I sent my first app in to the app store now, and I'm working on another personal project of mine, not sure how I  can describe it, but it will save you money on your shopping.

I'm building it mostly for me. :)

Getting back on that horse

It's been a few months since I last updated the blog, and I'm back in Sweden now. Did some odd jobs here and there the first month and managed, the second month, to score a gig as windsurfing instructor in the middle of Stockholm. This job honestly is the most fun I've ever had while getting paid in my whole life. I also happened to get a job from the same dude who hired me as an app developer.

Which is why I'm writing again, because after the initial burst of energy and development, getting further than I ever dreamed both with my own app and with the app I've been requested to make, I'm slowing down to a stop. Mostly what makes me so lazy is the fact that I'm working like 6 days a week and thinking that I shouldn't have to do anything else.

But what about the fun of developing? Is it gone? I need to find my spark again, and I think I'm gonna set a goal for myself to publish my own app on the app store by the end of July.

Final deadline.

Masters of Diving

And just like that, it was done.

Me and Aziz, the lead-singer of the local Malay band that played on the island sat on the bottom buddy breathing and struggling to get all of our tanks and gear in place while the instructors did their very best to mess up every single detail of our gear. Luckily both me and Aziz are pretty chilled out, so within 45 grueling minutes we managed to get all our gear switched and put in place properly. A fist bump later we head up and boom; we are dive masters.

It's been an incredible couple of months here in Borneo and I feel spoiled rotten to the core for being able to do this. But above all I feel very, very grateful.

And as for my app, I've managed to get every functionality I needed in order to release it on the app store working as I needed it to. So I'd say another month before I can really feel confident enough that Apple won't outright reject me.

It's gonna be so nice to finally get home and see my family, my girlfriend and my cozy room...

Särklass

Getting pretty close to finishing my DMT at this point. I've demonstrated the skills, I've shadowed dives, assisted courses, carried snot loads of tanks and today I've carried them strapped to a little malaysian man underwater.

It was pretty cooky, this huge group of malay accountants had all decided that they wanted to discover scuba diving for the weekend and opted for scuba junkie. So we were basically 15 people underwater, instructors, DMT's hanging on for dear life to these little malay accountants who were just so excited they were all jittery and kicking up sand all over the place. Some were like torpedoes and you just had to basically sit on the tanks and ride them, some were just frozen in the water and you had to carry them.

Good times, but it seriously looked like an underwater school class of special people.

Hamjacked

We got our Hammock stolen about a week ago, it sucked. We were just going out into the field to sleep and lo and behold; the coconut trees were empty save for some strings they left dangling. I wonder what they were gonna do with a hammock without strings to tie it up.

But hey, what does one expect when one sets up a 100$ hammock on an island that's basically a third world country. I'm just happy I got so many nights out of it, it saved me about four times as much money as I spent on the damn thing. Oh, and my back just got A LOT happier from me sleeping on the mainland in a nice air conditioned dorm.

I said goodbye to the Nish-Fish a couple of nights after the hammock incident as she went back to Sweden to apply for a music school. I miss her, but it's also been good being alone for a while. I think couples who travel together all the time sometimes get too caught up in being with each other and don't give themselves the space they need to truly be able to take in the experiences of travel.

Speaking of travel a ship showed up on the island, a fucking crazy, beautiful, high-tech, diving, hippie vessel which was basically like standing on a slice of heaven when you got on board. We had a party on board that I can honestly say was the high-point of this whole trip. Basking in the sunset until night came and the moon rose over Mabul. I climbed 10 meters up the mast and jumped into the ocean, smacking my ass on the surface like the hand of an angry god. Insanely enough they needed crew, but they were the type of ship that charged a fee for being on board á 850€ per month. Which to be fair isn't an insane amount of money, but I decided against it despite Nishra pleading for me to join her in the ultimate realization of her dream to become a pirate.
Why? Because this year they're gonna spend 6 months in the west coast of Thailand, and next year they'll be sailing across the Pacific via New Zealand and Micronesia to Easter Island. I don't know about you, but as far as diving goes, it sounds like a bit more fun that old "BengBeng"-land and like something I can actually see myself saving up money for..

So what else? I'm too busy helping out on courses and shadowing other dive masters for me to be able to squeeze any programming in there. It's been a bit of a standstill also as far as my progress has gone, I've got to figure out a way to make an array that can be accessed by the whole app, not just one view.

So I've been pondering how to do that today as I learned to tie three new knots: Bowline, Half Hitch and Sheep End. It's been an awesome day, sunny and warm. At one point under water as we were waiting for the ridiculously large DMT group to finish showing off their knot tying skills Juan(another DMT) and I were picking up baby hermit crabs and playing with them on our hands.

Locked and Loaded

Big things have happened under slow connections, so no updates for a while.

