Saturday - Working on assembling tax stuff, pretty much all day. Bah. Apropos of that: I resisted the urge to actually vacuum, but the kitchen is cleaner than it has been in a while.
Sadly there is still more to do before Monday's appointment.
In
the evening I streamed some video on my iPad. It works just fine for
that. I prefer the big TV, but the onscreen guides are so slow and
broken that it's a real hassle to find stuff. I guess I should cancel
my cable subscription, except for a few episodes of the Mentalist and
Elementary I haven't watched anything on it in about a month - since
the Superbowl in fact.
In theory one can stream from the iPad to the TV, but Hulu, for one, has actually disabled that.
Friday
1
March
2013
Friday
- So we met with our app artist in the morning. Sadly it doesn't look
like it's going to work out with her, so we'll have to do something
else. We'll pay her for what she's done, but it is clear she needs a
few more miles on her paintbrush. Ah well.
I
stopped to put gas in the Explorer, and noticed, on resetting the trip
odometer (I guess I've been scarred for life by that car with the
broken odometer) that the main odometer had recently turned over:
I bought the Explorer at a well cared for 60K, it's still running strong. [although the transmission sometimes makes a "thump" sound on starting]
Thursday 28 February 2013
Thursday
- Spent about 8 hours on the "new" app, which appears to be my current
Objective-C limit. Things are coming along. There are a couple of new
things I need to add, so I'm researching those. Had another nice walk,
though my heel was aching a bit, so I didn't go too far.
I saw this old cabin cruiser in a field the other day:
[update:
for some reason this image was sideways after the first posting. Some
weirdness with the paintbrush app on the Mac. I used gimp, on the PC,
to rotate it to the correct orientation later.]
Which
reminds me, that old full keel sailboat over on 20th street that I've
mentioned before, possibly an old Albin Vega; when we went to
lunch the other day I noticed that it looks like someone is taking a
chainsaw to it. The bow had been cut off. What a shame. It's been on
the hard up here in the AV for many years, so maybe it had some serious
problems.
Wednesday 27 February
2013
Wednesday
- Working on my tax document collection (I see my tax people Monday), and the GIS stuff, and on the App stuff as well.
For the GIS it was mostly just
reading - I've done the corrections to the map, but I need to get them
into the Manifold SQL tables. I've been cutting and pasting, but I want
to see if there is a faster and less error prone way. Sadly I can't
bill the client for that sort of research...
For the App is was research on
how to import user's pictures into an app, via the Photo Gallery, and
scrollable windows. Not hard, per se, but it all takes time to research
and implement. I want the users to be able to drag the thumbnails, and
that's another thing I need to learn to do.
My reading has really slowed down, less than a book a week! In 2012 I'd read 30 books by this week, in 2011 I'd read 22. Well, the iOS stuff has been keeping me busy.
Tuesday 26 February
2013
Tuesday
- Working away on this and that. Took a nice walk, 3.5mi,
before lunch. Started in with a t-shirt, wool shirt and
sweater, ended in t-shirt alone. Warmish. I saw my first tree in bloom
- it's a bit early, and it's been cold, but this was in a back yard
near a house.
I
note that Kompozer on the Win7 partition here is a lot snappier than
the old Sony. I can recall when the Sony was snappy, or seemed that
way. One of the nice things about installing your own OS is that the
various chunks of bloatware that the manufacturers put on the system
are absent- no useless Sony s/w taking up cycles, no ads for AOL
installed by Dell, and so on.
I guess I should install Dropbox as well. I hate little utilities that 'steal cycles', but it's pretty darn useful.
Monday 25 February 2012
Monday
- More Win 7 installs. For someone planning to use the Apple side I'm
sure spending a lot of time in the little Windows partition. Today it
was AVG, Vim, Gimp, Blender,
Kompozer, coreFTP and so on. It's a little startling how long this all
takes.
Things that I
didn't put on: Adobe Flash and Adobe Acrobat.
(1) Flash has always been a menace, and I didn't even
consider using it, really.
(2)
Acrobat,despite also being a menace, was a problem. It's the
de facto standard for documents
in PDF format, but clearly it has serious security issues. Adobe is
apparently unwilling or unable to address root cause of the constant
security
problems - there was another vulnerability two or three days
ago! I'm just tired of looking at their little icon on my taskbar
demanding
that I apply the patch-of-the-week. Enough is enough.
There
are other free pdf readers out there, so I download one of them
(SumatraPDF), and we'll
see if that works. Firefox has a built in PDF reader now, and Google
Doc's also reads them
If it turns out to be an enormous problem I can install it at any time,
but right now it's time to see if I can live without it.
I was careful when installing AVG. It's a huge bloated pig, and I chose
my install options to avoid the various toolbars and the search window
hijacking code that it really wanted to load my system up with. I think that
stuff, installed on the old XP laptop was a big contributor to
it's slowness, even before the current issues. We'll see.
A pleasant surprise:
Bootcamp allows me to see, read, write and copy between the OSX
partition and the Windows partition from the Windows partition. I just
assumed that wouldn't work, but everything shows up in Windows
Explorer and works fine. Huh.
Sunday 24 February 2012
Sunday
- Warmer than Saturday, and not blowing quite so hard. I took
the opportunity to do a 5 miles walk. I was sore afterwards - I've been
a slug this year - but it was just leg muscle soreness, not the usual
near blisters on my feet. The new boots are nice.
I did a bit of work on the app stuff, but mostly spent the day trying
to get Windows 7 setup the way I like it. This was mostly
Firefox, Google Earth, Microsoft Office. It's a little
startling how much stuff I use, and how much stuff is just accumulated
cruft.
I was going to install Office as a suite, but realized that it would
install Outlook and a bunch of other barnacles, so just installed
Excel, Word, Access, Powerpoint and Project individually. It took
longer, but it's cleaner that way.
And then, of course, Update had to download another 250MB of updates
and patches for those...
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: Mountains and trees near Wrightwood, Ca.
