Post Christmas Update

Been a while, but have been busy due to Christmas and taking care of the kid. Christmas wasn’t bad, was able to fly my Havoc Heli for a while at her cousins’ house. I made them rent Halo 3 since they wanted me to bring the Xbox up and we played some local multiplayer before jumping into Big Team Battle. They got bored with it for a while, so I played the second level (Crow’s Nest) with campaign scoring turned on and got the achievement with 24K+ points. I was pretty excited by that. 7 more meta game achievements then its on to the 5 remaining Lone Wolf/Campaign achievements. I’ll be able to hash out one of them easily as it’s the only campaign one of them left and requires destroying a vehicle with equipment (trip mine and Brute Chopper on Tsvao Highway.

I’ve been hanging out in the iTeam IRC room since I’m trying to get it to compile on my Mac. So far nothing has worked and I’ve tried 5 different Xcode projects.

Sean and his girlfriend will be here today for a couple of days before he heads back to Virginia to begin his initial flight training. Still need to get him his present, but I don’t know what.

I’m rewriting my Tecplot file viewer to read in a generic PMARC output file, definitely a feat in C++, but I’ve figured out how to parse strings easily with stringstreams and the code looks pretty similar to my FORTRAN code that parses the PMARC output file. Haven’t tested the actual reading of the corner points, but the part to get the patch data works. I also need to work on the main loop and the SDL initialization to get it to compile on the Mac. I finally figured out how to do colormaps. It’s not the prettiest solution, but I have it go from yellow to reddish purple. I ended up making a Python Tkinter program to view to colors to see how they go together. Here is some output. I don’t know why I keep messing with PMARC file viewers, but it’s something to program I guess. Maybe I should just for-go all that and try my hand at doing the blog writer using Cocoa and Obj-C or help out the iTeam guys.

I think my wireless access point is going downhill. I need to log in to it to change settings, but can’t connect to it’s IP address. Total suckage.

White Christmas

Barring any extreme weather, the 8 inches of snow we have will be around for quite some time.  We have a white Christmas this year!  Pretty exciting, but what is not exciting is the snowblower not working.  I spent 3 hours shovelling the driveway yesterday (in 7° temperatures) and trying to get the snowblower started. At least it’s clear and we can enter the street without going over a 2.5 foot pile that the plow left. I shovelled that too and it was a lot more work than the 4 inches left on the driveway (I had shoveled the night before). I feel really accomplished after all that work. The only problem with all the snow is the fact that Bailey won’t go to the bathroom properly since she sinks down into it.

Bailey has now warmed up to the fact that Lilly will be around for a long time. This morning she [Bailey] was licking her [Lilly] face. The dog’s tongue is almost wider than her cheek. Bailey has also gotten protective of Lilly, evidently she was blocking Erica’s mom’s dog Winnie.

Curling was on TV yesterday! Twas amazing. I caught the last for ends of the US/Sweden game in the Korbel championship in NYC. The US won 7-3 after 6 ends. Did you know that there are 1.5 million curlers worldwide and Canada has a million of that total? I didn’t either until yesterday. Watching that made me really want to curl on a proper surface with good equipment and the special shoes. Maybe one day…

In an odd turn of events, we’re going to Erica’s dad’s house tonight for about 2 hours. Slightly interesting barring what all has happened between the two of them, but who knows.

I still need to get Erica’s present, which I don’t know what I’m getting her. I also need to go get a new pair of jeans and a pair of khakis today. I accidentally ripped a hole in my other pair of jeans, which is mostly repaired now.

Thunder Snow!?

This is crazy stuff, it’s snowing and thunderstorming at the same time!  Who knew that could happen.  Erica says it’s happened once before in her almost 25 years of existence, but I’ve never experienced it.

The snowblower that we got from her dad through Mark didn’t start when I wanted to clear the driveway earlier tonight.  Guess I’m getting up early tomorrow to clear it off before it get’s driven on.  I did shovel it once before I left to return the movies (“Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End” and “The Simpson’s Movie”) we rented.  The “Pirates of the Carribean” movie wasn’t all that great, there were some good parts, but with everyone backstabbing eachother every 5 seconds, it got old quick.  ”The Simpson’s Movie” was pretty good, I was worried that it’d be like a normal episode, but it was not.

It doesn’t feel like Christmas, but then again, it hasn’t felt like Christmas for the last couple of years.