WEEK 9 2014
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First Post,
17 March 2002
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Saturday - Still overcast with
scattered showers. This storm was a "pineapple express", a large tongue
of moist air pushed up from the tropics.
Still kind of dragging. I suspect the infection was pretty severe, and I'm still recovering.
Did
a bit of shopping in the morning, cat foot and some other staples at
the 99-Cent store. Some yogurt, though Von's was quite competitive with
a 10-pack for $4.50 as compared to the $0.50 at the cheap place.
S
called, and asked if I could help mount their TV on the wall. We went
over to Costco and found a unit big enough to hold up to an 80" that
also tilts and swivels, and in the evening Kirk and I installed it in
their Great Room. It went well, if a bit slowly. The studs in the
alcove wall were not spaced at standard widths, but it worked out
that we could install the frame a bit off center. In fact it needed to be off center, by 10.25", if the swing arm and TV were to be centered in the alcove!
The biggest part of the task was getting the old
entertainment center and it's electronics out. It was massive - it took
three adults to move it when empty - and hadn't been moved in ten years
or so.
Their entertainment center used to contain a vast
number of elements, but with a HDMI Blu-ray player, built-in apps, and a single
Ethernet and composite cable to their old TIVO everything is much
simplified!
Friday
- So, fixed that problem with pointer stuff.
Curious
about a point of style, I researched what the best practice was - to
use a C style function or an Objective-C "method". There really isn't a
big literature on it, but at least one person suggested using functions
for stuff was just a bit faster. OC was, initially, just a preprocessor
for C and there is a bit of overhead in using it rather than vanilla C.
Raining and storming all day. Quite the deluge.
Thursday 27 February
2014
Thursday
- Off to the dentist. Work has been suffering the last couple of days,
so I took advantage of my friends recommendation and went. Naturally
they found several other things, but couldn't find a real "cause" for the
pain in the molar. It's been bugging me for years. Probably it is a
somewhat botched root canal, too shallow, that got infected, so I got a
prescription for antibiotics to treat that. This dentist, like my old dentist, looked
dismissive when I said that flossing and hard brushing started the
pain: "That doesn't happen!". But, of course, it does, experience is king....
So,
not much done on the app, my concentration was kind of shot. But by
late evening the pain was subsiding, which is good. My friend returned
the C book, and I'm pretty sure I know what I was doing wrong.
Wednesday 26 February
2014
Wednesday - Working on the app. I was
putting things into subroutines - er - functions, and ran into weird
errors. I know it's a pointer/dereferencing issue, but I'm not sure
just where... I asked my friend Can to return my copy of K&R, so I
can check on a couple of things.
Had lunch with S, went over the
look and feel of things. I think I need to add one more layer of
difficulty, a fifth layer, to do some of the things she wants to do.
Not a big deal, that bit of the framework is really kind of done...once
I get past the c-programming issues. I also got a haircut, lunch, a
brief talk with K about his new Surface tablet, and a lead on an
inexpensive dentist in town (since my Cobra has long since expired
it'll have to be cash).
Late
in the evening, after I'd already gone to bed, it started raining,
hard. Gah. I was thinking of covering the peach tree - always a PITA -
tomorrow, but I guess I waited a bit too long. I was expecting anything
to happen before tomorrow afternoon.
The cats were delighted with a paper bag I brought home some groceries in.
Tuesday
- My back is somewhat better, but I'm waiting a bit longer to get out
in the yard again. Of course now they are predicting a storm to blow
into the valley, in the next couple of days. Bah. Well, it won't really
hurt a hole in the ground...
Not
too much else going on. Working on the app still. Trying to simplify
and organize things before a big push to finish. I need to get together
with S on some of the specifications and how things need to go.
Book #9 was Rising Tides (Destroyermen #5),
by Taylor Anderson. This is a fun series. The plot is fairly
straightforward - a destroyer, the USS Walker, in the Pacific in early
WWII, goes through a rift in space/time and ends up in an alternate
universe. There are dinosaurs, evil lizard bad guys, friendly
lenur-descended allies, humans - good and bad - descended from ancient
British India merchantmen and Spanish Manila gold galleons that passed
through the rift centuries earlier, all at a somewhat more primitive
era than the Americans. Stone age to early steam.
And, just to top things off, a Japanese cruiser, the Amagi, which heavily out guns the Walker. has also come through the rift, and allied themselves with the evil lizardoid "Grik"...
The Walker, an obsolete "four piper" in out universe, is second to the Amagi
in the new universe, but with some Yankee ingenuity and the help of the
"Lemurians" is turning the tide against the forces of evil...
Monday
- Back to working on the app. Kind of a grind, but getting into the
details of things now.
Ideally a program would be simple on the inside. An analogy would
be a Wankel engine, powerful, elegant and simple. My programs
usually start out looking like something from Rube Goldberg, and then I
work on them until they are at least a bit simpler, maybe like an overhead
cam V-8.
Currently...still kind of Goldbergish. But it's getting there. You do
something, then extend it, then extend it again, then recode to make it
simple, rinse and repeat.
Sunday
-I finally got around to doing some work in the yard. I trenched to put
the base course of landscape blocks near the east wall. This took a lot
longer than it should have, because I was near the drip line of my
fruit trees and trying not to dig any deeper than absolutely necessary.
Then, up at the north end I ran into an old stump, from a tree that I
cut down years ago. It was somewhat rotted out and I was able to use
the pick and mattock to clear some of the roots away, but the pick work
did my back no good and I had to quit for the day. But the foundation work
is about 90% done, I just need to add some more base and level things,
then stack the blocks, which is really the easy part.
Kind of a warm day - 85 or 90F, perspiration was running into my eyes and I had to swap out my bandanna regularly.
Indeed, the weather has been so nice that my donut peach tree is blossoming. In February. I should probably think of someway to protect it from the almost certain frosts we'll probably have before April 15.
