Mon pays

OSAP

The following is a long and angry post. To get some of the back-story, you might also want to read my post from September, Gambling with OSAP. Basically, this is a timeline of many of the ways that OSAP, the National Student Loans Centre and McGill Financial Aid have been screwing around with me all semester.

Email from me to Financial Aid at McGill, October 19, 2011:

Hi there,

I came in last week to speak to someone about the state of my OSAP. I repaid a $2222 loan overpayment in September, and I was told over the phone by the NSLC that they would let OSAP know that the overpayment was dealt with.

When I went in to see someone in person at McGill Financial Aid last week, I was told that someone would email OSAP to find out what’s going on with my student loans, and that I would be emailed as soon as they send an answer.

Could you advise regarding the status of this inquiry?

Benjamin Carlisle
MSc(A) Nursing Student

I never got a response to that email. I went in to see them in person on October 24th, and demanded to know what was going on with my student loan. After much confusion, eventually they told me that the information I received from the National Student Loans Centre was inaccurate. It turns out that I had to get them to fax a proof of payment to McGill, who would then fax it to OSAP for processing.

I would like to emphasise at this point that I phoned the National Student Loans Centre on September 15th, 2011 to ask them specifically if I needed to do anything so that OSAP would know that I dealt with the overpayment. They explicitly told me that, no I did not have to do a blasted thing. This was a lie.

Two days later, on October 26th, I received the following email from Financial Aid at McGill:

Hello Benjamin,

Just wanted to give you an update on your OSAP status. The following message is the one I received from OSAP when I inquired about your file.

Documentation was received Sept 21, but has not been reviewed.

With regards to LOP [Loan Over-Payment] the student must provide a letter from NSLSC indicating the amount that he repaid and the date of repayment. This should be sent to the ministry marked clearance.

Please note I have received your received your proof of payment and the copy was faxed to OSAP today.

While your file is being sorted out, please note should you require emergency funds kindly meet with one of our financial counselors and we will be happy to process a loan to assist you with emergency aid.

In addition, I strongly encourage you to fill out the continuation of interest free form found at the following link https://osap.gov.on.ca/prodconsum/groups/forms/documents/forms/tcont003388.pdf and return it to me by fax or as a scanned email attachment. Please note this will prevent you from going into re-payment mode as of November 1st.

Our fax number is 514-398-7352 and my email address is [removed].

Best regards

I went back in to the office and asked how long I should expect to wait for an answer regarding my loan. The answer at the desk: four to six weeks. Six weeks later, on December 7th, I went back in to the Financial Aid Office and asked them what the status of my loan was. I was told that the only person who could possibly help me with this would only be available on Tuesday, 6 days later.

Keep in mind that I have been waiting for fully 3 months, not knowing whether I should expect any financial assistance at all. By this time, I had actually received my bill for next semester’s tuition. I was getting very antsy about this.

Tuesday, December 13th rolls around, and I receive the following email:

Hi Benjamin,

We re-faxed your proof of payment to OSAP today.  The Financial Aid counsellor also provided you with a tuition deferral for fall and winter.

Regards

I would like to note a couple of things at this point. This email was worse than unhelpful. It raised more questions than it answered and it illustrated clearly that the people at Financial Aid had no understanding of my situation.

First, there is no explanation of why my proof of payment was re-faxed. Did OSAP say they never received it? Did McGill fail to fax it in the first place? I emailed twice to ask, and they have not responded.

Second, a tuition deferral at that point would have been of absolutely no help to me at all. Tuition deferrals are helpful only if you know that you have some money coming, but you need some time for it to be processed. Tuition deferrals are not helpful in the slightest if the NSLSC, OSAP and McGill have been collectively screwing around with you for the last 3 months, and you have no guarantee of any kind that even a single penny will be coming in the form of student loans. It’s not like OSAP told me that they would be sending me a large sum of money, and I just didn’t know when. I was still waiting for them to assess me for eligibility for a loan. If OSAP decided not to give me money, or if OSAP decided to give me an amount that isn’t enough for me to live on, then a few more weeks to pay my tuition would not have helped—I would have needed to drop out of school to find a job!

I went in to the Financial Aid Office to explain this to them. I told them that the tuition due in January was a sum greater than my current total assets in the world. The person at the desk said that she would see if she could encourage OSAP to work on this faster.

On December 15th, I received the following:

Hello Benjamin,

Please note I have been following up with OSAP and have asked them to expedite your funding and provide me with an update on your OSAP application, the latest email I received from them is as follows:

I have just processed Benjamin’s file. I am unable to determine what his assessment will be. Please have him check back at the end of the week.

