbled and there are some stray vertical and horizontal white lines too. I accused her like 7 times of dropping it or doing something bad. But she denied any wrong-doing. I googled around and the same thing has happened to other Kindle owners. I wonder if the screen is

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-10028659250828908032009-06-22T15:45:00.000-07:002009-06-22T16:02:53.281-07:00

I've tried a lot of iPhone games. Here are my two favorites. The Creeps! There are lots of Tower Defense games for the iPhone. This is my favorite. Cartoony monsters try to wake up the sleeping kid. You have to stop them. There's no scrolling or zooming, everything is on-screen. There are multiple modes and lots of levels for each that offer a good variety of game play. The best game design

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-41148996786978029702009-06-19T08:50:00.000-07:002009-06-19T10:08:02.108-07:00

The casual game I was working on at PlayFirst, DinerTown Tycoon, finally shipped! I finished fixing bugs early and moved onto the web version of the game. Unfortunately I was done with the web game super early (normally that's good), but then it was canceled. I'm bummed they didn't cancel it before I did the work. It's sad to see your work thrown out. Then I helped out on the SDK and with other

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-59206269518650146252009-02-23T21:12:00.001-08:002009-03-29T23:18:04.707-07:00

So far it's been a pretty stinky year, 2009. I won't go into the details onacounta who knows who reads this blog. Maybe I should password protect it? Sell subscriptions? Then it wouldn't be weird to cover what's what. Then again, maybe I don't need to. Most anyone who reads this (Hi Dad and Mom!) already know everything crappy that's happened this year. I've been making progress on solitaire for

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-51292703678158670482008-09-29T08:33:00.000-07:002008-09-29T08:42:12.659-07:00

I finally gave in and ordered an iPod Touch. I had lunch with my friend, Bob, and he graciously offered to use his Apple employee discount. I had been holding out for a while because I like to buy used things instead of new for a bunch of reasons. But the deals on used iPod Touches (That sounds a little creepy) were not-so-good. So soon I'll be the owner of a brand new one with a warranty and

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-31560810557039209572008-06-27T11:04:00.000-07:002008-06-27T11:14:11.476-07:00

My phone says it's time to post to my blog. And if I don't then I'll snooze the reminder until it reminds me again next week. And so on. So instead I'm going to write some stuff. Right now! I've been working a lot but just hit a big milestone for my game at PlayFirst so that's great. I can relax a little. Plus right now I'm working on a really fun part of the game. Jonah's birthday is coming up.

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-14593055292054471242008-06-08T14:59:00.000-07:002008-06-11T11:11:56.954-07:00

I just heard the news from my friends, Mary and Joe, that my friend, Erick Wujcik, died. I'm really sad. Erick was so nice and smart and just so wonderful to talk to. He was always supportive. I wouldn't be at my current job, which I like a lot, if he hadn't given the company his seal of approval. I ran my (grown-up) nephews through Erick's first published role-playing game, Sector 57, about a

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8780987.post-4623666392550543002008-05-09T16:30:00.001-07:002008-05-09T16:30:55.573-07:00

This is take 2 of trying to post to my blog from my phone.Hey! It was "Crazy Hair" day today at Jonah's preschool. He was alittle worried and wanted to know what his friends hair would looklike. I explained the girls would mostly have lots of crazy pigtailsand the boys would have hair that was sticking out all over.So Kelly made his hair stick straight up. It was awesome.At school everyone loved

Erichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04533359279284523597noreply@blogger.com0