morrowlife

Here’s a great dragon on the carousel in the mall in beautiful Tracy, California – not too far from Lardville.  We took a walk through the mall after dinner a few weeks ago.  We should have taken a ride.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Statue series.

Missed a couple of days again.  Sorry about that.  I’m just so . . . busy?  No, that’s not it.  Important?  No, not quite there yet.  Lazy?  Aha!

Although not all that much is new.  We enjoyed our weekend with LRN12, as always.  And we were pretty much exhausted by the time she went home.  So it was good that her mom came and got her on Sunday evening.  LRN4 got to test out a bunch of  activities for her website on LRN12, which was fun and productive at the same time.  She also took a bunch of pictures – so many, in fact, that the girl who loves to have her picture taken actually seemed to get a bit sick of it.

I didn’t really accomplish anything else over the weekend.  Yeepers.  Maybe more will get done this weekend, which is already just about upon us, this being my off-Friday week.  We’re going to see Al Jarreau Thursday night at the Gallo Center.  Hopes are high, but I fear it will be too loud.  Hopefully, the Jarreau-loving crowd has a lower tolerance for aural pain, and the artist behaves accordingly.  But we’ll probably bring earplugs, just in case.  Also binoculars.  We’re in the very last row of the very last balcony.  Cheap seats indeed.  It ought to sound about the same way up there anyway.

Not much else planned for the weekend yet.  It’s been raining off and on, and promises to continue to do so through Saturday.  So no lawn mowing, filter cleaning, or car washing.  Dang.  After a sunny Sunday, it’s supposed to start raining again on Monday.

I signed up for our annual free trip to Great America yesterday.  The company rents out the park for a Saturday shortly before it opens to the public for the summer, which is a nice little thing for them to do.  They buy 20,000 tickets and give them all away to employees.  The park’s capacity is significantly higher than that, so the lines are generally more or less reasonable too.  Assuming all the rides are open, which was pretty much the case last year.  The year before that, not so much.  In fact, just about everything was closed that year, it seemed.  At least all the good rides were closed.

Speaking of which, I’ve discovered my tolerance for roller coasters has greatly diminished in my old middle age.  Things that really jerk you around tend to hurt my back, and my stomach gets less and less tolerant of being whipped around too.  I guess it’s the carousel for me.  Sigh.  The good old Blue Streak certainly wouldn’t bother me, though.  That’s got to be the best roller coaster in the world.  You simply can’t wipe the smile off your face when you get off of that one.

Anyway.  I’m looking forward to our day at Great America.  Maybe I’ll ride the kiddie coaster.  We’re going in mid-March, so hopefully the rain will have abated by then.  At least on that one day, anyway.

Nothing else to report and I should be going to bed.  So I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: frozen steak assault!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN12 with her fourth birthday cake, courtesy of LRN4.  Pretty fancy, that.  In fact, it’s so good that I’m declaring it a part of my famous Statue series.

No post yesterday, even after I committed on Tuesday to post every day.  Oops.  Got busy doing nothing useful last night.

Good week so far.  I haven’t really accomplished anything useful on my upcoming iPhone app, although I did find a couple of things that won’t work.  That’s progress, in an very Edisonian way.  I’m still looking for a place my app can go on the interwebs to get a constant flow of English text.  I’ve tried the public Twitter feed (excellent format, too much non-English, too much gibberish, and too much profanity) and a random Wikipedia page generator (too many links, but I might be able to make it work anyway).  Any other ideas, Loyal Readers?  The text has to be constantly available and always different.

LRN4 is making great progress on her website, and it’s now ready for public consumption.  It’s called Shannon’s Book Nook and it’s for parents/grandparents/others who want to read with their children.  She’s recommending excellent books (just picture books so far, but she’s planning to branch out to books for older kids too) and providing fun, simple activities related to each book for a little bit of education and a lot of fun.  Highly recommended.  Go have a look.  I command you.