If I hear anything further I will let you know. In the meantime if you need emergency aid feel free to come by to schedule an appointment with an advisor and we will assist you until your funds come in. In the meantime I have processed a fee deferral for the Fall and Winter tuition fees.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards

What’s surprising about this email is the offer of “emergency aid.” In September, I asked about “emergency aid” from McGill and received the following email:

Hello Benjamin,

We are unable to assist you at this time. Please contact us later on in the semester. Remember to update your Financial Aid Profile if your situation should change.

That email, by the way, was in response to a request for a meeting to discuss my financial situation. That’s right. Financial Aid at McGill declined even to meet with me about this.

I did check back at the end of the week as the email suggested, and I was told by the person at the desk that she couldn’t find any notes about my case, and that there was no reason for me to have come in. I stayed and insisted that I received an email telling me to come in at the end of that week, and it was only after I showed her the email on my phone that she asked one of her colleagues about it.

Finally, I was told that on Wednesday the 21st (today), my loan documents might be at McGill for me to pick up, and I could expect my loan to be processed by early January.

I’ll believe it when the money is in my bank account.

December 21, 2011 | One comment | Tags: Angry posts Frustrating Money OSAP Sketchy Why is this so hard?

Hard disc full

My computer’s hard disc has been bumping up against its upper limit for months, and so I’m tempted to just buy a bigger internal hard disc. I could probably get a disc with a much larger capacity for less than $100.

The only thing that’s stopping me is that I think my venerable old MacBook (whose name is “Fermat,” by the way) is about to die. It has been dying a slow death for a long time. The fan makes a “k-tuck-k-tuck-k-tuck” sound when the computer’s running, and when it’s thinking really hard, it makes a sick sort of “whoosh” sound.

When I close the lid, it goes to sleep, but only momentarily. As soon as the fan shuts off, the optical drive spins up again (making a “meh-nah-num-dee-umm” sound) and the computer wakes up. Then it remembers that the lid is closed and it tries to go back to sleep. The cycle then resumes (“meh-nah-num-dee-umm”) and continues until the battery dies, which doesn’t take too long these days. (“Condition: Replace Soon”)

This means that I have to shut down my computer entirely if I want to go somewhere with it. This isn’t such a big deal, but then sometimes when I push the button to turn on my computer, it takes a scarily long time for the screen to turn on and the optical drive to spin up. It doesn’t do this every time, but when it does, I think that I’ve turned my computer on for the last time.

Those are the most serious things, but there are a few weird little problems as well. When I have the computer plugged in to my external monitor, I always turn the brightness on my laptop screen all the way down. Sometimes, when I leave the room with the computer running, I’ll come back after a few minutes to find the screen on my laptop will be turned on. When I touch the mouse or a button on my keyboard, it suddenly switches the laptop screen off, as if my laptop remembered that it’s supposed to have been that way the whole time, and I caught it doing something it shouldn’t have.

Due to the passage of time, the plastic casing has chipped, cracked and is peeling slowly off the computer, and the little pulsing white light that’s supposed to indicate that the computer is sleeping does not work. The DVD burner is flaky at best, and the whole computer runs very hot. By that, I mean it reaches a very high temperature.

Other than that, it works just fine.

My computer has a lot of character, and we’ve been through a lot together, but since I’m afraid that it will die soon, I don’t know if I want to invest the money in a new hard disc. But then if I can squeeze another year or two out of this computer by simply investing $100 for a new hard disc, then that would be a good investment.

October 14, 2011 | One comment | Tags: Computer Money

E-thesis final submission

This week, my goal was to make final submission of my thesis. All the actual work on the document was finished. I just needed to figure out how to hand it in. As per instructions on the GPS website, my thesis has to be submitted in PDF/A format.

For those of you who are unaware, a PDF/A is not the same thing as a PDF. What’s the difference? It’s more expensive of course.

The thesis has to be converted to PDF/A using special software to ensure that it can still be opened in the future. So, in order to submit my thesis, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies recommends that I buy Adobe Acrobat Pro, at a cost of $101.38 with tax—and that’s the reduced student price.

And the most frustrating thing about this? According to the instructions, “Standard PDF files will be rejected unless the thesis was written in LaTeX.” For those of you who are regular readers of my blog, you will recall that up until February, I was using LaTeX to typeset my thesis, and it was a painful and scary transition for me to move to Microsoft Word part-way through.

