Friday
- back in Lancaster, but only briefly, before heading down to San Diego
for a long weekend stay over. It's a birthday party for a friends
mother, a very nice lady, a little early this year, but the weather
looks promising.
I get to tag along, and get a free ride down and back, so that's cool.
Riley, enjoying last year's low October sun.
Thursday 27 May
2010
Thursday
- another day of working on stuff. I don't want to get too far ahead on
this stuff, we might run out of billable hours, but we're OK for now.
It was a rotten night at the
boat on Wednesday. The weather was nice, but the loud and annoying
people in a nearby apartment apparently decided to start a party at
10:00pm. They went on and on,
until about 2:30am. I closed the hatches and put my earplugs in, but
finally had to resort to putting a radio by my head. Sheesh.
Time to get a new boat slip.
But
noise pollution is everywhere. I mentioned the partyers, but when I got
down to the boat earlier in the evening there were also:
somebody practicing electric guitar across the water
someone's barking dog in the apartments
someone's crying baby in the apartments
Wednesday 26 May
2010
Wednesday
- down in Ventura, doing various things that, in theory, will result in money rolling in, at some point in the future.
Like I said earlier, vbscript can be irritating. From an email to my sister:
"I was comparing two spreadsheets, and some values didn't seem to
match. They looked OK but the code said different. Finally realized that
somebody had entered some (not all) values with hidden trailing blanks
(spacebar).
Jeez. There's a half hour of my life I'll never get back. The sad
part: this happens every couple of years and I forget until it bites me
again. Simple fix: use the vbscript TRIM function on character data read
from spreadsheets."
Tuesday 25
May
2010
Tuesday
- working.
Monday 24 May
2010
Monday
- working.
Sunday 23 May_2010
Sunday
- not much to say. Doing a bit of script programming.
It's
kind of fun - and irritating - work. It's impossible, almost, to write
clean code, and readable code, in BASIC or Vbscript. Yet it's quick,
and sometimes rewarding in a way FORTRAN isn't.
Book #31 was Blackout, by Connie Willis. This is a time travel book, that takes place in the same framework as the earlier read To Say Nothing of the Dog.
It's not quite as light in tone, and takes place during the Battle of
Britain, and follows several Ca. 2060 time traveling historians as they
research various aspects of life in the early days of WWII, the Battle
of Britain, Dunkirk, and the ensuing Blitz. Things go badly, and they
find themselves unable to get back to the future (have they changed
history?), and have to live with much the same wartime uncertainty and
danger that the ordinary Britons ("contemps") experience.
The
book was well done, but turns out to be just the first volume of a set,
leaving the reader hanging. A number of seemingly secondary characters
- time travelers and ordinary people - are drawn in nearly as much
detail at the three protagonists, so that one has to wonder exactly
what their part will be in the second volume.
Picture of
the Week
Photo
Notes: Aqueduct and snow, west Antelope Valley 2009.
