BeerPad is a nice little application for the iPhone that is designed for beer enthusiasts to keep track of their beer adventures. You can add beers that you try into the application and it keeps all sorts of information in its database for you.

Features include:

– Assign parameters to each beer from predefined lists. These include Style, Brewery, Region, and Pairings. Each of these lists are editable so that you can add items to them if they don’t exist.
– Assign a photo to the beer. Choose from the camera roll, or take a new one. I am not a fan of the iPhone camera, so I search google images to find either the label or a good pic of the beer online, then save it to my phone and use that one. I discovered that once you assign the photo in BeerPad, you can remove it from your camera roll and it stays in BeerPad.
– Assign a rating for the beer on a scale of 5 stars.
– Several other free form parameters can be assigned. i.e., color, aroma, finish, etc.

Back to my alergy to some beers… if I drink a beer that I am allergic to, my throat swells up. Now, it’s not my airway but rather my esophagus. Regardless, it’s not comfortable and quite irritating. By the way, I’m also allergic to macadamia nuts, which I discovered before the beer allergy. My tactic on new beers is to take a few sips, then wait a good 5 – 10 minutes for a reaction. If there is one, I slide the beer over to a friend to finish. If there is no reaction, score one for me because I have a new beer that I know I can drink without worry.

Here’s where BeerPad comes in to help me. For the past year+ I’ve been adding beers to BeerPad; ones that I know are OK and also an new ones that I try. I use the rating system to track the bad beers. Well, they’re not necessarily bad, just bad for me to drink. I assign a single star to the beers that give me an allergic reaction. Any other beer that goes down without a ruckus gets 2 or more stars.

When I first figured out this allergy, about 8 or so years ago, I had to rely on written notes to remember which beers I could drink. The iPhone in general has improved my quality of life by keeping me more connected. But with apps like BeerPad, it makes it all the more helpful to me. Are there smart phone apps or tools that you use in ways that were not necessarily intended but help you?

What could be running all the time that would cause a drain on the juice? Well, I have my work email account configured to sync mail, contacts, and calendar via ActiveSync. This was the only culprit I could think of that would run all of the time… at least when I had the push feature enabled. I did a few days worth of testing and here’s how it went.

• Day 1: Charged the phone overnight and left push and fetch off (as I normally do to avoid being awoken by new emails). At 6am, I turned both push and fetch on. I typically set fetch at every 15 minutes, so I left it as such. 
  • Results: After 2 hours, the battery was down to 50%. This was 2 hours of very mininal use, pretty much sitting on my desk for all but maybe 10 minutes of use. No phone calls, no internet use, no texting, etc.
• Day 2: Charged the phone overnight and left push and fetch turned off. At 6am, I turned only fetch (15 minutes) on.
  • Results: After 2 hours, the battery was down to 90%. Again… no phone calls, no internet use, no texting, etc.