I pondered using “personal turmoils” as a post’s title. After all, how many personal turmoils can a soon-to-be-33 year old bachelor can have? But I do have them and the title certainly describes my life lately.
Unfortunately I can’t go into details because I can’t imply other people on this blog. So that’s pretty much all I can say. It just needs to get out there so I can continue writing here without feeling as if I’m cheating by not writing that something has been bothering me lately.
One week to go for my next Prodigy show! This time one of my best friends is coming with me from Israel, which would be amazing. She’s the best choice for this as she’s been listening to The Prodigy for a month now and recently started learning Czech phrases for the single day we’ll be there.
Oh, and I got tickets for another show – Paris in April. Who’s coming? :)
I have some Google Wave invitations. Comment on this post if you want one. I will use the email you posted your comment with as the invitation address.
Dindy was released a month ago and now it’s time to review statistics, look back at my feeble “marketing” efforts and figure out how to continue. So far 17 people downloaded Dindy. Out of these 17:
3 people used the option to uninstall Dindy for a full refund (they’re allowed to do so during the 24 hour period that follows the purchase.) They all returned it a few minutes following the purchase, so I guess either it was unclear to them what Dindy does from the description or they simply looked at it and uninstalled.
One person uninstalled Dindy after paying (so he didn’t get refunded.)
One person’s payment was declined by the credit card company so the order was cancelled.
I refunded one purchase to someone that gave Dindy its only review. He gave Dindy 5 stars, which is very nice of him, and immediately caused a “surge” in sales on the following day, when about 5 people bought it.
I concluded from the surge in sales that followed the review that I need to get Dindy reviewed more, so I sent the following email to some of the buyers a week following their purchase:
Hi,
My name is Amit and I’m the developer of Dindy for Android, an application you recently purchased for your Android-based phone.
As Dindy is relatively new it desperately needs ratings and comments in the App Market. If you have been using Dindy, I would appreciate it if you take a few minutes of your time to rate Dindy and/or write a comment about it in the App Market.
Thanks in advance,
Amit
Notice that I didn’t ask for positive reviews… just reviews. After all, I believe in my product.
Unfortunately, non of the receivers of this message reviewed Dindy. Additionally, my requests from several Android-related sites for a review have not been answered, so I decided to try something else: I developed another (small) application called Sleepless, which basically blinks the phone’s led to let you know the CPU is running and that it’s wasting battery. My intention was to give it for free and promote Dindy through it, but then it hit me – because Sleepless can be misunderstood (for example by thinking that it will always blink) it might have a negative effect on what potential buyers think about me or my apps.
I consider this my first lesson in marketing software: Once you start selling software, you have to make sure all your software products are top quality, both free and paid ones.
So right now I’m considering two options:
Offer a free, crippled “lite” version of Dindy. It’s basically a good idea but as a user I dislike “lite” versions of software so I’m not inclined to offer them to others.
Make something out of Sleepless, like maybe publish it in forums to get recognition.
Or I can just wait it out and see how Dindy does without my help. Maybe it’ll get enough “mouth to ear” publicity, now that there are so many Android phones out there.
On an Android based phone it happens sometimes that you unintentionally add a word to the dictionary (also called the “user dictionary”) that you didn’t mean to add. On the HTC Hero (or Eris, depends on where you bought it) there isn’t apparently a way to edit this dictionary – only delete it.
I’ll repeat the advice I found here, presumably based on an HTC support request:
Thank you for your questions about how to delete an entry in the dictionary. We are more than happy to help you with this situation. In order to clear out a misspelled word you accidentally saved you must clear out the entire dictionary. To clear the dictionary you press Menu then go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications and find the “Touch Input” program. Tap on the Clear data button.
Shameless plug: If you’re an Android user, check out my app, Dindy.
My next Prodigy show will be in less than a month. The warm-up act will be Enter Shikari so I decided this time I’ll know the warm-up act’s music as well, which would make the show even more fun.
Enter Shikari are very good. My favorite song from their latest album, Common Dreads, is Zzzonked, which is embedded here. The song is very good in general, but gets really good around the 2-minute mark:
Happy day today – the release of Dindy 1.0.0, my first mobile application ever, for the Android platform. I won’t repeat the specifics of what it does here because there’s a page for Dindy on this very site where you can read about it.
Dindy costs UK£ 0.75 (don’t ask why it’s in British Pounds. Really… don’t ask) but if I know you and you have an Android-based phone you can get it completely free of charge.
A lot of people ask me why I chose the Android platform. The initial reason was that it was the easiest platform to develop for. Google makes it really easy to install the SDK (on Windows, Linux or Mac) and test the applications to the fullest prior to moving them to the phone. Even debugging on the phone itself is a snap.
Publishing an application on the Android App Market is also a no brainer (except maybe for having to be an authorized merchant) and the initial fee is only USD 25, unlike the draconian rules of Apple with iPhone development.
I’m at least hoping to get my money back for the HTC Hero I bought to test Dindy on, but as always my biggest ambition for software that I develop is that as many people as possible will find it useful.
Today I’m celebrating the 5th anniversary of my road to fitness. I’ve made many changes in my workout routine over the years. This last year, during my 3 months trip, I worked only on my aerobics and so the latest change I made to my gym workouts when I came back 6 months ago was to stop working on muscles (mostly weights) entirely and only run on the treadmill for one hour three times a week.
