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WEEK 40 2014

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Oxnard Weather Underground

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First Post, 17 March 2002

Twelve Years Ago, This Week 2002

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Nine Years Ago, this week, 2005

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Four Years Ago, This Week, 2010

Three Years Ago,
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2012

One Year Ago,
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2013

Saturday 4 October 2014

Saturday - Out doing yard sales with friends in the morning. It wasn't, despite all warnings, incredibly hot. Indeed, it just barely broke into 'hot' at all, from 'very warm'. I bought a couple of small things, and passed on several good deals for things I don't actually need right now. Though I kind of wish I'd gotten that cement mixer for $140. Oh well.

In the evening I went over to R&S, where their son K had made me a nice galeano cake for my birthday, and got a couple of pretty cool presents: an antique transit and a bird bath. I'd been looking for a bird bath for a while, so that's cool.

So, I've had Suzy a year now. She's getting to be a big gal...

Dang I look old.

Friday 3 October 2014

Friday - It wasn't as cool on the patio in the morning, and quickly heated up. I'd say in the 90's again.

Chores in the morning, then working away on the app in the afternoon.

Mostly this was some restructuring, putting stuff in modules and the like, rather than new stuff. Of which there is still plenty to do...

Books read so far. In week #30 I mentioned that I thought I could insert The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches to the missed Book #22, but on copying the table I see that actually I used that for Book #7, so the spot is still unclaimed. Huh. I actually have several unread Sci-Fi books on the Kindle, bought before summer vacation for reading at the coast house, which didn't happen. So, eventually.

#1 A Talent For War (Alex Benedict #1) #2 iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, 3rd Edition #3 The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce #1) #4 The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce #2) #5 A Red Herring without Mustard (Flavia de Luce #3)	#6 I am Half-Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce #4) #7 The Dead in their Vaulted Arches (Flavia de Luce #5) #8, The Judge of Ages (Hermetic Millenia #3) #9 Rising Tides (Destroyermen #5) #10 Firestorm (Destroyermen #6)
#11 Iron Gray Sea (Destroyermen #7) #12 Broken Homes (Rivers of London #4) #13 Existence #14 Storm Surge (Destroyermen #8) #15 The Lure of the Basilisk (Lords of Dus #1)	#16 The Seven Altars of Dusarra (Lords of Dus #2) #17 The Sword of Bheleu (Lords of Dus #3) #18 The Book of Silence (Lords of Dus #4) #19 Like a Mighty Army #20 iOS Drawing: Practical UIKit Solutions
#21 How to Massage Your Cat #22 #23 The Unwilling Warlord #24 The Wizard and the War Machine #25 The Martian	#26 Hyperbole and a Half #27 Rex Regis: The Eighth book of the Imager Portfolio, #28 Ark Royal #29 The Nelson Touch, #30 The Tralfalgar Gambit
#31 Mobile Learning For All, Supporting Accessibility for the iPad #32 A Sword Into Darkness #33 Origins of a D-List Supervillain #34 Objective-C for Dummies #35 The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible	#36 The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian #37 The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe #38 The Horse and His Boy #39 Prince Caspian #40 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
#41 The Silver Chair #42 The Last Battle

Thursday 2 October 2014

Thursday - It was cool on the patio in the morning, 45F. I was considering removing the window insulating panels on the south side of the house, as historically Lancaster is only in the 80's in October, but they are predicting over a 100F this weekend. It probably got into the low 90's by the afternoon.

I talked to both Tim and Dave, and they both say that the temperatures in Vista and Ventura are expected to be very high this weekend, Santa Ana conditions in fact. Yuck. Dave said it was in the 90's when I spoke with him.

I was thinking of heading down to the Miramar Air Show, but not if it's going to be that hot. And R agreed. Of course he has multiple mechanical issues with his old Mercedes to deal with, so he probably couldn't have gone anyway. One had an oil line fail on the way to work earlier this week and he had to go back home. The other had a failure of the throttle linkage later in the same day, so he had to drive that home.

Now he's driving the old Volvo - fingers crossed that it doesn't fail, too.

I did a bit more cleaning in the morning, vacuuming and dusting downstairs, including some areas I don't usually hit: the bookshelves. I decided to re-organize those, and ended up with a bunch of stuff removed and sent upstairs... Didn't finish until after noon.

