User:Woozle/2005/08

2005-08-31

10:44, 31 Aug 2005 (EDT): Working on HyperMail some more -- back to the run/debug cycle; the semi-substantial code design change seems to be working.

2005-08-30

09:50, 30 Aug 2005 (EDT): Attempting to recover data from a seriously messed-up 60 GB HD. I don't think there's anything wrong with the hardware, but it looks like Windows wrote over the boot sector and the home directory -- however, it seems to me that it should theoretically be possible to recognize other directory fragments and recover the data to which they point. It's all a matter of whether or not there are tools which allow this. I've set the drive up on a machine with Linux, which seems the best bet for having such tools.

Yesterday was a kind of nothing day, except that I did place a Mountain order and we went for a walk and I fixed JERS's internet again (probably the one thing I did which he hadn't tried was to tell the router to refresh its DHCP).

2005-08-28

15:48, 28 Aug 2005 (EDT): Just finished processing Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief (favorite track: "Background to History"). Next, The 5th Dimension The Age of Aquarius and Joni Mitchell Court and Spark (both skimmed yesterday, but needing various tweaks). Also wrote a few glue articles (i.e. articles that help give the site some cohesiveness) for Issuepedia.

2005-08-27

15:38, 27 Aug 2005 (EDT): Skimming Court and Spark (Joni Mitchell). Before that, The Age of Aquarius (Fifth Dimension) and three 45 RPM singles. Before that, shipped the Zion Rootswear order which came in yesterday afternoon. Before that, worked a bit on HyperMail: realized some major reorganization was needed in order to be able to save too-large messages to separate files, so I had started on that but realized I had to finish the shipping so Harena could take the packages (over 1 pound, so can't go in the mailbox) to the Post Office on her way to work at 12:30.

2005-08-26

07:03, 26 Aug 2005 (EDT): This is a good example of how my days suddenly just come to a screeching halt. I was in the middle of doing some programming when Josh suddenly began hitting Benjamin every few minutes, for no obvious reason – probably because he wanted to lie down on the couch, and Benjamin and Zander were sitting in it watching a movie (but it could have been anything; he sometimes attacks Benjamin – because Benjamin is the smallest and will wail loudly – when he is trying to get an adult's attention for something completely unrelated, e.g. he is out of juice, which was also true in this case). I didn't actually catch him in the act, so I thought I had better go out into the living room for a bit and just watch him, so if he did it again I could act immediately.

About half an hour later we were done with the movie, but suddenly it was past time for supper, and Harena didn't feel up to cooking. So I made some spaghetti. Unfortunately we're now out of the thinner, faster-cooking variety, so this took another 30-40 minutes. Once I got everybody served, it was about 10 minutes until bedtime; I was still finishing mine as bedtime rolled past. Went upstairs, read books to both; came downstairs, cleaned Benjy's lunch stuff for the next day, and then Harena was feeling exhausted and needed to go to bed right away (and I have to go as well, for reasons which I'll summarize by mentioning that Harena has bad insomnia *and* needs to get up at 6 a.m. to get Josh out to the bus on time), so that was it. The "Right Now" entry I had started typing just before all the mess began was still waiting in preview mode when I came down this morning.

Still working on HyperMail; latest bug is that it runs out of memory trying to load an unusually large message into memory (probably has a large file attached), so I'm having to add a feature to set size limits on saved emails; when an email is over the limit, it gets saved to a file instead.

2005-08-25

16:40, 25 Aug 2005 (EDT): Working on HyperMail. Deferring the header storage seems, oddly enough, to have caused it to run much more slowly at first -- but unlike before, it now keeps a steady pace; the previous version slowed down gradually as it worked, so that processing time was a function of the square of file size -- which, for a 90 MB Inbox, meant very slow indeed. I wish I understood why it's slower at the beginning now, but I'll settle for getting this thing working; optimizations can be done later.

2005-08-24

12:53, 24 Aug 2005 (EDT): Shipped a couple of in-stock orders. Before that, spent part of the morning dealing with the ivy creeping across the sidewalk. I think now the priority is probably to work on HyperMail some more -- storing the header data for each message is apparently a large part of why the import runs so slowly, so I'm now having it defer the header parsing until later. Hopefully this will improve the speed enough that I don't have to wait several hours until it trips over the current bug.

2005-08-23

16:44, 23 Aug 2005 (EDT): Shipped the Liquid Blue order which arrived sometime yesterday (I don't know exactly when because nobody heard the doorbell ring; I only saw the package sitting outside when I went out to do the trash and recycling. If it hadn't been Monday...). Nothing back from the lawyer yet. I'm assuming she's out of town or something.