So ultimately, it came down to a choice between trying to convert my thesis back to LaTeX, or spending $100 to avoid all that hassle.

Laziness won, of course.

On Thursday, I went in to the bookstore and bought the software. When I first installed it and tried to convert my thesis, I got an error. Acrobat couldn’t convert my thesis. This seemed strange, since there wasn’t any strange formatting in it. I fiddled with the settings, tried restarting, but the very expensive software wouldn’t do it. Fortunately after a half hour, it auto-installed an update and after that, the conversion went as planned.

So as of yesterday, I have submitted my thesis to McGill. It’s over! Those are all the requirements for my master’s in bioethics! The only thing that’s left is my supervisor clicking “accept.”

By the way, one of the most satisfying things about making final submission of my thesis is the fact that I can take the ugly EndNote app out of my computer’s dock. It was such an eyesore! :P

September 23, 2011 | 6 comments | Tags: Frustrating Grad school McGill Money Thesis Why is this so hard?

Gambling with OSAP

I’m not usually a betting man, but in the last week I reached a critical point in terms of funding my grad school habit and I had to reconsider some options I had previously ruled out.

On the 7th of September, I received a nasty surprise by email: tuition for nursing school is literally on an order of magnitude higher than I was originally billed. At first, I thought that they were charging me tuition twice—once for my bioethics MA and once for my nursing MSc(A). I went in to the Service Point office to double-check, and it turns out that the tuition fee was accurate. It’s going to cost me about $11,000 for nursing school for this year, when you put together all the tuition, fees, books, uniforms and equipment.

So I went in to McGill student services to see what my options were and if there was anything that they could do to help me. The woman at the desk told me to make an appointment by email. I emailed and McGill student aid actually declined to meet with me to discuss my situation. They no longer respond to my emails.

So at first I panicked, and considered dropping out of the programme just because I couldn’t afford it: I didn’t have the money, I had no prospects of getting a TA-ship or an RA-ship, and I had no collateral for a bank loan. You might be asking yourself, what about the student loans you got in previous years? Why not get another one of those?

It’s true. In years past, in order to make ends meet, I did successfully apply to OSAP for a student loan. I did not apply this year because in October of last year, OSAP sent me a letter indicating that they would not send me any more loans until I sent them a payment of $2222. They did this because I was offered my RA-ship after I had already received my student loan for last year. (For the record, last year they sent me about $5000 to live on for the whole year.) So when I told them that I had an RA-ship after all, they decided that they overpaid me by $2222.

Up until September 7th, it appeared that my tuition would be roughly the same as last year, so I didn’t think it was rational to apply for OSAP: if it would take a $2222 payment just to apply, and they only sent me $5000 last time, it’s entirely possible that I would receive a loan for no more money (or possibly less) than I spent to apply.

Then September 7th rolled around and I found out how much tuition actually costs, which changed a few variables. Since tuition is so much higher this year than last year, I decided to make the repayment and gamble that OSAP will send me more in loans than I’m expending for the ability to apply.

As it stands now, I have sent in the $2222 and I’m waiting to hear back from them about how much (if any) money they plan on loaning me for this year. The size of the loan will dictate whether or not I stay in school.

What’s really annoying about this whole thing is that OSAP has given me a strong disincentive to accept any upcoming offers of legitimate work for this year. For example, if I am offered an RA-ship, OSAP will hear about it and probably do the same thing as last year—demand that I repay a large sum of money. The harder I work, the less help I get. Frustratingly, if I had just sat on my rear end all summer and burned through my savings rather than working and setting aside money for school, I would actually be much less stressed about whether or not I have enough money to make it through the school year.

Anyone need a kidney? Lightly used—like new! Still in original packaging.

September 15, 2011 | 3 comments | Tags: Frustrating Money TA-ship Why is this so hard? Work

Buying my textbooks

I haven't even bought all my textbooks yet

I’ve made a number of trips to the McGill Bookstore to get the various texts that I require. While standing in line, I came to a realisation:

I would seriously be willing to pay full hardcover price for the ability to download my textbooks as a PDF file with no digital rights management. If I could get my hands on a PDF for all the textbooks I need to buy, I would then buy a Kindle or a Kobo or an iPad and carry that around, rather than the gigantic stack of books.

There is no reason for me to be hurting my back by carrying around huge stacks of papers. We have the technology to make that a thing of the past.

Of course, this isn’t going to happen, and mainly for economic reasons.

