It's halfheartedly dry and windy. I mean, you cannot say it rains yet everything gets wet outside and there isn't any real wind yet the dry leaves keep rustling. A rather depressing type of weather. Even the temperature is undecided swinging between 5 and 8C throughout the day.

I got a day off for servicing my car. I get up at my normal hour, 5:40, which is of course far to early. So I hang around a bit scanning the newspapers and a few old computer magazines and then I have to hurry to get to the garage in time.
Just after doing the dishes I hurry back to the garage to bring in my fathers car which needs servicing as well. Later I pick up first my car and then my fathers. All in all I make four trips to the garage on foot.

At noon I make a thin cake (standard measures cast in a large size form) and try out some glazing. I use a bit too much lemon juice so the icing is too soft and flows down the sides. Tough for a flat topped cake it would have been perfect. the taste is perfect anyway.

Way too hot for my taste (and the season) at 10C. And way too wet as well with a soft but persistent rain lasting well into the afternoon.

Ronny completed the WebSpeed exercise we got on Friday based on an HTML page I prepared. Of course that is not good for me because even though he explained what he did I did miss the action and that is where most of the learning is. Not that I expect to get much work from that side anyway. Still, ...

Spent most of the day working on the validation program, which is not going as fast as I would like. (Now who is surprised here?)

And I noticed Matt is back, posting twice this week. Something must be going on behind the scenes down in Arizona. Welcome back <g>

And the optimistic Shelley Bowman found a spot on the web as well. Welcome <g>

I think we have a heat wave going. We started with 10C in the morning, at 5:45 which should be about the coldest moment of the day. The noon temperature got all the way up to 16C. Someone must have forgotten we are November.

More work and discussion about the validations redesign. Things are picking up even though we still don't have a deadline. If things keep getting faster we may be reaching a demonstrable version ready before week 50.
Maybe.

We got some interruption from Theo, bringing in some 'new' problems but nothing seems to be burning

 

My brother passed by this evening. He is getting DOS-23 error when reading diskettes on his old Toshiba (i286/12, 1MB ram, 20MB hard disk) . Nothing new here, only they start to occur more frequently. Not surprising for a notebook that has been going since 1989, having seen service aboard ships al over the world.

Mostly dry and sunny throughout the day, real Indian-summer style weather. And, at 9C, still too hot for my taste.

I got into head-down keyboard torturing mode. And got (almost) all of the changes for the validations built in. Of course there are still some questions to be answered. And lots of mis-typings to be corrected. But I won't have to invent new methods of doing things.
One problem I noticed Yesterday was that I defined the index to a file wrong. I corrected that now but any change to a file on the AS/400 results in the rebuilding of the server-schema both on the AS/400 and on the NT server. We lost quite a lot of time doing that because not everything was working as expected, ex TOS was running and locked some files. Normally the whole process should take about one and a half hour. We had to restart twice so the whole morning was shot.

Even so it was a productive day. tomorrow is course day again so no productivity is to be expected.

 

I started working on the roll-over of my daynotes to next year. My original intention was to move each year in a separate directory hanging one level deeper than the current year. That of course is not really a good idea because it breaks all the links to other directories. That would mean I either lose all the graphics and a lot of other stuff, or it would mean I have to check and adapt all the links on all the pages. Neither option is a good idea.
I think I am going to drop all the past years in a single directory (hist) at the same level as the current year (cal). That still needs some work (for example the Calendar has the same name for each year) but it is manageable.
Any (better) suggestion is welcome.

A little drizzle at about 5h50 but by the time I hit the road it had stopped. And it stayed dry till 6h15 when we had our second bit of drizzle. In between it was nice and sunny and way too hot. Well 16C is too hot for the first of December. (Of course Mister Sturm has a different set of seasons.

No productive work but a productive course in stead. With Koen calling in sick there are just three of us and Ronny already knows Progress so Theo and I are executing the exercises with Ronny adding comments and questions while Sasha (the 'teacher') tries to guide the whole thing.
It is fun in a way but our (Theo and me) lack of Progress knowledge is really slowing us down. It is (for me at least) easy to see what needs to be done but I have trouble casting it in code. I guess I have been programming in RPG for too long.

 

At home I take over the cooking ( haddock with mushrooms) and add a good dille-sauce to it. Washed down with a bottle of white wine (Assagi, 1997, from South Africa).

And later I mangle my daynotes while working on my Zero-click^tm method. All right JHR you can stop laughing, I got things sorted out well enough for posting today. Just don't go to the calendar, or anywhere outside this week. Thanks.

Dry all day but also grey and windy. It does remain unseasonably warm with the temperature fluctuating between 10C and 16C.

Shopping. Again nothing computerish, just the standard food and drink. And a visit to the barbers shop.

I make a round cake at noon and pend the afternoon decorating it with glazing and butter-cream. That last is a bit of an experiment cause I don't have a recipe for it. I hope to make our Christmas cake myself this year and then I need some good butter-cream and glazing. The cream used in the normal commercial cakes tastes a bit too artificial IMO.
The butter-cream turns out superb just like the glazing. The only problem I have to tackle is that the cake itself rises to a dome shape while I want it to remain a bit flat on the top.
Decorating a cake definitively takes more time than making it. And eating it.

A rainy (real and drizzle) morning turning in a true steel grey sky. With the obligatory spate of rain and the unexpected ray of sun (notice that is singular). The temperature remains relatively high.

No trouble running. It's warm but there is a brisk wind driving the cooling drizzle forward. I added just over 2 Km to the route and it doesn't tire me more, it just takes about 5 minutes extra. I guess this indicates my condition is good.

I clean up my desk a bit by assembling Aria and shoving it on the floor. For which I have to clear some stacks of paper and other rubbish. All of which I have to get rid off somewhere else.
Yep, that is the domino-theory in action.

I have been having problems sending things out. Both FTP and mail timed out whenever I tried to send something. Receiving mail and receiving web-pages was no problem. Weird.