This change, which cut my net workout time from 6 hours a week to 3 hours a week, proved very positive. I lost 10 kg, which I can only guess is mostly muscle, and I get lots of compliments that I actually look better than I did when I bulked up. Since my initial goal of going to the gym was looking better, I embraced this new routine and I plan to keep on doing it until my body adjusts and starts gaining weight again.
Most of the time I enjoy running. I usually do nearly 12 km in one hour and I try to push myself harder but sometimes my knees start hurting so I pace myself.
As for nutrition, my response to the weight loss is different than most – when I lose weight I become more watchful of what I eat and try to keep it healthier, as if to not to ruin the new achievement. I hope I’ll be able to keep it up, as I do with the workouts.
(If you haven’t read part I you might like it too. Go ahead. I’m waiting.)
The book was a good start but I was looking for something more original. While my friend is a programmer, and a good one at that, she’s actually a mathematician at heart. So I started looking for a fitting gift to appeal to that part of her.
At first I thought I’ll be able to find a replica of the Curta calculator for a reasonable price. The Curta calculator has an interesting story that dates back to the concentration camps in WWII. You can see how amazing it is in this video:
Unfortunately, the Curta calculator is only available as a collector’s item and can be found on eBay starting at about 600$ (if you’re lucky.)
In the spirit of used stuff (like the book I got in part I. Told you to read it) I decided to try and look for an antique abacus. In the process I learned quite a lot about the history and evolution of abacuses, which is really interesting. The most “advanced” one, for example, is Lee Kai-Chen’s abacus, which allows you to do complicated operations like finding the square root of a number and more. Unfortunately, those are extremely rare and I couldn’t find any. What I did find was this amazing video on children using the abacus:
That last part about “mental calculation” really surprised me.
While looking for a nice-looking abacus on eBay I stumbled upon the perfect gift – a Klein bottle. A Klein bottle is a mathematical shape with interesting properties – it only has one side and zero volume (Here’s a Wikipedia link, in case you’re into this sort of stuff.) And the gift is perfect not just because it’s great for a math-oriented person like my friend. It’s perfect because of the experience I had getting it. Little did I know, when I purchased a medium sized Klein bottle from kleinbottle.com, that I will be getting the following response from the seller, Cliff Stoll:
Dear Amit,
Thank you very much for your Klein Bottle order! I’ve just snuggled the Medium Classical Klein Bottle into a 23x15x15 cm box with plenty of bubblewrap & padding, as well as the usual Acme literature, invoice, and agitprop.
While packing the Klein bottle, I took a few photos. You can see these pictures at
http://www.kleinbottle.com/gallery2/main.php/v/455SomePhotosForAmit
About half an hour ago, I bicycled to the Post Office and sent the box via Express Mail International. The box should arrive in a few days depending on the post and Israeli customs.
The postal tracking number is ECXXXXXXXXXUS. Within a day or two, this tracking number should show up on the US Postal website, http://www.usps.com/shipping/trackandconfirm.htm
So from across the Atlantic and around our three spatial dimensions, here’s my warm cheers to you … I’m sure you’ll like the Klein bottle!
– Cliff
And here are the pictures I got from Cliff:
The pictures were a stunning personal touch. I was so happy about getting this kind of customer service and wrote him back a thank you note with a link to the pictures from my latest trip.
It soon became obvious from our correspondence that Stoll is not your regular bottle maker so I looked him up. It turns out the bottle making was a secondary venture of a well known astronomer and mathematician. Here’s his Wikipedia entry, but even a Google search for Cliff Stoll brings up interesting results, including this TED talk:
To come full circle with this post it turns out Stoll is a fan of the Curta calculator. Here’s a video of him telling the story of the calculator and how its inception saved its creator:
About a month ago I realized a good friend’s birthday was coming up and I wanted to get her a meaningful gift. What I mean by “meaningful” is something that is more personal in nature and preferably utterly useless.
The gift has two parts – a book and a glass bottle. The book is obviously the useful part but it also carries a nice story with it: I was walking down the streets of Tel-Aviv when I spotted a copy of Jerry Seinfeld’s book, SeinLanguage, in a used book store. My friend is a big Seinfeld fan so I thought this would be a nice candidate for a gift – I bought it even though I didn’t know whether I would end up giving the book to her.
When I got home I opened the book, which was in very good condition. It turned out to be a first edition from September 1993. It’s not worth anything, I’m sure, but if you buy a used book it’s nice when it happens to be a first edition. Inside its pages I found a bookmark. Here are pictures of both the book and the bookmark:
As you may have noticed, the bookmark is little yellow and seems old. It doesn’t have a web address on it, either. I was curious whether the “neighborhood bookstore” still existed and quickly found the Brookline Booksmith website. The website’s design and the personal nature of its content made me think the owner (Paul) might find the whereabouts of the book and bookmark amusing so I sent him a message detailing the story along with the pictures.
Soon enough I got this reply from Paul:
Ha!
Awesome. Thanks Amit. I was going to include the picture of the bookmark in this week’s newsletter, but then I looked at all the discounts that we haven’t been able to afford to offer our customers for many years now. Ahhh, the days when we could let our bestsellers go for 30% off….thank you so much for sharing this. I’ll pass it around among the staff, and it will go in next week’s newsletter.
Thanks,
Paul
And indeed a week later a mention of this appeared on the weekly newsletter.
