Today I learned that if you’re an Adams Electric customer, and you need to drop a tree on your property that might get into power lines, they’ll come out and cut it down for you. I knew they’d do that for the power lines along the road, but it turns out they’ll do it for the lines coming in as far as your meter too.
Good to know, so you can let them take care of it in the first place, instead of starting to drop it yourself and then having to call them anyway because you need more manpower to pull the tree over in the right direction.
With the Game of Life working at the end of the last session, I thought we’d do something a little different this time, converting a famous one-line BASIC program into assembly. In the process, we had to write code to scroll the screen as new lines appear at the bottom. Enjoy several minutes in the middle of me rubbing my furrowed brow as I struggle to figure out why it’s broken at one point.
Looks like I jinxed us, talking about sunny weather and garden planning a couple days ago. I took an “after” picture to go with Thursday’s “before” picture, after most of the snow today.
As snowstorms go, it wasn’t bad. Lots of snow, but it came down easy, and we can use the added groundwater. Might get a little more overnight. Maybe tomorrow I’ll see if I can fashion a sled out of something and give the hill a try.
A bald eagle flew overhead this morning while Guy and I were on patrol. By the time I got my gloves off, phone out, and camera on, it was nearly past, but I managed to get this one shot of it. They’ve been hanging around here a bit this last week. Shape-wise they look just like a turkey vulture, so that’s what I figured they were at first, but when they get close enough you can see the white head and tail.
In this session we added a “press a key to continue” feature to the program, and then worked out the bug that was keeping certain cells from updating properly. Then I talked a bit about the possibility of refactoring the algorithm for walking through the cells and determining their neighbors to make it faster, and whether to do that next time or move on to another project. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
This one is of Summer 5-8, Year 1. Not much interesting happened in this one; just grinding for money for the next one.
I realized after recording the last video that my method of converting the work area into the game board was overly complicated, so the first order of business this time was to simplify that. That also got rid of the buggy behavior we ended with last time.
Then we do some self-modifying code to save bytes, which is cool but also shows how easily that can result in bugs. Got that working, but there still seem to be a few cells that don’t work right.
When I was done wrapping Christmas presents, the kitchen table was completely clear for the first time in a long time, so I decided to start a puzzle that needs a lot of space. This is the biggest one I have, at 3000 pieces, so it should take a while. As it turns out, I also got a new puzzle for Christmas (1000 pieces with chickens on it, very cool), so now I have to finish this one so I can do that one.
I spent most of this one talking about the apparent lack of Unix/Linux skills out there, the causes of the shortage, and what might be done about it. While playing through days 1-4 of Summer, year 1.
Some thoughts I’ve jotted down over the last few days before Christmas:
I bought eggs this weekend for the first time this winter. It sucks to do that when you have chickens, but that’s how it goes. For those who don’t know: chickens usually stop laying for a month or two in the winter while they molt (gradually shed their feathers and grow a new set). Young ones don’t always do it their first winter, but after that they generally do.