Well, I just discovered I already plugged LRN4’s website in my last post.  Doesn’t make any difference.  Go there again.

I’ve been watching old Get Smart TV shows on the train when I have nothing better to do (or when I don’t feel like doing anything better).  Great fun.  I was watching them on my computer, but realized it might be a bit easier to use my iPad for that, so I loaded a bunch of shows on it and I’ve really been enjoying them.  I have lots of them.  Plus a bunch of F Troops and Hogan’s Heroes.  And some other stuff too.  I have no shortage of entertainment.

Speaking of which, I don’t know if I mentioned an interesting little E-book I’ve been reading.  It’s called Safecracking for Computer Scientists.  The premise is that they teach you how safes are protected against thieves and how thieves try to overcome the defenses, with the idea that there are analogies in how you protect software/websites against hackers.  One of the things I’ve learned (that I probably already knew, come to think of it) is that there is no such thing as a burglar-proof safe.  Safes are rated only by how long it should take a competent professional safecracker to get into them.  There’s also the question of whether evidence of the break-in is left.  There truly are very interesting analogies to software security design.  I’d kind of like to become a safecracking software security expert.  Maybe some day.  There are so many things I would like to do.  Did I mention I’d like to become a rich, successful iPhone developer?  Emphasis on the rich.

Anyway.  Let’s see what else is going on.  Oh, LRN12 is coming for the weekend.  She arrives tomorrow, and we’re excited to have her over.  LRN4 has plenty of book-related activities to test out on her (she doesn’t realize she’s being used as a human guinea pig – bwaa ha ha!) and we just love to have her around.  It’s pretty quiet with just the two of us around here.  Not that that’s a bad thing, of course.

LRN2 is doing pretty well at school.  He’s getting much better at taking care of himself, which is a skill we all need to learn at some point.  I knew he’d do fine, and he is!

I’ve decided to go back to Salt Lake City at the end of March.  The church is having a developers’ conference the two days before general conference.  Our project will be discussed in detail and we’ll be recruiting new team members, which we can always use.  Have all my Loyal Readers with iOS devices downloaded our project?  It’s called LDS Tools and can be found on the App Store.  Absolutely free.  Try it out.  I command you.

Time for dessert and bed.  It’s still way early, but we’ve been getting to bed much too late all week, and I’m exhausted.  So we’re going to bed earlier tonight.  Oh boy!

So I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: stinky chicken bomb!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN2 breaking a dam and letting all the poor little people downstream go to their watery fate.  Those must be some pretty small people.  Also, that’s a pretty easy dam to break.  Great Art taken at the science museum we visited on Christmas Eve, whatever its name was.

Anyway.  No posts for a week.  Yet again.  I’ve been busy, as usual.  On the other hand, there’s not much to tell.  Yet again.  I’m getting up, commuting, working, eating, programming, and going to bed.  Things could be worse, though.

I have been spending quite a bit of time on the old programming gig.  Mostly, I’ve been working on LRN4’s website.  Some refinements are still needed, but it’s looking good and working well and it has gone live!  Check out Shannon’s Book Nook!  And tell a friend.  Tell lots of friends.  Buy all our playsets and toys.  Do it now.

I’ve also made good progress on my new iPhone app.  Got the UI done, with the possible exception of some simple graphics for the background.  Now I have to figure out how to get a datastream into it.  From Twitter to you.  That’s my plan.  I found an API that ought to get me what I need.  Just have to figure out how to implement it.  I’m hoping to spend a few minutes on that tonight.  I’d like to get the app done and submitted within a week or so.

Then on to my next app idea.  Don’t have one yet, but I’m sure something will come to me.  I think I need ideas that have a bit more mass market appeal.  Also that will make me filthy stinking rich.  So far, only I’m filthy and stinking.  Two out of three!

