morrowlife

Here’s my white board, featuring this year’s cartoon by LRN2.  I like it.  I think he has a future as a cartoonist, if he wants it.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam.

No post on Friday.  I got busy, as usual.  Although I don’t really remember what I did.  So I might as well have been blogging, no?

Good weekend.  I spent a lot of it on my iPhone app, which is coming along quite well.  The first half is just about done – I just have a bit of fine tuning to do.  The first-and-a-half half will be to create a preferences/about page, which I can probably get done on the train tomorrow.  Then comes the second half – the tough part.  I hope to conquer it sometime this week.  After that, the third half will be making it as pretty as my engineer’s eye and hand can do, and then I submit it.  Do you think anybody will download it?  I hope so.  If it becomes really popular, will I regret not putting ads in it?  Probably.

Anyway.  We jacuzzified tonight for Family Home Evening.  I went out and fixed the loose screws on the blower right before that, and it failed again after about fifteen minutes of use.  Sigh.  I need to figure out how to get that blower motor screwed down to stay.  LRN2 has recommended duct tape.  I recommend he listen carefully when he gets to Engineering school.

And it’s time for bed.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food disaster news:  burning yam truck!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN2 standing inside a tree.  Well, inside a tunnel inside a tree.  Yet another piece of Great Art taken at Calaveras Big Trees State Park and part of my famous Camping and Vacation series.

Extreme Short Shrift.  It’s late already.

My new network-attached storage drive is working great.  The Time Machine backup continues.  It transferred a total of about 2.5 GB overnight last night.  So far tonight, it’s gotten a total of about 2.8 GB transferred.  At this rate, it’s going to take many days.  That’s okay, I guess.  I’m not really in a hurry.  I already have one Time Machine backup on my 500 GB drive, which I don’t plan to erase until this one is done.  So what if it takes two weeks to get my first backup done?  The incrementals will go much more quickly after that.

Forgot to download indexing batches last night, so I watched three Get Smart episodes on this evening’s train instead.  Good show and highly recommended.  One of my favorites.  Another desk came from Netflix today, so I’ll watch its episodes Real Soon Now.

And I need to go to bed already, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife employment opportunity: security monkey!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s the beach at Santa Cruz around sunset.  That was a long but enjoyable day.  I think I may have mentioned that my favorite part was the four hours LRN2 and I spent together waiting for the rest of the people to come.  The low point – cleaning up the Dutch ovens afterwards.  Never again.  Check out that old concrete ship at the end of the pier.  World War I relic.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam.

Short shrift tonight.  I want to work on a bit of iPhone programming before I go to bed in about an hour.

Lots to do at work.  It’s kind of hard to stay productive right now – I suspect it’s because many of the things I need to do are things I don’t exactly want to do.  Must . . . put . . . shoulder . . . to . . . the . . . wheel.

Plenty to do at home too, but the schedule isn’t quite as tough.  LRN4 spent a good portion of the day cleaning out her hobby shelf in the garage.  Most of the stuff is in the trash can now, but she found some pretty good things there that she’s hanging on to.  Maybe she’ll be able to find a little time to work on hobbies after the house isn’t so full of time-consuming junk.  We can only hope.

Otherwise, not much.  Oh – our iPhone app came out today!  I have no idea how many downloads there have been, but we’ve had about five people already that can’t get it to download their data.  Sigh.  I suspect the database people may have chosen today to make another change, which would be unfortunate, but my contact at the church can easily get that fixed.  Or it’s something else we’ll get figured out.  My iPhone- or iPod-Touch- or iPad-owning Loyal Readers are invited to go to the Apple App Store and search for LDS Tools.  Let me know what you think.  Even bug reports are welcome.

Been watching the videos from iTunes U of the Stanford iPhone Development class.  It’s very well done, with good, clear lectures and quite good production values.  Highly recommended for budding iPhone developers such as myself.  I’m also working through the Big Nerd Ranch‘s iPhone Programming book.  Also highly recommended.  Between the two, maybe I’ll be able to figure this thing out.  I think I’m making progress.

So today was my all-iPhone blog.  Some days are just like that.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: let’s just say I’ve had this problem before too.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN1 and his new haircut.  What do you think, Loyal Readers?

Wow.  It’s been a long time since I last posted.  Some journal, huh?  Maybe I need to get another hobby.  But what would my long-suffering Loyal Readers do for entertainment?

We had a great weekend at Lake Tahoe.  The cabin was cute.  A little older, but neat and in great condition.  It was nice being there.  I’ll get a few photos onto the blog Real Soon Now.

In other big news, I’m writing this on my new computer!  It’s a beautiful MacBook Pro.  Nothing too out of the ordinary, but I really like it.  LRN2’s machine looks identical to it (although his hard disk is a bit smaller), and LRN4’s also looks almost identical – she has LRN1’s old unibody MacBook from a year or two ago.  It’s still a great machine and seems just like mine except for a smaller hard disk and no backlighting on its keyboard.  I’m guessing its processor might be a bit slower, but not so you could notice.  We’re all in computer heaven around here.

And we’ve been busy getting rid of old computers.  I’ve thrown away six or seven desktop machines in various states of repair, along with my old semi-broken laptop.  My trusty, still-working right Linux machine is in storage in my office – I’ll probably get rid of it soon, but I can’t quite bear to do it yet.  I think I’ve thrown away enough computers for one week, don’t you?

