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WEEK 13 2017

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Fifteen
Years
Ago,
This
Week
2002,

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Saturday 1 April 2017

Saturday - Happy Birthday to my sister A.

Doing a bunch of yard work. Mowed the front lawn, about all I can do in a day these days, before the back gives out. Did a bunch of bills as well, it's that time of the month.

Lunch with friends at the Red Salmon. Good food, but because of the interior design (no real ceiling, ducts and pipes exposed style) incredibly noisy.

Book #14 was Shadow of Victory (Harrington #14), by David Weber. Another library book. These are long and, to be honest, kind of boring. But I've been reading them for years (the first book came out in 2002) and just keep reading, though I wait for the library copy.

Friday 31 March 2017

Friday - Working away on this and that.

I did go over to Home Depot and pick up a new, inexpensive, Skil Saw. Technically not Skil, but made by Ryobi. The old saw was so bad that it had trouble cutting 1" pine planks, and I had a piece of 3/4" plywood that I promised to cut to size for someone. I did buy a plywood blade as well, and everything went very well.

It's not nice to hear the motor drop to 200 rpm and be engulfed in a cloud of burning wood from the cut. And no, it wasn't a bad blade on the old saw, it was brand new.

This is a backing board and brackets for a little "Free Library", so I also sanded and gave them an initial primer coat of good white paint, some outdoor RustOleum that I had. It was a bit clumpy, but I stirred the heck out of it and will sand the completed boards again before handing them over to my friend for painting with the final coat of some other color.

Made more progress with the app sounds. I have both System Sound players, and AVAudioPlayer items, for short and long sounds, and am working on getting them roughly in synchronization with the animations. Before I get too far I'll let S vet them.

Also updating a bunch of other stuff, in particular the dozens of errors that have cropped up since the last Xcode update, wherein stuff that was first deprecation in iOS 9 is not supported in iOS 10, including the video clip player. Sheesh.

I imagine they'll screw with me again when iOS 11 comes out.
Thursday 30 March 2017 Thursday - Amusingly enough I got an email invitation to enter a lottery to pay for a ticket to Apple's WWDC next month. Got that? A chance to pay Apple $1600 to watch them pat themselves on their own back for their second rate junk.

And yet, people pay it:

Apple: "Hey you Developer Scum, pay us more money, out $200 Billion dollar offshore slush fund, made from the software that you wrote, isn't enough!"

Developers: "Sure, here's my money!"

Apropos of this, this week's Apple annoyance: System Sounds are limited to 30 seconds. OK, whatever, Apple.

But what sort of message do you suppose you get from Apple's second rate IDE if the sound is a few seconds longer than that?

I bet you are thinking "Warning, Sound too long" or "Warning: Sound file will be clipped to the maximum", or something like that.

What you actually get is a message saying "File not found!" and then you spend an hour of your day trying to figure out why the perfectly fine file in your media folder, that you dragged into the project, and can see there, and can be played in the IDE there, isn't found during compilation....

Wednesday 29 March 2017

Wednesday - Nice-ish weather. Starting to get windy again in the afternoon though.

Worked on the app all day, doing punch list stuff.

Added an object for system sounds, button clicks and card flips and the like. It's acting a little funky, the sounds aren't always playing...

Tuesday 28 March 2017

Tuesday - Nice weather. A bit warm in fact.

Worked on various things. I downloaded a newer version of the STARS testcases, since there was some sort of error with the old set.

Worked on the app for a bit.

Monday 27 March 2017

Monday - Another nice day.

In the morning I did a chore I'd been avoiding - cleaning out the downstairs closet. It was packed with various bits of debris. How packed, you ask? Let's just say that I found an entire upright vacuum cleaner that was masked by junk and that I'd forgotten I had...

I was just about to hit the computer for work when a friend called and said he was on his way up from below for poppy viewing. Some popular media outlet had featured the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve as a 'must see' over the weekend it seems. So I ended up joining him out there and we had a nice time - it was a bit crowded and the flowers not particularly impressive, but the weather was perfect.

Afterwards we went for a late lunch / early dinner at the Rock Inn, then he headed home to Ventura and I went back home, pretty tuckered out.

It became windy late in the day:

Sunday 26 March 2017

Sunday - Another warm day. A bit windy.

After the usual morning chores I drove up to Tehachapi to visit M&M. It was just me, the big crowd obviously wasn't there, but I brought some hamburger patties and fixings, and we had a nice afternoon visit and picnic.

I headed home about 5pm.

I stopped by a couple of homes for sale in Mohave on the way home, but they were in far to sketchy a part of town to even be considered. Oh well.

Picture of the Week

wild flowers

Wildflowers on Sunday.

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