Monday, August 31, 2009

Busy weekend!

It was a busy weekend. On Friday after work, I went and purchased a used TI-83 Plus calculator that I found on craigslist; I want to experiment with programming its Z80 processor, and don't want to risk John's TI-84 Plus Silver Edition that we bought him for school. That'll take me back to my TRS-80 Model I days. I then naturally needed to update its operating system to the latest version, 1.19. There were some hick ups along the way--the transfer died in the middle, but I eventually got it installed, using Google to help me find the solution. I then wrote a quick and dirty TI-Basic program to compute a Fibonacci Number.

Friday evening, I drove John and one his friends to a youth night at a home out past Oregon City.

On Saturday, I had multimedia duty at PVC. Steve Arrington was the speaker, telling the story of his life as a Navy diver, a convicted felon, chief diver for the Cousteau Society, and lay youth minister. He also had a program Saturday evening, showing undersea video from Fiji and Hawaii.

Yesterday, we went over to Joy's mom's house for brunch and for me to work on her computer. One of her grandkids had installed some software on her computer that had somehow disabled her sound card. I tried several different things and finally just reinstalled Windows XP on it. I set up a limited "Kids" account on there for the grandchildren to use, but prevent them from installing any software.

At work, I'm reading about a relatively new design pattern, Data Access Objects (DAO), that abstracts the persistence layer of an application from the business logic, making it easier to switch database managers, etc. I'm going to use that technique to refactor my homepage application.

No comments: