I've changed hohle.net to grey in support of my brother-in-law, Troy Gray. Troy is an inspirational, dynamic guy who has poured his heart and soul into his family and teaching the youth of Tempe, Arizona about Jesus.

Troy has been battling leukemia since the summer and at the moment it looks like his cancer has the upper hand. Kortney and I are aching for him and his wife and children.

We are praying continually for Troy, Kelly, and their two beautiful kids who need their dad. We appreciate any time you can spend praying for him as well.

The first computer I had growing up with an Apple //c with a color monitor, tri-color ribbon printer, and an external 5¼" floppy drive. I used the computer to play games, write papers, draw pictures, make banners and birthday cards (with The Print Shop). I even learned to write simple programs using the built in BASIC interpreter and the Apple II Basic Programming Manual.

While I always had an interest in computers, it really wasn't until high school that I thought I might pursue a career in programming. I fell away from Apple computers for several years, but when faced with the opportunity to get a new laptop in 2003, jumped at the opportunity to get a Titanium PowerBook. I was a heavy Linux user at the time and thought having a commercially supported UNIX would be interesting. What I didn't realize was OS X would become my operating system of choice.

Earlier that year I also picked up an iPod. This was when iPods still used FireWire cables, had hard drives (5GB!), and grayscale screens. It was brilliant. My previous CD+MP3 player could store about 10 hours of music on a CD, but this iPod could store all of my music.

Since then I've become an avid iPhone user and written software for Macs, iPhones, and iPads. We've had more iPods in our house than people and currently have four Macs for just the two of us. A trip to the mall meant a trip to the Apple store, whether or not we were in the market for new gadgets or not.

It was always exciting to see what Apple would announce next, and powering it all, a magic polish which made everything insanely great.

And behind it all, Steve Jobs. He brought Apple back from irrelevance into not only the biggest company, by market cap, but also one of the most engaging, opinionated, detail oriented, and customer focussed companies in America.

It's sad to think there will never be another Jobs keynote. We'll never hear "BOOM!", about "magical" new features, or "one more thing" again.

And at the same time, the sorrow of his death should be a catalyst to seize life and remember that "all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important".

In Jobs' now famous 2005 commencement address, he states, "[Death] is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." Sometimes we're not ready for that change, though. But that change is inevitable and we must accept it or be paralyzed by it.

This summer we were shocked by the sudden discovery of advanced lymphoma in my brother-in-law. In a matter of weeks, he went from leading teenagers at Young Life camp to a medically induced coma. He's now in the process of recovering, but events like this shouldn't be necessary to shake us into an awareness that we can all do so much more.

In the Apple community the verb switching has meant various things in the last decade. Seven years ago if you would have heard the term switching in the context of Apple, you'd have thought about getting rid of your PC and getting a Mac. Four years ago the same term signified Apple's transition from PowerPC processors in their computers, workstations, and servers to Intel processors more commonly found in Windows computers and low cost servers. But at the beginning of 2011, switching takes on a third meaning, at least in the US. And from a customer perspective it has less to do with the relationship with Apple and themselves, but instead introduces a new third party choice of network operator: Verizon.

I'll be up front, Kortney and I are planning to have Verizon iPhones on February 10th. We may not port our number over immediately due to a vacation in the middle of February, but we'll be ready to switch as soon as possible.

I've read almost deafening cries about why this is a dumb idea: the iPhone 5 is right around the corner, Verizon's network is slower, you can't use data while on a call, etc. Guess what: none of those things matter for some people. I'll address each of these claims in order.

Apple has released new phone hardware like clockwork every year since the first iPhone was released. Undoubtedly, Apple will release their fifth revision iPhone in June with a dual core processor, longer battery life, and world mode radios. Is that stopping people from buying iPhones on AT&T or other networks now? Of course not. Sometimes you just need a new phone. In my case, I'll be replacing my long in the tooth 3G and Kortney's Sony Ericsson feature phone. Based on the resale values of current used iPhone 4s, I imagine that we'll be able to "upgrade" to the iPhone 5 if we choose for a modest upgrade fee. But when it comes down to it, the iPhone 4 is available now (or at least soon), and the iPhone 5 and its feature list is only known to Apple and perhaps its suppliers.

Verizon's peak network speed is admittedly slower than AT&Ts with one major difference: Verizon provides reasonable service in the major metropolitan areas I frequent. I don't care if I can theoretically download at 1.5 Mbps on AT&T, I can actually download at >500 Kbps on Verizon. I recently did a speed test on my phone while in downtown Seattle. I averaged 536 Kbps. That's right around what Verizon is offering. I guess I won't notice any slowdown.