2005-08-22

13:04, 22 Aug 2005 (EDT): More vinyl skimming (I think I prefer the term "skimming" to "ripping" (which technically only applies to digital media anyway), and I am hoping the former will eventually replace the latter in common parlance, especially where analog media transcription is involved; this sentence, then, is my small contribution towards that end), and once I reach a point where the audio computer is busy doing stuff, I'll start in on the document reorganization.

2005-08-21

09:38, 21 Aug 2005 (EDT): Scanning bank statements and processing some digitized vinyl. I decided to do a half-baked job on my current stack of audio-to-digitize rather than waiting until I could afford a new needle; this way I at least have the music to listen to while I await that blessed and probably mythical day.

19:57, 21 Aug 2005 (EDT): Just sent an email to my lawyer regarding how to get things moving again... and I have to say, I [heart] having all the documents here on the wiki where I can search them easily. (Though they seem about due for some further reorganization, especially the legal documents.)

2005-08-20

08:25, 20 Aug 2005 (EDT): This.

13:23, 20 Aug 2005 (EDT): Now this.

2005-08-19

12:58, 19 Aug 2005 (EDT): This.

15:58, 19 Aug 2005 (EDT): For the 2nd year in a row, Githens has initially assigned Josh to a mainstream class. Hopefully his teacher can get things straightened out...

2005-08-18

17:46, 18 Aug 2005 (EDT): Spent most of today uploading check images for the accounting, though I did also ship an in-stock order which came in yesterday and the one shirt actually ordered from a bunch of SunDog Crinkles (minimum order 24 pcs) which also came in yesterday. Need to enter a list of disputed items from the accounting, as best I can puzzle it out from the scattered notes in the Defense's paperwork, along with my responses.

2005-08-17

07:29, 17 Aug 2005 (EDT): (Headache off and on all last night; it's currently in the "on" position.) Continuing to update the accounting, as well as processing images of checks and so forth to fill in the blanks in the spreadsheets.

18:41, 17 Aug 2005 (EDT): Overheard Benjy quote: "Put ketchup on the french fries, because they're being really evil." "Aaah! They're dead! Because the ketchup is their blood!"

2005-08-16

14:39, 16 Aug 2005 (EDT) Entering SvsG accounting updates from the documents provided by the defense. Found a way to paste spreadsheet data into the wiki using a converter script -- it was a bit broken for data containing tabs, but I fixed it. I should post the fixes on the author's wiki, but at the moment I don't feel like it, so I will do it later.

Also narrowly dodged a bullet on the bank account front -- forgot that SunDog hadn't yet debited for their order (it was complicated -- they were sending the order in 2 parts, and apparently they didn't bother to debit my card until the 2nd part went out, which meant a huge charge that I wasn't expecting rather than a smaller charge that I was half-expecting). My bank balance this morning was 88 cents.

2005-08-15

07:39, 15 Aug 2005 (EDT): Putting together an order for Liquid Blue.

08:22, 15 Aug 2005 (EDT): okay, that's done... Now I need to ship that one shirt (customer paid with PayPal yesterday)

20:01, 15 Aug 2005 (EDT): My head hurts. I should probably mention this whenever it happens in case I can spot a pattern later on.

Spent the rest of today (except for errands) working on the design docs for HyperAdmin, especially HyperAdmin Sessions. Slow going; the kind of thing in which each interruption sets you back about half an hour. There were a lot of interruptions, and I'm now about 17 minutes into yesterday. Maybe if there are more I will get to last week, and I can start over.

2005-08-14

09:03, 14 Aug 2005 (EDT): Uploading rebuilt vbz pages. Finally (finally!) added the new Beatles and Yes shirts to inventory, so maybe someone will actually buy them now. I've got three more boxes of what looks like sets of Mountain close-outs, so probably no need to tag them (lots and lots of the same design in different sizes), and then a few other bits and pieces left over. Also need to get a Liquid Blue order ready to place on Monday morning. Oh, and there was an order to reactivate because the customer wanted to use PayPal, and another order to charge because I decided not to wait for the rest of it...

2005-08-13

17:08, 13 Aug 2005 (EDT): I have discovered the joys of buying used CDs for one cent plus shipping on Amazon, or about $2.50 with shipping (which is still less than I used to pay for most used LPs in the late 1980s, even without adjusting for inflation). Not every CD is that cheap, but more than you'd think... a couple of weeks ago I got a Smashmouth CD at that price, and just now I got Tubthumping -- possibly the very last Tigger-certified Trampoline Song.

Before that, I was finally starting to make a dent in the huge stack of unfiled shirts-etc. hanging around the office. I'm starting to run out of places to put stock boxes.

