Saturday - I spent most of the morning
and early afternoon assembling the shelves in the garage. I'd forgotten
to pre-drill some stuff, then had to take stuff down, drill, and
reassemble it. In the end it was nearly six hours and I was happy to
get it up, it was getting warm. Also the person down the street
"sharing" his pop music with the neighborhood was getting on my nerves.
The varnish job came out kind of awful. Well, it was practice, after all.
I was surprisingly tired afterwards, arms aching, and what's that about? After just six hours of light labor?
Friday
10 October2014
Friday
- Still working away on things. Got the V2 settings and storyboards more or less that way they should be. A long day again.
I
had a bit of excitement in the morning. I was sitting on the patio,
enjoying my morning coffee, when I heard an ominous "scritch" sound
from the flowerbed where Jimmy likes to hang out and hunt hummingbirds.
Looking that way I couldn't see him, and walked out to check - and he was on top of the 6' high block wall. When he saw me he ran away. Fortunately
he ran along the wall towards the house, not away, and I was able to
corner him and get him down with only a few scratches. If he'd run the other way...
But
now I have to find a way to keep him in the yard. This was really about
the highest point in the wall, the rest is 8" to 16" lower. Maybe some sort of "cat run" thing. For the next few days he'll be inside.
Thursday 9 October2014
Thursday
- Not much going on. Working away on the app, starting V2, with a bunch
of storyboards and the settings pages. Kind of a grind, about a 9 or 10
hour day at the keyboard.
Win7
has been thrashing my hard dirve, over on the Bootcamp partition, so
eventually I just shut it down. Microsoft knows about this problem -
some sort of background process that can take up nearly 100% of the cpu
allocation, I've seen it mentioned online, yet they seem unable to get
on top of it.
Wednesday 8 October2014
Wednesday - Kind of a busy day. Went
over to the computer lab in the morning and got a couple of the
required hours in for the digital media course. I think 24 hours is
crazy for this sort of thing - the assignments just don't take long -
but that's the way it is. Then there was a lot of shopping to do. S needed to go, so I tagged along and picked up a bunch of stuff for myself.
In the afternoon I did a bit of app work, not much to say there, nothing much new.
In the evening I finished what I will call Book #22, Blood of Tyrants (Temeraire #8), by Naomi Novik. I've had it since early August. It's 448 pages, which makes sense, it took me several evenings to read.
A few years ago I mentioned that the WuChao Bridge in China was the
longest stone arch span in the world, but it turns out that there is a
longer: the Danhe Bridge, at 146m (476') clear span.
It's all of stone, though the roadbed itself is (naturally) of
concrete. China, where labor used to be cheap, has a great number of
100m+ stone bridges like this built since the 1950's, though in the
last decade or two the new stuff is of reinforced concrete.
Given the quality control issues reported in China, you have to wonder: will the stone bridges will outlast the RC?
Danhe Bridge picture, with the stone blocks clearly visible. (via highestbridges.com, where there are more pics and info)
Tuesday 7 October2014
Tuesday
- Added in the sound stuff for the first few levels of the app. It works well
enough, but there is still a tiny memory leak.
I could play hundreds of hands before it became a problem, but... I can
see it happening, but I'm not sure why. A lot of people report similar
problems, but their fixes are too old (pre ARC) or just plain don't
work for me. And at least a couple of people report that it's the
debugger giving a false error...
Not much else to say. Working on Naomi Novik's latest book in the
evening. It doesn't have page numbers, but it feels like two or three
books run together. One in Japan, one in China, and another in Russia...
Added another layer of varnish to the shelving.
Monday 6 October 2014
Monday
- School in the morning, with a decent enough lecture from the
instructor, and more stuff about using Adobe Illustrator.
Then it was lunch, then home, then a kind of wasted day because I had a
really nasty headache. I finally tried an icepack in later afternoon,
and that helped a lot. .
Then a small amount of app work, reading up on sound stuff.
Sunday 5 October2014
Sunday
- Morning was devoted to various chores. It's always something. I did
put a coat of varnish on the remaining shelf board, finally.
I then tried to watch the Niners' in the afternoon, but could only get
the Chargers. Oh well. The Chargers won, and I understand the Niners'
won as well.
After that I did a bunch of bills.
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: Cliffs at Redrock SP, Sept. 2014.
