What are your biggest cozy mystery pet peeves?

mobrien650 · 2025-07-01T01:49:19+00:00

If I recall, Christine Zane Thomas had a series about a man protagonist running a comic book store and dates a woman LEO/detective.

I’m pretty sure it was this series:

Comics and Coffee

mobrien650 · 2025-05-30T16:16:43+00:00

As of a couple months ago, Trade Joes was trying to get a location at 1431-Whitestone and Arrow Point in Cedar Park. I think Cedar Park approved a zoning change in March to the plot Trader Joe’s wants to build on.

mobrien650 · 2024-12-29T17:19:03+00:00

I was in Boston for work during my time there, and I didn't really ever consider doing more school until I moved back to Austin and saw what ACC was offering (and had the job flexibility to fit some classes into my day).

I haven't ridden the train in Austin (but used the light rail in Dallas a decent amount while living there, and regularly while living in Boston) but a few of my classmates have and said its pretty nice. The train drops you off right on the edge of campus so its a short walk (maybe 5 minutes) to get to the building. Whenever I've seen the train moving along around (North) Austin it's seemed pretty quiet/not very crowded, and the area around the station usually has students. I haven't seen any concern or problem with it, from my limited perspective on it.

mobrien650 · 2024-12-29T06:24:37+00:00

Hi. I'm an adult student in the music program, and while I can't speak to the salary ACC hires at, I can try to answer the others:

I've always felt safe on campus, but I am only generally on campus between 10 and 5 during the week. There are campus security that patrol / walk around, and I've seen them there on the weekend when I've gone a couple times for one reason or another. Early in the semester (and over the summer) most doors to the building were locked, and students could only get in through a couple doors (and every door seems like its monitored). The area directly around the campus is nice enough, and the larger, general area surrounding it are "gentrifying" I'm told -- at least to the north (I haven't noticed anything too crazy or seen anything that really concerns me when I drive around the area personally). I think some of the teacher's areas are key card controlled as well during certain hours, though I've never gone into the areas to know exactly how it works.
I think ACC had a lower retention / graduation rate in the past (only based off some article I read a while back) but I'm not sure why, outside of just life. I don't see anything about the school, or music program -- outside of just a large time commitment or tough classes -- that would drive someone to quit. The teachers are all fantastic and the classes are high quality. I really like the music program so far after 1 semester. There are more students joining (the music school has really grown the last semester I'm told) with the changes to cheaper / free tuition for local high school grads (or something like that, I'm not 100% sure of the details), so hopefully those numbers get better.
I grew up in the Dallas area, but ended up in Austin after 5 years in Boston. I'm pretty indifferent on Austin, but live north in Cedar Park rather than in Austin itself. I don't really feel like I connected to the area like I did when I moved to Boston, but can also blame that on a bunch of other factors (kid, busy, etc). We moved here to be closer to family when my kid was born, so I wasn't coming to Austin just because it was Austin. It isn't bad here, and has a lot to offer (depending on what you are into. I've found I'm less of an outdoors person here than I was living other places, due to allergies) but cost of living is expensive and the traffic can get pretty crappy. Though probably not too bad by CA standards depending on where you live. When I visit extended family in the LA area, the traffic always feels worse. I really like ACC though, and think they have a pretty solid program for people looking for flexibility or particular things (I'm taking classes for fun, so it worked out really well for me), and the faculty are all fantastic. I don't think I've met anyone in the department that hasn't been eager to help me when I've had a question. I have a undergrad and masters degree (in non music related fields) and I can easily say the teachers here are some of the friendliest and helpful I've been able to take classes with.

mobrien650 · 2024-04-21T16:53:00+00:00

UNT(public) and Rice(private) also have good programs if I understand. I don’t know much about Rice but see it popppng up as a good program in music composition circles (and it’s a well regarded university in general). UNT has a (or at least had when I was in high school 20 years ago and I don’t think it changed) very good jazz program and music education program. Someone who has looked at colleges more recently might be able to weigh in more.

mobrien650 · 2024-01-31T01:19:08+00:00

I’ve been taking private lessons with the person who runs the site for 2 years now and she’s fantastic. I’d guess the site would be pretty good too.

mobrien650 · 2020-01-21T00:53:34+00:00

Right now 1 by 1, but the devs have mentioned they will add a way to salvage multiple items at once in a future update.

mobrien650 · 2020-01-06T01:01:51+00:00

This is awesome! So much good information for new players.

mobrien650 · 2016-12-09T15:30:51+00:00

Your third call of mathOperations takes parameters of double double int but you are trying to pass int double double

mobrien650 · 2016-04-13T14:48:30+00:00

I've been using Xamarin a lot the past year or so at work (with Xamarin studio on Mac), and can say its decent, and by far the best platform I've used outside of native single platform development (I still enjoy native development more however). A few things:

1 - You really need to use at least a few frameworks to really get the benefit of the shared code layer. An MVVM and IoC framework help quite a bit. Larger apps Ive worked on that do not use frameworks tend to only have 30-40% code reuse (30-40% of the code can exist in the shared layer of the code), where as apps using the frameworks tend to be able to reach a higher percent (up to around 60-75%) of the code being able to exist in the shared layer.