While I do recognise that authors and publishers need to be paid for their work, and I don’t pretend to live in some make-believe world where everyone is so morally upright that pirated textbooks wouldn’t happen, there are massive inefficiencies all around in the way that textbook publishing currently works.

For example, Fundamentals of Canadian Nursing actually comes with an online e-book version included. This is great! What’s not great about it is the fact that I can’t download the e-book. It’s an online one. So that means I can’t load it into a tablet or an e-reader or something like that and take it with me. I’d have to bring a computer, and that computer would have to have electricity and internet access.

More importantly, the access code for the e-book version expires in four years. Assuming I don’t die and I’m still working in the same field, it’s likely that I’ll still want access to my textbook after four years. This means that if I take notes on the text, those will be all gone by 2015. That’s a huge disincentive for me to use their e-book. It’s not mine. It’s just a rental.

There are also inefficiencies for the publishing industry here. They put a lot of work into making sure that I could see the textbook, but not keep it. And they’ll have to keep investing money to stay ahead of the efforts of hackers and computer-savvy students who are okay with breaking the rules.

I’m not sure what the solution to this problem is, to be honest, although maybe the case of Fundamentals will be instructive: Fundamentals is a text that I would have much preferred to buy used, due to its price. I had to buy it new, though, because of the online access code. The text comes with online videos, the aforementioned e-book and tests that will be used as (mandatory) evaluations for the course. The access code can be purchased separately, but it costs $48. So in order to not take a loss on buying a used copy, I’d need to find a used copy that’s at least $48 cheaper, which seemed unlikely to me.

This is where I think the solution to the problem is: The secondary product (online testing) in this case provided an incentive for me to get the primary product. Even better than this would be something like giving away the primary goods/service and subsidise that cost with a purchase of a secondary good or a subscription to a secondary service.

There are plenty of businesses that work on this model. Cell phones, printers, web comics, Apple. See Table 1 for a few examples. Maybe it’s time for the textbook industry to move in this direction.

Now I’m no print media industry expert, but it seems like it’s a whole lot easier now for people to pirate media than it has ever been, and industries like music recording or computer software have had a hard time preventing pirating of their content from happening. The publisher of Fundamentals for example, spent a lot of money working on a system for displaying a textbook that would not allow the user to save the textbook and send it to others. That’s really inefficient for the publisher. Because the user can’t save her work, it’s also really inefficient for the user. That’s a lose-lose situation.

However, if they gave their textbooks away for free or for very cheap, they could spend the money they save on some secondary product or service that would provide value to students, like tests for example, and if the tests were structured in units that followed the text that was given away for free, the textbook would work for the publisher like an advertisement. This is a win-win situation.

The risk of this alternate strategy is that the publisher has to come up with some secondary service that would be so good that students would find it indispensable, or that professors would make it mandatory. That said, there is risk in continuing to work under the old model—there is a chance that someone may find a way, despite a publisher’s best efforts, to make and distribute a pirated copy. Further, there’s a risk that another publisher might be the first to switch business models.

Table 1. Primary goods or services subsidised by secondary ones

September 7, 2011 | One comment | Tags: I have a great idea Money Why is this so hard?

Hidden costs of the direct-entry MSc(A) in nursing at McGill

It’s back-to-school time!

And in honour of that, it’s time for me to show off my back-to-school shopping list. It makes me long for the days when I could go to the department store on the weekend before class started and pick up a bunch of binders and some 3-hole-punched paper and I’d be fine.

Just as a side-note, for the last couple years, as a grad student in philosophy, my profs gave me textbooks. For free. They gave them to me to keep forever and didn’t take any money in return. That was a pretty good deal. Maybe we can work something like that out with the nursing profs.

What do you say guys? Any of you want to sponsor a grad student?

August 24, 2011 | Leave a comment | Tags: Grad school McGill Money Nursing OIIQ

How to tell someone’s fortune

I have to admit, I can’t take full credit for this idea. Steps 1–3 were Pickles’ idea. This technique will only work if you have a smartphone and you take public transit regularly.

