Every month, I am going to give away a book to a Facebook fan chosen at random. The first random drawing will be this Saturday evening (July 10th). You have until then to become a fan, and you may get a free book! In fact this particular month it’s even better than that, because I’ll give away two books if the fan count is more than 1,000 when I do the drawing (it’s 988 right now).

Of course, if you become a fan after that, you might get a free book the following month. If you do not become a fan at all, you will probably not get a free book. The rules are quite simple. All you have to do is go to the Septic’s Companion Fan Page on Facebook and click “like” or “become a fan” or whatever Facebook have decided the button is this week. Good luck!

I’ll try and keep this blog for things marginally more funny. Once I think of them…

I recently bought my first digital SLR camera, a Nikon D40. At the weekends I often climb up mountains, so it seems sensible that I use my nice new camera to take pictures of those mountains. As far as carrying a large camera up mountains goes, you have two options:

1. Leave it in your pack all the way up there and back again
2. Swear at it continually until you revert to option (1).

Enter the Cotton Carrier.

Simply put, The Cotton Carrier is a harness that straps over your chest and allows you to carry a large camera as though it was bolted to your chest. The unit has a sturdy plate which sits on your chest, and the camera attaches to that plate via a small mount that goes in the threaded tripod attachment on the camera. The camera is attached to the mount by turning it to face left and then sliding it into a groove – it cannot then be removed from the mount without turning it ninety degrees and sliding it upward, therefore making it unlikely (but not impossible) that you’ll disengage your camera from the mount by mistake. The device was created by Andy Cotton, a landscape photographer, and it’s described a lot better in Andy’s own introductory video on his web site.

I heard about this system from my boss, Doug – after explaining the whole concept to me he was then inspired to go out and buy one himself. It arrived on Thursday, and rather generously he lent it to me immediately so I could take it on my backpacking trip down the side of Lake Chelan that weekend. This I duly did, and here are my thoughts about the device. I ought to point out that Doug, being a man of great means, purchased the $170 complete system, but the parts that I am reviewing really just represent the $99 camera vest for regular cameras. The complete system has attachments for a secondary camera, bottle opener, lightning conductor, divining rod et cetera. Neither of these systems are cheap, so let’s hope it’s good!

Okay, it’s good. I was never an expert at suspense.

Putting on the harness was pretty simple and after a few experiments I found a height that works well for me on my chest. After you’ve done it a few times, taking the camera out of the carrier becomes almost instinctive. Once it’s out, it seems to magically end up exactly in the right place to take a picture – you can have the camera out of the carrier, take a photo and put it back in within a few seconds. It fits solidly into the mount so there’s never any doubt whether you’ve got it successfully in or not.

Historically I’ve always taken a point-and-shoot camera in my trouser pocket where it’s nice and accessible – carrying the SLR on the Cotton Carrier actually made it much simpler to take photos on the spur of the moment, especially given the extra power-on time that my compact camera seems to need. At one point, one of my backpacking companions leaned over and grabbed my SLR from my chest mount because he didn’t have the time to take his own compact camera from his pocket. It’s amazing the times when a handy pocket is actually not handy at all.

Alright, I think I’ve gushed about this enough now, so I’ll analyse a couple of details. First off, the way in which the camera is mounted to the stand. This is done via a small machined button – I’m please that it’s not heavy, but it does mean that the camera doesn’t sit level any more when you put it down on a table. The only real annoyance here is that it’s hard to take long exposure shots without actually using a tripod – I’m used to just sitting the camera on a rock, and it’s tricky to do that with the button on the bottom. The button comes off easily with the tool provided – it would be great if either the button was a little wider (so the camera could sit flat on it) or the tool could easily be attached to the harness itself (because, umm, I left it in the car). The slot to unscrew the button is pretty generic and the button could easily be removed with a coin or some other similar object, but I stopped short of this one given that the harness belonged to my boss and it might be a bit difficult to explain on Monday exactly what I had been trying to do with his brand new piece of camera equipment and a bent spork.

I was concerned that wearing the harness all day would make both it and me somewhat sweaty – somehow, this didn’t happen but I’m not exactly sure why. The carrier is made of some sort of mesh – Mr Cotton, I don’t know what this is or how it works, but please keep making it that way. Somehow, my rucksack straps ended up soaked, but the carrier did not.

