Once in a while, just for grins, I like to browse the apartment listings on listpic.com, which bills itself as a "visual classifieds browser." As far as I can tell it's basically a wrapper around Craigslist (though not affiliated with it) that presents a convenient user interface for browsing listings with photos.

Today, for extra grins, I decided to browse the apartment listings in Honolulu instead of New York. The first hit for apartments under $1000 was a furnished two-bedroom for $800 a month. In New York, you couldn't rent a coffin for $800 a month. And the kicker? This place is in my old building in Waikiki. I used to have a little studio there with a lanai and pretty blue tiles in the bathroom.

The attendance for last night's CocoaHeads-NYC was surprisingly good, considering there was a torrential downpour half an hour before. I even wondered whether the basement at Tekserve would have any water issues. But no, it was dry and we got either 9 or 10 people, I forget which. Given the weather, I would have felt lucky to get half as many.

I talked about what I'm doing in AppKiDo for the next version and got some great questions and feedback. Thanks to Gianni Jacklone (a famous Switcher) for keeping it lively — I loved the questions! It only took me one try to get my laptop working with the projector, which was a great relief. I showed how I'm using fmdb to query a SQLite database to get token information. I explained what I'm using to parse files (I wrote my own ugly parsers) and why I still have to parse the HTML at all (to find out what each class's delegate methods and notifications are).

I promised that cutting down that long startup phase is top on my list for the next version after the upcoming one. I appreciate Bob Clair's patience ("What is it, 60 seconds? Three times a week?"), but I do feel it makes the app look bad, unnecessarily.

During the demo I came across what I thought was a bug, but actually it's more of a quirk. NSPathCell was listed in the quicklist of "Classes with delegates," but when I selected it no delegate methods were displayed. I just checked and it turns out NSPathCell does not in fact have delegate methods, although it has a -setDelegate: method, which is what I look for when I populate that list. I assume NSPathControl forwards its delegate messages to the cell.

Some other things that came up in the general, non-AppKiDo discussion:

• Someone had a question about graphing packages. Mike Caprio pointed us to his Delicious link to the Google Chart API.
• Speaking of charting software, we raffled off two mugs that Ed VanVliet of VVI sent me. He had meant to raffle them when he was our guest at the last meeting, but forgot. I thought it was quite nice of him to remember and ship me the mugs. I'll be raffling off the remaining two mugs at the next meeting. Here's the high-tech raffling software we used:

      perl -e "print 1 + int(rand() * 100)"

• Jonathan Sarno of the Facebook Developer Garage announced that his group is looking for people to help them learn iPhone programming.

After the meeting, three of us had dinner and talked until 11:30. Topics included Cocoa entrepreneurialism, martial arts, religion, wormholes, and Summit, NJ. I learned that Scott Yelich is going to have a baby girl in a couple of weeks, and Paul Agron is about to move to San Diego. Paul, if you're ever in town on a meeting night, make sure you drop by.

And speaking of dropping by, I got email from John Nunez last night. He's been traveling but says he should be able to make the next meeting. He's been approving new members of our Yahoo group, and says we're up to 67 members. I hope to meet more of those 67 in future meetings.

I see from Google that I'm not the only one who found this company's trucks amusing.

In case you need any reminders that Starbucks coffee is expensive:

Saw this on a cross street off Broadway, somewhere way downtown. I was walking north and this was on the north side of the cross street, just to my left.