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WEEK 33 2016

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Saturday 13 August 2016

Saturday - Hot, 106F officially. 80F inside the house by late afternoon. I had to turn on the mechanical a/c as an aid.

I went to yard sales with S and R, more out of boredom than anything else. I picked up a file folder, a USB laptop cooler, and an unused bandanna kerchief - all for a dollar. And a new-to-me metal rake, since my old one fell apart this spring.

Lunch was Mahli's in Palmdale, my treat since I actually got paid a week ago, and then everyone went to their respective homes and hid inside from the heat...

Actually I need to pick up the laptop cooler and the rake from them at some point.

Which reminds me: I've been meaning to build a yard tool holder for rakes, shovels, and such like for a while, just haven't gotten around to it. I have the little tines, I just need to drill and paint up a board and attach the tines, and then (probably) attach it to the block wall.

Friday 12 August 2016

Friday - Hot out.

Still unwell, though better than yesterday. I'd canceled my dental appointment for the morning, glad I did.

On S's advice I took a Bonine tablet, and either that or time helped, and I was able to keep food down by evening. Flat 7-up and some chicken soup anyway, all I dared.

Book #37 was Hollow City, by Ransom Riggs. The sequel to yesterdays book. Entertaining, but not as good.

There's a third book, but it's still back ordered at the library.

Thursday 11 August 2016 Thursday - Hot.

Feeling unwell, with quite the stomach upset. Something I ate or the flu? Worked for a couple of hours in the morning, but really wasn't up to much for the rest of the day. Antacids and (after painful experience) nothing to eat and nothing but an occasional sip of water for the rest of the day.

Book #36 was Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs. Entertaining.

Wednesday 10 August 2016

Wednesday - Hot, a bit over a hundred I'd guess.

Not much going on. Too hot to work outside...

Worked on the app. Had to debug an intermittent off-by-one thing, but finally got it done about 6pm...

Tuesday 9 August 2016

Tuesday - Average hot. High 90's.

Did my short morning walk, then did a bunch of necessary chores in the side yard.

I'd heard some rustling, walking there in the evening yesterday, and was concerned. With good reason: it looks like mice or rats had found the bags of birdseed on the metal shelves near the chimney, and chewed them open: the seed was scattered everywhere. So I cleaned things up and put the birdseed into containers. I also had a box of diatomaceous earth there, for which the bottom had fallen out, so I put that into containers as well (my containers are actually old kitty-litter containers, the 20# size, with sturdy sides and covers).

Realizing I was now almost out of birdseed, and finding that the old hummingbird feeder had failed (sunlight destruction of the plastic after six or seven years in the high desert) I made a quick trip by Winco and Home Depot and picked up seed and a new feeder.

And, as long as I was out and about, went by the bank and deposited a check; and also went by Walmart and picked up a bin to put old financial records in - they are scattered all over and I wanted to consolidate. And with the back-to-school sales the price was right.

I had a reasonably productive day on the app afterwards. Debugging the added language feature, which is occasionally wrong. The worst kind of bug is the intermittent type... Fixed one bug, found another...

Monday 8 August 2016

Monday - Hot.

I took a walk in the morning, about 6:30am. Cool and clear, with the sun just up. Just over a mile, but it felt so good to start getting back in shape. I'm getting overweight, even by my own lax standards.

I'll bump it up to 2 miles in a few days.

It looks like the teachers are back in school, which suggests the students will start in a day or two. It seems early...

When I went in the office later in the morning I noticed the laptop fan was running. I'd noticed yesterday, but just assumed it was the external drive backing up stuff. Not so!

Apparently there is a bug in the OSX search/indexing daemon for Spotlight that can cause it to run continuously, using as much of the CPU and disk as it can.

I think I mentioned this happening on the Windows 7 partition last year or the year before. I was never able to fix it then.

Now it's happening on OSX El Capitan. But when a couple of the simpler fixes didn't work (removing some items from the search, rebooting, ...) I found a command on an Apple forum to let one nuke the process from the command line:

$ sudo mdutil -a -i off

and it worked:

You can see the Processes drop from 40% to almost nothing.

Later in the mid-afternoon the neighbor was going crazy with his music. I endured it for a while, then went over and asked him to stop.

So, with all the distractions it really wasn't a good programming day.

Sunday 7 August 2016

Sunday - Hot. In the low 100's.

I did some shopping in the morning, then small chores around the house and yard.

I went by Home Depot to get some mite oil, which upon reading the ingredients, is just water diluted mineral oil. Hmm. I just picked up the concentrate, but it might be cheaper just to buy mineral oil in bulk online and use that.

I also picked up a 3-pack of Philips "60W" LED bulbs on sale (9.5W, 800 Lumen).

At the 99-Cent store earlier I had picked up a couple of inexpensive solar yard lights, and a couple of LED lights. Upon inspection the LED bulbs were 6700 degree color - way too blue. They were some no-name brand, but would be suitable for the garage. The Philips from Home Depot were 2700 degrees, and appear very natural. I'll replace the lights in the upstairs office that are on about 8 hours a day. These new bulbs are mildly semi-directional unfortunately, so the light I use downstairs the most - the reading light, isn't a good match.

Reading the blog, this is the two year anniversary of starting on the app code named: "Nope". Yikes.

Picture of the Week

Gold Lake in the Sierra Nevadas.

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