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WEEK 30 2016

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Saturday 23 July 2016

Saturday - Hot again, 109F officially, so actually hotter in town.

There is a huge fire in Santa Clarita (the Sand Fire), that has turned the sky brown and the light to a strange orange. I think it's keeping the temperatures down a bit.

In anticipation of the heat I ran the lawn sprinklers in the morning an extra time.

Too hot and disgusting to do anything else outside, though my foot is getting better.

My friend Tim texted a few times from the road. He was taking CA-395 up to Tahoe. I suggested a scenic detour to Trona, but sadly he'd already passed the turnoff. At least that's what he said....

Books so far this year.

#1 Madness in Solidar, (Imager Portfolio #9) #2 Solar Express #3 The Aeronaut's Windlass #4 A Call To Arms #5 Proven Guilty (Dresden Files, Book #8)	#6 Turn Coat (Dresden Files, Book 11) #7 White Night (Dresden Files #9) #8 Small Favor (Dresden Files #10) #9 Changes (Dresden Files #12) #10 Ghost Story (Dresden Files #13)
#11 Cold Days (Dresden Files #14) #12 Furies of Calderon #13 Skin Game (Dresden Files #15) #14 Academ's Fury (Codex Alera #2) #15 Cursor's Fury (Codex Alera #3)	#16 Captain's Fury (Codex Alera #4) #17 Princep's Fury (Codex Alera #5) #18 First Lord's Fury (Codex Alera #6) #19 The Lost Gate #20 The Gate Thief
#21 Son of the Black Sword #22 Hell's Foundations Quiver #23 Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (#1) #24 Iron Chamber of Memory #25 Rosario & Vampire Season 1	#26 Rosario & Vampire, Season 2 #27 The Rook #28, Into The Storm #29 Don't Make Me Think, Revisited (3rd edition) #30, The Long Earth
#31, The Long War #32 The Long Mars #33 The Long Utopia

Friday 22 July 2016

Friday - Very hot. Officially 106F at the airport, but 110F by my Explorer's thermostat, in Old Town Lancaster.

At Trevor and I Street in Lancaster.

I got a ride from T, and took the Explorer in to Scott's to get the shocks replaced. The front had to be done, and the rear were of the same vintage, so for $300 I did them all.

Scott also said the ball joints were worn, though not dangerous yet. No surprise, at nearly 260k miles.

While we waited I bought T breakfast at Karen's Kitchen, and had the doc check out the stitches on the foot. The foot is good, healing well, so I'll get the stitches out next Friday.

It was just after lunch when I picked up the repaired Explorer and noticed the extreme temperature. Yuck.

In the afternoon I read and sketched out the process (10 steps!) to read a piece of metadata programmatically in my code. It was in the 80's inside the office upstairs, too hot to code, so I'll work on that tomorrow morning.

Book #33 would be The Long Utopia, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. Well enough done, though they have been trying (in my opinion) to cram too much into the books: aliens, supermen, prequels, and what not.

I guess Sir Pratchett (he was knighted by the Queen) died at some point during the writing of the story. He was a quirky individual, and was most famous for his Diskworld series with a lot of understated british humor, but I can't say that I noticed any huge difference in the book style.

I see that there is one more book, The Long Cosmos, that just came out in June. I'll have to see if the library carries it.

Thursday21 July 2016 Thursday - Hot, low 100's.

Worked on the app a bit. The metadata is a real pain. One problem is that apparently Quicktime wasn't writing it! Yep, the "comments" field wasn't being saved. So I tried iTunes, and GarageBand, with much the same results at first.

Apparently the trick is to add the metadata in iTunes, then copy from the iTunes library and paste to the desktop. It took me a while to figure this out. Apple is making it pretty hard to get out of their little walled garden, but since they have to make some concessions to the public (and developers), it's doable.

If you want to read from the iTunes library, I note, it's about two lines of code - but that doesn't work for the app.

Book #32 was The Long Mars. If there is a "Long Earth", then what about the other planets and celestial bodies? Many many millions of "steps" from our Earth, 'Datum' Earth, the explorers are finding other intelligent species, and sometimes just their ruins. So...what will we find millions of 'steps' away on a Long Mars?

Wednesday 20 July 2016

Wednesday - Hot, in the 100's, and it's going to get hotter. They are predicting 106F by Friday, and 109F on Saturday.

I wanted to work on the app, but my foot was throbbing a bit, and I had to keep it elevated, so mostly I just read.

This was the AV Foundation stuff, but also some left over library books from the vacation trip.

I'd read what I'll now call Book #30, The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. The idea is simple: what if you could, just by flipping a switch, step "sideways" into a parallel version of Earth, but without people? And then step again, into a copy of that? And so on, and so on. Well written, as you'd expect from two science fiction pros.

I'd started the sequel, Book #31, The Long War, and finally finished it. This deals mostly with the knock-on effects of people being able to leave, civilization and authority, and the efforts of those left behind to extend their power over millions of empty Earths (they can't).

Tuesday 19 July 2016

Tuesday - Average hot again. Exactly Average: 99F is what we had, and what the average is. It was nice that the humidity was low, 4-5%, so the swamp cooler worked very well.

I sent a link to my sister in Portland, who replied with her temperature: 74F with 55% humidity (feels like 76F). Heh.

I went by the urgent care and got that infection in the left foot 'excised'. The Lidocane injection was extraordinarily painful, but worked great during the surgery and afterwards. Unless it gets infected (knock on wood!) I should be able to do some hiking around Labor Day.

They actually thought I was coming in for a follow-up, not the surgery, and weren't expecting to do it (hence the non-Friday appointment), but since the operating room & doctor were both available...

Three stitches. I go in Friday for a follow-up check (feet tend to get infected) and next Friday I get the stitches out.

It's not too painful, Ibuprofen level stuff.

Since I had to keep my foot elevated I just read the AVFoundation book during the afternoon.

It occurs to me that I could replace all the scattered stills, text and audio prompts (hundreds of them) with a single *.mp4 file, now that I know I can figure out how to extract specific bits. It may be too clunky or have too much lag, but it's a possibility.

S called to say that (1) she put the fear of God into the insurance company and they are going to pay her full value for the totaled vehicle, and (2) she'd broken a tooth and is scheduled for surgery tomorrow, when we had planned to get together and look at the iTunes Store video stuff she'd been working on.

It's a bummer for her, but it does give me some time to look into the video player parts of McCune's book.

Monday 18 July 2016

Monday - Average hot.

Working on various things, mostly the app. Feeling a bit slow, but have to forge ahead.

The Learning AV Foundation book by McCune arrived, and it's excellent. Exactly what I was looking for, and even has other stuff that I didn't know that I needed but did...

And, honestly, it's nice to look at some well written professional Objective-C coding. My own stuff is still pretty primitive and I found myself thinking "... so that's how you do such-and-so cleanly ...".

Called the doctor and scheduled the foot surgery for ... ulp, tomorrow. I thought they only did surgery on Friday, but so it goes. Sooner is better as far as I'm concerned.

Sunday 17 July 2016

Sunday - Hot. Some minor shopping in the morning.

I went by Walmart and picked up a visor CD holder. I don't like pulling over to switch CD's for books on tape, but it's kind of unsafe trying to wrangle to usual CD book holders. So this should help, for $2.50.

I did some light chores around the house and yard.

I had to go and ask the neighbor to turn down his loud radio. I could hear the vulgar lyrics inside my house, doors and windows closed, a/c and baseball game on.

Not much else going on.

Picture of the Week

A curious fish in the aquarium at Morro Bay.

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