Water Rocket

My son Max turned 4 yesterday. We had a rocket-themed birthday party for him so I found some instructions on the internet on how to make a water rocket. I'm not much of a handy man but this looked like an easy enough project. The results were somewhat disappointing for me, but luckily 4 year old boys are pretty easily impressed and it was a pretty big hit:
Launch I
Launch II

It looks like the seal at the mouth of the water bottle needed to be tighter and we were going a little overboard on the air pressure. The seal at the top was formed by heating up the PVC pipe with a candle until it became flexible, then pushing inward on both sides to create a bulge. The bulge I made was off to the side a little bit so I'm not surprised that caused a problem. I think if we could have figured out just the right amount of air pressure before it broke the seal we could have gotten a pretty decent launch. So I'm hoping to use it again in the near future to see if we can get better results. If we can't, it was easy enough to make that I'd like to try again, maybe when Max is a little older and can help build it.

Overall it was a fun experience and educational. It definitely made me want to find other projects to work on.

30 Days to Success 1.1

On Monday, Apple approved the new version of my iPhone app, 30 Days to Success. The new version doesn't contain anything too compelling:

• Added functionality to restore application state at launch.


• Updated application to only retrieve user Facebook info as necessary.


• Added nicer view for Facebook Wall of Fame page.


• Added functionality to share the application link with email contacts.


• Added a friendly reminder to provide a review for the application.


• Fixed some minor bugs.

I added the reminder to review the application using Appirater and integrated Facebook's Three20 library to make a much better view of the Wall of Fame. Adding state restoration was a bit of a pain but I figure if I'm going to charge for my app, I need to add little niceties like that.

I also updated how I retrieved user Facebook information. To post to the app's Facebook page, the user must "like" my Facebook app. Because the user might like/unlike the app, I need to make sure I have the latest info and prompt them accordingly if they try to post one of their successful trials to my app's page. Because it was easier on me, I was retrieving that information when the app started up. But that was a sub-optimal user experience as that information only is needed when posting to the app page. So that was a needed change as I was putting myself ahead of the user.

For my next update, I plan on adding functionality for users to suggest potential trials. I'm going to create a small set of web services on Google App engine that will allow users to submit a trial suggestion, email me a notification so I can review the suggestion and then return the list of suggestions to the app.