An errand day.

2012-02-27: Day +77.

I took an extra day this weekend just to be with my sweetie after her three week absence :).

We did a bunch of chores in the AM, the most interesting of which was to take a look at married student residences at the UofC. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'll be doing nothing but school full-time from May forward (April is half and half). So, we thought it a good idea to check them out and see if these would be a good fit.

The initial impression was pretty favourable. For two people, there is a good amount of space, including an actual basement. (Quite a bit better than what I lived in in the 70s at the UofA). So, we sat with it for the day and sat with it and ....

At supper, we made this fantastic salad (Big bowl of greens, veggies, feta cheese, avocado). After supper, we loaded the dishwasher and talked it through.

It just would not make sense.

The initial thought was that it would save us a bunch of money and we would be walking distance to all of the UofC (including the gym, library and bookstore). The thing is, though, it doesn't really save us that much actual money. Cash flow would be better, of course, but at the end of the year, our asset base would be pretty close either way. So, no advantage there. Secondly, I already live a 25-30 minute walk from the UofC. So, yes, a bit further and less likely to do it for a casual gym visit. Definitely not a clear win.

The clear loss, however, was the kitchen. They are quite small. Having just completed a 4 week course in chef school, that doesn't appeal to either of us :).

Final nails in the coffin:

• No laundry in the units. (UofA had those).
• Moving costs and hassle
• Putting items into storage
• Moving hassle
• Less comfortable surroundings
• Moving hassle

So - we're staying put for another year. (This is about the 10th time we have made this decision....)

Sleepy Sunday too!

2012-02-26: Day +76.

"Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"

Well, we certainly lived that last night / today. Asleep by nine, and woke up at 5:30AM. Again, a lovely day inside away from the cold. Visiting, reading and catching up.

Sleepy Saturday

2012-02-25: Day +75.

With my sweetheart arriving after midnight, we didn't get to bed/sleep until after 3:00 AM. We had a bit of a sleep-in — to about 9:00, but I was wasted pretty much the whole day. Tea helped.

It was a lovely relaxing day. We stayed inside as it was bitter outside and just visited and caught up on life.

For supper, I was treated with a mushroom dumpling, using rice wrappers. Man, did that perk me up. They were delicious! Marie made them up on the spot, loosely based on the ones she did for her graduation.

Bella Nocé!

2012-02-24: Day +74.

This is it!

Sweetie arrives in about an hour. Heading up to the airport to get her and then disappearing in the house for the next few days. I'm taking Monday off work so I can be with her. All the dishes are clean, all the clothes, towels, floors etc. are clean. I bought groceries. We're good.

One more sleep!

2012-02-23: Day +73.

One more sleep and my sweetheart arrives!

I worked from home today. As I've said before, I always get a bit amazed at just how productive I am when I do that. I get through emails, I get things crossed off my todo list, I get a better sleep and generally just feel like a lot gets done.

I did some more work on the cucumber with uispec4j. Works very smoothly ... except... it won't terminate. Sigh. Always something. I've tried dispose on the main interceptor, dispose on the main window, getting the frame of the main window and disposing that, reset the environment and nothing works. Of course, java.lang.System.exit(0) does the trick, but it then cuts out of cucumber as well.

That is really the strangest thing. Cucumber finishes and gives its stats and so forth - but the threads just keep on running. Hopefully I will find something simple that handles that eventually. For now, I'm just going to proceed with actually doing some BDD/TDD on this program.

Swingtown!

2012-02-22: Day +72.

I finally took the plunge and tried uispec4j with cucumber for BDD on Swing. A little fussing and a little pushing and it seems to be doing everything I need.

It is different from jemmy in that it doesn't bring up the screen as it runs through the clicks. I actually like that as I find it less distracting. The other good thing is that it actually does work with menus.

I'm sure it has some things I won't like but that's ok, nothing is perfect.

Only two more sleeps until my sweetheart returns!

Caffeine withdrawal going ok. Most of the day without a headache, just body aches — primarily the leg. Thank goodness for tiger balm!

Caffeine free....

2012-02-21: Day +71.

Back to work after a nice four day weekend.

Today, I went caffeine free (at least, I think I did - I had a decaf Americano in the morning.)

Tough day. Depressed, lethargic, a headache all day and my leg hurt like fire. I managed to get in a full day at work, even with all that to complain about.

