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WEEK 7 2014

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First Post, 17 March 2002

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Saturday 15 February 2014

Saturday - Happy Anniversary, Dad & Mom.

Mom and Dad, on vacation, at the Columbia River. Probably in the 1980's (judging from the style of their glasses!).

Somewhat overcast, but still warm, 80F or so. My friend Roger says there should be a cooling trend in the next few days though. And our winds are kind of back - it's been strange, not having a constant wind from the west, but when I walked out in the morning there was a warm gust coming from the southwest.

I vacuumed and cleaned downstairs, until about noon. Not much got done last weekend, so it was time. I put the kittens upstairs in the warm south facing bedroom during the process, to lessen the shock and awe that a fully functioning battlestation vacuum on them. Last time I vacuumed it was a couple of hours before Suzy dared come downstairs...

Went to lunch in Palmdale with R&S. Roger saw an old Mercedes for sale by the road, an early 80's Super Diesel, and we stopped and looked at it. The engine sounds good, though there was a substantial pool of oil (well, to my mind, apparently not a show stopper for old M's) under it, and he is now in negotiations to buy it. At which point his boy will more or less inherit the old Volvo.

It was a late lunch, therefore, and I essentially just napped when I got back. For some weird reason I'd been up to midnight the night before - very late for me - and needed some Z's. So nothing actually got done on the new planter :-(

In the evening went over and watched some of the Soichi Winter Olympics. At first we watched the 480i Tivo stream, but switched over to NBC 4-1, the HD channel, on the new TV. Much nicer. It made it a lot more interesting when you can see the puck in hockey, and the body movements of the athletes in the ski jumping and Grand S events.

I also got some very nice Valentine's Day cookies and muffins, and a mince pie, to take home :-)

Friday 14 February 2014

Friday - Still warm and sunny. It was tempting to get out in the yard, or clean up around the house (it didn't get done last weekend because I was ill) but I stuck to working in the office.

Still working on the app. I actually found a couple of bugs in the display logic, and fixed them. Then spent most of the rest of the day deciding on how to draw the imagery. I decided that the naive way I was going to draw was probably going to be too time consuming, so was looking at other ways. Probably I'll subclass UIImage and add a draw method that just changes the color of a high-alpha image, rather than do the addition thing I was considering originally.

Thursday 13 February 2014

Thursday - Warm again, 80F or so. Remarkable.

My friend Tim sent me a picture of his new oak floors in his house - nice! Maybe I'll do something like that when I redo the floors in this house. The carpets here are a disaster, but with cats, and kittens, and the Lancaster dust and dirt, maybe non-carpeted floors are the way to go.

I went over to Home Depot and bought another 30 landscape blocks for this weekend. It's hard to estimate how many I'll actually need - the ground slopes, so it'll be more than 60, but how many more is up in the air. No big deal, I should have enough to do the first couple of courses, and that will tell me how much more I need.

Blocks and east wall. You can see the slope - about 3 blocks high in the foreground,
and about one in the background corner. I'm keeping it a bit lower than the corner planter, probably.

Still working on the app. About to the point where I need to start writing the code to draw images, rather than just load them from pre-created images. We'd need to generate about 400 images to do it the way I was doing it for the prototype...

Wednesday 12 February 2014

Wednesday - Working on the app.

Went out to lunch with S and her daughter, who was still in town. I was surprised, I thought she was leaving on Monday, but she had visits to friends and her grandparents to make, so she delayed things a couple of days. I was glad to see her, and we discussed her photography business, and what people look for in trying out an iPad app. She's a firm believer in the "free, try before you buy" thing, either limited time or mostly disabled, but enough to see what you are getting.

Talked to S about the issues with the app logic - basically we transition from one sort of question to another, more difficult type, and need to pin down how/when we do that. I didn't realize the issue until I was scripting things out on the white boards. No big deal, this always happens, and I'm still grinding away on things.

Book #7 was The Dead in their Vaulted Arches (Flavia de Luce #5), by Alan Bradley. Flavia finds another body, during the exhumation of a saints bones...

Tuesday 11 February 2014

Tuesday - Feeling better. I worked a bit more on the app, and discovered some issues not covered in our Specifications, so I'll have to talk to S about them. Still struggling with objects, and where and when to call the model parts of the model-view-controller thing, but it's coming along.

Also did a bunch of bills. They'd been building up. I carefully checked my credit cart statement, no weirdness from using it at Target in December, but they've sent me a new card, and I'll have to transition over.

Mid day I went out and picked up a load of landscape blocks, 30 of them. I'll need at least that many more, but the idea is to have them ready for the weekend, so I can work without stressing the back too much. If I can get a planter or two constructed along the east wall I'll have a spot for the dirt I need to remove before installing more pavers in the side yard.

I think my friend Tim's pictures of the beautiful work he's doing on his own home has inspired me. Or shamed, something like that...

Monday 10 February 2014

Monday - Feeling a bit better, but not to the point where I'd want to make any long car trips...

Worked a bit on the app. Mostly just doing some graphics stuff - I installed GIMP on the old Mini (download from gimp.org, open dmg, drag into Applications folder) and it seems to work OK. I needed some transparent backgrounds and the very simple paint program I had on there didn't do that. For most stuff - color backgrounds, dots, blobs, stripes, it was fine, but since I'm layering masks I need a bit more oomph.

Sunday 9 February 2014

Sunday -Not feeling well at all. I feel a little less guilty about not getting a bunch of yard work done yesterday, obviously something was already troubling me. Some gunk picked up on the train maybe.

A neighbor was throwing things out yesterday, kind of a curb alert thing, stuff left by some departed dead-beat renters. I draw the line any anything that will go into my house's living quarters, but I picked up some clay flower pots and a bigger pet cage and a metal shelf. They're still in the back of the Explorer, I was too tired Saturday night and Sunday to remove them.

Book #6 was I am Half-Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce #4), by Alan Bradley. The de Luce's, on the edge of bankruptcy, have lent out their decrepit mansion to a film crew. Flavia is very busy with her own business: setting traps for Santa (her sister's claim he doesn't exist, but she figures snaring him will be proof!), but she takes an interest in the film world when the leading lady is murdered....

Flavia on a performance of Romeo and Juliet:

"... and I found myself wishing they had chosen a more exciting scene from the play, one of those involving toxicology, for instance, which are the only decent parts of Romeo and Juliet.
    We had been made to listen to the play in its entirety on one of Father's compulsory Thursday wireless nights, during which I had formed the opinion that while Shakespeare was good with words, he knew beans about poisons.
    The difference between poisons and narcotics seems to have escaped him, and he was in an utter muddle when it came to those vegetable and mineral irritants that act upon the brain and spinal cord.
    In spite of all the wordy hocus-pocus about gathering herbs by moonlight, Juliet's symptoms indicated the use of nothing more mystifying than plain old hydrocyanic acid administered in drinking water."

S did stop by in the later afternoon, and we went over some more specifications for the app. She's done some yeoman work on those, and a bunch of work on the imagery to use, once we get ready to install it.

The cat, Suzy, was studying the screen intently as we discussed what to do next. She tilts her head to once side in puzzlement, much like a human. I suggested that it was an instinctive motion to help a predators binocular vision focus but S thinks it's to bring the entire field of vision into just one hemisphere.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Cliffs at Sunset, 2009.

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