Anywho, me and the girlfriend have been sleeping in our hammocks for three weeks now, in pretty much every kind of weather the tropics can possibly conjure up. Remarkably, the hammocks have held up perfectly under every condition. Well, besides monsoon/heavy/firehose rain, in which case we slept in the Dive center's bar one night and got in A LOT of shit for it too.
In fact, the whole dive center seems to be a bit on the sour side over us not paying the 95RM for accommodation. They've had a few talks with us about why we don't switch to their overpriced dorms. So I'm pretty much waiting for a proper shit-fest to break out at some point with one of the instructors yelling at us. But we'll burn that bridge when we cross it. Until then, what can I say?
Haters be hatin'.

I recently got my 40th dive and somehow managed to squeeze some Sipadan in there too!
Sipadan, by the way, is one of the most fucking amazing places I've ever been to. The sheer scale of life on that island is unreal. Every animal acts differently to people than they do on other islands as well, displaying a much more feral and inquisitive nature. This may sound strange seeing as most ocean life is fine with people and pretty much doesn't fear humans at all. But in Sipadan, I had turtles swimming after and chasing me, I had sharks just passing me by, looking at me and every other kind of huge fish you could think of just swimming up and looking at me. We saw these huge flocks of hundreds of Bumphead Parrotfish, the size of a small person crunching away at the coral. In some parts, as we hung on to the coral for dear life in order not to be swept away by current we saw giant swarms of barracuda, thousands of fish strong. First seeming like an impenetrable wall of fish, then swimming toward the surface forming massive tornadoes of fish. I know I told mom and dad I wouldn't, but with one of the dive masters leading us we swam a small bit into a huge cave which is a natural graveyard for turtles, where countless turtle skeletons have been found.

And with my rescue course finished and my 40 dives cleared I'm good to go for the Dive Master Training!!!! Today is the first day and we're just sifting through knowledge reviews in waiting for the actual practical stuff to get started.


AS FOR THE APPS:
I finished the book like.. a while back, maybe a week ago. But still: BOOM!

And! I'm in the middle of making my very own first app for the iPhone. I remember trying to make an app before really knowing anything about Xcode, and the difference between then and now having read the book is just insane. I'm able to code independently on a whole different level, but also take in tips and stuff from forums and actually get exactly what they're talking about. The craziest part is that the problem solving and the issue areas of the app are actually really fun to fix. I could actually see myself continue developing apps for a while.

My first app is basically a comic book app for some funny internet comics I'm a fan of.
I'm at the point that I can gather all the comics in one place, display them on small pictures and enlarge them to be able to scroll around in them. Now I'm gonna put in an animated intro screen with functions like randomizing the comics and getting to the comics archives.

Life is so haaaaard!

No but seriously, I am so god damn spoiled to get to live on this island and see and do all the things I'm doing and seeing.

I've seen baby turtles hatching, I've been teaching at a local school, diving siiiiiiick dive-sites full of every imaginable type of animal. If I even were to list the whole plethora of magnificent and ridiculous encounters with sea creatures I've had it would take up this whole post, so I'm just gonna share one of them;
A few nights ago, we went out for a night dive, geared up with flashlights we entered the calm dark water. The whole dive was very tranquil and peaceful, but with no types of animals that I wanted to see really, until we got to the end. The dive master bangs her tank and signals for octopus, we all go down and look at this strangely shaped rock. Sure enough, it must be an octopus, but it is so ridiculously well camouflaged it is barely visible. The divers move on, but I am so fascinated by the animal that I stay behind. Watching and shining my flashlight right next to the perfectly disguised being, it began to transform before my eyes. The skin changed form from rocky and rough to smooth, from pale green to bright red. The arms suddenly in full movement the octopus positioned itself on the other side of the rock to slowly assume the form of the rock it was perched upon once again. I could barely believe that my own eyes were really seeing what was happening before them.

In my dive training I'm now done with most of the rescue course, we only have one day left now and we're done practicing all the skills and theory we need to learn. All that's left now: HELL-DIVES!
A hell-dive is when everyone in the water knows that you're taking a rescue course so they do their very best to make it as horrible and nasty as possible, throwing off their masks underwater, inflating their BCDs, unhooking weight belts, bolting for the surface, pretending to be dead, panicking and grabbing on to you, unhooking things on your BCD and even pretending to touch underwater wildlife. The purpose of all this is so that you can demonstrate how well you handle these situations.
It is god damn awesome, plus every time we get down to the jetty all the dive masters jump in the water and pretend to be drowning so you need to jump in and rescue them while avoiding being drowned by their crazed panicking.

So far in my app programming I have gotten to chapter 8, so I'm getting deeper into the world of debugging, and hopefully pretty soon I'm gonna be ready to start making some apps of my own. Things are getting faster and faster for me as my learning progresses.

Onward!