Something I discovered recently that bears writing down: you can define all the handlers and actions you want in your code but if you don't actually list them in your android manifest, then you can't dispatch intents to them.

I just read a story on NPR's website about a co-working space in New York.

It took about a week to apply the three coats of spar varnish to the laundry rack, between my day job and the cold weather. I did get it done, though, as I really wanted the garage back before the rains came. The tools required for the mounting step were a ladder, a stud finder, a pencil, a drill, a screwdriver, a tape measure, a pair of pliers, and a pair of scissors. The parts were eight eye bolts, four "S" hooks, two single pulleys, two double pulleys, a cleat, two screws, and a spool of light rope.

We were looking in a recent Lehman's catalog and saw this swell laundry rack. The cool thing about it is that it hangs from the ceiling from ropes that run through pulleys. You lower the rack to put clothes on it, then you raise it up to let everything dry while it's up and out of the way. At about the same time, I saw this story from Ode Magazine about people around the world line-drying their clothes instead of using dryers.

From time to time, and increasingly frequently at this time of year, my dear wife has to send out emails to big segments of her company's customer base. That's her job, after all. However, for reasons that are outside the scope of this blog, the list of customers doesn't always have an email for each customer and, for various other reasons, the email addresses are not always well-formed. It takes her several hours each time to go through the list and manually screen them all.

Over the weekend I started working on writing a simulation environment. On Saturday morning, I had an empty project. This morning, I have a couple of sample components that I can link together (programmatically, it's true). I can tell them that time is passing and have messages flow and computation occur correctly. And I've got unit tests for all this, so I can tell when I break it in the future. Not bad for a day and a half!

I keep thinking about the Salamander Simulation Engine (SSE) -- a codebase I worked on in the mid-nineties -- and thinking what a cool tool it was. For that matter, it likely still is, although the company has changed name and direction a bit since 1997. Now it's DecisionPower and they're all about market simulation. Back then they (we) were Salamander Interactive and it was about this general purpose simulation engine.

About two weeks ago, we gave away nearly two thirds of our hens. Let me just say, nineteen hens lay more eggs in a week than we eat in a month. The only way we could possibly keep up is if we were doing lots of farming or lumberjacking and using only non-powered hand tools to do it. Plus, November was approaching and 20 chickens make a lot of manure. Never mind that they eat a heck of a lot of feed.

Recently, the Nuu-nuu's battery has gotten flaky. Eventually rechargeable batteries will stop being able to hold as much charge as they once did, and the time has come to replace the power pack. I ordered a replacement battery pack from iRobot, but was notified (by email) after I'd placed the order that the battery was on backorder.

It rained yesterday. A tree fell across the driveway, blocking Peaches and Granny in. A tree fell across our road, a mile from our house, blocking me from getting home and cutting them out. The wind blew the carport over, flipping it off the truck. The wind also blew the gazebo around on the deck. When we all managed to get home, we put on grubbies and, in the failing light, cut a path wide enough for the cars to get through.

The power was out until 3 this morning. Of course, we are totally prepared for that.