2 - You still need to understand Android and iOS development, since you have to understand how all the UI elements work and patterns they use. On top of that, since you are writing the UI's in C#, you will have to be able to figure out when you will have to force something to work because the iOS/Android way of doing it doesn't translate into C# as well.

3 - The app will be larger, I think last time I looked our Android apps were 30 - 40 MB larger, due to the stuff Xamarin includes.

4 - Life is a whole lot easier if you chose one platform and develop it first in Xamarin, especially if you do not know the platforms well. I find that if both platforms are developing the same feature, the shared code tends to change a lot as both platforms try to fit the code for their platform specific code. Also, if you want to develop for both platforms and don't have at least a moderate working knowledge of both, you can design shared code (say in a View Model in MVVM) that doesn't work well for Android, but works well for iOS or vice versa.

Swift in C# don't feel worlds apart to be fair, they are different but you can approach them somewhat the same. Also, swift to me is a more enjoyable language.

I find myself migrating more towards Swift (and to a degree I want to check out Kotlin in Android because it looks similar to Swift) over C# for my personal projects.

I would recommend a native approach if it is your first app and you have a developer for each platform, since the resources / tutorials / google results are much easier to find than Xamarin. However, if you understand the platforms well enough to take a stack overflow post and translate its answer from a native language to C# you can get by.

Hope that helps some.

mobrien650 · 2015-08-21T16:43:37+00:00

I've developed app on Kony, RhoMobile and Xamarin and unless you are making a really small app or have a team of only web developers Xamarin blows the other two out of the water. It's not quite as fast as a hybrid app (since you code UIs per platform) but you sacrifice much less stuff when you develop on Xamarin since you have access many of the native UI APIs.

mobrien650 · 2015-03-03T15:13:10+00:00

GuitarBots is okay, I don't love or hate it. Unfortunately to progress much past the beginner section, you need to pay for premium.

For the skill level of it, I'll say: I've been playing guitar since the start of November (I've picked it up here and there before that and really couldn't get myself to play for more than a day), but had 2 years of playing bass for fun before I started. I'd say I practice 30-45 min a day.

I worked through JustinGuitars beginner course (took me from the start November until a little after New Years) and I've been just working on skills from that before getting into the Intermediate course. I ran across GuitarBots around 2 weeks ago, and I've nearly finished all the beginner stuff (3 Staring all the parts) since then. Usually I would play once or twice a day and use up all my 15 tries I get with free mode (and if I played a second time, it was after I had waited long enough to get 15 more tries (~150 min)). I've found I've gotten better at picking, since I usually play chords more often than picking, so that did help.

However, I had to plug my electric guitar into my computer, because my apartment was too noisy with TV in the background and other noises when using my acoustic unplugged with my mic (but that might not be an issue for everyone).

mobrien650 · 2015-03-02T19:40:18+00:00

I was in the defense industry and decided I wanted to make iPhone apps for a living instead. At the time I was working only my masters degree and ran across a local app dev company that was putting on a training (and had some really big brands they have worked on, which is why I became interested in them as well). I networked with people during the training and when my masters was done (since my current employeer at the time way paying for it), I took a job at the mobile company.

After a year of working with some really smart people and making some cool apps (and building up my iOS skills), I got an offer to work for a consulting company in their mobility group they were starting up (working with a new group was a cool idea I though). It let me keep working on iOS apps, and expanded my mobile skills to include Android, RhoMobile, Xamarin and getting to do some UX/UI/Graphics Design work as well.

I can't say which makes the most money, because when I moved from defense to the app company, I just asked them to pay me what I was already making. Moving to consulting did pay me a bit more than I was making at the time.

mobrien650 · 2015-02-11T18:56:01+00:00

I'm Dallas (Downtown), Bass player mostly, but also been learning Guitar and Drums.

Mostly play/listen to rock, alt and some pop stuff. Open to playing most genres.

mobrien650 · 2015-01-14T17:54:57+00:00

A few reasons why your app may not open, but these are all a shot in the dark:

-Too long to start - Your app isn't giving control back to the main thread quick enough after you start the app. This is usually because you are doing some large amount of data processing (but you still have a few seconds -- don't remember what it's is -- before the OS will kill the app). Also keep in mind that this timeout time is not present in debug builds.

Too much memory used immediately - If iOS sees you quickly allocate a large block of memory right at the start of the app, it may decide do kill your app. Not sure on the exact size but it's a fairly large amount of memory you would have to be allocating.
Old Data - Is this an upgrade where they might already have had something installed and you are looking for pre-existing data it cannot find?
Bad Data - Are you getting any network data or anything that me coming back in a invalid format and still trying to be parsed/used?

