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Category: Blog

2014

It’s important to have a Top 10 list. I know this as every other site has one. I don’t want to miss out. So here are the top ten most read posts here this year, with the year they were originally published in parenthesis:

  1. QA Mindf**k
  2. Do Apple take 40% in the EU? (2011)
  3. Learning Swift
  4. iOS Developer Program: from individual to company (2011)
  5. How do I do “X” in Swift?
  6. AQGridView to UICollectionView (2013)
  7. iPhone Dev: Saving State (2010)
  8. NSFetchedResultsController and iCloud
  9. Why you need a crash reporter (2011)
  10. Sophia Smith (2006)

If there’s a lesson here in increasing readership it’s simple: get retweeted by people with lots of followers.

Furry

[![Furry: not in a cinema near you](https://i0.wp.com/www.zx81.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/furry-202x300.jpeg?resize=202%2C300)](/blog/furry.html/attachment/furry)
Furry: not in a cinema near you

For some reason, when I saw the poster for the new movie “Fury,” I misread it as “Furry” and saw a beard on Brad Pitt that wasn’t really there. I’ve tried to correct these errors.

Lucky Number Two

I’ve been pretty quiet here for a couple of of weeks and that’s because… well, a picture speaks a thousand words.

IMG_7084

Junior took his sweet time popping out — we were in the hospital over a day before he made his grand appearance — but for Juniorette we weren’t sure we’d make it there in time! In the end we checked into the delivery suite just after ten in the evening and the birth was recorded just before eleven.

That was 2013

It’s a cliche to ask where the year has gone but it’s no less true this year than any other. Life has got in the way of blogging more than usual — moving house, a toddler, work — with only 23 posts this year and only one of those making my “most read” list.

Talking of which, these are the most read blogs this year:

  1. iOS Developer Program: from individual to company
  2. iPhone Dev: Saving State
  3. Do Apple take 40% in the EU?
  4. AQGridView to UICollectionView
  5. Old Fashioned

Probably my favourite blog of the year was “What to do?” but I posted it a little too late to get the readership that I would have liked.

Big day

[![](https://i0.wp.com/farm8.staticflickr.com/7342/10992669726_91f6213278.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/10992669726/ "photo sharing")[Handing over the keys to my old flat.](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/10992669726/), originally uploaded by [stephendarlington](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/).
Friday was a big day. Not only did I finally sell my flat — this is a picture of me handing over my keys — but I also found out that we’re expecting baby girl in April next year.

The only thing that would have made it bigger would have been if the Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary show was on the same day. But I had to wait another day for that.

Digital Age

This post is a rant. I can offer no solutions, no help. Some sympathy perhaps but that’s not terribly useful.

The story: we’re moving house. So we need to deal with lawyers and mortgage companies. For sound reasons, they both need to prove that we’re not laundering money.

Frankly, until I had to do a number of anti-money laundering courses at work I would have had no idea how to launder money. I’d be stuck like the characters in Office Space looking up the definition in a dictionary. Or, more to the point, looking it up online.

2012 in review

I don’t normally do this kind of thing but I’ve been blogging a little less than usual this year so I thought it might be worth jotting down a few notes about what I have been up to. With pictures, obviously, as I’m never far from my camera or iPhone.

The theme, in case you missed, it is my son who grew from a tiny, sleeping-eating… thing to a walking, playing and noisy toddler.