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WEEK 14 2014

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Saturday 5 April 2014

Saturday - Again, a nice day. The weather has really warmed up lately.

The vet called back, said Riley had elevated levels of bacteria, and needed an antibiotic shot, so I took him in again. So, about $300 in the last couple of days for him. The vet also said to be stricter on his diet. It's a pain trying to feed kittens which need food with LOTS of protein, and an old cat which needs a special LOW PROTEIN diet; both in the same house. Maybe a mechanical system with electromagnetic collars for the kittens is in order?

Not too much going on. Helped my friends pick up some furniture, went to lunch at the Thai Cafe, where they seemed to have gotten a handle on the spice levels in their food, which is good. Worked a bit in the yard, and on the taxes (I'm getting more confused, not less...), and just a tiny bit on the app.

S has simplified the levels a bit, so I'll need to change that, but it shouldn't be hard, just different changes on the old stuff really, that she thinks is redundant.

I'm trying to get my ducks in a row for work next week, we'll probably start Tuesday or Wednesday, and am reviewing various bits of documentation and trying to get organized.

I did a search through various dressers and drawers to find all my jeans. With the assistance of S in shortening a pair I've nowfive full sets, which should be enough to get a weeks work done. Picked up water, Gatorade, and other field essentials.

Friday 4 April 2014

Friday - Another nice day.

I decided to take Riley in for a checkup, since it's been about 6 months, and he was seeming a little low on energy. They took some blood, gave him some intravenous vitamins and water, but in general said he looked OK. He's really vocal about riding in the car in the cat carrier, and in the vets lobby, but is very quiet when we go into the little room. I don't think he's terrified, he's been there a couple dozen times, but he'd rather be almost anywhere else....

C brought some toys over for the cats, and they've been having fun:

Jimmy cautiously checking out the new electronic light and squeak toy.

Thursday 3 April 2014

Thursday - A nice warm morning, then starting to haze over and get windy in the late afternoon.

Working away on this and that. Some chores: shopping, gassing up the Explorer, cleaning up the house a bit, cleaning in the yard, putting plastic over the tomato beds, etc.

Which reminds me: on Tuesday I heard the trash truck going by on the other side of the street, so I got up and dragged the cans out to the curb. As I was setting the green waste container down the guy waved at me and said "Hey, we already did that side, but if you bring it over here I'll take it!". So I did.

It's strange, in twenty years here I never had a trash guy offer to help like that. And usually they do that other side of the street first, then mine, so I have about an hours grace after hearing the first truck. So, maybe things have changed, and they were being nice to the old guy in t-shirt and sweats at 6am in the cold.

Sent more info and data off to Dun & Bradstreet and Apple. What a waste of time.

Spooling up on the manuals and trying to get the new mappers working properly. I'm missing a step somewhere, but I downloaded the manual and that should help.

I need to finish up my taxes, but am waiting on other people to finish up and send me their K-1's. They are officially due March 15th, I still haven't gotten them. I did have a question on retirement accounts that my friend Tim was able to answer.

My friends boy had an appointment down in Palmdale with a sponsor for his science club, so we decided to make it a dinner out. We decided on Outback, since it's been a while since any of us were at a steak place. I actually had a friend take me to Black Angus for my birthday, back in October, so it's been a while. They were at a buffet at an Indian casino somewhere, and had tri-tip, which was...unimpressive. Sort of "beige-colored" they said. Gah.

Wednesday 2 April 2014

Wednesday - Well, we're still NOT an Company that can distribute apps at Apple. S had to take over talking to the people, I just don't have the patience [I think it was my audible fantasizing about the joys of fire bombing the Apple campus that finally caused her to take over]. We finally got voice tech support, and they walked us through registering. At this point the database was completely confused, having a mixture of my own, Sheryl's, and the company's info. How does Apple stay in business with this sort of setup?

After an hour or so of painstakingly careful data entry. Yay.

As I said on Monday, during a small gap in the Apple/Dun&Bradstreet process, we registered with Google Play, including the Wallet, in less than an hour. We are now at 7 days - and counting - with Apple.

iOS 8 comes out in June. I can't say I'm looking forward to seeing how they are going to screw me.

Tuesday 1 April 2014

Tuesday - So...still working away on the Apple Developer thing. I let my individual developer license lapse, we shouldn't need it once the company is a developer.

My picture backups are done. The last few years took a Blue Ray disk each, but most of the stuff prior to 2008 fit on a couple of disks. I didn't bother to back up the RAW files that I sometimes take, not really worth it.