On the subject of rucksacks, the carrier can easily be worn at the same time as a large pack. As you can see from the photos, I was carrying somewhere around 20kgs of stuff in a 70 litre pack and the carrier fitted fine underneath. The shoulder straps are wide enough that they cause almost no discomfort, although if I had to choose I’d have them wider rather than narrower, as that would mean the backpack sat entirely on them which I think would be even better. The carrier was sitting high enough on my chest that the chest strap sat just above the waist straps on my rucksack, so this worked ideally. I could easily have worn a climbing harness as well, and the carrier wouldn’t have got in the way.

Any minus points? Well, I jotted down a couple. However, I’m very much convinced that the positioning the Cotton Carrier uses is precisely the correct place to carry a camera, and some of my gripes are around this. Firstly, I was using a water-bladder inside my rucksack to drink from – the problem with this is that you’re drinking water from a spout directly above the back of your camera so you have to be a little careful not to cheerfully pour a torrent on top of the thing. The solution to this one is, I think, just to drink more carefully. Secondly, it would be inadvisable to keep the neck strap on the camera when using the carrier unless you were going to also put it around your neck as an emergency measure – there’s a reasonable chance it would slip down and you’d end up putting a knee through it when climbing steep terrain. Again, not sure of the solution – the carrier itself comes with a “jesus strap” that you can attach to the harness, so the right answer here is probably just to embrace that, and ditch the old neck strap.

Overall, this is a superb piece of gear – as you know, I don’t make a habit of writing equipment reviews on this blog but I was so impressed with this harness that I felt I ought to write something. I was approached by two people during the backpacking trip asking me what it was and where I’d got it, and my backpacking chum told me he was sorely tempted to buy one because right now his $1000 DSLR camera was largely worthless, gathering dust in his basement. I’m amazed that this device isn’t an open secret in the climbing community, but it isn’t – I’ll certainly be doing my best to remedy that, and I hope Mr Cotton continues innovating because he’s onto the right thing.

Now to persuade the wife…

As I mentioned in my last post, I am currently selling two apps on the Windows Mobile Marketplace. These are Carlos (an app intended to remind you where you put the car) and Proximity (a location-triggered alarm and notification system). My previous post detailed the sales I’m currently getting for those apps – I’ll post an update on those numbers at some point, but this post is about how I got those figures into a nice chart.

You can say many things about the Windows Mobile Marketplace, but if you’re an app vendor then one of them will probably not be a long treatise on how wonderful their sales reporting system is. Their primary reporting output is a mysterious “Fulfillment report” XML file that turns out to be SpreadsheetML, the ISO 29500 file format used by Excel. Oddly enough this crosses over into my day job, but enough of that. Here’s how to turn that file into something useful, using Excel.

Using the Template

Download my template reporting spreadsheet, mobileappsalestemplate.xlsm.

Open it in Excel. Enable macros.

Request and download a “fulfillment report” from the Windows Mobile Marketplace developer page:

Leave the report set to All Markets, All OS, All Platforms and choose “90 days” as the time period.

The report downloads as a ZIP file containing two XML files - save FulfillmentReport.xml and use File/Open to open it in the same copy of Excel that your reporting workbook is in and enable editing (if you open it in a new copy you’ll get a VBA error when you try to import the data).

Now you need to add your products. FulfillmentReport.xml has a “SKU detail” tab – copy and paste that data into the same tab of the template sheet. You have to repeat this step whenever your SKUs change (usually when you add a new product, or issue an update).

Now, save the reporting sheet somewhere. It’s going to keep a hold of more history than the Marketplace does.

Without closing the FulfillmentReport.xml workbook, go onto the “Consolidated Purchase History” tab of my template. There’s a button on the right hand side of the table - click this. It will import the fulfillment data from the FulfillmentReport.xml you currently have open, and put it onto the Purchase History tab. It will not import any history that’s already been stored in the template, so it’s fine to just keep requesting 90-day histories from the Marketplace and importing them over the old data. Unless I screwed up the VBA, of course. The VBA is dog-slow - it could take ten minutes for the first import. Yes, I could certainly speed it up. And no, I can’t be bothered. If you do, I’ll be pleased to use yours instead!

Once the import is finished, the yellow columns in this sheet should populate with the right product names – you have all your data now, you’re ready to report on it!

On the sheet imaginatively called “A Chart”, you’ll see that I have the data for the chart I used in my previous blog post. The data on the left is simply to aggregate sales by day. You’ll have to replace my product names in row 1 with yours before you see any data. I was using it to track two products – you can change the chart range if you want to track a different number. You can also create Pivot Tables based upon the data on the Consolidated Purchase History sheet, or add new charts, or what have you.

This is not intended to be a glitzy boxed solution. It’s something I’ve been using myself so there’s not really any error handling and there are all sorts of things hard-coded around the place. If you’re not very familiar with Excel, it’s going to be tricky to use. That said, if you make any improvements to the sheet I’d love to see them (feel free to link them in comments here) and I’ll also post an update if I make a newer version.

