I love the iPhone. So much so that people have accused me of being an Apple fanboy in the past before (they’re probably right).

I also love Japan. I spent a chunk of my childhood growing up there and I now enjoy traveling back to the country whenever I can.

So during the September Apple keynote this year, you could imagine how excited how I was when Apple announced not just the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 2, but that both of these devices had the necessary capabilities to have Suica loaded onto them.

What’s a Suica? Suica is a NFC-based prepaid smart card that you can use to pay for things in Japan with a simple tap of the NFC receiver. You can buy them pre-charged in Japanese train stations, and while they were originally intended for automatic paying of fares on train lines, they can now also be used to pay at vending machines, and even some types of stores.. Easily the most convenient way of paying for things when you’re over there.

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And WWDC 2016 is now officially behind us! What an absolutely crazy week it’s been.

For the third year in a row, I sadly did NOT get a ticket to WWDC (Next year Gadget! Next year.), but thanks to the nature of my work, it’s always still absolutely worth the trip out here anyway to join in on the alternative conferences happening during the week, as well as the festivities during the evening. 

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Earlier this evening, something somewhat disturbing, and extremely sobering happened.

I have a media PC, a small Intel NUC in my living room plugged into my TV on which I play a lot of movies/music. In order to control the NUC remotely from my laptop or desktop PC, I had TeamViewer installed on it, and always running in the background. Even though it was on, I rarely ever used it.

This evening, as I was watching a video on YouTube on my NUC, the TeamViewer ‘thanks for using the free version!’ dialog box popped up. ‘Whatever’, I thought, ‘It must have just done a system update’. And closed it.

Right after that, the TeamViewer application window itself appeared and stated ‘Tim Oliver has connected’. Immediately after that, the audio on my NUC was muted.

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I’ve been a customer of Telstra since 2010. I originally moved from Optus. My reason for swapping was because I discovered that there were many parts of Western Australia I frequented (e.g., when I was working in North Perth, or taking a trip to the countryside), where the reception of Optus just wouldn’t reach. I moved to Telstra when I got my iPhone 4 on a contract, and I’ve had nothing but praise for the company since then…

Until now.

This is a story of how when Telstra fails at fulfilling an order, they fail spectacularly hard.

It’s a story on how an omission of a single word on a package caused a delivery to spiral out of control from a simple 3 days, into a terrible, horrifying bureaucratic mess that took more than 45 days to resolve and nearly cost me $4000.

This is what happened when I tried to order an iPhone 6s Plus from Telstra.

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Whew! I’m back home from Japan and settled back in. What an amazing trip that was! Before it becomes too much of a distant memory, I figured I’d write a wind-down blog post on it. 🙂

So late last year, I was invited by Natasha Murashev (Better known as @NatashaTheRobot) on recommendation of my colleague JP Simard, to come and present at a conference she was organizing in Japan for March of 2016. The conference, known as try! Swift was going to be a 3 day conference consisting of a stream of 25 minute talks, specializing in Swift, Apple’s new programming language but also including iOS development in general.

A trip to Japan (one of my favorite places), to hang out with iOS developers and talk about app development (one of my favourite things)? I couldn’t say ‘hell yes’ fast enough!  😀

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… that’s it? 2015 is over?

I’m not sure how good a sign that is, but I can’t believe how fast 2015 flew by. That was truly ludicrous.

I said last year that 2014 was a ‘maintenance year’ for me. A lot happened, but it felt like all the effort that went in simply maintained the status quo. Nothing really advanced. I could probably chalk that up to the fact that I had to spend a chunk of my time re-designing iComics for iOS 7, as well as shifting house several times.

No, if I had to describe 2015 in one word, I would say ‘transformative’. So much changed, SO MUCH CHANGED and it was an exhilarating and amazing time. 🙂

Some of my highlights of 2015 included:

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