We’ve had a bit of nice weather here in Lardville for the past week or so.  It’s been sunny and quite warm, considering the season.  The weekend days were pretty much at or a bit over 70 degrees, about which I can’t complain.  Turned quite windy today, with the high maybe up to 60.  It felt positively cold.

I stayed home from work today with a bit of a sick stomach.  Feeling much better by this evening, so I’ll be back to work tomorrow.  I enjoyed lazing around a bit.  Maybe a bit too much, in fact.  Just exactly when can I retire?

Had our friend Art over for dinner again last night.  He’s spending his Monday evenings with us until his wife gets home, which might be a few more weeks.  We enjoy his visits.  Last night, he brought a bunch of stuff he collected during his mission to Japan a few many years ago, and he gave us a very interesting little briefing on the subject.  Really enjoyed it.

Well, that’s about it for today.  I’ll try to get back to writing every weekday.  In the meantime, I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife employment opportunity:  airport-dwelling monkey!  (Bonus secondary employment opportunity: monkey-adopted raccoon.)

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN2 with his dream machine.  As seen at the recent Salt Lake Auto Show.  Which we attended recently.  In Salt Lake.  It’s some kind of Subaru, apparently.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Machinery series.  Maybe somebody will write a book about the car like this one.  Or maybe even this one.

As usual, a few days have gone by since my last post.  Fortunately, not much has happened during that time.  Let’s see – can I think of anything?  Umm . . . nope.

Actually, there are a few things, now that I think about it a bit more.  For one thing, I’ve started working on my next iPhone program!  Not too far yet, but I have a rudimentary UI and have stolen a bit of code from Morse Coder, which I have to massage a bit.  In fact, I should be programming right now.  But I’m blogging instead.

Speaking of blogs, LRN4 and I have made a bunch of progress on hers.  The main page is looking really nice!  I did the CSS and she’s done the content and photography.  Still have a bunch of CSS to do for all the other pages, and she has a bit more photography and writing to do.  She’s just about ready to reveal it to the world.  After which I’ll publish a link.

And I think I’ll go back to programming.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: pickle assault!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN4 making a phone call.  I suspect she’s just about to transform into a superhero as well.  Or is that a superheroine?  I don’t care, as long as it includes a really cool costume.

Well.  Another week, another lack of posts.  I’m just busy.  Plus, there’s nothing much interesting to report.  Kind of pathetic, that – busy, busy, busy and boring, boring, boring.  But I’m having a great time.

I discovered today that my iPhone app now has 412 downloads!  And my second-biggest market (after the USA) is still Korea.  Why?  I guess they’re Morse code crazy over there.  Anyway, I’m delighted to have so many downloads.  Still need to get to work on the follow-up app.  Haven’t even started it yet.

Also need to work on LRN4’s website.  There’s a ton to do there.  She’s making good progress on making her photography beautiful.  I have high hopes for the site.  But I really need to do my part to make it beautiful too.

LRN5 and LRN12 were here on Saturday for a birthday party.  Happy birthday, LRN5!  It was the first time we’d seen LRN12 since mid-December.  We had missed her!  She just keeps getting cuter and more fun.

LRN2’s doing well in school, although he strangely doesn’t seem to feel like he’s doing all that great.  All I can say is the results are speaking for themselves.  He’s doing great.  And he’s doing really well at learning to take complete care of himself.

LRN1’s also doing very well.  We got a very nice letter from him this week.  He’s working hard and seems happy.  Lots of success too.

We had our friend Art over for dinner last night.  His wife, our friend Cathie, is out of town and he deserved a decent meal.  He brought over a bunch of maps of our area, including some really good information in Yosemite.  We live about two hours away from there, and we’ve only gone once since we moved to Lardville.  Need to correct that situation.  Art pointed out a whole bunch of interesting things to see.  Need to spend a few of my off Fridays doing a bit of exploring.

And that’s about it for tonight.  I want to go to bed.  So I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife employment agency opportunity: fugitive monkey!

See you tomorrow.