Pandamallet

The pandamallet part of this site is beginning to come together. I spent most of last night on work stuff so I didn’t have a chance to add anything interesting to that area but I’m expecting to start doing something in the near future.

I’ve still got plenty of assets to work out over there as well. I want some sort of banner strips for posts where the color and content of the strip calls out the type of entry. I also need to load up icon and banner assets…panda mallets need to come out and be seen 🙂

Another unseasonably warm day today. Work staying busy…was doing work stuff ’till midnight last night.

A conversation earlier in the week caused me to grab my copy of Error Control Coding to rummage around a bit. I don’t need forward error correction often (and when I do there’s generally a library to handle the heavy lifting) but it is an interesting bit of technology and the devil is in the details there…

Interesting…when I hopped over to Amazon to look for a link to the book I’ve got, I saw that there is a newer version by the lead author that gets much better reviews for usability. I appreciate the mathematical grounding of the second edition, but having a version that can be directly approached would be nice.

In the background as I’ve been doing other things lately, I’ve been listening (mostly) to some segments from a historian/gamer from England who covers a broad range of topics in an engaging manner on YouTube. 

Seems that the turkeys are back in our yard again for the fall and today Kitty Khan was playing ‘scatter the flock’ with them. He stands no chance of catching anything so he was just leaping into the middle of a group and watching them scatter. Lorna spent some time trying to corral him and get him inside before some critter got hurt and bumped her face on the mirror on Leo’s van along the way. In the end though she triumphed and all was well-ish…

Seems as if the weather out there can’t make up its mind. Some days it is warm and humid, others it feels like fall.

Saw Venom yesterday. It was better than some of the reviews had suggested it would be. A fun romp with the usual Marvel mix of humor and action and no more than the necessary amount of suspension of disbelief issues for a comic book movie. Clearly set up for a sequel and this version of venom is clearly being positioned as a slightly dark hero rather than a villain.

Got the ‘T’ part of the walkway trench expanded to the necessary width and depth for about half of its length. I’ve been dumping the dirt down the face of the slope in the front yard to build that up and provide a terrace behind the rock ring I created half way up. The smaller stones (pretty much rounded gravel) go on the two paths up to the side yard on the far side of the driveway. I had considered crushed rock there, but we’re have to order more for that. This stuff is free, looks pretty good and should do the job.

Lorna cleared out the lower front bed and mulched it so that it looks great.

I had been planning to drive down to Gloucester today to try out some hiking/walking trails in that area (Ravenswood Park). This weekend looks like a mix of partly cloudy and rainy so I’m thinking of trying some fallback options. Driving an hour and a half to walk some nice trails on a not so nice day seems less than ideal.

The other options I found within reasonable range (to the south) are Harold Parker State Forest, Ward Reservation, and Weir Hill which are all much closer in the Andover area. May try one of those today or perhaps just hit one of the more local options.

Another rather gray day out.

Got the lift cable replaced on the garage door last night. Turned out to be easier than I had anticipated…just attach the cable to the pulley,  shove a piece of wood (2×2 stock I keep around was fine) and lever the door up enough to loop the cable to the attachment point and done. Much easier than the torsion spring replacement of a few years ago.

Lorna got some Halloween candy for me to put out at work. Seems a bit early to start with that so I’ll probably wait until next week or so before I put it out.

Going to an introduction to meditation class tonight that Lorna found at the local library.

A drippy, grey morning today. 

Re-synced my data backups of my main home machine so feeling pretty good about that. Too much on there that I’d rather not lose. I still want to have an offline mirror of the vacation photos (8 TB covering quite a few years) but will likely need to code up some tools to make that happen.

I’ve got to clean up the rsync scripts that handle this chore sometime soon. Currently they’re scattered all around the system and named things like aaa.cmd and such. I should run this process more often to make sure that I don’t lose too much if I have a problem…making that easy is the first step to making it happen…

Got to grab the Xilinx Spartan-6 tools sometime soon…even if I’m not ready to do too much with VHDL, having them around would be nice. Just created a Xilinx account for work reasons anyway so should be straightforward.

Relatively unexciting weekend overall. More digging and some image post-processing of shots from our trip to England a couple of years ago (yeah, it seems to sometimes take that long to get these things done). I’ll probably post some galleries here once I get some decent sets of shots finished. Mostly focused on shots for Lorna’s scrap-booking first though.

Finished digging out the main trench for the walkway and back-filled it with sifted clay to the level that I want to start from. I’ll likely wind up putting another inch or two of base in there before I get to layering in the aggregate.

I did find out that the ‘T’ on the trench (which I had thought was fine) is actually neither wide enough or deep enough. I’m in the process of getting that addressed at this point.

I’ve been dumping the sifted soil from this area down the front slope as that is more convenient and I’ve got plenty of material in the piles that were dug out earlier to top up this trench once it is deep enough.

I’m also putting the left over small rocks (from the sifting process) on the paths up to the far side of the driveway. I had planned to put crushed rock here, but the supply for the parking spot was used up elsewhere and these stones are available so I’m expecting that they’ll do.

The weekend finished on a down note at one of the life cables for the garage door snapped. Amazon did come to the rescue as they have replacement cables and so I should have a pair (may as well replace both) in hand by mid-week.

Beautiful day out here today. Early fall and sunny with a little breeze. Grabbed coffee and breakfast at the Benson’s Bakery Cafe and then walked a short loop around the park. I didn’t bring my big camera so a very photogenic blue jay perched on the fence for us by the dog park. 

Dropped Alyssa off at Logan earlier in the week to fly back to San Diego.

Hoping to finish up the trench for the in-law apartment walkway today. Just a few more feet that needs to be taken down to 7 inches and then back-fill with sifted clay to establish an even bed.

I’ll probably do my photo shoot with the tie fighters and x-wing once the bed is clean and flat. Likely tomorrow. Recent events have made this a bit of a bitter-sweet thing and I don’t expect to go as elaborate as I would likely have otherwise…but the chance to do something is too good to pass up.

I’m likely to do some more work coding over the weekend to get ahead of the curve. Lots to get done and some interesting architectural improvements that can likely be made. 

Also likely to try to get some general purpose coding done and a bit more RepRap, Prusa i3 research done. Perhaps I can get Malcolm to fab me the plastics I’ll need soon…I should look at appropriate filament and buy a spool to support that effort.

I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m going to disconnect from the new and politics out there for a while. The current brand of chaos is making me crazy and there are better and more productive things to do with my time.

Hoping to get the walkway finished soon. Should be able to start putting aggregate into the trench this weekend…may be late in the weekend as I need to refill with packed, sifted clay to level the bed first.

Dropped another wheelbarrow full of small rocks on the drip line under the bay window last night. Should clean that area up a bit with the mulch coming up to the rocks and the rocks keeping erosion down.

Once the walkway is done, I’ll need to get the terracing in the middle bed area going. I’ve now got the dirt needed to bulk up the retaining rock rings and the sifter to clean up the fill before I add it. I do need the walkway in place in order to have a clear path for the wheelbarrow trips.

Spent last night doing some work coding. Looks like I’ll probably spend tonight doing more of the same. Some good code clean up along with added functionality so win-win.