WEEK 9 2012
Last
Week-
Sun-
Mon- Tue- Wed-
Thur-
Fri- Sat-
Next
Week
Picture of the Week
MAIN
PAGE
First Post,
17 March 2002
|
Ten Years
Ago, This Week, 2002 |
Nine Years
Ago, This Week, 2003 |
Eight Years
Ago, this
week, 2004 |
Seven Years
Ago, this
week, 2005 |
Six Years
Ago, This Week, 2006
|
Five Years
Ago, This Week, 2007
|
Four Years
Ago, This Week, 2008
|
Three Years
Ago, This Week, 2009
|
Two Years
Ago,
This Week, 2010
|
One Year Ago,
This Week,
2011
|
Saturday - The weather is nice, so I
took a longish walk (5 miles) before lunch. Then made a quick trip to
the library and checked out a couple of scifi and a couple of
programming books.
A month or two back the Science Fiction
section disappeared from the local library. I mean, the shelves were
there - but empty. Since I have plenty of new stuff it didn't really
affect me, I simply assumed they were re-shelved somewhere else, making
room for an expansion of the adjacent Mystery section. But, looking around, I think they've just lumped them in with the General Fiction. I'm not sure what to think of that. Does this mean that Science Fiction is now considered mainstream and no longer needs its own "SciFi Ghetto", or does it mean it isn't considered important enough to deserve a separate section, like Mystery still does?
The 12th book in the Garrett PI series would be Cruel Zinc Melodies, but since it was listed as Book #20 in 2008 I'm not going to count it here. Also I can't find my copy, and refuse to buy it again. I have a vague memory of checking it out from the library, but it's not in the library or library catalog, locally, now. The 13th, and (to date) last, book in the series is Gilded Latten Bones, and I've bought it for the Kindle.
In the evening I watched a movie with some friends, at their house. It was The Help (2011), and was pretty good.
Friday
- Well, the new glasses arrived and they are pretty decent. Much better
than the damaged older pair. Without a bifocal area it's hard to read
with them, but it can be accomplished by pushing them far down my
nose...
Objective-C study continues. Working on polymorphisms and various bits
of inheritance and compiler directives right now. A bit over half way
through the book, though I've been skimping on doing all the problems.
A bit warmer and less windy than yesterday. I watered the raised
vegetable beds that I'd put the parasites into, and put plastic over
them since it was predicted to be below freezing overnight.
Book #30 was Angry Lead Skies, by Glen Cook. This is Garrett PI #10, and is a bit ... odd. To Cook's world of hardboiled detective noir and wizardry he now adds flying saucers and aliens and autistic kids. What the Heck? Not horrible, but it definitely has a different "vibe" to it.
Books for 2012, so far:
Home: noun \hohm\
1. A house containing cats and books.
Thursday 1 March 2012
Thursday
- Sunny and windy:
Midday, at Fox Field.
Well, that's Lancaster in late winter.
The garbage guys did come by and take the green waste. I chatted them
for a bit, it was the right can and it was supposed to be picked up, so
they said they'd "leave a note" for the regular guy. This new can is a
grey color with a shade similar to the regular garbage can, unlike my
neighbor's who all have bright green waste containers, so maybe he just
wasn't paying attention, though it's a different size and shape.
Got into a discussion with someone online about the shock absorbers on
an Orion class nuclear bomb propelled spaceship (Pournelle's Michael).
My take was that it was a big deal, his that it wasn't. There isn't a
lot of info out there on the actual design, but if you treat it as a
critically damped spring-mass-damper system you can calculate the work
done. For at 10,000 metric ton vessel with an explosive pulse every
three seconds I come up with about 650MJ per pulse, or a steady state
heat rejection requirement of about 200MW. Doable, with high
temperature radiators, but definitely not trivial. And you can't cool
it with water or steam and then dispose of that to space - the weight
penalty for carrying that much coolant would be prohibitive.
In the country of the blind...
Wednesday 29 February 2012
Wednesday - not much going on. The weather is back to sunny, and cold, and windy.
My friend, the same one who gave me a pile of sh*t a few years ago, came over with a bucket of parasites for me.
Yay, actually! They are supposed to kill the grubs that infest the lawn and garden.
This is a leap year, and coincidentally I was reading about control structures in my Objective-C book, Programming in Objective-C, by Stephen Kochan. Here's how you calculate whether something is a leap year in this language:
It's a good book, I'm just plowing through it. C and C++ were never main languages to me, but so far I feel I understand things.
Apropos of leap years: I saw a post online about someone who claimed he
was going to get married today so that he would only have to remember
their anniversary every four years. I may be a bachelor myself, but I
know better: In your dreams pal, in your dreams...
In other exciting news I
called the trash people and complained about their guys missing my
greenwaste pickup for the third week in a row (probably 4th, but I was
gone that day). They'll send somebody by tomorrow.
Tuesday
28 February 2012
Tuesday
- Did a bunch of reading on Objective-C, quit when the eyestrain from bad glasses got too bad. Hurry up 39dollarglasses.com! Feeling better about things with O-C, I've seen this stuff before, though the terminology was different.
The city called back, and are issuing a permit for me to take the tree
out, at my own cost but with an arborist the city has a contract with.
Hmmm.
Clear and sunny again, snow on the hills to the south:
Monday
27
February 2012
Monday
- working away on the Ipad programming project. Not being an Apple guy
it's a bit of a steep learning curve. I did sign up to be an iOS
developer, and downloaded and installed the Xcode IDE with only minor
problems. Then it was a matter of slowly going through some example
code, and learning to use the IDE and the Simulator on the Mac Mini.
The Mini is working well enough, it has OSX 10.6.8 'Snow Leopard'
freshly installed and though it turns out to only have 1GB of ram
seems to have no problem running things.
I may move the widescreen monitor over to the Mini, the extra screen real estate would come in handy.
I am a little daunted by Objective-C , I admit.
As the day went on it got colder and windier, until by evening there
was snow falling in the hills around the Antelope Valley and traffic
hazard alerts on the I-5.
Sunday
26
February 2012
Sunday
- Pretty weather, shirtsleeve even. But a storm is predicted.
We went to see a Taiko drum group at the LPAC in the afternoon, the Taiko Project. Not bad. I
think they were a little low-energy in the first set, but really picked
up after the intermission and did a great job.
Book #29 was #11 in the Garrett P.I. series, Whispering Nickel Idols. I can't find my copy of Angry Lead Skies, which
technically at #10 should come next. Very similar to all the others...
