Saturday - Warming up a bit. But it's
definitely winter, what they call a 'mild fall' in most parts of the
country. The leaves are beginning to fall everywhere - many from my own
trees, though the lawn is not quite as covered as some years. I'll wait
a few days, then rake and mow them.
I fixed the app problem with the touches, so that part is done. I want to also do some shadows, but that should be easy enough.
I
need to start thinking about provisioning - reading up on shadows says
they can be real CPU hogs, so it needs to definitely be tested 'on
device'.
The Win7
partition is still thrashing the disk. I think it's the same services
problem that Vista had. The Task Monitor lies, and says nothing is
active, but you can hear the disk heads thrashing away for an hour or
so after a boot, with the memory maxed out a nearly 2GB, all while no
service takes responsibility. I suppose it could be a virus, but I
doubt it, I mostly just use it for graphics and spreadsheets, I rarely
go on line with it.
I'd just leave it running, but because of
OSX and the VM machine Parallels having a memory leak somewhere I
do have to shut Parallels down weekly. In general I like Parallels, it
just works, but it isn't perfect.
Not too much else going on. Noisy neighbor's again. Sigh. How many decades has that been bugging me now?
Friday 5 December2014
Friday
- Again, still kind of gray.
I got up early, 5am, to watch the Orion EFT. And found it had launched an hour earlier:
I'd messed up, thinking it was launching at 8am Eastern time, not 7am.
I then watched it, via streaming, on the NASA TV channel. It was pretty
cool. Of course, after re-entry, at "Main Chutes are about to deploy"
the stream buffered and froze. Bah. Eventually I logged onto the
computer to see that they had, indeed, splashed down successfully. Yay
for the Orion team.
I don't actually think much of the program, it's mostly pork, but still, pretty cool to watch.
They
showed some video of the Delta rocket - what a monster! Interestingly,
it is assembled on it's side, then tilted up, very reminiscent of the
way the Soviets user to do things. I remember someone in the West
pooh-poohing the idea, saying that it meant that the rocket skins were
too thick, if they could resist the bending moments. I guess someone
thinks better of it now.
Amusingly, everyone in the control room
was dressed as an adult, the men in particular were all in long sleeved dress
shirts and ties. I guess, after the Rosetta mission "shirtgate" of a
couple of weeks ago, that management wasn't going to take any chances
with angry feminists.
The
rest of the day was app stuff. It's getting close. Bizarrely enough I
ran into an issue about 6pm with touches not being reported from a
view. This is usually pretty simple, so I guess I'll work on it
tomorrow. Probably a mistake of mine somewhere...
Jimmy, Suzy and Riley (LTR) enjoying the warmth of the season's first fire in the hearth.
Thursday 4 December2014
Thursday
- Still damp and gray. This storm has exhibited remarkable staying
power, usually the AV gets the end of storms late, and they end early.
I didn't see it, but I'm told we had heavy fog in the morning.
The
flight test of the new Orion capsule was scheduled for today, but put
off, there was a boat in the range, and some technical issues. They are
on schedule for another attempt tomorrow.
Working
away on the app mostly. It's kind of a grind, just going through a
checklist of "stuff to do". Right now it's mostly just a bug hunt for a
visual/audio synchronization issue, not very entertaining, but it has
to be done. Then I have to verify some other stuff, add some logic for
the audio prompt, and the workspace will essentially be done. Not
finished, but the stuff will work.
I think I mentioned that in
early November I realized I'd made an architectural mistake, but
decided to keep on, and that was probably the wisest choice. Things are
kind of clunky under the hood, but much better than the V1 version, so
I'm happy.
I really do
need to make an appointment to see the dentist - that old infection is
flaring up, and of course the missing filling really should be attended
to.
Wednesday 3 December2014
Wednesday - Still raining, off and
on, into the evening. Various places in the valley have flooded, but
everyone knows we need rain and you don't hear much complaining.
I had lunch with a friend, and did a bit of work, but was kind of tired all day.
Tuesday 2 December2014
Tuesday
- Rain, rain, and more rain. Which is good, it's what we needed! But California drivers are crazy...
I
went over and talked about dry storage of the boat with the yard across
the way. Their prices sound reasonable. They also had an estimate for
bottom cleaning and painting that was kind of crazy. I'm not sure what
to do about that.
I had a nice lunch with Tim & Dave & Chris at the local
Mexican joint. Tim showed us some more pics of his Thanksgiving road
trip, and I had a nice chance to catch up with Dave & Chris,
who are doing some contract environmental monitoring at a repair site and had
spent the entire morning out in the downpour in the hills above
Fillmore.
Then it was on the road home, in a deluge and lots of traffic. By the
time I got home I was beat: so many crazy people to watch out for,
going too fast or too slow in the wrong lanes.
It rained enough that I hydroplaned a little, here and there, but
nothing like what Tim recounted. Tim said that he'd had his car on
cruise control when it went into a deep hydroplaning section of road,
where upon the computer goosed the RPMs to keep the speed up. Yikes.
Something I'd never considered.
The
cats were fine when I got home, running over to the food bowl and
meowing piteously. The bowl of less tasty food still had a fair amount
in it...
Monday 1 December 2014
Monday
- I took the test in the morning, it went OK, although I missed an item
or two in the 'practical' - justifying margins in the little fake ad
for example. I think I'll pass.
Then I cleaned up around the house, put out lots of cat food, and headed down to Oxnard.
The boat looked good, dry and tight and reasonably clean. The decrepit
cabin cruiser in the next slip was gone, and my good hose with it...
They left a dried out piece of junky hose laying on the slip finger, so
I attached that to the faucet and hosed the boat down, getting all the
leaves and silt off before the predicted rain, and making sure the
drains were working.
Dinner was some kraft cheese mac. It's sort of a comfort food I
associate with being on the boat these days...
The storm was very late in arriving, we didn't get anything until about
2:30am, then it gradually increased, and rained hard until mid
afternoon Tuesday when I left town.
Sunday 30 November2014
Sunday
- Partial overcast. They have pushed the storm arrival back a bit, but
are still predicting it to arrive, perhaps Monday evening sometime.
Worked on the app a little, but am trying not to do too much over the
weekend, to let my hands recuperate.
I did search again for my class notes, without luck. I took a picture
of S's midterm, and printed that out and reviewed it. I also went over
a few things for Photoshop and Illustrator, so I feel reasonably
comfortable about tomorrow's test.
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: Wapama
in storage, circa 2004. They 'dismantled' (scrapped) her in
2013.
