Pacing

The past three weeks or so kept me busy both at work and on my personal projects. One of the less pleasant tasks I've had to do is update and upgrade the system that I help host. Normally this would be done on an ongoing basis, but I've neglected it for so long that some of the software is now past end of life and is no longer being actively maintained. All this effort is part of my pet project, a modern website for posting events. As I have only have an hour or two each day it is important to accomplish at least a little bit each time I find the opportunity. In the past I've had trouble with doing things this way. I preferred to work in long uninterrupted sessions sometimes long into the night. That's the way I got through my programming projects while at university, but that is difficult to keep up for long periods of time. One of the problems with relatively short sessions of work is the context switch at the beginning. Sometimes it takes as long as half an hour to get organized and get into the flow of things. To help me with this, I've been keeping a work log, so that even if I'm away from my project for several days when I read over the log it gives me a very good idea where I was at the last time. That way I can begin where I left off. Of course the log is very high tech, well not really, it's a simple paper notebook ...

Another Step

Andy returned from visiting a friend in Belgium. It's good to have him home again. Karl won the school Geography Bee. It's his last year he's eligible. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for him. I wrote some backup scripts for the hosted databases. They seem to work correctly, but I'll have to monitor it for a day or two before I take the next steps.

Candid Moments

Found an interesting photo of Tom when we were getting the Christmas tree last month.

A New Year

Another year's gone by and another one begins. Here's hoping that this year is better than the last. Not that the previous one was terrible. My personal and family situation was stable a fairly easy. We had an actual vacation that we all enjoyed. Overall the past year was good, but we're all hoping for better.

Minor Misadventures in Meta-programming

Recently I resumed working through Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp Working thorough the section on binary parsing, an all too common misfortune befell me. I got stuck without any clear idea why. Not quite expert in the use of the macroexpand function I did the usual immediate testing of the example code as I typed it in and loaded it. The results were unexpected, rather than the expanded macro form (i.e. a bunch of generate code), the target code executed. Baffled by the results I began the hunt for the offending code, for I was certain that's where the error was. I searched the examples, scrutinized the meaning of each and every function call in my code, performed many experiments where the meta-programming code was just slightly different than the examples, followed odd hunches on a wild goose chase. All to no avail. Then, while staring blankly at the examples in the book and in the documentation I noticed a minor detail, an apostrophe that I hadn't included in my testing. Ah yes! that blasted apostrophe which tells the reader to treat the following s-expression as a list (i.e. data) rather than as code to execute. Here I thought my error was in the code that I wrote but the error was in how I tried to invoke it. That oversight and my bull headed insistence that the error was in the code I wrote, cost me two days worth of spare time effort. A costly lesson, but a lesson that I am not likely to forget soon.

Moonlight

Standing outside on my deck, looking into my back yard I marveled at how bright the moonlight is tonight. After acclimating your eyes a bit you might even be able to read by it. Brought out the camera to snap a couple of pictures.

The first one is a twenty second exposure.



The second one is a thirty second exposure.



The railing on the deck served as the adhoc tripod. Perhaps I should add a real one to my kit.

Blue Marsh Lake

This weekend, we planned to hike, perhaps at the Boyd Big Tree Preserve. The weather and other circumstances didn't cooperate. In the end we went to Blue Marsh Lake, which is not more than half an hour from home by car. The morning was wet and blustery, but by the afternoon it cleared out and eventually warmed up. We, that is Tom, Karl and I, got there by late afternoon.



As you can see, both Tom and Karl were happy to be there.



We found our first sign of wildlife.



We of course had to investigate the lake. We've been there many times before. So it was all familiar ground. None of us could resist throwing stones into the lake.



We weren't alone at the lake. Other people were there sailing on this cool windy day.



So we went on a trail into the woods along the shore.



Our path eventually let us to a hilltop field.



Then it led deeper into some woods filled with tall trees.



We had gone far enough and decided to turn back.



On our way back, someone decided to hide in the field.



From a distance we saw a bird of prey. Perhaps it was vulture.



Just as we were returning to where our car was parked, we came across some rabbits. Tommy couldn't help but chase them.



It was getting late, but the skies above were a treat for the eyes.



On the way home we drove by Ontelaunee Reservoir as the day was ending.



It was good day to be outside, even if we did get out a bit late.