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WEEK 3 2014

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Saturday 18 January 2014

Saturday - Doing various chores around the house in the morning. Didn't get to the ewaste thing.

My friends were doing their yard sales rounds and called to say they'd found some fairly inexpensive windows that might be re purposed for a solar space heating unit. I went over and looked, but they were all either too large or too small. Ah well.

We then went off to lunch, and then to a Boy Scout Court of Honor. Actually it was the Sea Scout equivalent, which is even more rare than the COH, only 0.5% of the boys achieve it. Kirk had to drop out of Sea Scouts because of his college classes, but keeps in touch, which is how we knew about Williams promotion. Good for him!

Then I went home and collapsed. My sinuses were killing me - which explains Friday's malaise, some sort of brief flu or infection I suppose.

Book #3 was The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley. This was a murder mystery in the genre of "dark doings at an English country manor". The twist is that the detective is a precocious 11 year old girl, Flavia de Luce, who is fascinated by death and poisons - an aspiring chemist with her own laboratory.

Friday 17 January 2014

Friday - Working on the app in the morning. Or trying to - inspiration was in short supply for some reason. So I spent some time re-organizing the upstairs office, mostly in an effort to make some space on the desk to work.

I did make an run to do some errands, picking up the expensive food for Riley from the vet, dropping off some books at the library. I tried to stop into the small Friends of the Library store, but one of the homeless was in there, and the unwashed reek drove me out in seconds. The poor clerk was standing by the door - trying not to gag on the stench would be my guess.

I got a quesadilla maker for Xmas, so I made lunch with that. Worked fine, really quick, and without all the spattering over the surfaces you get from putting a tortilla in a fry pan.

I then decided to work in the yard, but got side tracked cleaning up the garage. I couldn't even get to my workbench! Took down the Christmas lights and packed them away with the rest of the Xmas stuff. Put up a shelf on top of the work bench. Threw stuff out.

Tomorrow is the 3rd Saturday of the month, so I can toss any ewaste from free down in Palmdale.

In the evening we had an LPAC performance, Kathleen Madigan, the comic. Amusing.

Suzy and her "cone"

Here we see Suzy, the escape artist: she has gotten out of her "cone",
dropped a toy into it, and is playing at getting it out...

Thursday 16 January 2014

Thursday - Warm, windless and sunny. I went for a nice 5 mile walk - and had to walk home through the parking lot that the street becomes near my house, when school lets out during school season. Sigh. I just need to remember to leave for the walk earlier or later...

I did find a 4' chunk of branch in the middle of the street on the way home. I just brought it back, and will use it for firewood if it ever gets cold again up here in the high desert. Doing well by doing good...

Talked to D a bit about some upcoming work, and to a client about finishing up a contract before the 31st.

Book #2 was (surprise,surprise) iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, 3rd Edition. I liked it. It was fairly dense and had a lot of useful stuff. You pretty much had to read it from the beginning though, it wasn't a recipe-per-chapter type of cookbook. That is both a plus and a minus, but so it goes.

Wednesday 15 January 2014

Wednesday - Working on my quarterly taxes. Sent them in.

I replaced the fill valve on the commode upstairs - the integral corrugated feed line was leaking. I couldn't get the compression ring off, so I re-used it. There doesn't appear to be any leaking, which is good.

Worked on the app. Worked with the debugging "Instruments" package. As I thought, I have a memory leak. Probably in the AvAudioSession stuff, though I couldn't exactly locate it yet.

Suzy continues to improve. I built a little staircase out of old boxes to allow her to climb up and down from the bed - she just ignores it and jumps up and down at will. I let her out to play with Jimmy, supervised, for several hours during the day. She is of the firm opinion that this is all nonsense and that I should give her the run of the house again. She also has definite opinions about the taste of antibiotic solution....

Jimmy is at right top-of-frame, outside the door to Suzy's quarantine. He
spends so much time there that I moved a cat bed outside the door for him on the cool nights.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

Tuesday - Suzy continues to be on the mend. I let her out of the spare bedroom (the warm, south facing room) for a while, and she touched noses with Jimmy and Riley. Riley is still upset with her - I'm not sure why, but for now I keep them apart. As I have to do with Jimmy, but because he is too friendly, and wants to play.

He lays outside the closed bedroom door, touching paws with her under it.

The commode in the spare bath was leaking again. I took the tank off and replaced the flange seal at the overflow pipe. There still seems to be a tiny drip, which, given that every single seal is now new, is strange.

Coming home from the Home Depot run I discovered that school is in session again down the street. The parents were out in force with their SUVs down on K-4. Which means the loser with the loud car radio will be showing up at 2:15pm every week day, parked and waiting for his kid, again.

I cut up some old tree limbs for firewood the other day, but it was so warm that I didn't bother with a fire in the evening. It will probably drop to freezing in the early morning, despite Weather Underground's 36F prediction.

The SS Great Eastern being broken up at Rock Ferry.

Monday 13 January 2014

Monday - I took Suzy in to get spayed: she's about 5 months now, so it was time.

It went well, I dropped her off in the morning and picked her up about 4:30pm. She was a bit groggy, but mostly OK.

Since Jimmy wanted to roughhouse with her and Riley wanted to attack her (??) I just kept her in the bedroom with me overnight, with the other two outside the closed door.

She managed to pull her collar off, and crawl under the bed, but she's not licking the incision, so I think it'll be OK.

She's supposed to be kept from the other cats for ten days, which will be a bit of a struggle to do.

Other than that, not feeling too well. I blame some Thai, from a different place than we usually go, for dinner last night.

Sunday 12 January 2014

Sunday - Warm and sunny. Did some housecleaning, vacuumed the downstairs.

The 49er's won. It was a not as close a score as you would expect against the Panthers in Carolina, 23:10. Good to see the Niners' going forward, but Seattle next week will be a tough game. It's a noisy stadium, and they stomped on the Niners' in the regular season.

S came by and we went over the app specs a bit. Took some stuff out, added a few things in, clarified some details.

I haven't quite finished iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, it is, after all, 787 pages of fairly dense material, but glanced ahead at the Afterword:

Welcome to the end of the book! You should be very proud of all your work and all that you have learned. Now, there's good news and bad news:

The good news: The stuff that leaves programmers befuddled when they come to the iOS platform is behind you now. You are an iOS developer.
The bad news: You are probably not a very good iOS developer.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Lounge on the old Queen Mary.

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