We’ve gotten rid of a whole lot of other stuff too.  Most notably, we’ve said goodbye to our camping trailer (as previously mentioned) and my beloved Miata.  Got pretty good money for both, although the Miata’s final departure has been delayed by difficulties getting it to pass its smog test.  It had to have its timing adjusted and now it’s getting a new catalytic converter and a fuel filler pipe.  We’re having to put a substantial portion of the purchase price back into it, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

We’ve also gotten rid of a ton of unneeded books, jillions of unneeded computer parts, unneeded stereo equipment, an unneeded semi-working laser printer, and who knows what else.  Progress is steady, but I fear we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the tip of the iceberg.  Much more junk awaits the axe.  And it can’t be gone soon enough.

Speaking of being gone, LRN2 has decided to graduate from high school in December and start college in January!  That’s pretty big news around here.  He has started the BYU application process and has until October first to complete it.  I think he’ll make it on time without too much trouble.  I’ll be really sad to see him go, but I think it’s a great idea to get out there and get going on college.

LRN2 has started driving my beloved Ranger, since my beloved Miata is gone.  We had to get a bunch of things fixed on it this week, including getting new spark plugs, spark plug wires, coil, and fuel filter (basic [but expensive] tune-up stuff), new brake rotors and pads, and a new steering wheel (paid for this week but not to be installed until next week).  It’s running great now.  I have the Suburban at work again, which passed its smog test (finally) last week.  Hopefully, we’re at least temporarily finished spending half our money on auto repairs.

Anyway.  LRN12 is here for a few days – she arrived last night and is staying through Monday.  In other visiting news, my father arrives from Michigan tomorrow.  He’s also staying until Monday.  Hopefully, this town will be big enough for the both of ’em.  I’m really looking forward to my dad’s visit, and I always love having LRN12 here too.  Should be a good weekend.

Well, it’s past my bedtime, as usual, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife employment opportunity: snake wrestler!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN2 with his strangely radioactive birthday cake.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken slightly before the view of a few days ago, and possibly even more frightening.

No post last Friday.  Got busy.  LRN12 was with us on the weekend, for one thing.  We had a nice visit.  LRN5 came on Friday also and spent the night.  We hadn’t seen her in a while either, so it was nice to catch up.

Speaking of Loyal Readers, LRN3 and LRN15 have decided to leave Arizona and carry themselves back to old Virginia!  They’re planning to leave on LRN3’s birthday, which is coming up in only a couple of weeks.  I’m sure they have lots to get done in preparation.  I think they’re planning to sell/give away/donate lots of their stuff.  Good luck, Loyal Readers!  We’ll miss having you here in the West, that’s for sure.  Who knows, though? We may be back in the East one of these days.

I really meant to get my weekly letter off to LRN1 last night, but just didn’t get it done.  I figured I’d work on it during my lunch break today.  Imagine my surprise when he sent a note at about 10:15 this morning, telling me he was receiving and sending emails early!  I quickly called LRN4 and we both got our letters written.  Fortunately, he got them before it was too late.  I’ll have to remember to get it done on Sunday from now on.  I’d hate to let a week go by without a letter for him.

My new iPhone book arrived from Amazon today.  It’s called: “iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide,” and my iPhone project co-volunteers tell me it’s about the best one out there right now.  I’m looking forward to going through it Real Soon Now.  I still have to read the very good Qt book I got for my birthday, too.  I’ve been going through my old C++ book in preparation for that one.  So there are lots of technical books to read right now.  But I’m pretty serious about iPhone development, so I’m giving priority to that one.

Speaking of which, I found an entire college-level iPhone development class from Stanford on iTunes U and downloaded it the other night.  It was taught Winter term this year, so it’s nice and fresh (although already about two generations of Xcode tools old – that’s an impossibility to keep up with).  I am within two minutes of finishing the first session – watched it on the train this morning and this afternoon, in between working for an hour in the morning and doing a bit of indexing in the afternoon.  The class is formatted for a 640×480 iPod, so that’s convenient train-wise.

Speaking of taking iPhone development seriously, I’m heading off to iPhone boot camp this Friday afternoon.  It lasts through the weekend.  I’m told it’s less of a tutorial than an actual working session, so I’m hoping to get as versed as possible before I get there and use it to get some real practical hands-on experience.  I know I’ll be getting a t-shirt (the registration form asked for my size), and I hear there may be other cool goodies distributed as well.  I’m excited to get started.

In more appley-goodness news, I installed iOS 4 on my iPhone yesterday afternoon.  I was really nervous about doing it, and the jury’s still out on the long-term effects, but so far, so good.  My phone wasn’t running particularly fast before, so I had very little to lose.  If it gets lousy sometime soon, I can revert back to the previous OS without too much trouble.

I’m pretty sure I mentioned that I’m listening to Jesus the Christ on the old iPod.  I’m really enjoying it.  Highly recommended.  We just started reading the New Testament at dinner, so I’m getting a double-dose of Jesus’s life.  Which isn’t a bad thing to get a double-dose of.  In spite of the reader having forgotten to remove his fairly regular speakos (the verbal equivalent of a typo – and who doesn’t do such things?), it’s well done and interesting.  Doesn’t put me to sleep, either.

Time for Home Evening, so I have to quit.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this fascinating toilet news: Canada has its own toilet museum.

See you tomorrow.