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WEEK 51 2016

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Saturday 17 December 2016

Saturday - It is predicted to get cold after this front passes, down to 20F or so overnight.

Not much to say, chores around the house in the morning, then lunch with friends.

Over for dinner with friends out in Antelope Acres. How I wish I was living out there now. Ah well.

As usual I ended up defending my 'prepping' ways. Which amounts to maybe $10-20/month averaged over all of last year. After chuckling over the usual 'Zombie Apocalypse' comments I pointed out that we were about 10 miles from the San Andreas fault, and the the I-14 and the I-15 would probably be cut in 'the Big One'. And that Los Angeles County would, quite properly, be concentrated on helping the millions of below in LA proper, and the San Fernando and Simi Valley basins, and not a few thousand in some distant desert town.

We got to talking propane and Aaron mentioned that he would drive into town to fill propane bottles. Since he has a large tank on his property I was surprised: but it turns out that the tank vendor is chargin retail prices: $3+ a gallon for filling, while Costco is charging about $2. Interesting.

Friday16 December 2016

Friday - Gray and windy.

Storm Update: A few more raindrops overnight and in the morning, not enough to even register 1/100th of an inch locally.

It sounds as though a lot of places had a lot of rain - my brother's rain gauge up in Martinez registered 1.3" for example, so some good came out of the storm.

I went to open the C# program from yesterday...and the design form is gone. Googling it turns up reports of the same bug from up to 10 years ago... As I reported to Sheryl, "Different circus, same monkeys". Bah.

I could feel my shoulders sag, in actual physical reaction to this. Can't be helped I guess, that's the start of the art in programming in 2016.

I was doing a bit of research on sound recording for vocals, interesting. It's apparently not easy to make a good studio at home without some serious effort. Eventually it occurred to me to check for professional studio's locally - and to my surprise there are a lot. Who would have guessed?

Our needs are very simple - a quiet studio, a good mic, and a bit of engineering for minor post-processing, for English, Spanish and Han. Probably not more than a couple of hours of studio time I'd guess.

Thursday 15 December 2016 Thursday - Gray and overcast. They are predicting a big storm, for late this afternoon.

Working away on this and that. Not much to say about that.

Played around a bit with Visual Studio and C#. Basic stuff.

Storm Update: About 3pm we had a few drops of rain, not enough to even make the streets wet. There was wind, but no moisture. I finally went to bed at 10pm, having waited hours for the promised storm front. It looks like it went around the valley.

Wednesday 14 December 2016

Wednesday - Another peculiarly warm and sunny day. They do predict a front bringing rain will come in by weeks end.

Did some app stuff. We were supposed to meet up with an expert in switch-assistance technologies, but she canceled, and since she's only in the valley once a week it'll be next Wednesday at the earliest before we can meet.

This actually works out, because the sample switch app I wrote to illustrate what we are doing no longer works properly. I'm not sure why - it's true that the side loaded development stuff expires after 6 months and I have to re-install it, but I've done it before without problems, and as recently a four or five months ago. The new version of Xcode perhaps?

So wearying - it's hard enough writing code without battling Apple's utter indifference to developers and stability.

But, rather than getting take out for our guest from a fancy Indian place, we instead went to Dickies and gorged on pulled pork and sausage. Always a bright side, if you look hard enough.

A different tooth, the broken one, started bothering me on Tuesday evening and into today. Sigh. I guess it's next in line for $$.

Book #64 was The Vindication of Man, by John C. Wright. This is, I think, the fifth book in the series. I thought it was going to be the end of the series, but apparently not. Enjoyable, in Wright's completely over-the-top-space-opera sort of way.

Tuesday 13 December 2016

Tuesday - Another nice day. Crazy nice. About 70F.

I'm very tired of cats fighting. They usually wait until I'm completely immersed in the project, then explode in snarls and screams directly beneath my desk.

I wrote a very nice Objective-C object to cough up prompts on demand, but integrating it into the old code is turning out to be a real bear. So much spaghetti code. Can't blame anyone but myself though.

Book #63 is another 'forgotten' novel for earlier in the year, Ronin Games (Wearing the Cape #5) , by Marion G. Harmon. Another enjoyable entry in the series.

Monday 12 December 2016

Monday - Another nice day.

I called the vet, and I'll take Budd in for his FERC booster tomorrow morning. He hasn't been on a car trip in a couple of months, wonder how he'll react? I'm curious as to his weight as well - my scale is rusted out and I haven't been able to find out how much he's gained. He still eats a lot - but no longer his body weight daily, sometimes there are morsels and scraps left....

Update: he weighs just over 16 pounds now, so about 4 lbs increase in six weeks! He was ok with the car trip, though not delighted by the experience.

Worked on the app for most of the day. And worked myself into a pretty good mad. There was a problem, some sort of namespace collision (it happens), but the debugger was absolutely useless, as usual. As was the error message:

"linker command failed with exit code -1 (use -v to see invocation)"

Seriously Apple, that's the best you can do? Am I supposed to take a couple of days off and write a compiler script and do it from the command line, because you can't be bothered to report errors correctly?

It's like I'm programming in 1966. I just need a background screen shot of vacuum tubes with their filaments glowing to make the experience complete.

Anyway, after failing to get any useful information from Xcode I just completely renamed a bunch of the new stuff and the error went away. Total voodoo programming.

Book #62 would be Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd, by Alan Bradley. This is another of the 'forgotten books' from earlier in the summer. This was another Flavia de Luce story, but sadly it was not up to the earlier books, and I actually started skipping bits in boredom.

Sunday 11 December 2016

Sunday - Sunny, pretty warm for a winter day in the high desert.

WinCo & 99-Cent and Walmart shopping in the morning. I was puzzled by the size of the crowds in Walmart, until I realized it was after 10am.

I also picked up a BBQ to small appliance propane adapter hose.

Not much else going on. Some chores, the usual Sunday stuff. Tried not to do any typing, but did some thinking about the app and how to approach the modifications for next week: definitely more modular and object-oriented methods.

Picture of the Week

Jimmy on my knee

It's nice to have a warm lap to lay on while watching pigeons...

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