Chris's Life

My software is coming along at work. Unfortunately, for everything visible I do there's a lot of back-end work that goes into it which no one but me sees, but even so, I'm making some visible progress.

I refined the interface for dealing with the sign a bit (though some of it will need to be re-written once I actually write the scheduler, but for the time being I'm ignoring that portion of things). I finally came up with a decent interface to manage the libraries, and have a skeleton for that done. I hope to flesh that out tomorrow so that it's usable.

Once that's done, I'll probably begin on the scheduler. The scheduler is going to be a fair amount of work, though most of it will be detail work which isn't too hard; the real bear is going to be efficiently figuring out when schedules collide. I do think that I've mostly figured out how to do that, though.

Things are starting to come together. Once a few more pieces are in place, all of the work designing the system will really start to show its worth. I'm really getting excited. I think that this software system will really be some good work. The future, as always, remains to be seen, of course, but I think that I have legitimate reason to be optimistic.

Today's big even was getting my car inspected. It took about 4 hours and $430, but by 1pm I had succeeded. All it needed was a new breakpad for the front right tire, re-finishing of the rotors, and two new tires for the front wheels.

The flat tire (which I got last weekend) couldn't be fixed, so it was replaced with one of the old tires which was a hair above the wear line (i.e. still legal but not terribly safe on snow, and not legal for many more miles.) It's not, perhaps, an ideal solution, but if a spare tire will only last for 300-600 miles, that's still far better than your typical donut.

Incidentally, it was an interesting experience changing a tire. It was easier than I had expected it to be, though tires are also heavier than I expected them to be. After all, they're mostly just air. :-)

I finally got the software that I wrote to talk to a message board and display what I wanted it to display. There is still a lot to fix, and a whole lot more to actually implement, but things are on their way. I've finally got something tangible (or at least visible, since it's only a pattern of light emitted by the sign) to show for what I've been doing all these months. Well, aside from the Arabic solution -- but that's not yet finished either. Still, we did sell some message boards based on it, so that's still an achievement, I think.