I’d really intended to do an actual post last night, but that football game went on FOREVER. I think it ended at 12:30 this morning or something. Naturally, I wasted time for another hour before actually going to sleep, which caused me to oversleep and get to the office late, but it’s a new year and that’s expected, right?
Doesn’t matter, though. I continued my streak of daily posts. Today’s suggested topic in the Post A Day thing was something incredibly moronic like, “Are you stressed out?” I’m supposed to write a blog entry with that as the topic? Seriously?
Fine. How about this? I’m stressed out by the price of gasoline and other financial issues. Other than that, no. I’m not stressed. I’m mostly bored and apathetic, but am occasionally pleasantly diverted. Fascinating stuff, huh? Screw that topic.
Work this week has been relatively fun, to be honest. After knocking out the errors on Monday, I managed to add a few new bells and whistles to a metrics dashboard that I’ve been writing for mobility, and I added a few more today. I’ve got another huge project looming, but the first meeting for that is next Monday, so in my downtime, I’ve been trying to learn how to write apps for android phones. Betsy Jones gave me one of her old phones as a development tool, and I spent a lot of time yesterday learning how to build forms on the screen (the forms don’t actually do anything at this point – I’m learning, remember?); and today I figured out how to get them out of the emulator on my laptop and actually run them on the phone.
I said I’d be doing more reading this year, and one of the things I’ll be reading over the next few days is a fascinating tome called, “Fundamentals of the Android Application Model.” Once I’ve got a handle on that, I’ll start getting a bit more serious and will attempt to write a notepad application for the phone. Yes, there are a million notepads already available. That has nothing to do with anything. The point is to learn how to accept input, manipulate it, store it, retrieve it and display it on the phone. If I can do that by the middle of next week, I’ll consider it a success.
On the larger computer front, I’ve been trying to update the operating system on the MacBook Pro almost since I first started using it. It’s currently running OS X v10.4, and all of the decent applications that I’d like to use (like the IDE for developing Android apps) won’t run on anything lower than 10.5. I’ve finally located a disk image for the upgrade, but so far have had no luck getting the upgrade to work. As I type this, I’m downloading a different image and will hopefully have better luck with that.
After a few really beautiful winter days in Atlanta, the weather turned pretty gross today. Temps were in the 40s and it rained on and off pretty much all afternoon. I think the rain is supposed to stop tonight, but the chill is supposed to hang around for the next week. Normal Georgia winter, I guess. I was just getting spoiled by the 70-degree days that we’ve been having.
I’m still hanging in there on the No Dairy thing. It’s not like I miss eating cheese or anything, but it’s just so damned hard to find food that doesn’t contain dairy. I had chicken strips, corn, and boiled potatoes for lunch (so there was probably dairy the breading on the chicken – I don’t care), and a couple of chicken breasts made on my George Foreman grill for dinner (with some expired BBQ sauce that I found in the pantry). Last night I had some of those 3-minute boil in styrofoam noodles that promise me about 400% of the USRDA of sodium. Tomorrow, I’ll be working from home and will probably eat some other expired canned food from the pantry. Life was so much easier when I could just make myself a cheese sandwich, but I figure I’ll lose 40 pounds by February at this rate.
Chris may make me some Italian food on Friday. That’d be good. Italians don’t eat cheese, right?
Did not practice my horn tonight (first night in quite a while, actually), but I did sit down at the piano for about thirty minutes. I’m not sure why, but I haven’t done that in a long time. It was relaxing and gave me a chance to practice reading chords.
Fun times in Olde Duluthe.
TWD