I pulled my RSS feed display for Make Magazine today because their feed is mucking up my UTF-8 charset document and it's not validating at the W3C's website. Stupid people.
I just found out about Postcrossing—much like Bookcrossing and its older relative, Geocaching, it's a social activity where you register (for free) and send postcards to people around the world, and receive postcards for those you send. Quite a neat idea, I'm going to try it out!
I just found out that one of my all-time favorite authors, Fred Saberhagen passed away at the end of June. His Science Fiction novels are great, as are his fantasy novels. He's one of the few authors that does both so well, even combined into the same story (read the Empire of the East books and the Swords series).
Fred will be sorely missed, and I'm saddened that a bright, creative light in the world is gone now.
One of the things that drives me nuts is hearing people chewing with their mouths open. I really hate that sound.
I had the opportunity to eat a late lunch at the Coeur d'Alene Resort Golf Course restaurant this afternoon, and it was quite nice! I had a great french dip with a caesar salad, they were both delicious. I am working on arranging a big meeting we're having at the resort in two weeks (we're renting out most of their meeting rooms for the whole week), and was treated to lunch by our contact at the resort. We also took the Eagle wooden boats out there, what a treat! It was a beautiful day for a quick boat ride on the lake. Not to mention the fact that it took me away from my desk for a couple hours. And the fact that it was my second free lunch today. Hehe. I love my job.
Spent the entire day yesterday working on a mosaic for the master bathroom. It was a lot of work, and we're about 1/3 done. I have a feeling I know where my next couple of Saturdays are going…
Drop everything you're doing and get a ticket for the next showing at your closest theatre—it's amazing. Hands down the best movie I've seen in a long time. Come back here and tell me I was right.
Lego turns 75 today! Thanks for all the fun!
Yesterday they put together a giant boom crane, it was neat to see it get set up. This morning on my way to the office I could see it sticking out over all the trees in the area, it's pretty tall. Most of the forms are down from the concrete walls that they poured early this week. I was surprised to see them all disassembled, though. I thought they'd reuse them but it seems like they have other things in mind…
Today is Miracle Treat Day at Dairy Queen—every Blizzard you buy gets a donation to the Children's Miracle Network hospital, so go treat yourself and help someone at the same time!
Sorry if this is boring everyone else, but I think this is pretty exciting. I've learned quite a bit about window animation and mouse positioning/clicking. Ignore the black and blue dots, they're my animation tests (you can't see them moving around, but I can). This is a screenshot of the animation test, central shop, a mouseover-highlighted square, and some mountains mixed in. All of the graphics here are still placeholders.
This was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I also have right, left, and middle mouse button click recognition in each square.
If you recall my last MULE episode, I was torn between drawing tiles individually and having the drawing done from a central widget. I tried the central widget idea last night and was able to draw 1,035 PNGs to the screen per second without really tapping the CPU at all. I wasn't sure this model would work, but it seems to work quite well.
I wasn't sure this would work due to the high number of images. I thought I'd have to go down the double-buffering route to make this idea work, but I ended up not having to do anything special whatsoever. Color me surprised.
I haven't posted much about it, but yesterday the construction crews started pouring concrete for what looks like the basement walls for the new Courthouse. They only had forms up for what looked like half the walls, but I imagine they know what they're doing. It seemed like they took about two months off while almost nothing was being done, but today they're out working away. They have been pulling the forms off the new walls today, and it's exciting to see some real progress.
I've been working on my SMA/MULE project a little more this evening, and figured out how to do animations. It works quite well, but I'm not quite sure which way of drawing the frames on the screen is the best.
You can either have one giant QPainter that handles all the frames for all the tiles, or each tile can handle drawing itself and have its own QPainter. My question is where is the worst overhead? Is it worse to make a 45 different QPainters, or to have one that is constantly redrawing? I'm talking 15 frames times and least 90 images here. Any thoughts?
This weekend I've seen family I can't ever remember seeing before in my life, although my parents told me I have seen them, I was just very small. My aunt Marsha came up to Coeur d'Alene with her family all the way from Texas (most of them drove!), and both my other aunts Chris and Laurel came with their family as well. Not all of the cousins made it, but there were a few, and we had a great time yesterday telling family stories and playing Spoons—a game banned in by wife's family because it got too bloody. I was one of the first to go out (hey, it was my first time playing!), but had a blast all the same. We've started planning our next reunion in two years in Ramah, NM (that's where my great grandma Jenny lived).