Worked on the app in the afternoon, and went by and picked up my notes from S and talked to R about whether or not to go to the air show.

Home again and more chores - laundry - in the evening. It's the beginning of the month and stuff is starting to stack up.

I haven't been able to finish the garage shelves, because I found a huge divot in the side panel I'd constructed. I must have swung the board and hit something, but there a a 4" long by 3/8" chuck of wood missing. I've been slowly filling it with wood putty, in layers so it won't shrink and crack, and put on the last layer this evening. Tomorrow I'll sand it flush, and by evening it'll be dry and ready for varnish. Unless I wait until Saturday.

Wednesday 1 October 2014

Wednesday - It would be Mom's 90th, if only. Happy Birthday to her anyway!

It's just after Suzy's birthday too. She was a stray, but only a few weeks old when I got her last year, so we'll just make it her birthday too. We played with the red ribbon for a while, but I hid it after she started losing her mind over it :-)

Working away on this and that. I did a backup of the Mac, which, considering that Apple still hasn't patched the "Shellshock" vulnerability, is a good thing. Weirdly I had to download pictures from the Redrock trip again before backing up. I'd downloaded them earlier, and burned a DVD for the scoutmaster, and somehow this deleted them from the Pictures directory. Weird.

I also talked to a S's daughter about issues with her iPhone iCloud backup. She suddenly found it encrypted, and doesn't know the password. Looking online this is an issue - and one that Apple is denying. All sorts of people are reporting it: sudden mysterious encryption without their input. It's a tough one, because the encryption is good, but fortunately she still has access to her stuff on the phone, so it's not an immediate problem.

My help was mostly in being a sympathetic ear, agreeing that yes, you're right, Apple is F**ked up and are a bunch of D**ks; she'd tried most of my ideas already. Mostly she was worried about her text messages backup. I hoped originally that Verizon had them online to be downloaded, but they've changed, and now they only save the last 90 days of texting, and that only if and only after you've added the Verizon texting service and app (not iMessage). But she still has them, so it's not too big a deal.

I also talked to S at length about what logic and descriptions of what the higher levels in the current app would be. She had copies of her notes, and I made more... and left them there.

She's rereading "Joel On Software" and enjoying it tremendously.

Tuesday 30 September 2014

Tuesday - Morning was eaten up by grocery shopping and policing the vegetable beds for tomato worms (ugh). I even gathered a small bowl of tomato's and peppers, but it's getting near the end of the growing season and there weren't a lot.

In the afternoon I made good progress on the app, adding some highlighting effects and updating the prompts for Level #2, dual directions. I was trying to use CALayers, but eventually gave up (inconsistent visibility stuff) and just used (sigh) three more UIViews. S gave me a better idea of what she wanted with the prompts yesterday, but most of that is stylistic and can wait until the logic is done.

"...until the logic is done." Another sigh. It's getting crufty under the hood again. I should probably create a better model, but honestly, sometimes it feels like the only thing that really works for me consistently is a UIView in a ViewDidLoad....

Audible prompts next. Re-reading stuff it seems there are 4 separate ways to play sounds. Apparently you can get memory leaks if you do it wrong...sounds familiar.

After searching around I found my external USB Blu-ray disk player/writer. It was in it's original box, who would think to look for it there? So I can install the Adobe stuff, then do a backup of my main work computer.

Monday 29 September 2014

Monday - School in the morning, with a decent enough lecture from the instructor, and an introduction to using Adobe Illustrator.

Then it was lunch, then home, then a quick nap (it was a bad night due to a mild head cold), then dishes and other chores.

Then a small amount of app work, CALayer stuff for animated highlights.

Sunday 28 September 2014

Sunday - Morning was, after breakfast and watching cats for an hour or so, devoted to edging and weed whacking the front yard. I'd have done it Saturday, but didn't want to open the garage with shelves with wet varnish in there.

Because, for the first time in a while, our Lancaster winds were back.

Fortunately the temps are cooling, in the low 90's at best, and I can even turn off the a/c in the evenings.

I then tried to put Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator onto the old XP box, but apparently the drive is bad and it didn't recognize any disks. I have other drives around, but instead I just did most of the assignment in GIMP, then went over to R&S for lunch and talked to S at length about the app, and finished the assignment on their computer.

In the afternoon I watched the 49er's just squeak out a win against the Seahawks. Well, a win is a win...

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Old tractor radiator cap, Aug. 2014.

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