WEEK 37 2014
Last
Week-
Sun-
Mon- Tue- Wed-
Thur-
Fri- Sat-
Next
Week
Picture of the Week
MAIN
PAGE
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 13 September
2014
Saturday - Went to yard sales with
friends in the morning, and then we all had lunch at a new-to-us
Japanese place. It was OK, but not spectacular.
I wasn't feeling 100% for some reason, but not sick either. Maybe it's the hot weather.
We're
expecting an extended heat wave, 100F+ for the next four or five
days, so I thought I'd get something for the other south facing
windows. In the afternoon I picked up a couple more of the foam
insulation panels, bigger ones this time, 4'x8'. Since I couldn't
fit the panels in the Explorer I actually cut them to size, roughly, in
the parking lot outside Home Depot. This was a hot and sweaty
experience - fortunately there wasn't a lot of wind, they panels really
wanted to sail in even the convection zephyrs that the parking lot
created!
I put one in, and boy, it's dim in there now. I'm not sure I want to keep it that way, despite almost never eating at the table.
Watched
a couple more videos in the Wild China series. Remarkable place, China,
but the growth and expansion is really endangering the wildlife I
guess.
Friday
- Did some grocery shopping in the morning.
Worked
on the app in the afternoon. Still having a bit of a problem with the
shuffling logic - I thought I had fixed it, but it showed up again,
after a certain sequence of actions. Sigh. At least it's not an
accursed OC issue, it's just me. Still need to fix the random number
generator issue too.
Apparently
I'm still on the hook to go out to Red Rock Canyon with a local boy
scout troop next weekend. I'm not really sure how that happened, I
attended a meeting as a non-parental board member for an Eagle Palm
award (S is the advancement chair), and... If one more boy cancels
they'll cancel the trip. I may still go even so, and bring the
telescope. I should charge the little lawn tractor battery, and use it
and a 12VDC - 110VAC inverter to run the tracking motor. I haven't
camped in years, I'll have to dig up a bunch of gear this week...
I did sit down and write out checks for my quarterlies, but need to put them in the mail. Sadly I owe more than I expected...
Jimmy in a favorite spot, looking up at a hummingbird.
Thursday 11 September
2014
Thursday
- Another hot, but dry, day. I found that the swamp a/c was still on
when I got up in the morning - I can't recall setting it to ON rather
than AUTO-ON-OFF. Hopefully the fancy timer isn't giving up the ghost...
I
did chores in the morning (including folding, always a favorite with
the cats!), and headed over and had my teeth cleaned at the college
free clinic. I had hoped for a free filling, but you have to go to the
regular clinic for that, and pay. Still it was great to get the
cleaning done (for free).
In the afternoon I did generate more
of the app work surface functionality. Most of the transitions and
animations are done, I just need one more, and to clean things up in
the code, then I'll transition over to work on the settings page, which
shouldn't be hard.
Also, speaking of free, there ain't no such
thing. Quarterly (estimated) taxes are due in a couple of days, as well
as the LLC tax.
Wednesday 10 September
2014
Wednesday -
Hot again. Actually it's supposed to be hot as heck for the next week
or so. They were saying 102F towards the end of the week, but they've
backed off that down to ... 100F. OK. Whatever.
I
was talking to Tim, and he mentioned that the utilities have gotten
smart, and will now pay you to have western facing solar panels. Late
afternoon and early evening are when power is needed the most in
Southern California, so rather that get the max amount of power per day (pointing due south)
they are now shooting for max output during high utilization times (more westerly). I
think I suggested this on this blog years ago, so it makes sense to me.
Solar makes no sense for me, I only use around 200KwH per month, but I know someone who is using 2000KwH a month - for them it would make sense!
I
had a drivers license renewal appointment at 11am. It went OK - a
security guard was keeping the crowds out of the building because
they'd reached legal capacity for occupants, but he just waved me
through since I had an appointment. It's a bit like being a star at a
nightclub I guess. No written exam, no problems. I did end up standing
in line for my picture for about 20min, but so it goes.