2005-08-12

07:34, 12 Aug 2005 (EDT): Decided not to try to figure out a way to automatically set prices of in-stock discontinued items; used existing price codes to set them once, and then can set them manually if needed later.

2005-08-11

16:40, 11 Aug 2005 (EDT): Oh... I should be doing something, shouldn't I. ...Well, okay, actually I was working on some revisions to the data design of the ordering system (the catalog part) because I needed to enter some new items, and the whole "price code" thing started seeming really redundant some time ago. So I got rid of it; "TGroups" are now used to maintain pricing information. Unfortunately, when I ran a test build of some pages, the builder got into some kind of tangle. So I'm trying to figure out what's up with that.

And then I really should get back to the legal summary... er, the accounting... er, the HyperMoney-online scripts... er, the HyperAdmin coding. Yeah.

21:26, 11 Aug 2005 (EDT): Trying to figure out how the pricing interface should work for items which are no longer available from the supplier but which are in stock. Can't always depend on prices having been set earlier, which is what we've been doing so far.

2005-08-10

17:23, 10 Aug 2005 (EDT): Hmm, I seem to have missed a day. I know I was doing some shipping yesterday, and a couple of other things... I finally started to collect the information about Josh's history, but I still don't have the older email collected and the program I was going to use to collect it is having technical obstacle after technical obstacle. Shipped two more things today; now waiting for deposits to arrive so I can place the next round of orders (hopefully it will come in before the debit for the 2nd half of the SunDog order comes in, otherwise things will be Icky).

Feeling otherwise very unfocused, starting shortly after we picked up Benjamin.

2005-08-08

07:43, 8 Aug 2005 (EDT): Working on login sequence for HyperAdmin, ultimately to be used for HyperMoney and other web-based applications, which in turn should let me post accountings online. It'll soon be time to get kids ready to go, though, and then we'll be out for a couple of hours erranding.

17:44, 8 Aug 2005 (EDT): Gaahh!! http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/story/335379p-286516c.html I say we boycott Daylight Savings Time altogether. Take all the money they will need to budget for software fixes and use it to buy solar panels.

Also, took photos of the burned-down #143 Pinecrest. I feel weird about posting them, because I'm sure the owners must feel absolutely horrible after all the work they've been putting in renovating the place. I mean, I'm sure (I hope?) insurance will take care of the expense, but who knows what irreplaceable quasi-historical parts of the house are gone forever? And of course the insurance company can't replace the time lost; that house has been under renovation for about a year now...

I'm also assuming nobody was in the house when it happened, and that therefore nobody was hurt.

2005-08-07

15:35, 7 Aug 2005 (EDT): HyperMoney was going to need a security system, so I'm adapting the one I mostly-created for VbzCart as a separate component. It's going slowly.

Also created a favicon.ico for vbz.net to reduce 404 errors, and made the favicon.ico for the hypertwiki properly transparent -- at least, it should be, though I can't see the difference yet. (Just checked, and apparently it's still using the image cached on disk, and the cache expires on Tuesday. So I loaded it on a different browser and... yes, there we go.)

2005-08-06

08:30, 6 Aug 2005 (EDT): Yesterday, uploaded all the scanned check images from Grievers. Now I'm trying to figure out some reasonable way to show the accounting on the wiki. The obvious solution is just to enter it as a table, but the first time I started doing that I somehow managed to crash FireFox and lose all my edits. It probably won't happen again, but it ticked me off enough to put some effort into finding a better solution.

11:16, 6 Aug 2005 (EDT): Typing on the HyperMoney page; looks like a lot of what I'm typing should probably have its own page(s). Also chatting with Sinaasappeltje.

2005-08-04

20:53, 4 Aug 2005 (EDT): Shipped Mountain shirts that came in yesterday, except for those awaiting confirmation from customers. Processed and uploaded some of the RDA check images I scanned yesterday. Typed up SvsG: Phone Bills page.

2005-08-03

10:23, 3 Aug 2005 (EDT): Transcribing emails for Staddon vs. Griever.

15:59, 3 Aug 2005 (EDT): Finally received copies of inspected documents from defense lawyer, via my lawyer. Now updating records and scanning stuff.

2005-08-02

16:37, 2 Aug 2005 (EDT): Just finished shipping a bunch of shirts. Now, should I work on HyperFile, or Staddon vs. Griever? Or should I check the official to-do list? <checks official to-do list> On balance, I think SvsG... but should do some dishes first.

2005-08-01

16:26, 1 Aug 2005 (EDT): The morning (a word which here means "the part of the day prior to now") was mostly errands and miscellaneous chores, though I did manage to get two in-stock orders into the mail. Currently working towards getting the items in the Liquid Blue package (which arrived Friday after we left for the beach) into tomorrow's mail.