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WEEK 16 2016

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Saturday 16 April 2016

Saturday - A beautiful and windless day.

Glen came over and we discussed the various yard work tasks that need doing. We also did more work on the trailer - this took hours longer than I'd hoped. Sigh. We did use the newly renovated beast to pick up a few yard construction supplies from Home Depot, then I returned him and the trailer to Happy Feathers Ranch, out in Antelope Acres. So named because they got a bunch of chicks a few weeks ago to replace older dying flock, and the chicks are really growing fast.

Friday 15 April 2016

Friday - A nice day.

Mostly I worked on the app, going back through my logic and trying to figure out how - and more importantly why - I did things in a certain way. Sigh. A forced three month's hiatus has not improved my memory... I do keep a daily log, and that helps a bit.

Dinner was with friends out in the west AV. I really want to move, but can't see any way to do it right now....

Thursday 14 April 2016 Thursday - Coolish, some high clouds, very very windy.

Glen came over during his breaks from school, and we finished adding bottoms to the trailer pockets. This involved crawling under the trailer and drilling upwards, so I was glad I had someone without a pulled muscle in their shoulder to handle it for me!

With the trailer 99% done now, we can go get some manure on Saturday, if we can find some nice dry stuff. Probably over at Painted Rose Ranch.

Then more app work. The logic and setup for the bins and the associated three classes of prompts is getting convoluted, and I found myself researching - as I was before October - the use of nested dictionaries of dictionaries. It is actually a lot cleaner than the way I'm doing it now, and less prone to error. Particularly as S wants to add something on the order of two dozen variants of the verbal prompts for the paid version.

I also downloaded and installed Zopfli, which meant first downloading and installing Homebrew, the "missing" package manager for OSX. Everything went fine, and installed OK. OSX uses Bash under the hood in terminal mode, and I'm more familiar with ksh and it's variants, but it's close enough to not be a real problem for simple stuff.

Sadly Zopfli didn't do much for me, my PNG's were created with GIMP at -9, and compressing an entire folder of card images saved a grand total of 0.1MB out of 10.5MB.

I talked to Tim for a bit, and he said the contractor is again 'winging it' and is going to start some excavation and potholing tomorrow, rather than Monday as he indicated earlier in the week. It looks as though Dave is on it, but I think I have to consider myself kind of 'on call' for now. I'll head down to Oxnard for sure on Sunday, and be onsite Monday at 7am.

I timed how long the commute from the boat would take on Saturday - 20 minutes to the Wells Road exit, and adding another 10 minutes to get through the usual backup means I need to leave the boat at 6:30am at the latest, meaning I'll be getting up at 5:30 or so, assuming I shower in the evening before. Which is pretty much the usual time I get up, so no big deal.

Wednesday 13 April 2016

Wednesday - Average day, a bit windy.

Since I pulled some muscle in my back I didn't do much in the yard. I've asked Glen to come by and we'll get started on all these spring tasks that are building up.

I did work on the app. Specifically I did a renaming, so now Nope_V8 exists, and can be sent to the App Store (testflight) independently of Nope_v6.

One of the things Apple did when they bought out Testflight was to trash the option for the downloaders to get different versions - they can now just obtain the latest - and S is using the old version and I didn't want to overwrite it with a more fully featured but probably buggy version.

Actually S and I met and discussed all this, and some other business stuff, at lunch. She was also kind enough to give me a haircut afterwards. R was home, and apparently getting the TSA Pre-Check thing done. I think NASA is paying for it, even.

Of course, having citizens PAY for the privilege of moving about their country without being groped by high school drop-outs is, in my view, unconstitutional. If the government thinks that check needs doing then it should pay for it out of the general treasury.

Tuesday 12 April 2016

Tuesday - Warming up.

I did more yard work, and picked up some landscape blocks and paver base from Home Depot. Moving eight hundred pounds of stuff did in my hands and back for the rest of the day, even though I had the help load it all into the Explorer for me.

They had some blocks useful for pre-fabbing raised gardens beds there, which I could use for my back yard. I need to get the trailer completely functional again, so that I can go get some compost and more construction stuff.

The side wall needs repairing, bad. I'll have to read up on how to do that.

Glen said he's available to help around the yard from time to time, and to watch the place when I'm on the road for a bit, so that's good.

There was also a bit of "prepping", namely repackaging some flour into two liter bottles. Which was, as people had mentioned, was a pain.

I noticed that the rice and bean bottles I filled a month or so ago are now "tin canned" inwards from the absorbers doing their job and removing the oxygen fraction from the bottles. Interesting.

I forgot to record the Weber book I read a few weeks ago.

Book #23 is therefore Hell's Foundations Quiver, by David Weber. OK, just more of the same Safehold stuff. Six Hundred and Seventy Two pages - and I forgot about it. I suppose that shows just how repetitive the books in the series have become (and the Amazon reviewers mostly agree). Oh well, a library book and free.

Monday 11 April 2016

Monday - Coolish.

Working on the app a little, but not feeling inspired. I did talk to S and we will probably add some extra language options for generalizations.

Cleaned up some more in the side yard and garage. I want to work on Riley's spot, but need to be able to get to my tools. Sigh.

Cut some bar stock to make bottoms for the stake bed pockets. If I'd realized that ones I bought didn't have bottoms I probably would not have bought them.

Did about four loads of laundry.

Sunday 10 April 2016

Sunday - cool.

Some grocery shopping in the morning. Some chores about the house.

The afternoon I spent just hanging around, to be honest. Not feeling up to much.

Picture of the Week

grand canyon

Sprinkling rain on the South Kaibab trail.

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