Saturday - A nice day. I worked on the app in the morning, went out for lunch with friends, then did some stuff around the house.
I
did go out and buy Jimmy a harness. For now I just am putting it by his
food bowl, and in favorite sleeping spots, to accustome him to it.
Right now he just thinks it's a toy of some kind. Next I will drape it
over him, then I'll momentarily put it over him and take it off, while
he's eating. Eventually he'll associate it with good things and we'll
try it outside.
Interestingly,
I've run out of RAM on the Mac a couple of times. If I'm running
Bootcamp with Win7, and Xcode, and Safari, sometimes the available RAM
drops to nothing and it starts swapping to disk. I've allocated 2GB to
Bootcamp Win7, and 2 processors, but there should still be 6GB of Ram
available on the Mac side. Not a bit deal, I can shut down the Win7
partition most of the time, and Xcode response is notably faster when I
do.
Part of the problem is Safari, which like all modern
browswers is a pig, needed 400MB just to have a single plain window
(Google) open, and a lot more if you're doing anything. Firefox is the
same.
Apparently my cats spend as much time observing me as I do them!
When
I went upstairs to work in the office, Suzy ran ahead up the stairs. I
walked into the office, closed the door to keep cats out and sat down.... and there was a subdued "bleeerrrrkkkk"
under my chair. Suzy knew I was going to my office, and just went there
ahead of me! Apart from the location under my chair, which endangers
her paws and tail from the chair wheels, I don't really have an
objection. Jimmy and Riley are obnoxious, but she just wants to hang
out at my feet.
Friday
17 October2014
Friday
- Fiddling around with the app still. I need to re-organize things,
adding in the extra game levels is getting complicated, the game model
needs changes...
I
was mulling over ways to cat-proof the yard, but it's difficult.
Perhaps I'll get a harness and see if Jimmy can stand wearing it. If so
I can just set up a tie-line arrangement rather than a huge cat run or
adding a barrier to the entirety of the fence.
. It'll be cheap, easy, and not interfere with yard maintenance!
Thursday 16 October2014
Thursday
- I drove a friend down to LA, that took up most of the day, not getting back until mid-afternoon. A bit of app work afterwards.
Wednesday 15 October2014
Wednesday -
Another nice day.
I
worked on the app all day, mostly just moving stuff around, over to a
new "storyboard" version. That took about 5 hours alone. For some
reason there is no simple "duplicate" option, the process to make a
duplicate version is obscure multi-step process and replete with traps
for the unwary. Anyhoo, that's done. I also talked to S about some
stuff that was unclear to me - writing Specs is hard! - and got some
good feedback.
In fact, since she needed a ride to the mechanic I also got dinner out of it!
I've
had trouble sleeping recently, and started taking Melatonin again.
Maybe it's the placebo effect, but it does seem to work for me.
Tuesday 14 October2014
Tuesday
- It's cooling down. High of maybe eighty, but overcast and 70F by sundown.
Chores
in the morning, dishes, garage cleaning up in there. I've been
disassembling the paint booth, and putting various stuff away, and it's
getting a bit more organized in there.
Lunch, then doing laundry
and working on the app until early evening. This has been mostly
cleanup and re-organizing things, with some logic and code updates here
and there.
It's a Microsoft Patch Tuesday, and supposedly a big one, so I will probably reboot the Win7 partition this evening.
I
talked to my sister K today, she's moved to a suburb of Portland. So
far she's enjoying the cool and temperate climate away from the
desert...
Looks like
the Ebola thing is getting worse. Talking to Tim this morning he
mentioned that he'd heard that a big concern was indirect transmission
to the US, via people getting infected in latin America, and
then coming in over the unsecured southern border. I hadn't even
thought of that, yikes.
Monday 13 October 2014
Monday
- School in the morning, despite it being Columbus Day. Ah well. It went OK, with a decent enough lecture from the
instructor, stuff about using Adobe In Design.
We
also put in a
good two hours of lab. When I asked the attendant she said S and I had
only
five each so far - which is an undercount of two or three hours low by my estimate.
Not good, I need to
start keeping track. Now we're at seven. The last couple of weeks will
see the lab too crowded to get in, and it's week 8 already, so that
leaves us about eight weeks to put in 16 hours more.
When I asked the instructor when the test (that he's always
mentioning) will be, he turned around and told the class "Ed here wants a test, so we'll
have one the week after next!" There's a reason I'm loved
everywhere I go... But seriously, isn't there some sort of students
bill of rights in schools now, where the instructor has to give you a
syllabus and the grading and test schedules?
The instructor also
claims that it's just a fifteen question, multiple choice quiz, and
that he will go over every question and the correct answer next week -
and that unless this class is unlike all others that 1/3rd will flunk
it. It's hard to believe, but that's what he says...
Adobe, good old Adobe. I mentioned that I was thinking of putting some
old versions of Photoshop and Illustrator on an old XP box (not connected to the internet), rather than
the newer Bootcamp Win7, because of the horrible security issues and
user trust issues they've had in the past. I started wondering if I was over-reacting,
telling myself that Adobe would have by now cleaned up it's evil ways and thuggish
attitude towards its users.
Heh.
Via
a Slashdot article: "Nate at
the-digital-reader.com reports that Adobe is spying on any computer
that runs Digital Editions 4, the newest version of Adobe's Epub app.
They are collecting data about what users are reading, and they're also
searching users' computers for e-book files and sending that
information too. That includes books not indexed in DE4. All of the
data is sent in clear text. "
Not only are they recording wheat you are reading in their ebook, they're searching the files on your hard drive and collecting what you read in other readers. Shootings too good for that bunch.
Then it was lunch, then home, then a kind back to work on the app again.
The Ebola thing seems to be getting worse. Apparently the CDC is now
just a bunch of politically correct politicians, with no clue. A second
person in the US has tested positive, and the first guy has died. I
went to the Surgeon General's page and ... we don't have a Surgeon
General. We've an acting Surgeon General though, and the web page on
Ebola there says: "whatever the CDC says".
We're screwed.
Sunday 12 October2014
Sunday
- Morning was devoted to various chores. It's always something. I did
continue sorting stuff, and shelving it. There's a bunch of stuff I can
get rid of - 6 gallon sized containers of antifreeze for example. I don't
work on cars much anymore, I can give them away to someone. Then there
is a lot of yard fertilizer/poison stuff that I need to consolidate,
I then went out to lunch with friends to celebrate a birthday, and then home to watch the
Chargers play a pretty good game. The niner's play tomorrow night, on ESPN, which I don't get.
After that a quiet evening. They guy down the street was playing his
music again in the afternoon. Not quite loud enough to be complaint
worth, but loud enough to be annoying. Bah.
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: Lunch at the Mexican buffet.
