WEEK 36 2015
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Saturday
5 September 2015
Saturday - Warm.
Not much to say. I finally put the shelves up, then took the lowest down and
added some hooks to hang both metric and English wrenches from, holes for
screwdrivers, etc, then put it back up. Then I started, finally, organizing
things to go onto the shelf's, the commonly used tools and such. Even spots
for nut drivers: I note that my 5/16" driver is missing. I think it's the
one that fits computer case screws, it's probably in the house somewhere:-)
I also sorted out about ten pounds of mixed screws and nails that I'd picked
up in an old leather bag, for a dollar at a yard sale. I ended up with a
mason jar of 3" drywall screws, two or three jars of 2" and 2.5", a mason
jar of nice bolts, and about forty used brass wood screws. Quite a bag of
loot for a dollar.
Not much else to say. Too warm to do much outside.
R&S are off to pick up their boy from LAX, summer school is over and
they've booted everyone out of the dorms at OSU for a few weeks.
Friday - Warming up.
I did a couple of small things to the app, then packed up the laptop and
went over to S's place late morning and installed it on her iPad, and showed
her the new features. She'll test it out and maybe run it by students that
might benefit. So far the feedback from parents and students has been very
positive: either you can do a relatively simple task - or you can't. It
really shows the presence of certain concepts in the student, or their lack,
despite its surface simplicity.
S is a brilliant diagnostician, and this is sort of 'bottled S'. She
mentioned that she'd ordered a bunch of books on brain neurology, and I
warned her not to let any book larnin'
get in the way of what she see's and observes in real life!
In the afternoon I worked on setting things up for another big change in the
app, adding in different 'suits' of cards for the targets and decoys. It's a
little tricky but shouldn't be too hard.
In the morning I gave the shelves a coat of white(ish) latex paint, then in
the late afternoon turned them over and gave the undersides a coat as well.
Book #46 was Uprooted,
by Naomi Novik. Novik is the author of the popular Temeraire
series, but this was a stand-alone fantasy book. Not bad, pretty straight
forward stuff.
Thursday
3 September
2015
Thursday -
Much cooler weather, in the 80's perhaps. It's nice not to have the a/c
running continuously.
S wanted to try out the app on
Friday, so rather than walk 10 miles or work on the garage shelves I put in
some time, 8am to 7pm, and 'got her done'. More or less. I'm not happy with
certain things, but I don't know of any outright bugs in it. The beta
testers will let me know if I'm smarter than a 5-year old!
In particular I couldn't get the simultaneous gesture recognizer from Apple
stuff to work. I fiddled with it for hours,
then just gave up and set a Boolean flag of my own in the app that allows
use of a gesture recognizer only after a tap begins. I imagine that's all
that Apple's stuff does, under the hood, but I was tired of messing with
opaque documentation and stuff that almost, but
not quite, does what I want.
I also put the images into a dictionary, and that works, though of course
it's invisible to the user. But it makes things cleaner under the hood, and
paves the way for some upcoming changes S wants.
It also allowed me to remove a whole bunch of Core Image stuff, so I'm not
compositing stuff five or six times per hand, but just one. The app is
noticeably snappier.
And I fixed some UI bugs, and added another UI feature S wanted.
Book #45 was Dreams
of Earth and Sky, by Freeman Dyson. This is a book of essays and book
reviews. Dyson is very, very smart and his stuff is always intriguing and
challenging to read.
Wednesday 2 September
2015
Wednesday - Shopping in the morning, I'd
let the pantry get pretty low. And the cats were happy for some new, fresh,
abundant kitty litter. As was I...
I did make some end caps, and attached them to the shelves that will go over
the workbench. Of course the end cap on the lowest shelf I messed up, since
it's the most visible. Bah. But it's just rough carpentry, not furniture
making, so no big deal. I was going to paint them, but it was about 90F in
the garage by the time I was ready, so I'll do it tomorrow.
I did a bit of work on the app, but the brain really wasn't engaging, so a
not particularly productive day there.
Tuesday - Slightly overcast in the morning -
which was excellent as this was a morning walk day. I was out of the house
by about 6:50am and took a nice long walk, over ten miles this time. My feet
hurt, and the rash reappeared, but it's nothing serious and I was able to
keep up a 3mph pace.
While out walking the marina I keep the boat at called me, and threatened to
start charging me double unless I
provided them my documentation papers. So, when I got home, I sent them a
copy of the receipt from the Coast Guard for the money I paid last week.
Hopefully that settles them down for a bit. Ten years, thousands of dollars
in slip fees, and they treat you like dirt on the bottom of their shoes...
The app work was basically getting the dictionary working, then testing it
out for the various levels. I created a new 'branch' in 'git' to do all
this. It seems to be working, but it's not really the final product. Right
now it's an alias 'key', and a corresponding text 'value' that is the name
of the graphic image. The cool thing about dictionaries is that the 'value'
doesn't have to be text, it can be the image itself! The image can be
modified, and it won't affect the original, and I don't have to pass around
a name and logic to handle it, the display portion of the code just uses the
key "image_1" to display whatever the value UIImage for that key might be.
This year's slogan: "Barn Appetit".
There's even a corn dog in there...
Monday - Warm, but not hot.
School has started, both the elementary school down the street, and the
college across the street. Lots of traffic in the morning...
I had a couple of small chores around the house, and had trouble performing
them because the garage is such a mess (still) that I couldn't find all my
tools. So I put up some brackets and another shelf over the workbench, then
added some hangers for adjustable wrenches and a set of english box
wrenches. Then I took everything down, and got ready to paint them, then
decided they need some end caps so stuff didn't fall on my head, and decided
to leave that task until tomorrow.
App stuff was basically creating and instantiating a singleton with a
dictionary object, to create a key as an alias to the actual image. This
will allow randomization of images - autistic kids really key in on
repetition of any kind, and to allow 'sepia' or 'gray scale' for unwanted or
unselected images or previously selected images. I had a lot of problems,
mostly my own fault, I wasn't setting the key properly.
Sunday - Not too hot, there were some clouds
about in the morning when I awoke.
I decided to do some exploring in the west Antelope Valley, find some trail
heads. I found a couple, but not the one I wanted. But I did locate the
crossing of the N2 by the Pacific Crest Trail, and where that trail
intercepts Hwy 138 and the state aqueduct. In between those two points it
runs along the border of a private hunting ranch, which, according to the
sign prominently posted next to it, starts September 1st. Good to know.
I also found the road to Sawmill Campground, though I didn't drive all the
way to the trail head.
Not found was the trail head to the Libre Mountain hike. Mike and I did hike
it once, but that was August of 2005, so it's a bit vague in my memory.
The N2 is a fun drive though. Very scenic, though it seems to have acquired
a bunch of landowners, wealthy ones, who have fenced off big bits of it, and
have little discreet signs to their homes. Well, bound to happen I guess, it
is Los Angeles county.
Afterwards I stopped by and visited with some friends in Antelope Acres, and
discussed buying an empty lot near them. There are a couple of problems with
that: (1) it's overpriced and (2) I'm kind of broke even if it wasn't...
Not much else to say. I read some more in the afternoon, and tried to avoid
using the keyboard.
Book #44 would therefore be Fool
Moon (Dresden Files #2), by Jim Butcher. This was an ebook library
loan. It was OK, light entertainment for a slow Sunday afternoon.
