A few weeks ago, I received my first four-star review. At first, it seemed like a bit of a slap in the face, but now I feel considerably different about it.

Receiving a four-star review means that the reviewer really gave it some thought. I like to think that he or she dug in and tried all the features, envisioned using it during actual gameplay (or actually did use it during gameplay), and then decided that it wasn’t the be-all and end-all application for tracking initiative that it could be. But it was close. This is the kind of review I can appreciate.

We’re constantly reviewing things: meals, customer service, books, music, clothes, road maintenance, and so on. In our minds, we approach this task with a great deal of nuance, breaking down the object or experience into any number of facets, assigning them importance, working out the interplay of different elements, and arriving at an impression of some sort, which we dutifully file away for future reference. When we’re asked to distill all that detail into a single number between one and five, the vast majority of us either ignore the opportunity or turn the in-depth mental review into one of two extremes: One or five. We’re prepared to either laud or excoriate something in such a situation because the feelings that drive those responses are the ones that are most likely to provoke action.

With this in mind, then, it’s nice to see that somebody likes the app enough to give it an above-average score without giving it a 5-star review, which (to my mind) should be reserved for the finest of applications, the paragons of their kind. I wouldn’t mind being credited with writing an app that deserved five stars, but PFTools is not it.

Related: I had an opportunity last weekend to actually put my app to the test while running a game. I probably should have done so before publishing the first version, but it’s too late to worry about such details. In any case, I quickly identified several shortcomings, and have been able to fix up most of them—the low-hanging fruit, really. The next task is a big one, requiring some changes to the underlying database. It won’t be as easy, but the difference it makes to the operation of the app will be significant.

I’m definitely still squarely in the hobbyist camp, but I have had an conversation or two with people-with-money, for whom I might be able to do something useful.

In the meantime, here’s my baby. I have a handful of sales so far, most (but not all) of them to family. As with most creative endeavors, it’s not done yet—in fact, I’ve spent much of the day working on the next point release (1.1), which adds a couple of features and smooths out some rough edges.

Today, I took the biggest step of all: I submitted an application to Apple for review and, if all goes well, publishing on the iTunes App Store.

It’s a niche app (written specifically to streamline and simplify the job of running a pencil-and-paper roleplaying game), but I’m hopeful that it will find an appreciative and paying audience. Wish me luck!

I built this a few years ago from a paperclip, an LED, a resistor, and an Atmel ATTiny13V microcontroller. The battery’s still going strong, though that’s probably at least partially because I only drag it out for a couple of weeks each year.

I don’t have the results of the sleep study in front of me, so I’ll wing it just a bit here.

Over the course of the evening, I averaged 32 arousals (no, not like that–we’re talking about a sharp shift in brainwave activity) per hour. In one study I located, the ‘average’ person only encounters this frequency during stage 1 sleep, which is a brief (5-10 minutes in length) transitional period between wakefulness and normal sleep.

Further, my sleep profile indicates that I fairly quickly progressed into stage 3 sleep (the deepest and most restorative) but only stayed there for a brief time before the apnea started. During the first three hours of the study, I had zero REM sleep, and no returns to stage 3. The remainder of the night, spent with the CPAP machine keeping my airway open, showed some periods of REM sleep and some short returns to stage 3.

In short, if the sleep study is indicative of my normal sleep patterns, my sleep is rarely restful, and the introduction of a CPAP machine was beneficial. So, I was prescribed a CPAP machine and mask to use, probably for the remainder of my life. Many patients whose apnea is caused by excess weight can give up the machine following weight loss, but since I’m not overweight it’s unlikely that there’s anything I can do short of surgery to get restful sleep without it.

Now I wear this to bed:

I’m still getting used to this new reality. If my mouth drifts open during the night, the constant flow of air shortcuts right out of my mouth. I’ll be great fun at birthday parties, having basically been transformed into a candle-extinguishing monster. Fortunately, the machine has a built-in humidifier, which has kept my sinuses from being chapped into oblivion. It’s quiet, unless the seal opens up (if I roll over too far and put pressure on the side of my nose, for instance), in which case the hiss of escaping air is loud enough to wake me.

I do feel better today than I have for a little while, but I’m still waking up several times each night. I’m told that it’ll take a couple of weeks before I stop noticing the machine, and I’m bound and determined to see this through.

The way it works is that the subject gets all wired up, with leads on the legs, chest, back, neck, and all over the head. Then, the subject tries to sleep in a strange bed with a thick cable of wires bundled at the back of his neck. If, in the course of the night, the technicians positively identify three clear signs of apnea (non-breathing), they wake up the subject, fit him with a CPAP mask (which continuously blows air into the subject’s nose and mouth), and encourage him to go back to sleep.

Hah!

I finished getting wired up and lay down to sleep around 10:30 PM, and I estimate it took a good half-hour to get comfortable enough to drift off. The technicians woke me up two hours later, around 1:00 AM. In the space of two hours, I’d fallen asleep, the muscles controlling the soft tissue at the back of my mouth relaxed, allowing it to collapse across my airway, and I stopped breathing. At least three times.