1. Sign up for a Twitter account and a Google+ account.
2. Next time your bus or métro is late, open Twitter and Google+ on your smartphone and search under “nearby” for tweets and posts that make reference to the bus or métro stop where you are. (A Twitter user’s first instinct, when his or her bus or métro is late, is to tweet about it.)
3. When you’ve found a recent tweet about your particular public transit problem, try to identify who it is that wrote it. Often you can do this from the person’s profile photo and by seeing who is fiddling with a smartphone.
4. Read back on that person’s tweets and try to infer 5 or 6 minor but specific details about that person’s life that couldn’t be guessed from the person’s appearance. Memorise these.
5. Look for one major thing, like a fight with a family member or an assignment at work or school, that is recent enough to not have been resolved yet. Try to guess what it is that the person would like to hear about that.
6. Approach.
7. Ask to see the person’s palm, or the pattern of coffee grinds in the bottom of her cup, or (my personal favourite) grab the person’s earlobe, and say, “Your pagh is strong, my child.”
8. Use the minor details that you have gleaned from his or her Twitter or Google+ feed to gain the person’s trust. (E.g. “Your roommate—she doesn’t do the dishes very regularly, does she?” or “Did you just get a promotion at work?”)
9. Act surprised about something, and then play “hard to get.” (E.g. “Oh! Isn’t that something!” / “What?” / “I don’t know if I should tell you. It’s about [major detail from step 5].”)
10. Let the person offer you money. Begrudgingly accept.
11. Tell the person what he or she wants to hear. (“Your brother puts up a tough exterior, but deep down he forgives you.”)
12. Cackle, disappear in a puff of smoke.

August 13, 2011 | One comment | Tags: I have a great idea Making friends Money Public transit Sketchy

First draft of my IQA hoop design contest entry

An early prototype

Earlier this summer, the quidditch team noticed that the hoops that we’ve been using were flaky at best. The bases for the hoops worked well, but the hoops themselves were, well … hula-hoops duct taped to the tops of ABS pipes.

They would fall over or break easily. The duct tape would lose its stickiness quickly and it became a chore to keep them in working order.

So, we started working on a replacement for the hoops. We wanted something sturdier. After a few tries, we eventually came up with a design that’s simple, modular, portable, affordable and very, very durable.

While we were working on this, weeks ago, I remember having a conversation where I mentioned that the IQA has “official” brooms, quaffles, etc. and that we should apply for this to be the official hoop of the IQA. Then, as if they read our minds, on July 28th, the IQA launched a hoop design contest. I guess I’ll have to brush up on my occlumency.

Here are the prizes for the contest:

• The best design will be promoted in the IQA handbook as the “official” hoop design and may be used at the World Cup.
• The designer and her/his team will be always credited as long as that design is used, wherever it is used, and the design of the hoops will be named after the designer.
• If the IQA chooses to produce and sell this design at an affordable price to teams, the designer’s team will receive a share of the funds raised as long as the design is used.

So a couple days ago we went back to the hardware store to look up the prices and the real-people names for all the component parts of the hoops that we built, and over the past little while I’ve spent a few hours putting together a construction manual for building one of our hoops. I’m pretty proud of it, really.

The IQA contest deadline is August 11th, so there’s still time for revision. I would appreciate any feedback (from the quidditch team especially, but all comments are welcome) regarding the construction manual and its contents before that date. Tell me if you notice any inconsistencies, grammar/spelling mistakes, or any parts of the instructions that aren’t clear. Also, please note any advantages of the design that are not mentioned on the last page.

[Download the construction manual as a PDF file here.]

August 5, 2011 | 2 comments | Tags: Money Quidditch

Human research ethics and smartphone application development

I’m entering the final stages of working on my thesis, and not a moment too soon—I looked up my submission deadlines, and I need to make initial submission by June 13th according to the graduate studies website.

As many of you know, I’ve recently taken up iPhone application development. Less well-known is the fact that this was partly inspired by my work on my thesis. This may seem strange due to the fact that I’m working on human research ethics, and not on computer science, but stay with me.

Phase IV drug research

My thesis has to do with phase IV drug trials. “Phase IV” means that the drug has already been approved for regular medical use in humans. The problem with phase IV trials is that they are often initiated by the marketing divisions of pharmaceutical companies for the purpose of getting physicians used to prescribing the drug in question. They often have a very inefficient study design and they do not ask or answer a valuable scientific question.

Research ethics boards have a hard time criticising these studies, and often their members have to “hold their noses” and approve such studies because there would be no risk to the subjects of such research. (Of course not—the drug is being prescribed by physicians for regular medical use already!)

My thesis argues that we should criticise such studies on the basis that they threaten the integrity of the human research project. That is to say, human research is a collaborative project that requires a number of stakeholders—the drug company, physicians, human subjects, nurses, administrators, universities, research centres, hospitals, etc. All of these stakeholders come to the human research enterprise to pursue their different goals and desires, and bring different contributions to the project of human research. Because of the way that human research is set up, there are certain rules or practices that make the project of human research work better and certain rules and practices that interfere with its proper functioning.

