For 1200 consecutive days, I woke up and decided not to buy a Playstation 3 that day. This was a rather unexpected and unfortunate pattern of behavior as both the Playstation and Playstation 2 had brought me many years, months, days, hours, and minutes of entertainment. But, who can say that the PS3 didn’t bring this on itself? The system came out at a ludicrously high price. After $300 in price cuts, the system is still more expensive than the Wii was at launch, and with every price cut Sony removed functionality from the system. There is still a dearth of RPGs and most multi-platform games run much better on the 360 and PC.

Anyway, things have changed. There’s still no must-have reason for me to buy a PS3, but there are a lot of kind-ofs. I kind of want to bash my brains against Demon’s Souls. I kind of want to see if Flower is brilliant or pretentious. I kind of want to get the superior version of Final Fantasy XIII. I kind of want to play Heavy Rain before I get the ending spoiled by YouTube comments. And I kind of want to play online from time to time without paying for a subscription. Eventually enough kind-ofs combine to make a should.

Now the irony is that after 1200 consecutive days of intentionally not buying a PS3, I am stuck unintentionally not buying the PS3. Inexplicably, the PS3 is sold out all over Madison. Best Buy, Target, Gamestop, Walmart, etc. Even Shopko! Online is no better. Newegg is sold out. Amazon says it will ship in 1-2 months. eBay sellers are asking $50+ or more above retail price. What is a guy to do? Well, I have placed an order at Amazon and am hoping that their 1-2 months is just an extremely conservative estimate. After 1200 consecutive days of not buying a PS3, I’m not sure how many days I can stay convinced that I should buy one before I decide to cancel the order. It’s a hard habit to break.

Unlike most of the people closely following Apple’s press conference last week, I wasn’t after details on their shiny new tablet. The announcement I was hoping for never came. It wasn’t about iPhone OS4.0 or a deal with Verizon either. The real prize would have been reforms to Apple’s current mobile development schemes.

Let me step back a moment and mention that I’m going to be working on developing free medical apps for the iPhone as part of a course I’m taking. Although the professor decided that we should do an iPhone project, he seemed to do so without considering the logistics of such a project. Without doing a little research, I too would have assumed that it would be easy to get started; after all, we all hear about the tens of thousands of apps available in Apple’s marketplace. I was surprised to learn that the barriers to entry when developing an application for iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad are much higher for the average programmer than those of the Android-based competitors.

Licensing: Apple will let you download their Software Development Kit (SDK) for free, but if you actually want to distribute your app, you will have to pay $99. On Android, this is free.

Development Hardware: Apple’s SDK will only run under OSX on an Intel-based Mac and virtual machines are not a viable option, so every developer must have access to a relatively new Mac. Android’s SDK is multiplatform and work on generic PC hardware.

Development Environment: The Apple SDK only works with one IDE, XCode. The Android SDK is compatible with multiple IDEs, including industry-standard IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans.

Programming Language: iDevice development must be done in Objective C, an extension of C that is only used on Apple platforms; unless you are already an Apple developer, you will need to spend some time learning the semantics. Android development uses standard Java, the programming language most-commonly taught to students these days.

Distribution: Apple has complete control over whether your app can be distributed since all apps are distributed by the Apple App Store and they must grant approval for your app to be put in the store. Android devices can install applications without requiring that those applications are in the official Marketplace.

Make no mistake, the proliferation of iPhone apps is the result of the large installed based, and not because Apple has made efforts to make development easier. If there were an equal number of owners of Android-based devices, I am confident that more developers would choose Android. I’m hoping that there will eventually be enough pressure that Apple will extend an olive branch to developers who want to create an app for the iPhone without requiring them to completely invest in Apple’s own computers, IDEs, and programming languages.

Despite what the weather outside might lead you to believe, once again Winter Is Not Coming this year. It’s been 4 years now, since George R.R. Martin promised us that the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire would be released ‘next year’.

What is really frustrating is the decision to take half the characters out of A Feast For Crows. Because of that, it has been over 9 years since the last published chapters from some of my favorite POV characters like Tyrion and Davos. I was 18 years old when Cold Hands led Bran north of the wall, and that cliffhanger is still unresolved. It’s also just shy of 2 years since GRRM posted the last progress update on his website. I try to limit these griping posts to one per calendar year, and I sincerely hope this is the last of them.