Here’s an ancient statue hiding away in a corner of the old owner’s mansion at Bryn Athyn. It’s probably a highly-significant religious artifact. Me, I like the dunce cap. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Statue series.
LRN3 got here on Monday. We’ve had a nice few days together. I took a guitar lesson from him last night and hope to have another one tomorrow. Needed to let my poor fingertips rest for a day. Learned a couple of CCR songs. Sort of. If I keep practicing them, I might actually be able to play them someday. Movie night tomorrow night at the Impenetrable Apartment of Doom’s cool little theater room. Friday morning, we’re going to Longwood Gardens to check out the Chrysanthemum Festival. We’re looking forward to LRN15’s arrival on Friday evening. We’re planning on setting up the Christmas tree on Saturday. I know that’s bizarrely early, but we’ll enjoy having family here to do it, and that’s the only time they’ll be here before the actual holiday week.
We’re planning to buy the cheapo $20 artificial tree from Target. LRN4 seriously considered the nicer, taller $50 version, but it’s just too darned fluffy to comfortably fit in our little apartment. So we’re getting the short, skinny version. We have a few dollar-store decorations LRN4 found. Strangely, I think the tree will look really nice. I’m looking forward to next year’s Christmas, though, when we have our decorations. Which are currently languishing in our garage in California.
Hopefully, she’ll have an easy trip up here. It snowed pretty much all day today and continues at this late hour (roughly 10:24 PM EST). We’re supposed to have up to about four inches of the stuff on the ground by tomorrow morning. I suspect it’ll be gone fairly quickly, though. It’s not time yet for permasnow. Maybe in December or January. This is just a nor’easter, which is exactly what all the people in New Jersey and New York who still don’t have electricity don’t need. We’ll be just fine. I only hope I can get to work tomorrow. If not, I’m in a bit of trouble, since I didn’t bring my work laptop home. Although that might make it a bit better, now that I think of it.
Spent some time this evening watching another in the excellent Stanford University iOS programming class. I’m on lecture 7 in the 2011 series. I had previously watched the 2010 version, which was also excellent, but this one adds all the cool iOS 5 stuff. Of course, we’re already on iOS 6 but, contrary to Apple’s express wishes, I’m not ready to abandon all the devices still running iOS 5. Including my beloved iPad. So I’m sticking with iOS 5 compatibility for now. LRN1 has convinced me to drop iOS 4, though. It’s time.
Speaking of my beloved iPad, I also spent some time this evening populating the excellent Flipboard content manager and linking it to the equally excellent Pocket offline reader. Pretty sweet combination. I loved Flipboard the first time I installed it many, many moons ago, but I never really started using it regularly. I think now’s the time. Just need to make sure I don’t overwhelm myself with extraneous content. I have too much to read already. Fortunately, it appears to be an excellent platform for Google Reader, which is where I get most of my news. So we’ll see. The browser-based Reader interface is simple, clean, and efficient. I’ll find out whether the magazine-like format of Flipboard is equally efficient in terms of getting things scanned quickly and reading the stuff that looks interesting.
I also have Zite and Google Currents installed on my iPad, but I don’t think I like either one of them as well as Flipboard. Maybe it’s just because Flipboard is the first such app I tried, but it just seems prettier and smoother to my eyes. Not that I’m uninstalling either of those other apps now. Need to keep my options open.
We haven’t bought much on Amazon lately, so I’ll have to start working on my wishlist. [amazon asin=B0042Z55RM&text=Here’s something I’d like to see] under the tiny little tree on Christmas morning!
And by the way, I’m an Amazon affiliate, you know. If you click any Amazon link on my site and then buy anything, I get a little kickback – and it costs you nothing extra! Feed the Morrowlife financial juggernaut!
Regarding last night’s election: nothing to say. Well, one thing. People generally get what they deserve, so I guess we’ll probably get what we deserve.
I’m rethinking what to do with my company website. Also kind of rethinking what to do with my company. I still hope to do iOS programming for the underserved world market, but I’m also thinking maybe I should be making use of my experience managing big-time software development and space engineering. So I’m thinking of figuring out how to do a little consulting in that area. One good way to start is to write a book on the topic that gets a few sales. One good way of doing that is by writing it a little bit at a time and publishing it on my website. So I’m working on finding a good theme that will allow me to emphasize writing a bit more while still not ignoring my programming efforts. We’ll see how that turns out. The problem is that the blog portion of the existing website is a bit difficult to find. I’d like to get it back on the main page. I think I found a good WordPress theme that will require a whole lot of modification, but provides a solid foundation with room for commercial information at the top and the blog starting underneath that. I’ll let my Loyal Readers know when the revised website is ready to check out. In the meantime, have a look at what we have up now. Also feel free to check out my non-profit (well, free, anyway) programming site.
Let’s see, what else is going on? Can’t think of a thing. So I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this rare exciting toilet news: the Kaiser’s toilet has been found!
See you tomorrow.