I'll concede the last point, I won't be able to use data while on a call. That isn't much different from my AT&T experience, however, where I often cannot make a call... or get on a data network. It will actually be an improvement over my current situation, as I'll be able to reliably talk on the phone or use the internet. I consider that an upgrade, despite the annoying limitation.

For over two years, we've dealt with atrocious service with AT&T in the Phoenix and Seattle Metro areas. AT&T has failed to provide reliable service, despite collecting thousands of dollars from me and each of the millions of other smartphone users on their network. Like the switch from PC to Mac, or PowerPC to Intel, the switch to Verizon looks to usher in a welcome improvement in my connected lifestyle.

Last weekend Kortney and I went up to Vancouver to see a few events at the 2010 Winter Olympics. We drove up Friday afternoon, slipped across the border with only a few cars in front of us and headed downtown for the evening. We checked into the Corkscrew Inn, a cute bed and breakfast in Kitsalano, about 20 minutes by bus to anything we were interested in seeing. After a small complication with our tickets, we roamed around the pedestrian areas that had been blocked off, and watched the opening ceremony while we dined at the Glass City Café. Later on we happened across Wayne Gretzky carrying the Olympic torch in the back of a pickup as he was transported to the cauldron.

Vancouver is dressed in Olympic garnish from head to toe. The signs and banners are all consistent, vibrant, and very well designed. All of the volunteers are uniformed in the same coats, hats, and occasionally snow pants. It was really impressive to see such a large city with such homogenous decoration.

Saturday morning we headed to the University of British Columbia to watch Sweden and Switzerland compete in women's hockey. Kortney and I rooted for the Swiss, but it was for nothing; Sweden shut them out 3-0. We headed back downtown and strolled through Chinatown, Gastown, and finally to Granville Island where we watched women's freestyle moguls while eating at Cat's Socialhouse. The Canadians were thrilled when they took the lead, and disappointed, but good spirited when we took the gold from them.

Finally, on Sunday we went up to Cypress Mountain to watch men's freestyle moguls. This was the highlight of the trip. We spent 4 hours, outdoors in the low 30ºs, but enjoyed the entire time (except the hour+ waiting in the concession line). The crowd erupted when the final skier, from France, got his score placing him in 6^th, and it was confirmed that Canada had earned its first gold on its home soil.

Afterwards, we got in the car and headed home. We took a rural back road to a smaller border crossing without any lines. We made it home around 10:30, exhausted but still with the glow of Olympic fever.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to buy books from the Twilight series for Seattle area charities, specifically those who were helping women and children. I was able to get 40 books — 10 complete Twilight Saga sets — to give away and found five great organizations to give the books to.

• New Beginnings Shelter received 3 sets of the Twilight Saga Collection.  They provide a home for women experiencing domestic violence abuse.  They also have a 24 hour crisis line, transitional housing, free weekly support groups, and legal advocacy. http://www.newbegin.org
• Roots Young Adult Shelter was excited they now had 2 complete sets of the Twilight Saga.  This shelter, located in Seattle, Washington, is the only shelter in the city that provides a safe place specifically for young persons between the age of 18 and 25.   Snacks, dinner, and a hot breakfast is also given out in addition to visits by healthcare providers. http://www.rootsinfo.org/
• Seattle Indian Center provides day programs for Seattle area teenagers. It offers a job placement program for adults among many other services in Seattle's diverse International District. Seattle Indian Center received two sets of the Twilight Saga for their library.
• Seattle's Union Gospel Mission has been assisting the homeless for over 77 years in the downtown Seattle area.  One set of the Twilight Saga Collection books went to the Women and Children=92s shelter.  While here, the women receive transitional housing, spiritual development, education and career training, and, if necessary, drug and alcohol recovery. http://www.ugm.org/
• Broadview Emergency Shelter provides confidential, transitional and emergency housing for women and children in the Seattle metro area. While at the site women have access to counseling, crisis intervention programs, addiction recovery services and goal setting meetings. Broadview received two sets of the Twilight Saga Collection. http://www.solid-ground.org/PROGRAMS/HOUSING/BROADVIEW/Pages/default.aspx

Each of the centers were really excited to get the books and I'm hopeful that they'll be put to good use.

