travels and images

WEEK 21 2014

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First Post, 17 March 2002

Twelve Years Ago, This Week 2002

Eleven Years Ago, This Week, 2003

Ten Years Ago, this week, 2004

Nine Years Ago, this week, 2005

Eight Years Ago, This Week, 2006

Seven Years Ago, This Week, 2007

Six Years Ago, This Week, 2008

Five Years Ago, This Week, 2009

Four Years Ago, This Week, 2010

Three Years Ago,
This Week,
2011

Two Years Ago,
This Week,
2012

One Year Ago,
This Week,
2013

Saturday 24 May 2014

Saturday - A long day. I went to yard sales in the morning, picked up a couple of books - a nice Excel 2007 book and a paperback copy of what looks to be an interesting novel. Also a copy of Bruno Bettelheim's book wherein he blames autism on the parents. That was for S, who read parts of it to us in horrified amusement.

In the afternoon and early evening I helped A move stuff out to the new place. He's moved a lot from the yard and his shop, but this was the weekend to move household stuff. Fortunately the weather was nice, not too hot and not too windy, and we got a lot done.

Friday 23 May 2014

Friday - I finished Book #20, iOS Drawing: Practical UIKit Solutions, by Erica Sadun. Not a bad book, probably worth the $14, but not a great one either. Oh well.

Book #21 was How to Massage Your Cat, by Alice Brock. Somehow I don't think I'll be doing that anytime soon....

"But Ed!" I hear you saying, "You can't count 32 pages as a book!"

Heh. If it's good enough for the Library of Congress to consider it a book, who am I to argue? (And whaddya know, I'm caught up again...)

I put a small a/c unit in my upstairs office window. It works, but it's so noisy outside at times that I can't work in there. This afternoon and evening for example: two parties going on simultaneously. Not crazy stuff, but it's impossible to concentrate...

Thursday 22 May 2014

Thursday - I picked up some river rock for the small planter in the front yard. It's bug infested, and weed infested, so I think a couple of flower pots on rocks will work better. I cleared out the weeds and loose dirt, and capped off the sprinkler heads, but my hands gave up the ghost, so I'll work on it this weekend to finish it up.

Not much else going on. The neighborhood has been quiet, but I imagine that will change on Memorial Day Weekend. We had one early party, but it was around the corner and fairly sedate.

Wednesday 21 May 2014

Wednesday - Downloaded Erica Sadun's book iOS Drawing: Practical UIKit Solutions, $14 from Amazon. I'm trying to save money these days, but I'm also trying to hasten getting a product out the door, so...

Met with S for lunch at her place, went over some graphics and looked at what the competition is up to.

My friend C came by in the afternoon and dropped off a nice big watermelon. We took the kids out back to look at the vegetable beds. When the little boy asked why bricks were stacked up on the grass I answered "To keep the cat from getting his paws hurt in the gopher traps." and started to pick one up to show him. When I realized that the trap had worked I quickly set the brick back down, without him seeing the insect infested remains...

Synchronicity. When watching my Korean soap in the evening there was an ad for Irish Tourism. Blarney Castle was there, and, surprise, a couple of views of the bronze statue of Patrick Kavanagh!

Tuesday 20 May 2014

Tuesday - Not much going on.

Fiddling about with layers and animations. For some reason I am getting translucency where I don't want it. Very annoying. As far as I can tell I'm doing things correctly, so it's a puzzle. But iOS graphics are a mess: there is UIKIT and Core Graphics and Quartz and OpenGL, and they aren't the same. And even within a graphics library there are weirdnesses, things that bridge, things that don't, memory and garbage collection. And then there's the library itself - an image can have an alpha - fair enough - but also has an separate opacity (i.e. opacity isn't 1-alpha!). And then the layer that the graphic is in has it's own alpha and opacity values. And, should one be overlaying images (like me) - there are 28 separate blend modes in Core Graphics alone!

And finally, just to make it interesting, iOS 7 likes to tint things on it's own.

This is stuff I expected to spend essentially zero time researching, so it's very annoying.

Monday 19 May 2014

Monday - Working away on the app. Doing a bit of yard work. Cooler than I expected.

I was fiddling about with the Kill-A-Watt meter. The swamp cooler, in water pump only mode, pulls 75W, much more than I expected. It's windy enough on occasion that I sometimes just run the pump, and let the winds do the work of the squirrel cage motor, and today was such a day.

Checking, both together pull about 290W on 'Low', so the squirrel cage motor pulls 220W, or about 1/3HP. on 'High' it's 320W, or 1/2HP. I could swear that I paid for a 3/4HP motor, but I'm too lazy to open up the case and check the plate right now. But it would explain why it's always seemed a bit puny, flow wise.

Heard from the boss finally. It's been about a month. Sounds like a tough one for him.

Sunday 18 May 2014

Sunday - Another windy day.

I didn't actually do much. Still resting the hands. Fiddled with little stuff, another coat of paint on the tool handles and transplanting the marigolds.

Back in 2002 the POTW was of a bronze statue in Ireland, by the canal running in front of our hotel:

and my comment was "On it is a bronze statue of someone sitting - I'm not sure who, it's one of the mysteries of that place to me. ...We may never know."

Looking at it now, it occurred to me that Google Earth is my friend. So I did a bit of sleuthing. Firstly, it's the 'Mespil Hotel', not 'Meslip Hotel'. The canal is the Grand Canal (still functional and in use).

By clicking on the images I was able to discover that the statue is that of the poet Patrick Kavanagh (although at least one image is titled, incorrectly, James Joyce).

The canal location, according to Wikipedia, is inspired by lines from his poem "Lines written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin":

O commemorate me where there is water
canal water preferably, so stilly
greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
commemorate me thus beautifully.

Sadly, even using Google Street View, there was still no sign of my missing underclothes...

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Another shot of the parrot from the other day.

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