I don’t have to explain how disconcerting this is. Fortunately, I have a followup visit with the pulmonologist this afternoon, and we’ll discuss treatment options. The most successful option has been the aforementioned CPAP device. Apnea suffers report that one can becomes accustomed to the device in a week or so, but I’ve read several accounts of people reacting very poorly to them, to the point that they’d rather risk continued apnea (and the accompanying risk of heart attack, depression, hypertension, and a whole slew of other unpleasantness) than wear a mask at night.

I have enough to be healthy for that this isn’t a great concern. I’ll do almost anything to stay healthy and rediscover what good sleep feels like.

Wish me luck. I’ll post more updates.

Eventually.

On what, you ask?

Let’s see…

• The Ticket to Ride 1910 Expansion, which adds several new routes to the original Ticket to Ride (one of our current favorite board games), along with a couple new ways to play the game, and new train card designs. We haven’t actually played the expansion yet, but we’re looking forward to it.
• Shadows Over Camelot, a great game that (usually) emphasizes teamwork and long-term strategies. Each player takes on the role of one of the knights of Camelot, and together they try to thwart the forces of darkness before the castle is overrun. There’s a neat game mechanic that means the players are essentially playing against the game, and every turn sees the situation at Camelot worsen. Complicating things is the possibility that one of the players is (secretly) a traitor. Backstabby fun!
• Finally, we also picked up Descent: Journeys in the Dark, Second Edition. What a game! It’s three-quarters tactical fantasy combat and one-quarter roleplaying game, and can be played in either of two ways. In the first, a game is made up of two short, linked combat encounters which is selected from a book of scenarios. In the other, a full game is made up of a long series of encounters (which combine to form a mostly-cohesive story), where success or failure in one can change the odds later on. This campaign mode allows the pre-generated characters to grow over time, developing new skills and making use of magic items and artifacts collected along the way.

Besides playing way too many games of both Shadows and Descent, we squeezed in some Last Night on Earth (during which Donnell and I witnessed our first defeat of the zombie horde–this game is tough!) and Zombie Fluxx which, while occasionally frustrating and chaotic, is always fun.

I look forward to inflicting some of these games on my friends and family. Consider yourselves warned.

If, while you’re looking at the main screen for a podcast, you touch the main image and swipe up, as though pushing the picture out of the way, you’ll be treated to a behind-the-scenes view of the app, which looks very much like an old reel-to-reel tape deck. You can make out the bottom portion of each tape reel, rotating as the podcast plays. It’s very cool.

But it gets better.

At the beginning of the podcast, the left reel rotates slowly and the right one goes faster. At the end of the podcast, the rotation speed is reversed: the left reel spins quickly, and the right one slowly. Do you get it? At the beginning, there’s more tape on the left reel, so for tape to feed off of it at a constant rate, it spins more slowly than the right reel because the circumference is greater. When the amount of tape on each reel is equal, the circumference is equal, and both reels spin equally fast. At the end, there’s more tape on the right reel, so it goes slower than the left reel.

Apple didn’t have to do this, but I’m glad they did. It shows that somebody there knows how these things work, and they care.

Last night, I was allowed to join Donnell on the first part of what the Houston Montessori Center (ominously) calls “The Journey”. It was a silent tour of a Montessori school campus, arranged as though the students had been interrupted in the middle of their work and whisked away. We saw the progression of environments, from infant and toddler through to high school, and I, at least, gained a better understanding of what a phenomenal educational system Maria Montessori put together.

It’s truly breathtaking.

Donnell is now attending the second half of The Journey, during which the trainees can speak and touch the materials and ask questions. It would have been awkward for me to join, so I’m back at the hotel room. I’ve been reading up on database techniques in iOS, learning how to drive iPhone and iPad table views from database tables, and getting ready to do real production programming on my first iOS app. It’s time to apply what I’ve learned.

Oh, I’m also exercising my eye muscles. Check it out:

I don’t know that it’s a marketable skill, but it’ll look great on vacation photos.

Good morning!

Donnell is redrawing diagrams from today’s geometry lesson.

I’ve been studying iOS programming topics. I contend that Core Data is the devil’s work.

We ate IKEA meatballs and mashed potatoes for dinner.

Take the Long Way Home (Supertramp, thankyouverymuch) was playing on the iPod when I started typing. Now it’s Innuendo (Queen, from the album of the same name).

Tully is asleep on the floor at our feet.

I’d rather be home, but this isn’t so bad.

It’s nothing like home, though the essentials are taken care of: Donnell is here, and I have hair gel and deodorant.

In the meantime, however, it’s going to do a bit of this:

And this:

I’m satisfied.

(I’m even more satisfied that these pictures were taken with the excellent 5MP camera built into my iPad. If you’d like to see the full-resolution versions, let me know and I’ll send ‘em your way.)

In any case, here’s their latest. The guys are geniuses.

Daily.

You really should just read Daring Fireball instead of this blog.