I had written a long post about getting a few apps on the iTunes App Store, and I might post more about it later, but in the mean time, I'm happy to write that I have two new apps available for download:

• New Moon Countdown - Team Edward Edition
• New Moon Countdown - Team Jacob editions

More about the apps can be found at the support page.

To market New Moon Countdown, I've decided to give a book from the Twilight saga to a women and children's center, school, or library in the Seattle metro area for every 100 downloads of the app through iTunes before July 31^th. These books have brought a lot of joy to young women and I hope that this will get books into the hands of people who may not have been able to read them otherwise.

With a full four days off, it seems like a good time for a "what am I thankful for" post.

Kortney

Kortney has been massively supportive in the past several months. I don't tell her enough how much I appreciate her and everything she means to me.

The End of Grad School

When I started taking classes part-time in January 2006, graduation seemed really far away. Thankfully (only in this instance), time flies by faster as you get older! I'm a fan of learning, but I'll be taking a break from classes for a while.

Stability

Kortney and I scrutinize over our budget and she is rigorous about finding where every penny goes. Despite that we often feel like we're not moving in some directions (financially) as quickly as we'd like. In reality though, we're both blessed with stable jobs in a rough economy.

Free Time

This week I turned in a book review for iPhone SDK Application Development. That process was really fun to be part of. Next week, I'll get the last of my paperwork signed for ASU. After that, I feel like I have December off (with the exception of work, I suppose).

Family

The Grays have welcomed done such an awesome job of making me feel like part of their family, which makes big family get-togethers all the more fun. I've gotten to talk to both sides of my family a lot more recently as well (but I need to do a better job at that).

Travel

This has been a pretty incredible year: My dad and Joan came out at the beginning of the year, and my Grandparents a few months later. Kortney and I went to San Diego at the end of May. I got to stand up in Ben's wedding in June. In July we spent three weeks in Europe. In October we spent a week in Texas visiting family and spending time in Austin. With several trips to Payson, AZ, and a few miscellaneous trips sprinkled around, Kortney and I put on a lot of miles this year.

That's not the entire list, but it is a good start. If you need to reach me today, you'll probably find me hovering around the pecan pie.

I haven't written any documents in L^AT_EX since Dr. Taylor switched to an XML submission format. (Or perhaps it was during Dr. Sebern's Formal Methods class.) I started the paper portion of my thesis this weekend, and decided to delve into the wonderful world of T_EX once again.

There are several ways to set up a productive L^AT_EX environment on your Mac, but the combination that seems to work best for me is teTeX installed from MacPorts and TextMate as my editor. I've also found Skim which will automatically refresh PDFs when they are generated by pdflatex.

Alternative, there is a MacTeX, however, the download is nearly 750MB, and includes many packages which already come with OS X.

Here's a collection of sites I found useful when setting up my L^AT_EX workflow:

• Setting up LaTeX on Mac OS X
• LaTeX on Mac OS X
• LaTeX: Live PDF preview with TextMate and PDFView

If you are writing a paper, a book, or any significantly long document (there are even packages for resum?s and presentations), I'd recommend looking into T_EX or L^AT_EX. They are a refreshing change from the WYSIWIG editors we've all become so accustom to.

About 16 months ago I scratched an itch and wrote Spangle, an app that checks for updates to the applications you have on your Mac. It's worked well enough, and its largely stagnated since its initial 0.1 release.

Back in May, Pierre Rudloff sent me an encouraging email and a link to a French translation he had written for Spangle. I also fixed an anchoring issue with the icon in the upper left of the main window.

The most major change is that Spangle has been recompiled with llvm specifically targetting Leopard. This shouldn't affect much (except for people still using Tiger), but I was interested in seeing how seemless a transition to llvm would be.

So the 0.2 release is out and the appcast has been updated. Feel free to contact me with any comments, suggestions, or bugs.

Switzerland was the last stop on our trip, and we really saved the best for last. The Alps were, by far, my favorite part of the trip. Kortney agrees.

Our first stop in Switzerland was Luzern. We came in with beautiful weather and great views of the surrounding mountains. Most of the rest of our time there was spent under an umbrella. We quickly swept through the old town and were limited to the things we could do within walking distance. We managed to get to the other side of the lake and found a theater where we almost saw Hancock. It was an almost, because it had already been translated into German, so we decided to skip it.

We decided to take an early train from Luzern and make our way into the heart of Switzerland, more specifically Lauterbrunnen in the Jungfrau region. Lauterbrunnen is lesser known, and much smaller than Interlaken to the north or Gr?ndelwald in the neighboring valley. If I could only pick one place to return to from this trip, Lauterbrunnen would be it. From our room's balcony we could see three waterfalls. The guidebook told us there were 79 throughout the valley.

