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WEEK 42 2014

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Saturday 18 October 2014
Saturday - A nice day. I worked on the app in the morning, went out for lunch with friends, then did some stuff around the house.

I did go out and buy Jimmy a harness. For now I just am putting it by his food bowl, and in favorite sleeping spots, to accustome him to it. Right now he just thinks it's a toy of some kind. Next I will drape it over him, then I'll momentarily put it over him and take it off, while he's eating. Eventually he'll associate it with good things and we'll try it outside.



Interestingly, I've run out of RAM on the Mac a couple of times. If I'm running Bootcamp with Win7, and Xcode, and Safari, sometimes the available RAM drops to nothing and it starts swapping to disk. I've allocated 2GB to Bootcamp Win7, and 2 processors, but there should still be 6GB of Ram available on the Mac side. Not a bit deal, I can shut down the Win7 partition most of the time, and Xcode response is notably faster when I do.

Part of the problem is Safari, which like all modern browswers is a pig, needed 400MB just to have a single plain window (Google) open, and a lot more if you're doing anything. Firefox is the same.



Apparently my cats spend as much time observing me as I do them!

When I went upstairs to work in the office, Suzy ran ahead up the stairs. I walked into the office, closed the door to keep cats out and sat down.... and there was a subdued "bleeerrrrkkkk" under my chair. Suzy knew I was going to my office, and just went there ahead of me! Apart from the location under my chair, which endangers her paws and tail from the chair wheels, I don't really have an objection. Jimmy and Riley are obnoxious, but she just wants to hang out at my feet.

Friday 17 October 2014
Friday - Fiddling around with the app still. I need to re-organize things, adding in the extra game levels is getting complicated, the game model needs changes...

I was mulling over ways to cat-proof the yard, but it's difficult. Perhaps I'll get a harness and see if Jimmy can stand wearing it. If so I can just set up a tie-line arrangement rather than a huge cat run or adding a barrier to the entirety of the fence.

. It'll be cheap, easy, and not interfere with yard maintenance!

Thursday 16 October 2014

Thursday - I drove a friend down to LA, that took up most of the day, not getting back until mid-afternoon. A bit of app work afterwards.

Wednesday 15 October 2014

Wednesday - Another nice day.

I worked on the app all day, mostly just moving stuff around, over to a new "storyboard" version. That took about 5 hours alone. For some reason there is no simple "duplicate" option, the process to make a duplicate version is obscure multi-step process and replete with traps for the unwary. Anyhoo, that's done. I also talked to S about some stuff that was unclear to me - writing Specs is hard! - and got some good feedback.

In fact, since she needed a ride to the mechanic I also got dinner out of it!



I've had trouble sleeping recently, and started taking Melatonin again. Maybe it's the placebo effect, but it does seem to work for me.

Tuesday 14 October 2014
Tuesday - It's cooling down. High of maybe eighty, but overcast and 70F by sundown.

Chores in the morning, dishes, garage cleaning up in there. I've been disassembling the paint booth, and putting various stuff away, and it's getting a bit more organized in there.

Lunch, then doing laundry and working on the app until early evening. This has been mostly cleanup and re-organizing things, with some logic and code updates here and there.

It's a Microsoft Patch Tuesday, and supposedly a big one, so I will probably reboot the Win7 partition this evening.



I talked to my sister K today, she's moved to a suburb of Portland. So far she's enjoying the cool and temperate climate away from the desert...



Looks like the Ebola thing is getting worse. Talking to Tim this morning he mentioned that he'd heard that a big concern was indirect transmission to the US, via people getting infected in latin America, and then coming in over the unsecured southern border. I hadn't even thought of that, yikes.

Monday 13 October 2014
Monday - School in the morning, despite it being Columbus Day. Ah well. It went OK, with a decent enough lecture from the instructor, stuff about using Adobe In Design.

We also put in a good two hours of lab. When I asked the attendant she said S and I had only five each so far - which is an undercount of two or three hours low by my estimate. Not good, I need to start keeping track. Now we're at seven. The last couple of weeks will see the lab too crowded to get in, and it's week 8 already, so that leaves us about eight weeks to put in 16 hours more.

When I asked the instructor when the test (that he's always mentioning) will be, he turned around and told the class "Ed here wants a test, so we'll have one the week after next!"  There's a reason I'm loved everywhere I go... But seriously, isn't there some sort of students bill of rights in schools now, where the instructor has to give you a syllabus and the grading and test schedules?

The instructor also claims that it's just a fifteen question, multiple choice quiz, and that he will go over every question and the correct answer next week - and that unless this class is unlike all others that 1/3rd will flunk it. It's hard to believe, but that's what he says...



Adobe, good old Adobe. I mentioned that I was thinking of putting some old versions of Photoshop and Illustrator on an old XP box (not connected to the internet), rather than the newer Bootcamp Win7, because of the horrible security issues and user trust issues they've had in the past. I started wondering if I was over-reacting, telling myself that Adobe would have by now cleaned up it's evil ways and thuggish attitude towards its users.

Heh.

Via a Slashdot article: "Nate at the-digital-reader.com reports that Adobe is spying on any computer that runs Digital Editions 4, the newest version of Adobe's Epub app. They are collecting data about what users are reading, and they're also searching users' computers for e-book files and sending that information too. That includes books not indexed in DE4. All of the data is sent in clear text. "

Not only are they recording wheat you are reading in their ebook, they're searching the files on your hard drive and collecting what you read in other readers. Shootings too good for that bunch.



Then it was lunch, then home, then a kind back to work on the app again.



The Ebola thing seems to be getting worse. Apparently the CDC is now just a bunch of politically correct politicians, with no clue. A second person in the US has tested positive, and the first guy has died. I went to the Surgeon General's page and ... we don't have a Surgeon General. We've an acting Surgeon General though, and the web page on Ebola there says: "whatever the CDC says".

We're screwed.

Sunday 12 October  2014
Sunday - Morning was devoted to various chores. It's always something. I did continue sorting stuff, and shelving it. There's a bunch of stuff I can get rid of - 6 gallon sized containers of antifreeze for example. I don't work on cars much anymore, I can give them away to someone. Then there is a lot of yard fertilizer/poison stuff that I need to consolidate,



I then went out to lunch with friends to celebrate a birthday, and then home to watch the Chargers play a pretty good game. The niner's play tomorrow night, on ESPN, which I don't get.



After that a quiet evening. They guy down the street was playing his music again in the afternoon. Not quite loud enough to be complaint worth, but loud enough to be annoying. Bah.




Picture of the Week
San Diego Zoo 
Photo Notes: Lunch at the Mexican buffet.




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