Back on my original topic, an interesting switch appears to be happening in my sales figures, so I’ll post updated sales figures for my apps in a month or so. If anyone comes up with a nifty new version of this spreadsheet, I’ll be delighted to do so using that!

Some of you may know that I’ve been developing a couple of applications for Windows Mobile, and selling them through Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Marketplace. A few weeks ago, Edward Kim wrote a very interesting blog post about his sales for his Android app, Car Locator – that information was very useful to me not least because one of my apps is pretty much the same as his, but also because it was the first time I’ve seen a public cashflow disclosure from someone else who had a proper day job too and was doing the mobile apps as a one-man side project. Before we get started, I ought to admit up front that my sales numbers are a darned sight smaller than Edward’s. But hey, who wants to read about other people being successful?

My Applications

Right now, I have two applications on Marketplace.

The first app I wrote was Carlos. This is a pretty simple app intended to help you keep track of where you parked your car, using either your GPS or some sort of text-based tag you write yourself (in case you parked underground or can’t be bothered waiting for a GPS fix). This app is somewhat behind Edward Kim’s Android app – his can do a good few things that mine can’t (his has a little map, the graphics are nicer, you can take photos and things) but mine can do a couple of things that his can’t (you can ask it to automatically remember your location when your Bluetooth hands-free disconnects or you unplug the power; it makes bona fide jackal howling noises and it keeps a tally of all the total cars it’s ever parked anywhere). One could argue that his features are more useful than mine. Well, hey. Everyone keeps telling me the modern world of mobile apps isn’t a feature race.

I’d say Carlos took around 80 hours of coding, and maybe another 50 hours of speccing/testing/writing Marketplace content/arguing with my friends about it. This was one of my first times coding C#, my first time writing anything significant for Windows Mobile and my first time submitting an app to the Marketplace. I was originally selling it for $0.99 but when I discovered that Edward Kim doubled the price of Car Locator without noticing a drop in sales, I doubled mine to $1.99 – and I didn’t notice a drop in sales either. Mine’s still half the price of his but, well, I refer you to my comment about features.

My second app is Proximity. This is a fairly generic app intended to “do something near a given location”. You give it a destination (or several), a list of things to do and it runs in the background. For any given trip, it records data each time you perform it and uses that data to make steadily more and more accurate estimates of the time. I originally envisaged it to be for waking people up before they slept past their train stations but subsequently myself and my users have found all sorts of things to do with it. Some people use it to remind them to buy milk just as they’re walking past the newsagent; one guy has it email his wife five minutes after he left the office and another uses it to text all his kid’s friends when he’s arriving to pick them up from sports practice. I used it last weekend to text the wife each time I was ten minutes away from the bottom of a particular ski run, so we could coordinate meeting up. Anyway, I digress. This wasn’t intended to be an advertisement.

Proximity is a much more complicated app, especially the trip-learning heuristics part. I think this one took around 80 hours of coding with maybe 25 hours of ancilliary work – I was a great deal more efficient the second time through development, so this time represents quite a bit more dev work. I also spent $120 on minor portions that I farmed out via Rentacoder.com, and $160 on some icons. I priced this app at $3.99. This was a number I picked largely off the top of my head.

Both of these apps are available in both touch-screen (“Smartphone”) and non-touch-screen (“Pocket PC”) variants. I’ve also made them work on the great majority of Windows Mobile screen resolutions (please don’t start me on that one). My intent was always to make some money out of these – I’m too old to go about the place programming for fun. So let’s see if I did.

The Money

Reporting using the Windows Mobile Marketplace is not very easy. If anyone’s interested, I’ll write another post about how I got these numbers. Here’s how both of my apps have sold, across all platforms (both touch-screen and non-touch screen) and markets.

To save you doing the math here – Microsoft take a 30% cut of the purchase price, so I’m left with 70%. This means that for Carlos I’ve made a total of around $280 since the end of January, and for Proximity I’ve made about $350 since mid-March. It’s hovering somewhere around the $10/day mark for each app now – around $500/month in total, although it’s obviously somewhat early to start giving out per-month figures. You can see easily from the chart that Edward was quite right – doubling the price of the app makes no obvious difference to sales. Edward is making $13,000 a month – for my equivalent app, I’m making more like $250. Edward is winning.