I argue in my thesis that we should be able to criticise certain “bad” phase IV drug studies on the basis that they compromise the integrity of human research, completely aside from any paternalistic appeal to the risks or benefits that may accrue to the participants.

How is this related to iPhone app development?

Smartphone software development is also a collaborative enterprise. That is to say, there are also many parties in smartphone software development that come together with different goals and desires and contributions to the common project. There is the hardware producer, the company or organisation that produces the OS, the software developers, the vendors of both software (“app stores”) and hardware, phone companies, organisations that dictate software and hardware standards and other regulatory bodies.

All of these parties contribute different things to the collaborative project of producing smartphone offerings. All of these parties have different goals. Many of these parties overlap. For example, in the case of iPhone app development, the hardware producer, the OS developer, and the hardware and software vendor are all the same company—Apple.

Similarly to the way that certain restrictions, practices or rules on human research help these stakeholders to work together (or not), there are also restrictions, practices and rules that make smartphone development ecosystems better or worse.

These are things like pricing structures for apps, “openness” of the platform, hardware limitations and consistency, etc. Often it is actually the restrictions placed on a platform that make it thrive.

Consider this article from the BBC about the Android platform.

Even my choice to develop for the iPhone was influenced greatly by the fact that there’s only one iPhone to write for, combined with the fact that distributing the app is not a huge headache—Apple takes care of the details. That’s good and bad, but the restrictions that Apple has placed on the iOS ecosystem seem to have been conducive to producing thousands of apps.

Getting back to human research, similarly, placing restrictions on human research might actually make human research thrive better. By getting rid of “bad” phase IV studies, universities can avoid situations like the one outlined here.

This whole situation is having huge cascading effects on phase IV research and human research generally at that institution, and could have been prevented. By taking a little bit more of a “walled garden” approach to human research, we can actually make human research work better.

May 16, 2011 | One comment | Tags: App Dev Money Thesis

Montréal Métro iPhone app

Logo for Montréal Métro Exits

On and off for the last little bit, I’ve been working on a little bit of a side-project: Something for when I don’t want to think about research ethics anymore. I was inspired to do this by something I heard on CBC a while back. A guy in London, UK made an iPhone app that would tell you which car to exit so that you would be closest to the exit on the subway.

I thought that this was a great idea. I would certainly use an application like that! Turns out someone already did it for Montréal, but they did a crappy job of it. The data set is incomplete, and the interface leaves much to be desired. Also, this other app tells you nothing about which car to board in order to transfer. In fact, the other app told you only which métro car to exit in order to be near the exit, not which métro car to enter, which seemed to undermine the point of the app. You need to know which car to board before you get on the train. (You can’t just infer one from the other, though, since in some cases the train approaches from the right side of the platform and in some cases it approaches from the left.)

I decided to write an app that would be really simple from the user’s perspective—just choose two stations, and the app tells you which car to get into at your departure station, and then which car to get into at your transfer station(s) (if applicable). I thought it would be a good exercise, just as practice for some other ideas for iPhone apps that I’ve had.

So, a couple weeks ago, I donned my lab coat, grabbed a clip board and went to every métro station in Montréal and wrote down where all the exits were. I also collected information regarding transfers. Writing the app wasn’t so hard, although submitting it to the iTunes store was a bit of a headache. That said, it was approved on my first try, and it took less than a week. (Thanks, Apple!)

It was getting Apple to process my tax forms that was the longest part of the development process.

The app was approved on Friday the 18th, and Apple processed my Canadian tax info last Tuesday. I had to fill out some US tax forms (just indicating that I wasn’t a US citizen) and then today they finally started selling my app on the iTunes store.

Tell your friends! Seriously. Every month I get roughly 300 visits to my blog from people in the Montréal area. If I could get a few of you guys to post this to your Facebook, I’d be raking it in. :)

Now that I’ve sort of figured out how to write and submit an app for the iPhone, I’ve got my sights set on bigger cities where this sort of app hasn’t been written before. (Yes, there are still some. Not many!) Also, I have a few ideas for other, better iPhone apps that I think could be a lot of fun. I’m not about to start posting my ideas on the internet though: That’s a great way to have someone else make my app before I do. :P

March 31, 2011 | 4 comments | Tags: App Dev Métro Money Profit Yintewang