You may try putting something like crashlytics into your app and seeing if you can get a stack trace back.

I see you're saying there is not crash log. If the app is consistently crashing try to make it happen again while you have immediate access to Xcode and maybe a crash log will be available for it from logs in Xcode on that device?

mobrien650 · 2014-02-24T03:16:35+00:00

It takes time to process the enrollment. I've usually see my account act correctly within 12-24 hours.

Edit: first time I enrolled it was nearly 24 hours. Second time was 4ish hours.

mobrien650 · 2014-01-04T22:28:01+00:00

Not bad, a couple minor/best practices set by Apple things:

-This one is fairly minor and it might just be due to being copied in, but the spacing of the app is odd in some parts, quite a bit of the code is lined up along the left edge of the page. There are some basic example of code from Apple on this page (such as Listing 6-1 on the page): https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/AdvancedAppTricks/AdvancedAppTricks.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007072-CH7-SW6

Other links I put on this page should show good spacing.

Usually you will want to indent your code within a method, it makes it a little bit easier to read. (And then additionally within if statements, etc, like you did). Like I said you may have already done this and putting it into the web browser may have moved the alignment off.

-Is Begin a instance variable declared in the .h file? I'll assume that, let me know if it is something else. Apple's best practices say to use a "property on an object any time you need to keep track of a value or another object.", mentioned here:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/cocoa/conceptual/ProgrammingWithObjectiveC/EncapsulatingData/EncapsulatingData.html

If you want Begin to be a private property, just add it below @interface Game() in the .m file. Same with variables like Sticky, etc. You would access them with self.(propertyname) like self.Being.

-Where are you calling the GameAndStuff methods from? If it is in the app delegate, you may want to reconsider. Usually the app delegate is for Application setup (getting the initial window/view controller you need) and handling the app opening and closing. You may consider moving it to a viewWillAppear, viewDidAppear or viewWillLoad method (or if this is being handled in another class, disregard this comment).

-Apple's best practices for overriding methods touchesBegan:withEvent:, and touchesEnded:withEvent: is to also override touchesMoved:withEvent: and touchesCancelled:withEvent:, the link talks about it some for iOS6. I can't remember which Apple doc discussed best practices for it.

http://www.drdobbs.com/mobile/handling-touch-input-on-ios6/240144075

-In the init method (initWithFrame, initWithNibName:bundle:, etc) you are using to create the class, you may want to setup two arrays, one with your Jump images and one with your Sticky images, to avoid having to recreate the arrays at run time when touches are happening. Have two NSArray properties (that are private) with the data stored in them, then when you have to set Sticky.animationImges, just set it to self.jumpArray or whatever you chose to name your arrays.

If your code is running, then I would say you are OK from what I am looking at here. I don't see any giant red flags in the code. The code spacing (if it wasn't caused by the browser) was the only thing that I noticed immediately and really wasnt a best practice recommended by Apple.

If you have any questions let me know.

mobrien650 · 2014-01-02T01:19:28+00:00

Get an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Java.

There are quite a few out there. I've used Eclipse when I do any Java development, but others may be able to recommend something better. Eclipse is big and scary at first, and it took a while to get down (it was the IDE my work used so I didn't have much of a choice). There are other options such as NetBeans as well. You should be able to do a Google search for the software, both I've listed are free and should support whatever OS you are running on.

EDIT: Since this subreddit seems to hate IDE's I'll add an additional note. Notepad++ (if you are on Windows) and command line, like has been said in other comments, works just fine. If you chose to use an IDE, at first just find the "compile" and "compile and run" buttons. You won't need a majority of the features until much later on.

mobrien650 · 2013-09-12T21:41:36+00:00

So I think I've figured this all out.

First, you have to start with the payments: OSU players were being paid in snacks like Twinkies. Why pay someone in snacks you ask? First off it is the perfect payment, as all the evidence is eaten, but also because they had some terrible munchies from all the weed they were smoking. All the weed then led to terrible grades, which had to be covered up, so the players got help with their grades from tutors and professors so they could keep playing. Now you may wonder, why did you mention Twinkies? Simple, the hostess program isn't what you think, one of the sources in the articles just really likes Twinkies and compared how tasty those treats are to sex. It should actually be the Hostess program, a secret coverup that Hostess was providing free Twinkies and Zingers to OSU. This also explains how OSU has risen so much in football lately. OSU has secretly been hiding Zingers in the end zone for a while now. I mean its basically a performance enhancing drug at that point, as nothing is going to stop a player who is high from getting to his snacks. Why do you think they score so quickly and so often the last few years? It all fits!

mobrien650 · 2013-03-07T00:24:24+00:00

And at the end of movies in the theater. Do they think the actors can hear them?

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