Some Half-Baked Analysis

Is this the sort of money I expected? If I’m honest with myself, it might be a little on the high side. Of course, while I was writing the apps, I lay awake at night thinking I’d make a million, but realistically I think this beats my expectations. Would I have made more on Android or iPhone? This is an interesting question. I ought to admit here that my day job is at Microsoft, but that’s not the main reason I opted for Windows Mobile. There are many apps on iPhone that do exactly what both my apps do, so I would have a lot more competition. You can only develop on a Mac, which I don’t have, and you have to write Objective C, a language nobody in their right mind is familiar with. And then Apple can pull your apps if they don’t like the cut of your jib. Android is a little more tempting, but I’d have to learn Java and the ratio of apps to handsets out there is really quite extraordinarily high. And, hey, I have a Windows Mobile phone anyway. My wife regards these money-making ploys as complete nonsense anyway, so I can just envisage the conversation that goes “you’re buying a what?! You already HAVE a phone!”. The largest problem with developing on Windows Mobile 6 has been the announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series, and the fact that Windows Mobile 6 apps won’t run on it. As a shareholder I have to say I’m pleased with this radical diversion, but as a developer it’s something I’ll have to think about.

If people are interested in this sort of thing, I’ll try to give further updates as time goes on. Edward Kim’s first few weeks of sales were pretty quiet too… who knows, maybe he and I will be buying a boat together this summer. If nothing else, we’ll at least be pretty darned sure where we left it.

Some of these were still looking for my site.

the septic’s guide
septic dictionary
septic mans dictionary
syptic companion

Some of them were looking for the right sort of thing, although perhaps they didn’t find it on my site.

what does the term love mean to british

british euphemisms has your wooden leg fallen off

Some people were just angry. About stuff.

why are americans such tosspots
are audio cable companies taking the piss

Some people needed help with something.

how to demo letter g?

derogatory chat up lines

am i most likely to date a guy thats starts with the letter c

c-h-r-i-s-t-m-a-s meaning in each letter

what do americans call faggotts

I want to have a pear everyday is that ok

what belt would faggot attic ed wear

Some people were looking for… well, they were looking for something. Heaven knows what it was. I’d like to warn readers that this is where it’s going to start getting more colourful. If Faggot Attic Ed was too much for you, close this window now.

“fag snow fairy”

the bitterness of s.w.o.t. is in the analysis,while the sweetness of wedding cake is in the icing sugar.discuss

why do prostitutes eat ice cream

strung up by the tits tube

colloquialism for nothing dick

animal words for willies and vaginas beaver

dog buggers the grandmother

russian or romany lady required as live in 4-sex shagg buy please apply if you can help

how to get your wife to make sense and shag you

how to strangle your manky skanky daughters

how to transport a naked girl into your house in two seconds 

if was going to shove veggies up my pussy i use a zucchini

And finally, onto some personal favourites.

replica of chocolate cocks

arab womne looking like binbags

quickest way to deflate boner at the beach

where can you fine scandinavian grope suit 

what do you call a system that really slows work flow in a company 

Ah yes. That would be the internet. Back to work, everyone.

• Myself
• A friend of mine who works in marketing
• A friend of mine who works in publishing
• My wife (this doesn’t really count, as she said “you didn’t put my suggestion on there” and then refused to look at it)
• A selection of my colleagues at my real job

There were a few popular ones. In the end, these people whittled it down to small batch (some of which got modified in the whittling process). The ones left were:

• Proximity
• Commuter’s Companion
• BuzzStop
• Are We There Yet?
• Whereabouts

These are all pretty good names, but there can be only one winner. And the winner is…

… drum roll…

“Proximity”.

This wasn’t actually suggested by anyone on its own, but it was a part of a number of suggestions from a gentleman named Eamon Holmes, on Facebook. I’m pronouncing Eamon the winner, and will send through his books. Many thanks to all who took part – I expected about three responses so was somewhat surprised by what happened. A lot of the funny ones gave us a lot of entertainment but may possibly not count as very professional. And I am, of course, exceptionally professional at all times.

I’ll be posting here again when the app is available – will probably be in a month or so.

The app is pretty much finished, but it is currently uninspiringly called ”LocAlarm”. I need a way better name, and I am willing to give three signed copies of The Septic’s Companion to the person who thinks of one. How’s about THAT?

