Lately I’ve been going to Gingerman Raceway for the weekly Test and Tune event and I’ve raced in an autocross event with an older BMW. Although track driving and autocross are completely different styles, they have one thing in common: go as fast as possible.

The problem with my older BMW was that it was slow and didn’t have the greatest handling (though for its time, it was very good). My times at the autocross were the slowest of the day, and probably of the entire event. Here is a shot of my car diving into the first corner of the course—this is bad.

That BMW stopped running and was promptly sold for $1100.

Now, I’m taking my other one to get some revenge. I’m not sure I’ll do any better, but as luck would have it, my company is sponsoring my entrance and the professionally-produced livery on my car. Behold:

As you can see my number remains the same, but my class has obviously changed. Here’s the rubric: HS stands for slow, DSP stands for fast.

I will be racing at Grand Valley State University on July 5th.

Going to a “Car-B-Que” today. In memorium of that, here is a picture of a car that is in my parking lot. It’s a VW with Polizei (‘Police’ in German) livery.

Two significances with this:

1. I don’t live in Germany.
2. It reminded me of this totally amazing cross-country trip by Team Polizei completed in 32 hours, 7 minutes.

Last summer I took it upon myself to create a few typefaces—two of which I partly finished. To say that creating usable, durable, venerable type is hard, is probably too much of an understatement to even mutter. Also, to find a type that fits your style is probably even harder. This is likely the reason why many of the best designers only find a small selection of fonts that they feel comfortable working with.

Here are a few of the typefaces I’m fond of.

DIN Schriften 1451 Engschrift

This is the slightly older, less used variant of the euro standard typeface. I use the updated version of DIN on a daily basis for Flipswap (and I don’t plan to change that), but this version has a tighter, less sterile character. It almost feels friendlier and less matter-of-fact to me than the newer DIN. Both have a distinctly techo look which fits well with the majority of the work I do. I like it. So, buy it.

House Industries Studio Sable

Now, I’ve never actually used this for anything, but I love it. The rhythm is perfect and somehow it makes every group of letters look like they were meant to be together. It has that feel of “fast and out-of-control” balanced with precision and understatedness. Of course this particular font uses some OpenType tricks to select glyphs based on context and various other things—but what’s important is that House Industries has done a fabulous job with it. I like it. So, buy it.

Miso

Free fonts are almost certain to be useless. Miso is one exception. It has the same cold feel as DIN above, but with a twist. I tend to like typefaces that seem purpose-built and this is intended for architectural drawings. But, of course, we don’t need to use it for that for it to be a good fit. It’s like sweet and sour, people. I’ve used this font in places where it didn’t seem like a good fit—with excellent results. My only gripe with the glyphs in this font is that the curves don’t seem to smoothly flow into the flats, creating a weird kink. Also, the lighter weights of this type don’t look to be drawn independent of the heavier weights, giving them an unnatural, gaunt characteristic (and awkward hot-spots in the ‘k’). I like it. So, buy it get it.

Ninety-nine percent of fonts are unusable junk. (Just thought I’d end on a high note.)

I’ve been anticipating iPhone Push app functionality for a while now—and it’s finally here. The interesting part about this concept, as opposed to having apps run in the background, is that it is a more distributed system.

Take, for instance, a simple background process that functions to check for new messages (eg. email, IM, etc.). A standard way of implementing this is to repeatedly poll a server every few seconds. When a new message is present, the user is notified. Depending on the checking interval, the appearance of “push” notfications can be faked.

This is the same type of system that the iPhone uses, except that there’s a single mechanism that handles this functionality for all apps needing it. So instead of having many seperate checks to various servers, there is a single check to an Apple server where various services hook into. However, this is not the interesting part.

Consider that, instead of a “background app” being an app that runs on your own phone, a “background app” is an app that runs on someone else’s phone, computer, or server. This effectively offloads the processing to wherever the change originates and uses Apple’s push conduit as a direct connection to your phone for notification. When thought about this way, the “workaround” for background processing is actually a huge advantage to developer’s wanting to create connectivity apps (which is a phone’s purpose in the first place).

In July of 2006, I created a small app to keep track of my website accounts, ftp credentials, and domain information. Not too long after that, I named it “Server Vault” and stuck it on my site. Two months later I received a notice from the law firm employed by this company to either change the name of my software/site or face repercussions. That’s the moment I knew I might get a little attention. In accordance with trademark law, I changed the name to Serverskine and created a proper website for it.

Not too long after that, I submitted it to MacUpdate, Version Tracker, and any other Mac-centric software site I could find. Also, as an experiment, I decided to add Google adsense to compensate for the time I spent developing and creating the software and website.

I’m not sure what I was expecting–I think it was my way of learning about AdSense with a tinge of cynicism. After all, the software was simple, but definitely not worth selling.

Handsome Income

So here we are, just over 14 months after releasing Serverskine for public consumption. In that short amount of time, Serverskine was noticed and written about in the French-based Mac magazine “Univers Mac”, included in a bevy of “must have” lists (1, 2, 3) submitted to StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg, and featured on the almighty TUAW.

I’ve made $47.78. That’s about $0.68 per hour. Not too bad, right?

What’s a TUAW mention worth?

It is obvious that the way I’ve chosen to monetize this project isn’t going to be ultra-lucrative. But, relatively speaking, mentions on certain sites will net me a few bucks per day. Let’s take a look at my visitor stats around the time Serverskine was mentioned on The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

In those 10 days, I recieved 5,211 visits. Although the sources are from various sites, the big explosion in traffic was due to this post. A significant portion of my total came from this.

That’s $12.76 from an early morning mention on TUAW. Just for comparison sake, we’ll look at one of the “Must Have” articles where Serverskine made an appearance. Freelance Switch posted 35 Absolutely Essential Mac Apps on September 6th, and it was picked up and posted on Digg shortly thereafter. This netted 2,345 visits and $2.67.

I could speculate for pages about why my relative dollar per visit ratio was so one sided, but I’ll leave that one up to you.

The Meaning of All This

The interesting part about this project was not how much I made of this app, nor was it that advertising is a bad way to support software development–it was that money can actually be made at all. It is almost still shocking that AdSense, the world wide revenue share, can function so easily and efficiently.

I’ve also learn that Serverskine is also serving a new purpose for me–it’s the test subject for my evil experiments in capitalism.