morrowlife

I was looking back at some photos from Summer 2005, and I think I boiled the essence of the summer down to four pictures. Here’s the first one. We were at Worlds End State Park, the place was beautiful, the weather was warm, we had a great time, and it was a good fire that night.

Back to reality. Last night’s snowstorm pretty much fizzled out on us. There was probably a little less than an inch on the driveway at Swampy Bottom this morning, versus the six or so we were expecting. There were a lot of disappointed kids around here this morning who found out school wasn’t being cancelled. Fortunately for them, there’s another chance this week – we’re expecting another snowstorm on Thursday night/Friday morning.

I have to say, though, that it was an absolutely beautiful day. After last night’s dusting on top of the weekend’s few inches, the sun came out this morning and turned everything brilliant white and clean-looking. On top of that, the streets all melted. Sweet. Why do I like the snow so much before Christmas but only tolerate it afterwards?

I have a great idea for this website – I want to write a Java script that will list all my readers’ first names in the rightmost column of the page. My user (or each user, eventually) would have his or her name in the column for a week or a month or a day or some reasonable amount of time. It might make it look like somebody actually reads the page! I wonder how hard it would be to create.

Summertime pictures two through four tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday.

Oops. No posts for a few days. Sorry about that, Reader. I found an interesting website tonight – the Retrobits Podcast. It’s on the iTunes music store, so I subscribed. There are already 23 shows up, so it’s apparently not just a flash in the pan. I’ll post my impressions soon. I’ve been disappointed by so many great-sounding podcasts that failed to fulfill their promise that I’m reluctant to recommend this one until I listen to a couple of shows myself. So stay tuned, reader.

Added a couple of new pictures to the random display on the gardenvillesoftware.com website. One’s of some purple flowers (which almost never comes up – I can’t figure out why) in Michigan this past summer and the other is a yellow fungus from a state park. Does that one count as a flower? I would appreciate it if my reader would try reloading the gardenvillesoftware.com website a few times to see if the purple flower one comes up. Here’s what it looks like:

By the way, we’re still looking for Reader number three! Where are you?

Here’s another picture I took at Hopewell Furnace during a family camping trip this summer. I like this one so much it’s now the desktop image on my work computer. As usual, click to enlarge.

I’ve been fooling around with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called Eclipse. It’s a cross-platform environment that uses the Gnu family of compilers and debuggers. I have mine set up to recognize Java, C/C++, and Fortran. Sadly, I can’t get the Fortran environment to launch the debugger, so I can write Fortran programs, but then I have to go outside of the IDE to execute them. I could fool around with it a little more and try to get it to work, but I think I’ll just switch to C instead. I have lots of documentation and some experience (certain more recent experience with C than with Fortran!). I just thought it would have been cool to write some Fortran code again.

Why, you may ask, am I using Eclipse rather than Xcode, the wonderful Mac OS development environment that comes free with OS X? I dunno – I just don’t feel like climbing the Mac (or Windows, for that matter) GUI learning curve just to do some programming for fun. So, it’s command line for me, and that means Eclipse. Besides, Eclipse also seems to be a good platform for writing Java Widgets. That might be fun. I just need to get a good Java book and a good idea and go wild.

Anyway, stay tuned for a simple little program or two.

Amazingly, I now have two readers – Andy and Mark! And don’t let the fact that they’re both members of my immediate household lead to you believe they’re reading morrowlife out of any sense of obligation. To the contrary – they know quality content when they see it.

Now searching for number three.