The BEZL and iphone cases

In my last post I brought up kickstarter. I plan on writing a full long boring post on kickstarter later but  for this post I figured I would talk about a specific product I found in my searches. It is a iphone case and before I get into specifics about being an iphone user.

There is a stigma attached to the iphone (and apple products in general) as it being trendy, overpriced, elitist and so on and so forth. The assumption of apple users is that they are the brainwashed masses muting anything and everything with an apple logo on it. I am not arguing against these people, they certainly exist.

They always have.
Via http://dadsaretheoriginalhipster.tumblr.com

Everyone who owns any apple product, however, is not a diehard fanboy. I got my iphone because it isa fairly impressive camera for a smart phone and it was easier to bring over the apps I bought on my iPod touch. For those two causes it works fine. My angry birds and rope cutting are intact and while it's not the most full featured camera but the image quality is decent enough to be worthwhile.

Pretty flower illustrates point and smells nice

So cagey defense of my choice of mobile out device of the way I will talk about the silicone ark of the covenants we are forced to wrap our phones in.

Now even with a somewhat suspect warranty in place dropping your glass in front and back phone would cause some issues to say the least.

So a case is an essential product. Also if you are one of the 10% of the population born left handed or you just hold the phone in a certain way bars can drop dramatically. Since I don't typically go mountain climbing I do need one of those tank cases that people insist on. I just go with a screen protector and a fancy case. The issue I run into is that since I use my phone as my camera the flash is inhibited by the case. This is where the BEZL kickstarter comes in.

All the information for the BEZL is available here at it's kickstarter page.

The condensed version is that the bezl is a case that isn't a case. It consists of four plastic pieces covering the four edges of the phone. This maintains the visual aesthetic of the phone with a minimalist design which is always good for us elitist apple folk.

How well it works is up in the air, as it is just a prototype for now the only person to test the product is the person asking for the donations but it's a solid idea so there is no cause for major concern.

It's a nifty idea and with it being a kickstarter you only get charged if it reaches its goal. So really you are only pitching in a hypothetical amount of money for the next month. So if you don't have an iphone and like to gamble throw some cash at this and see if it's still in your account in the next month.

In memory of failures new and old

It has been two full months since my last update to this blog. When this blog was started I had already conceded to not finishing the book by the end of November. However the intention of posting it wasn't just to parade my failures in a grand display of failure. I had intended to become encourage through sharing to write more, and indeed I had written more but I am nowhere near a satisfying end. I thought about this while looking at my sparsly updated blog and word document and wondered what stymied my progress in November and since.

What many of the successful NaNoers did was to do as the project required literally. They wrote 50,000 words of a novel. The difference between them and me is that I attempted to write 50,000 words of a novel in sequence whereas some of the successful writers merely wrote several different parts and later assembled the missing pieces. Also I think I over thought the project and should have just wrote with a goal of X words a day and not worry about why it makes sense.

Either way that was why I didn't finish in November, it doesn't explain why I haven't started writing more since then. Why I haven't written more is broken down into three groups

1.) Self doubt
 I go through periods of depression and can't dare do anything productive. During this time I will order myself a large waahburger and french cries. Also if the depression is bad enough I will order a very real burger and fries. This group actually segues nicely into group too

Pictured above: self doubt. Glasses don't help ideas flow

2.) Laziness 

No buts about this I can be a lazy fool. I have gotten better but the fact is the mighty electronic machine that I write my stories also has everything I would want in my lifetime. If I downloaded things illegally it would have enough for several lifetimes. So when I sit down to write on the computer it competes with youtube something awful and a litany of other things that capture my short attention span. Even as I write this I tabbed away several times to look at kickstarter projects. 

It's what Billy Shakes would have wanted people!

Thankfully it's not all depression and steampunk Shakespeare. I do have more reasonable...reasons for not  writing.

3.) Important or seemingly important distractions
It may be hard to believe but I am an adult.

Cigar+Mustache+Polo=Adult

As an adult I often have to deal with adult concerns and put projects on the backside. So if things are hectic at work or if essays are due at school I may not even think about writing for weeks. If family comes in they will get first priority over projects, though depression and internet may push them to second.

Now those are the obvious ones. The seemingly important distractions are where things get hairy.

I have the tendency to take on several things at once. So around the same time I started NaNoWriMo I got the idea to do a movie project in 2012 where I make a new short film every month and upload the results to youtube. In my head I can justify it by saying that I am not writing because I'm making movies. Though in reality most of my films are made at the end of the month. Though I will save that for a later entry. And later entries is what I am getting at with this post.

I may never finish my novel, but hopefully I will. Regardless of this I want to keep this blog active and if it's not with novel dumps then it will be with more bloggy things. Long form posts that are too lengthy for  my Facebook Twitter or Tumblr (yes I have all three) will go here.

Though here is my promise. If I go a month without an update I will go into my vault of failures and expose the embarrassing past for all to see. Breaking down my issues with writing have been therapeutic and if I have to do that with my other projects I will.

Heres to a future of happier posts.