Once nice I was able to do at the end of the day was catch up on these blog entries. Finally. Blogging days after is rather useless. I remember bits of the day, but nothing is fresh, nothing is vibrant or has the same meaning as the day it occurs.

I had wanted to do more exploration with Cucumber and jemmy or uispec4j once I got home, but I just felt wiped. Instead, I watched a couple of episodes of Eureka and then crashed. I was in bed by 8:30 and slept through to 6:30.

Go see drogar.blogspot.com

2012-02-20: Day +70.

Wrote / published the blog post monkeybars-with-intellij-swing-designer

Back to programming

2012-02-19: Day +69.

Spent a fair amount of the day writing my blog on monkeybars with IntelliJ. I like to get these things as readable and sensible as possible. My sweetheart helped tons — as usual.

I actually had her do the same when I wrote my Master's Thesis (1Mb PDF), and it showed. (If you like, compare to my 1981 Thesis from the UofA.)

Struggled to get cucumber working with testing Swing - more on that in a couple of days.

Shopping, cleaning and chores

2012-02-18: Day +68.

Although I had intended to spend all four days of the weekend doing nothing but programming, a day off from that kind of thing is good.

So, today, I went around doing shopping, getting a couple of things, cleaning the house, doing laundry and generally just doing all the things that keep life livable.

Talked to my sweetheart lots today. (Sometimes every few minutes :).

Friday off!

2012-02-17: Day +67.

Tweeted today that I had monkeybars, IntelliJ, JRuby and Forms Designer working.  From that, I had very nice encouraging comments suggesting a blog would be in order.

It seems to me the twitter brings out the best of the web.

IntelliJ is quite the IDE

2012-02-16: Day +66.

So, IntelliJ has support or plugins for Cucumber, Scala, JRuby and on and on. Nice stuff. The only issue I having is the keystroke stuff, so I may switch it over to the emacs keys and upload/update my emacs plugin.

Cucumber support is quite nice - as long as you make JRuby the default in rvm. The JRuby cucumber task can not seem to find the cucumber gem, but the standard cucumber task just chugs along fine.

There are a couple of things that would be nice to have — for instance if you add code to lib/ruby and load that in env.rb, the steps within it are not found by IntelliJ, leaving them with a warning. No big deal as the execution just rolls along.

Decided on monkeybars

2012-02-15: Day +65.

I finally found the most up to date version of monkeybars, downloaded it and started trying in out in IntelliJ.

(BTW - typing monkeybars on the Mac has been over a week of frustration as it continually wants to put a space between the 'y' and the 'b'. Sigh)

Anyway, it seems to work really quite well. I've spent the afternoon just "spiking" code (read - playing around).

Happy Valentine's day.

2012-02-14: Day +64.

I'm in YYC, my sweetie is in OKC. Not what the best Valentine's day is made from.

Monday monday.

2012-02-13: Day +63.

As I write this, I am 8 days behind on my blogs.

Today was an uneventful day at work. Catching up a bit and doing Win7 stuff.

I've also finished reading all my testing books and now thinking about how to approach the quantum emulator interface.  I did a bit of research in JRuby interfaces to swing and the more I look at Monkeybars, the more I like it.

The 3D Phantom Menace

2012-02-12: Day +62.

I went to see the 3D release of the Phantom Menace yesterday with my daughter and Grandson.  I was one of those strange people who actually enjoyed the first release :)

It was good.

I had read a review on wired the day before that was so-so and I did agree with a couple of his points (Young Annikin's acting a bit uneven, the 3D didn't add a lot).  The only other big point was that the glasses definitely darkened the picture quite a bit.

Yummy yummy yummy

2012-02-11: Day +61.

More food photos of the dishes Marie is learning to do!

A working Friday

2012-02-10: Day +60.

One of our few Fridays that I had to work. Rather straightforward day, various meetings and so forth.

Up to the UofC in the afternoon to listen to Jonathan and more info on derivatives of computations.

Work work work

2012-02-09: Day +59.

Tuesdays and Thursdays seem to be my most crowded days at work. Typical T/Th is meetings from 9:00 AM through to 4:00 PM. Sometimes a break for lunch, sometimes not.

Wednesday == School Day

2012-02-08: Day +58.

Wednesdays I head up to the UofC late in the afternoon. Today I got to attend a seminar and then chat about development environments with some people. Nice stuff.

I've finished The Cucumber Book, Rails Test Prescriptions and most of The RSpec Book now. Now, to see how to apply them to my quantum emulator front end.