This may be obvious to most of you, but I am not Jamie Cunningham. Sadly, this is not a universally known fact. Let me back up a bit. The other day, some guy decided to fill out a loan application under the name “Jamie Cunningham”, giving out a fake phone number. How do I know this? Because the fake phone number he gave out happened to be my cell phone number.

Ever since, I’ve been getting calls for him from people who want to give him money. You hear that, Jamie Cunningham? People want to give you money, but can’t because you gave them the wrong number. Why would you even fill out a loan application if you didn’t want a loan? What, were they giving out free toasters?

So now I’m subjected to a bunch of calls and text messages all because this guy wanted a free toaster. I hope you enjoy your free toaster, Jamie Cunningham. Also, you owe me a dollar in cell phone text messaging charges.

Do you like playing Yahtzee? Then check out Spicy Dice, a new iPhone dice game from Enginuity Game. It also happens to use Mach Dice for the dice physics.

Spicy Dice are six-sided dice with one number colored red. But each of the six dice has a different number colored red. If a die comes up red, you can use it as a wild card or you can use the red number for bonus points. You can roll the dice up to 30 times and you can score in Yahtzee-like categories like “all the twos” or “sum of all the pips” or “a run from one through six”. There are also advanced things you can do like score a set but hold some of the dice for the next set.

The game is free (it lets you play once a day but you can upgrade for unlimited plays if you like it) so if you’ve got an iOS device, check it out!

I downloaded the new SDK a while ago and recently decided to recompile Castle Tiles, the action game that I made for the iPad. Much to my chagrin, the screen went completely black after the load screen! After some digging around, I found the solution. (Oh, interwebs, what would I do without you?)

It turns out that they added a new flag for nib files in the new SDK that specifies whether its visible at launch or not. Why add something that totally breaks your previously working code by default?! I have no idea. But to fix it, open up your main nib file (probably “MainWindow.xib”) in the Interface Builder, select the window item, and under the attributes, turn on “Visible at Launch”.

Hopefully that’ll save someone a couple hours of panicked searching through their code.

One of my friends was telling me about this theory that people are attracted to certain other people based on their scents. Something, something, pheromones, something… I don’t know. Anyways, I thought, “Hey, let’s take that one step further and set up a dating service based on smell!”

It’d sort of work like speed dating. Blindfold five guys in a line, blindfold five women in a line (maybe mix up the genders a bit, depending on sexual orientation), have them smell each other, and then rotate one of the lines. Repeat until everyone’s had a chance to smell each other and record their experiences.

Unconventional? Sure. But it’d be a heck of a story for the kids. “How’d you and mom meet?” “She smelled real good…” Who’s in?!

I do what I can to help prepare Baby Mach 2 for the harsh world out there. With any luck, he will avenge my inevitable death at the hands of the shadowy multinational corporation bent on world domination, which I am in the middle of investigating right now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMEm9jYdiOU

Hmm … I think I might need a better contingency plan.

The latest update to Mach Dice has just been approved on iTunes! Here’s what’s new:

• Fudge dice!
• rounded edges for d6!
• fast app switching for iOS4!

To use Fudge dice, simply type in “d3” (because each die has 3 possible values). For example, to roll 4 Fudge dice, type in “4d3”. You can also add Fudge dice to other rolls like, “2d10 + d3” to add a bit of unpredictability to your normal rolls.

The rounded edges for d6 was another big request. I like the flat edges because they look more professional, but lots of people wanted a bit of rounding so I put it in there.

And fast app switching means that if you switch between Mach Dice and another app, everything will stay the same when you switch back. That makes it handy to use Mach Dice to make quick rolls even if you use another app most of the time.

If you’ve already got Mach Dice, get the free update. If not, go buy it on iTunes now!

One of my friends recently started a tea company that has such an awesome name that I just had to mention it. I have no idea what their tea tastes like and I’d be a bit hesitant to give it as a gift to any woman I know, but dang if that isn’t just the coolest name for a company I’ve ever heard.

So hey, if you’re into tea or you’re a crazy bitch, check ’em out!

Currently, Mach Dice 2.01 (with Fudge Dice and rounded 6-sided dice) is still “Waiting For Review”. But I noticed that there was a new option in the pricing agreement. You can now apply a 50% educational discount to your apps for institutions that want to buy multiple copies of your app. I’m a fan of education and all that, so I said, “Sure!”

So if you’re a college math prof and you’re looking to teach a course on probability and all your students have iPhones and your department has a budget for classroom software and … Hmm, okay, I have a hard time imagining anyone actually using the educational discount. But, heck, if you’re interested, check out the entire Mach Werx line of apps!

So, Tracy’s best friend from high school has been visiting us over the weekend and she has a blog, like I do. But her blog posts are like really, really long and she says it hardly takes her any time to write the posts because she just types whatever she’s thinking; unlike my posts, which take me forever because I’m constantly editing what I write and I spend a lot of time worrying if anyone’s going to find it even remotely interesting…

But today was a pretty brutal day, work-wise and I’m feeling pretty beat now so I figured I’d give this stream of consciousness thing a shot.

…

Well, I don’t really want to talk about work.

…

So I was talking to — Ach, dammit, I can’t write about that…

…

Okay, for real, this time. I’m just going to write the first thing that comes into my head … My nose is itchy … what is that? … Oh geez, I just realized that it’s one of my nose hairs that’s gotten so long that it’s scratching the other side of my nostril. I’m getting old. Wow, I suck at this stream of consciousness stuff. Back to regular blogging on Friday.

The other day, I had this idea for a short story. As it happened, I found out about a screenwriting competition at work around the same time, so I wrote it up. It’s a very fast read. It’s sort of science fiction-y and it involves waking dreams and multiple timelines so if that’s your sort of thing, check it out and let me know what you think.