PolarLava::Blog

About a month ago NOAA's National Weather Service made some changes to their XML data feed.  In return, this broke my weather retrieval system.  The primary change they made was to no longer include empty elements in the feed.  Thus my error check routine in the weather class —which worked by counting elements in the feed, stopped working because there was no longer a set number of elements in the feed.  I fixed this —at least temporarily, by disabling this element counting in the error checking.  I'll need to do some further analysis to see what sort of error checking I might be able to do in the future, but for now this should suffice as the feed is extremely reliable.

Additionally there are a couple of minor bug fixes and some clean up.  I need to regenerate new API documentation yet, but other than the source view it should be functionally correct as it currently is.

So if this is something that might of interest to you or if you've been using it previously, jump to the PolarLava Weather project page where you can download it.

So just shy of 8 months ago was when I was Joining the iPhone Cult.  And today I officially exit the cult.  I've long known this day likely would come, as my phone —both iPhone and previous RAZR's, were company supplied.  Thus as part of a cost cutting effort they have revoked phones from a number of us.

To say I don't care and I won't miss it would certainly be a lie.  I used it extensively for email, calendaring, notes, texting and todo's as part of My Organizational System (GTD).  This was a primary tool for getting things done while not in the office.  A tool I found to be 10 times more valuable than my laptop.  But my voice usage (which was used to determine my usage) shows that I used my phone very little for business.  This is true, because the overwhelming use of my phone was the data plan, not voice.  But irregardless, I get it, as the bottom-line is that this was about the cost.  Not just of my phone, but numerous others.  It adds up, and it was determined to be too great of an expense for what they felt they were getting in return.  That's entirely fair, after all it's the companies money, right?

So it will likely be an adjustment going from an iPhone to no phone at all.  After 4 years of having some kind of a phone, I've come to depend on it.  It was invaluable for reminding me of meetings and responding to email after hours.  All of that will now have to be done from my laptop.  Something that frankly will happen less than when I had the phone because it has nowhere near the convenience.  On the plus side, I know I will never get called on holidays and such as I did last 4th of July.  :)

The time may come when I do get another phone at my own expense, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.  Because I would certainly want a smart phone with a data plan at this point.  And being I'm raising a family of 5 (including my son's child support) on a single income, it's certainly not an easy expense to justify.  But all in all, it could be worse.  Losing my phone is an inconvenience, losing my job would be a far worse scenario.  Sadly, one that's probably not completely out of the realm from my perspective.