The morning after we arrived we took the first cogwheel train to Jungfraujoch, a low point between the Jungfrau and Eiger summits (about 12,000 feet). At the top is an observation deck and restaurants designed for tourists, but it also serves as a launching point for climbers and glacier hikers. In an unexpected sign of bravery, Kortney agreed to walk about 500m with me across the glacier to a hut where climbers and researchers occupy. The winds were intense and the environment was stark, but the promise of a kitchen stocked with hot chocolate kept us focussed. It was not the kind of trek you should make in tennis shoes (but that was all we had), so we were both glad we doubled up on socks before we left that morning.

By the time we made it back into the valley, we had caught mountain fever. Doris, who was keeping track of things at the hotel for most of the weekend, informed us about an easy downhill hike from M?rren on one of the mountains rims just southeast. The next day we took a cable car to the top of M?nnlichen and hiked down past Klienesheidegg. During our walk we heard a thunderous crack, like if you snapped a cedar in two, and saw a new waterfall form from a low patch of snow. That afternoon we were hit with rain again, and walked to covered glacial waterfalls, which serve as the outlet for all of the melting glaciers in the region.

From Lauterbrunnen we headed to Zermatt, about two hours southwest. We were greeted with a clear day and spectacular views of the Matterhorn. Kortney's impeccable travel planning skills put us in a room with another incredible view. Zermatt sits at a much higher elevation than the Jungfrau valley we had enjoyed. It wasn't as green, the mountains appear rockier, and the tree line much closer to the town below. Unfortunately, Kortney began to get a sore throat, so our second night there was cut short.

The next morning we took the train to Lugano, well into Switzerland's Italian region. When we left the Alps, the atmosphere changed almost as rapidly as the scenery. No more snow capped peaks, and no more Swiss-German dialect: everything was written in Italian, everyone spoke Italian, and the architecture had much more Italian influence than anything Germanic. After two and a half weeks of German immersion, the Italian region was, for me, culture shock. And to top it off, I had started to come down with the same thing Kortney had.

There isn't much in Lugano itself. The town, appropriately, sits on the Swiss side of Lake Lugano. Ferries allow you to get to other towns scattered around the lake and were free with our Swiss Pass. After an afternoon in Lugano we decided the next morning we'd catch a bus to Italy and spend the day at Lake Como.

Until this point in my life, my most frightening experience as a passenger took place on the Apache Trail in Arizona. The bus ride from Lugano to Menaggio quickly eclipsed my previous experience, and I would imagine that anything more terrifying would involve serious injury or death. On the one hand, the bus driver would enter blind turns without slowing down, just a couple taps on the horn to alert drivers who might be coming the other direction. On the other hand, the two-way road often shrunk to barely the width of two compact cars, often with a sharp cliff and a lake the only alternative to collision, if those were the only available choices.

Remarkably, we made it in one piece, and had a relaxing time. Bellagio is a cute town with tight alley ways, cheap gelato, and quite a few gigantic estates. My favorite stop was Verenna, a much quieter town across from Menaggio.

Our ride back to Lugano didn't seem as death defying, but by that time, my sinuses had taken control of me, and I just wanted some to relax in bed with a constant supply of cranberry Ricolah.

Finally, we headed to Zurich, our last stop and point of departure. My throat and nose kept me in bed for most of the day, but Kortney and I were able to walk around the city later that night. From what I saw, Zurich seemed like a wonderful city, similar to Heidelburg or Luzern in its old-european charm but at the same time hip and active.

We caught a red eye from Zurich to Amsterdam, where we had a five hour layover. Several days earlier I had suggested to Kortney that we take that opportunity to spend a few hours in the city, but in my condition I just wanted to find a place to take a nap.

Amsterdam airport has several areas filled with high back, reclined lounge chairs: a comfortable place for any traveler with a long layover. The chairs we passed were all taken however. Kortney suggested following signs which pointed to a "meditation room". Upon arrival, I found a hidden stash of lounge chairs behind the meditation room, with enough open that we could take our pick.

From Amsterdam we flew into Minneapolis and finally back to Phoenix, tired and happy to be home. Our three weeks was incredible. Kortney's travel planning skills are second to none. I've tried to cover the basics of the trip, and Kortney's put them in her own words as well, but there are far to many experiences, stories, and memories to try to describe. To quote Dr. Arroway, "They should've sent a poet."