Monday 31 March 2014

Monday - It was an odd day. I was sort of cold all day, putting on a sweater, taking it off, putting on a long sleeved shirt, taking it off. Odd.

It wasn't freezing, but sometimes it's like my body thermostat isn't working. In the evening quite a storm blew through, high winds gusting to 50mph, rain, the whole shebang - the younger cats actually ran and hid away for a bit about 10pm - so maybe it was really humid earlier, and that combined with low temperatures made me uncomfortable? Anyway, first time I've turned on the heater in weeks.

Did a bit of work on the app. I was encouraged (if that's the word) by reading on another blog about a developer who was happy to accomplish "one or two things a week". I guess my goal of "one thing per day" wasn't crazily unambitious after all!

One thing S and I did was to go over our Dun & Bradstreet info, and then contact DnB and ask their Apple Developers group (via email, there is no other way) if the information would be satisfactory to Apple. They hadn't replied by evening.

The other thing was to sign up with the Google Play store. This wasn't quite as annoying as signing up with Apple. We did have to sign up with Google Wallet, and our application was refused because (apparently, the error message was useless) we hadn't put an email with the companies domain name in correctly. At any rate, we went over things after the refusal and fixed that: I added a couple of email accounts, one for me, one for S, one for "support" and another for "info". Three of those I just forwarded to my email account...

A constant theme in all this is the big guys just not providing enough information to successfully complete registration the first time, or supplying decent feedback on what to do if it fails. This isn't a new problem, I've a book on compiler design from the late 70's or early 80's (Brown, Interactive Compilers and Interpreters, 1979) that talks about this error, making it one of the deadly sins of programming. Ah well, as they say, if history doesn't repeat it sure as heck rhymes.

Of course, I also have some stuff to do for next week, equipment protocols to go through, documents to review.

Book #18 was The Book of Silence (Lords of Dus #4), by Lawrence Watt-Evans. This is the fourth and last book in the Lords of Dus (the fifteen gods of his imaginary universe, seven good, seven evil, with Time being the 15th) series. Despite his efforts not to help Garth and the Yellow King obtain the Book of Silence. The Yellow King is a priest of Death, you see, and wants to die, after tens of thousands of years of immortality. To do this he has to bring an end to time itself - and does, using the spells of the gods themselves, written into the Book of Silence.

Fortunately what happens is that the King dies, as do all fourteen Gods, plus Time the God, not time itself. As one character says, when the rest of the universe doesn't end: when a carpenter dies all the houses he built don't disappear.

Anyway, it was a good first effort for an author. I read the first couple back when they came out back in the 1980's and never got around to reading the others before this - it was sort of gloomy series and Garth wasn't a particularly empathetic character.

Back in the 80's and 90's there was a chain of small bookstores, the "Book Nook", and I was a big customer, being single, well paid and living in Lancaster. I probably bought a book or two a week for years. After we got a Daltons and a Waldenbook I went less, and at some point the Book Nooks disappeared. Later the Daltons and Waldenbook' disappeared, as well as all the used bookstores in town (including those whose business was bodice-ripper recycling), and all that's left today is the Barnes and Noble down in Palmdale.

Though I hear there might be a used bookstore way down in Palmdale, on Avenue Q.

Sunday30 March 2014

Sunday - Working away on this and that.

I installed Words With Friends on the iPad, at a friend's request, to play with them. Looks like a version of Scrabble. S usually kicks my butt in this stuff.

My friend Dave is in Boston with his family and has sent me some cell phone pictures from his trip. Some came from aboard the USS Constitution. Looks like it was raining and they had the ship mostly to themselves!

AH and his boys came by, and the boys did a good job on mowing, weed whacking and edging the yard.

I also got them to turn over the earth in the tomato beds - the 15th of April, planting day, is only a couple of weeks away. Following the suggestions of a couple of people I'm not adding leaves or manure this year - adding it last year may have been part of the problems with all the bugs and insects. We'll see. I need to cover the beds with plastic and let them heat up and dry out to (hopefully) kill some of the insect eggs and larvae.

I also started doing some backups of the computer. My pictures are over 100GB, and since I have the Blue Ray recorder it was time to store them on few disks. I was sort of dreading installing it on the MacBook, but the software is as easy to use as a DVD burner, so it turns out not to be a big deal. It does take a long time - hours per disk - but these are 25GB disks after all.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Balloon with propane burner running, a few weeks ago.

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