United Airlines: Sexism still in 2011
Last Sunday and this Friday I flew United Airlines and for the UA to save time and money they showed a movie telling people about the security features of their Airplane. This is fine with me because I rarely pay attention to it beside looking where my exit rows are.
That said the end of the movie did really put me off and I was thinking that could be be happening in 2011. So what’s up with that movie.
In the beginning a stewardess talks about some features and then a steward takes over and explains the rest. Still fine until the closing shot. There the steward is thanking the audience and the the camera is pulling out while two beautiful and smiling but silent women a sliding in from the side behind the steward. So they just decorated the man like in a good old James Bond movie except that it is now 2011 and we shouldn’t keep on distributing such stereotypes, shouldn’t we.
If Huge Hefner is pulling that stand off then I am fine with it, what else would we expect from him and even James Bond could do it even though the last movie in the franchise does not follow that stereotype anymore (AFAIKR). But from a major US company which for sure has some equality employment opportunity rules this is just nasty. If they want to invoke some feelings about the good old days then use something else or at least show the women on the same level and let them talk as well. The decoration aspect of the shot is what I despise and what I really would hope is a thing of the past.
– Andy
Snow, Cold and Far away from Home
This week I am in the North East in Queensbury to give a class about Swing and Design Patterns. As much as I enjoy giving classes as much as I hate to be in the cold snowy weather far away from home.
Back when I lived in Switzerland it wasn’t that bad because I knew how to live through the cold season. But this is a rural area which I hardly know anything about it I am at. Zagat to Go for example only had my hotel listed in a radius of 20 miles. Today I am tired all day because I just slept a few hours on the plane to Boston. In addition I skipped lunch because there was nothing around here that would be inviting.
So for tonight I will eat room service and hope that tomorrow I learn about some places where I could go eat beside the usual chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Red Lobster.
I didn’t mind to be in Boston during the winter of 07 where there was a bunch of great restaurants in walking distance and I never needed a car. That said on Friday evening I am heading back into the warm (relatively speaking) SoCal.
Cheers – Andy
Hooray: Stadiyum iOS App Released Today
In less than 10 days the iPhone app I developed the last 4 weeks was released to iTunes today. You can check it out on iTunes. The app was slated to go live before the end of the month but now it is already available.
As hard and exhausting the project was this fast approval is a great satisfaction.
Cheers – Andy
That’s smoking fast
Today I started to work with the CQ from Day (Adobe) and started upload some content. Then I saw this in the Activity Monitor:
I achieved this by finally started to develop on my Solid State Drive (SSD) which I did not do so far because I had stability issues in the past.
In the past I only saw the system so maxed out when an application was going berserk but this time the disk is churning along:
Finally it seems that I can take advantage from the SSD and that may also means that I will install one in my Mac Pro desktop machine.
Cheers – Andy
Time to Relax but How Do I Do That?
After finishing such a high-power project like the iOS app like the last one I have a hard time to settle down. But maybe it is a good idea not to relax too much and stay current with iOS technology.
I still have another app that I would love to finish but it turned out that there is more work necessary than planned. The app does not work well with a few things and the most important one is that it does not work when people want to share their data on multiple iOS devices. The solution would be to sync that data with a central place like a web server, a Mac desktop application or device to device synchronization. Each of these solution has its advantages and disadvantages.
That said I need to figure out if the remaining work is worth the effort or if I should scrap it and do something else. It would be definitively interesting to create a Mac application but that would not be usable for people without a Mac. I am not really inclined to create a web server even though doing something with Sling would be nice or to do device to device synchronization would be a challenge just to get it working.
As you can see I am already back in a heightened attention level (maybe I am a professional ADD guy) ready to tackle the next challenge.
For this weekend though I am doing not much and go away one day to visit SeaWorld (at least that is planned).
Cheers – Andy
First iOS App Submitted
Finally after 4 long weeks with long hours the iPhone App I was coding is submitted for reviewing on the App Store.
At the very end we not only had to fix last minute issues which are always very dangerous but I also ran into an issue where I could not build and archive my app and then symbolicate a crash log afterwards. This was very bad considering the fact that when users would send in Crash Logs we would have no way to figure out what went wrong. Eventually I had a hunch that having XCode 3 and 4 installed could be the culprit. So I went ahead and installed XCode 3.2.5 onto a Mac that had not prior installation and after resolving all the issues like missing Certificates I was finally able to create an archive and symbolicate a crash log.
Now for the App it means we have to wait for Apple’s verdict but for me it means that I start on another project today but in contrast that is a project with normal hours and no hard deadline.
-Andy