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WEEK 29 2017

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Oxnard Weather Underground

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Saturday 22 July 2017

Saturday - Hot. Working away in the yard. G came by to help mow the lawn and some other chores, my hands being kind of messed up again.

We all went out to lunch at Mahli's in Palmdale, then Glen and I did a bit more work, then I sent him home at 3-ish because I was tired out. Oh to be in your early 20's...

I contacted the real estate agent for the distressed property in Tehachapi and will go up to see it tomorrow. He says it's "worse than the pictures". Yikes. Roger and Sheryl might tag along for moral support.

I mentioned this to my brother, who said that he'd been looking at an out of state property himself recently, in Nevada. Huh.

It occurs to me that the weirdness with the inaccessible file on Wednesday occurred after I'd downloaded Code::Blocks from SourceForge. SourceForge went over to the dark side some time ago, but people claimed (and I'd believed them), that they'd been bought out and that the new owners had gotten rid of all the malware and crap they were bundling with otherwise useful programs. I sure hope so...

Friday 21 July 2017

Friday - Hot. Working on app and STARS stuff.

I happened to notice, because I was trying to build something in there, that the garage east wall is cool to about 5' up the wall. It isn't a finished wall, but there is about a 2' thick layer of firewood stacked up against it on the outside! So, it keeps the heat out, but also supplies a steady stream of insects, including black widows.

I suppose I should finish it.

I finally called the vet this week, and told them that the rescue cat had escaped. So they'll put a hold on his file. I hope he didn't just crawl off and die somewhere.

RIP Goldie.

S took her to the vet because she was having breathing problems and a very distended abdomen. She was hoping it was just a bowel blockage or something, but the vet diagnosed it as congestive heart failure - the distension and breathing issues were because of all the fluid build ups from the weakened heart. So, rather than having her live out a few more days hopelessly gasping for breath she had to have her put to sleep. She said that the vet and help at Smith's Veterinary were very kind and sweet, and that it was as good an experience as these things can ever be.

Thursday 20 July 2017 Thursday - Hot.

I pinged Glen to see if he was around for yard work, but the family was up on Taboose Creek, fishing.

Wednesday 19 July 2017

Wednesday - Hot. Nice in the morning though, almost balmy.

Working on some app stuff, some stars stuff, not much to say there. Grinding stuff out.

Went by the library, dropped off some books, picked up a couple.

The Code::Blocks IDE works reasonably well. There was one oddity, where the executable was flagged as inaccessible by Windows. I'm not sure why - the only unusual thing I did was to open an ascii text file that wasn't code, just to see what it did with it (nothing special).

Nothing I did would allow me to run the executable, edit it, move it, delete it, and so on. Finally I decided to go to SAFE MODE and delete it.

Only, with Windows 10, SM doesn't really exist any more as a boot option. It used to be a boot time option, if one held down escape or F10 or whatever - no more. There is a ten or twelve step process, involving a command prompt window, that allows you to enter that mode and then manually set a flag in the registry. And then you can successfully delete the file. But now you are stuck in SM, and have to shut down, reboot, and go through the same 12 step process to undo the SM flag in the registry...

I finally bummed a haircut from S. It was awful trying to work or exercise with sweat building up in it - I'm not sure how I survived my younger days...

I found a very distressed property for sale in Tehachapi, and sent the link to a couple of friends. One reply was "GREAT FIND!!" and the other was "RED FLAGS EVERYWHERE!!". Heh.

I am trying to get back on a decent sleep schedule, after the vacation and hot days. But I was woken up just before midnight by neighbors who decided that it was a great time to drive their four wheeler illegally up and down the neighborhood streets, over and over and around and around. I yelled at them and they stopped, but I so want out of this town....

Tuesday 18 July 2017

Tuesday - Hot.

I actually remembered to set the trash out.

Apropos of that: One thing I've noticed lately is the the trash scavenger's have upped their game. Five or ten years ago we started to get people going through the trash for stuff they could sell to recycle centers. Usually an old man or woman walking through the neighborhood, with a bag or occasionally a shopping cart. Now it's younger people, in cars and trucks. One guy that I saw was just emptying the entirety of the recycle bins into the back of his pickup!

In general the number of homeless and panhandler's has exploded in Lancaster. They are now on all major corners in intersections here. Here in LA County they've just passed a new tax to generate $350,000,00 for the 'homeless'. They claim this is to help them, but I suspect it will just act as bait and draw more of them to Southern California. People respond to incentives...

Apropos of that, I received an unsolicited text from a friend visiting the Midwest (Iowa) this week. He commented the people there were polite, buttoned-up, and that was was not so much as a gum wrapper on the sidewalk, and absolutely no graffiti...

My brother emailed to say that he'd found a reasonably priced painting contractor, so the Martinez house and eave's will get a nice coat of paint. He also mentioned some electrical problems, and that the electrician had given him a ridiculous estimate to fix what seemed like a pretty simple problem. I may head up there at the end of the month and take a look.

Did some minor yard chores, then worked on the app until my hands gave out.

Monday 17 July 2017

Monday - Hot.

Did some work on STARS stuff.

Last time I talked to Dr. G I had attempted to demonstrate the little conversion code, but it wouldn't run on his laptop, it was 'missing DLL' time. Bah. Turns out that you have to add a -static flag to the gFortran compiler to make a stand alone executable.

I remembered that, once it had happened, but it's been a while since I did this stuff. I'd also, somehow, forgotten to include moments of inertia for beam elements, and since we are using FreeCAD as a preprocessor there was an issue with third point nodes not existing. Dr. G gently pointed out that we now have available a vector based definition for element coordinate systems, so I didn't need to create a dummy third point node, as I was initially thinking to do. Yay!

I used 'pi', 'e', and 'sqrt(2)' as vector components for the dummy STARS output file. Since the Iy and Iz I inserted are the same, the beam elements are therefore symmetric about the longitudinal axis and any arbitrary vector is fine. There is a remote chance that the longitudinal axis could be aligned with the vector, but it's a small chance, and really the point is just to make a file that people can view and edit with the standard preprocessor, not a 'real' model.

I downloaded and tried out the Code::Blocks IDE for the gFortran stuff. I've been using the command line and Vim, but maybe this is better. The syntactical highlighting is nice.

So, I finished that up and (I think) sent him a version via Dropbox.

Did some work on App stuff too. Trying to wrap my brain around the 'game model' routines...

Sunday 16 July 2017

Sunday - Hot.

I went to WinCo in the morning, picked up some groceries.

Afterwards S came by and we loaded the dogs and their paraphernalia into her van, and she took them home. They like me, but they were ecstatic to see her. I'll miss them, but it's nice to have my back yard to myself for the first time in three weeks.

They, and their bedding, desperately need a bath.

I did a few chores, inside and out, but not much else.

The house is staying reasonably cool. If I don't have occasion to open the garage door for a couple of days it stays a LOT cooler. This is common sense, but it's surprising how strong the effect is. The temp is perhaps 85F in there, instead of 100F. Since it's directly under the master bedroom this makes a difference.

Picture of the Week

Cayucos Beach

Cayucos looking North. It's a color photo of a gray scale world.

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