Most
of the day I worked on the app. It's really coming along. The game
surface actually works like it should, though the back end is pretty
much spaghetti code.
Tuesday
- A normally hot day. The moisture has moved off...
I
did get a notice from the water board that we are now on State drought rules,
with lawn watering only three times a week, and a few other rules. Palmdale started on the
rules a couple of months ago, but I suspect they've never recovered
from losing the Littlerock Dam.
I spent some time doing bill pay stuff. Some oddities there, but mostly taken care of.
Other than chores in the morning I just worked on the app until early evening. I'm making progress there, moving ahead....
Monday
- It rained during the night, with a bit of a downpour between
6
and 7 in the morning, and sprinkled off and on until nearly noon during
the day. A warm and humid rain, shirtsleeve
weather.
A nice change of pace, really.
Class in the morning, or would have been, had the instructor
showed up.
He didn't, and didn't call in, and eventually the lab assistant came to
where we were standing around in the hall and told us to go home. In
theory it's a four hour lab/lecture class that meets once a week. So
far we have:
- Week #1: Shows up 30min late with Starbucks coffee in hand,
gives no apology, does roll call, no lab or lecture.
- Week #2: Shows up 15min late, does roll call and
approximately 1 hr lecture (at a 4th grade level)
- Week #3: Labor Day Holiday
- Week #4: Doesn't show at all.
So, we're starting Week #5 next week, and we've:
- no book,
- no syllabus,
- no handouts,
- no lecture notes,
- no USB drives,
- no introduction to the lab,
- no lab work of any kind with a program
He did show us some YouTube cat videos.
There
is a requirement of 25 hours of lab to pass, and it's not open the last
week, so we're down to 13 weeks left for the class and lab. I don't
care, in the sense that I expect much out of the class or worry about
the grade: it's really just a gateway to useful stuff. Still....
S
and I made use of the morning, going to her house and spending
about 90 minutes changing our business category at
Dun&Bradstreet,
to an LLC from a Partnership. Confusing and obscure web pages with
opaque and incorrect documentation... Well, it's (hopefully) done
there. We'll wait for the changes to propagate through their database,
then try again with Apple...
Our mandatory $800 state fee is due
in a few days. Had we expected setting up the LLC to take this
long we could have waited to pay until Jan 15th 2015. Oh
well.
I then went home and battled with Xcode and fixed stuff. A couple of
different gotcha's.
Firstly
if you define button methods in the implementation file (as they now
want you to), then they are private methods (OK, makes sense), but now
you have to use an underscore to access them!!! So, if you've a button
named, say, "checkAnswer", and a method names "checkAnswer", then you
have to access the method variables using _checkAnswer (for
example, to disable the button you have to say: _checkAnswer.enabled=NO;
)
Once
I figured this out (it used to be optional, now it's the default!) I
started adding other buttons & methods. For example "newGame"
- which caused a horrendous error and crash. It took a while, the error
messages were almost meaningless, but it turns out that Apple has reserved
anything starting with the word "new"
to itself.
Because no developer would ever
want to use "newGame"
or "newDeal"
or "newDeck"
or anything else like that in his code... I actually like thinking
through the little logic problems that software development entails,
but these little goat
pellets that Apple strews in my path are not to my taste.
Sunday
- Some weather was predicted to come in, and indeed by morning you
could see clouds to the east and south. It was humid, and they kept
building, and by noon it was overcast enough to ... allow me to mow. So
I did. It seems a bit strange, but it was better than trying to mow in
100F+!
In the evening I visited with friends out in Antelope Acres. No wind, a
full moon shining through partial clouds, good company. I should move...
Not much else going on in the afternoon and evening. I did some grocery
shopping, various household chores.
Working
on the app again. Making progress, apart from weird problems where
things that worked in iOS5 and iOS6 no longer work in the same way.
Apple did me dirt,
again. How I despise Objective-C....
