It’s all been rather hectic. Lots has been happening and unhappening. The most obvious being that the box that runs this website went a bit mental as the hard disks succumbed to age; and I’ve been too busy to fix it until this rather wet and dull bank holiday.
Anyway it’s more alive now than it has been. However because I’m a muppet I lost the www.chefs-book.com website. I have a very very old copy but it’s gonna take me sometime to massage it back to life. I suspect I’ll start from scratch. In fact I know I’ll start from scratch!
In other news I’ve been playing a lot of The Secret World and been having a nose around Guild Wars 2 this morning. All looks good there. I bought a K90 Corsair keyboard, which was gorgeous until it stopped working OK. Thankfully Overclockers and Corsair rock and a new one is in the post as I type this. Should arrive tomorrow at work.
On the subject of work that’s been going really well… everyones cool and rather supportive; even when I’m doing stuff I don’t quite understand (re: PHP/Zend/Security/Forms/Payment Systems etc.).
All the PHP coding at work however has given me the impetus to revisit my own Objective-C code. I’ve spend the last week polishing my own Last.fm scrobbling app which may not ever see the light of day in the app store. It does what I want, it’s very minimal and it does musicbrainz lookups to supplement the data when last.fm rejects the scrobble. Normally because it falls foul of a fubared filter, as Alanis Morissette’s “Incomplete” track did a few months ago. The downside is background notifications of song plays appear to be limited to three, so the only two ways to have it as a background app are:
– Hacks
– Check play counts on tracks and scrobble plays that have occurred in the backgrounded period (iffy but I’m looking into it)
– Integrate a music player into the app itself. Not keen on this idea and have no idea how much other processing I can do with the app running like that.
My idea to have my Delicious Library database on my iPhone has reached fruition. This is a piece of software that will definitely never be released. Mostly because I’m not allowed, though I do have permission for it on a personal learning basis. It’s actually a project I started doing whilst learning to code for iOS but quickly got back burnered when I’d learnt what I needed from it and moved onto Chef’s Book as a project that could see the light of day. I’ve still got some Core Data wizardry to do so I can search it etc. That should hopefully stop me buying books/cds/games and movies I already own when I’m out shopping!
As for Chef’s Book I have the compound predicates needed for recipe searching working. They need spit and polish and need to have a bit more natural language processing put in. Either by removing words such as and/or/with or actually processing them into their respective meanings and modifying the search accordingly.
I’ve taken lots of photos but haven’t yet punted them up to Flickr.
I took a step I’ve been thinking of taking for several years, I shut down my Facebook account. It feels good, although it would appear that many people missed the posting where I said “Hey I’m shutting down my account, you’ve got my number please call me if you want to chat”. Essentially I’d rather speak to my friends and meet them for a coffee once in a while than exchange banalities electronically!
Also there’s less photos in my face of things I don’t care about or wish to see! }:-)
What else? Not a lot. I keep a proper hand written daily journal now, having finally found a pen I can write with that doesn’t cause muscle cramps/carpal tunnel whatever the hell is wrong with my hands to flare up. I’m still going to the gym twice a week. Errr… I’m single. Again, but there’s a nice lady I talk to once a week about that crap. **grin**
I might post the odd journal type entry here now. Seeing as I can excerpt them from my diary. My pre-daily journal diary has now become my personal to-do list appointment diary, the paper that Moleskine use is crap with fountain pens compare to these lovely creations Paper Blanks. These particularly are nice Paper Blanks Mucha but too small for journal needs so I don’t know what I’m going to use them for. This is the one I’m using for journal stuff Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby Ultra. The papers nice and thick and they look lovely. I’d hunted and hunted for the Mucha ones, trying to find somewhere that had them in stock. Just because I like Mucha. They are a lot more gold in person than they look in photos on the web. Having ordered them online I found that the Waterstones in St. Albans has a tonne of them in stock upstairs. They also have a decent enough selection of the much larger ones, as does Smiths in Hemel Hempstead (upstairs).