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Life is good. Really, really good.

If I seem giddier than usual these days, it’s not just because I’m enjoying being back in Chicago. (Though I am.)

Today’s not been unusual, and it’s gone like this:

• Wake up at five. Brew excellent coffee in a french press. Make eggs with salame and four cheeses, and granola with fresh cut strawberries and bananas and almond milk.
• Sit-ups, push-ups, and some curls in the gym. Sorry if that sounds bro-ish, but it makes me feel great, so deal.
• See fiancée off to work, do dishes, shower at leisure.
• Go back to bed for a while.
• Restring a guitar. Play it for a few hours.
• Walk around my favorite place on the planet in the sun.
• Journal. Better stuff than usual.
• Get some good news on the job front.
• Meet fiancée after work. This is always really exciting, like we’ve been together a week instead of five years.
• Get an unexpected call from a job prospect I didn’t know existed. Whoa.
• Band practice.
• Dinner and a couple glasses of wine.
• Early to bed and do it all over.

I’m not gloating, I’m just counting my blessings. Sincere thanks to everyone who has helped me and led me here. I still am and always will be an Ohio boy from Akron, and I didn’t do much to earn this.

How to use Find My Friends on iPhone/iPad without entering your iTunes password every time

This isn’t strictly a tech blog, much less a how-to blog, but I figured I owe the Internet a handy how-to for all the ones it gives me.

With Apple’s release of the latest iPhone/iPod/iPad operating system, iOS 5, came an app called Find My Friends, which does precisely what its name implies using the devices’ GPS. There are other apps that have been around a while and do this pretty well (see also: Google Latitude), but they’re beyond the scope of this post.

Click the image to download the app.

The trouble with Find My Friends is that, for security, it prompts you for your iTunes password every time you open the app. This is a deal breaker for a lot of people and creates a lot of friction in the name of security.

Here’s how to get around it:

1. Find My Friends allows you to forego the password if you set a passcode lock on your phone, a four-digit PIN you have to enter every time you unlock the screen. You can set a passcode in Settings > General > Passcode Lock. But this too is security friction I don’t want. So…

2. In the same settings module, you can tell your phone how often you want to be prompted for the passcode. By default, the phone requires it each time the screen is locked or goes to sleep. If you tap “Require Passcode” in the passcode settings, however, you can choose to only be prompted after 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, or an hour.

3. Choose an hour.

Now you can use Find My Friends without being prompted for an iTunes password AND without having to enter a passcode every time you unlock your phone’s screen.

If you’re less cavalier than I am about the security of your phone’s contents in the wrong hands, consider that Find My iPhone (or iPad, or whatever), designed for tracking stolen devices, allows you to wipe the device remotely. You should have Find My iPhone activated anyway, folks. In iOS 5, it’s in Settings > iCloud > Find My iThing.