Why can’t I think of one myself? Well, it’s kind of complicated. I want it to be immediately apparent that it will stop you sleeping past your train/bus stop (because that’s mostly what it’s for) but I also don’t want to rule out all those other uses. The situation is complicated by the fact that it will be sold through the Windows Mobile Marketplace site, where people will only see the icon, app name and my company name, like so:

Clicking on the app shows a long description. This means that my program name and icon have to alert the casual browser to the fact that that this is to stop him sleeping past his train station, but also does other stuff. I was originally keen to have some sort of catchy Twitter-style name – was thinking about “Jitterbug” (as in “wake me up, before you go-go”) or “Dozer” but I think this is a no-go as you’d actually have to click on the app to see what it did. I then got thinking about some train-specific catchy ones (“WakeMeUp“, “BRT“) but wasn’t too happy that either of them was particularly great. The maximum length of app name is 58 characters, so I am now heading towards something horribly bland and Microsofty (“GPS Alarm“, “Location Alarm“) – I hate myself for doing this but, given the way in which the app is going to appear, I think it might be my only option.

Does anyone have any better ideas? If anyone can come up with some sort of name (and ideally an icon too) that somehow tells the reader all these things, I shall be delighted to send them three books. I will also immortalise them on the credits screen for the app, should they wish!

Q: How do you become a famous poet?
A: Sit in front of the fire until your Robbie Burns.

Robert Burns is the national poet of Scotland. “Robbie” is not an alternate name for any part of the body, although in this context it quite clearly is intended to mean “penis”.  Let’s be honest, it’s a pretty crap joke. Heavens, my dad finds it funny.

I was thinking about this joke for some reason recently, and it occured to me that this joke itself could be just the tip of an iceberg of jokes. In the honour of Scotland’s favourite bard, let me introduce you to the Burnsies. A Burnsie is a joke of the format “how do you <become a famous role>?” where the answer is “<perform some action> until your <heretofore unknown private part euphemism> <verb related to action, which has the slightest of suggestive connotations>”.

I know what you’re thinking. Perhaps this would be better illustrated by example. Or maybe you’re thinking this is shaping up to be a complete waste of your time, but you just can’t let go of the three minutes you’ve already spent. Here come the examples.

Q: How do you become a famous musician?
A: Sit in the bath until your Bill Withers.

That one, my friends, I invented. When your children try and tell you it in fifteen years, you can turn around proudly and say “I know the guy who invented that! Well, I sort of know him. He’s this guy on the internet. The internet? You remember, it’s that thing we all did when all the computers were connected by wires. Of course, back then we didn’t know the dangers.”

You’re ready for another one, I can tell.

Q: How do you have an affair with a famous politician?
A: Sit in a plant pot until your Jennifer Flowers.

I had to modify the rules very slightly for that one, but I think it can still qualify as a Burnsie.

Well, that’s my contribution to modern society. If you think of any, feel free to post them as comments. Oh yes, I know, you have this look of scornful disdain on your face, as if you were so far above this. But really, you’re angry because you haven’t thought of one yet.

The marketing concept is great - not only will you end up in the online casino, they’ve also given you a great system for spending your money there.

Without more ado, let me introduce “scott”.

From: scott <garywtw@my-syte.com>
Sent: 25 November 2009 08:46
To: me
Subject: Re: ok sending it
yo mate, ok I`ll give you my trick but if you give it someone else I`ll fuckin kill you : ) you know in roulette you can bet on blacks or reds. If you bet $1 on black and it goes black you win $1 but if it goes red you loose your $1.
So I found a way you can win everytime:

bet $1 on black if it goes black you win $1

now again bet $1 on black, if it goes red bet $3 on black, if it goes red again bet $8 on black, if red again bet $20 on black, red again bet $52 on black (always multiple you previous lost bet around 2.5), if now is black you win $52 so you have $104 and you bet:

$1 + $3 + $8 + $20 + $52 = $84 So you just won $20 : )

now when you won you start with $1 on blacks again etc etc. its always bound to go black eventually
(it`s 50/50) so that way you eventually always win. But there`s a catch. If you start winning too much (like $1000 a day) casino will finally notice something and can ban you. I was banned once on royal casino. So don`t be too greedy and don`t win more then $200 a day and you can do it for years. I think bigger casinos know that trick so I play for real money on smaller ones, right now I play on elite vip casino: www.elite24tables.net for more then 3 months, I win $50-$200 a day and my account still works. You`ll find roulette there when you log in go to “specialty” section – “american roulette”. And don`t you dare talling about it anyone else, if too many people knows about it casinos will finally found a way to block that trick. If you have any questions just drop me a line here or on skype.

c ya
—– Original Message —–
From: “rhs100932044″ <clr@chrisrae.com>
To: <garywtw@my-syte.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 1:14 PM
Subject: Please send me the system

> Hi scott.
>
> Please tell me when you will send me your roulette trick?
> You promised you`ll send it few weeks ago : (
>
> Thanks in advance.
>