journal for 2004-04-18
recap
For our anniversary, we exchanged gifts and had some tasty dinner at the Apollo Grill. I had French onion soup, which was great, pork loin, which was good, and chocolate cake. The chocolate cake used to have peanut butter mousse, but now has chocolate. It was good, but nowhere near /as/ good. I was disappointed, but the dinner was good, overall. Next time, I think I’ll get the osso buco again.
Gloria gave me some video games, some books, and some legos. We built the AT-TE together after dinner, and it was fun. We built Slave One the next day, and that was also fun.
I gave Gloria some movies, a Timbuk2 yoga bag, and a big ol’ inflatable balance ball. Oh, and subscriptions to some fitness magazines. The ball was pretty hard to inflate, but I think we got it pretty well inflated. I think the bag is bigger than she expected, but maybe she’ll grow to love it. If nothing else, it’s good for carrying around a yoga mat!
One of the video games Gloria gave me was Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando. It is totally rad. I’m about twelve hours into it so far, and I think it’s definitely better than the original, which I already thought was awesome. I hope I can eventually finish at least /one/ of them!
I spent a few hours working on my Objective-C this weekend, by way of Cocoa and Xcode. I like the O’Reilly book on the subject, I guess, but it’s very irksome that it’s Project Builder-oriented. I wish there were some diffs available for the book, to clarify things for Xcode. I’m making fair progress, I guess, but I was hung up for hours trying to understand how to use NSStringDrawing to draw normal NSStrings. I don’t know what I was doing wrong at first, but I finally ended up getting it to work. Right now, the book has me building a four-function calculator. I hope to run through this bit quickly.
Working on a four-functional calculator has made me think more about my almost-completed survey of RPN calculators for Mac OS X. I got the field of fair calculators down to two: Stacniac and RPNC. I think Stacniac is going to win, because it’s simpler and, basically, cooler. I might try to reimplement it in Cocoa when I’m closer to capapble.
In the meantime, I thought I’d try to implement an RPN calc in Vim. After all, the Vim interface seemes like a pretty good fit for a stack-based calculator. The buffer makes a good stack, command and insert mode help divide operations, and it just seemed like things would be easy. Then I realized that numbers in Vim are integers. So, 10 / 3 = 3. Worse, 10.5 / 2.5 = 1025; I’m not sure how that works.
I can make it work by doing the math via the Perl interface, but that becomes stupid. I really don’t want to implement virtual rational numbers in Vim script, so I might give up on this for now.
We watched the film version of Rhinocerous this weekend. It was OK; it was about as good I imagine any film of an Absurdist’s play could be. I think I much prefer reading Theatre of the Absurd than watching it. Maybe only the authors could direct it well. Who knows? We also watched In the Bedroom, which wasn’t bad, but was entirely unenjoyable for me. Tonight we watched The Hours, which was quite good. It wasn’t my kind of movie, but it was really very good, and I’m glad I finally saw it.
We also went out and saw Kill Bill vol 2, which was great. I felt like the beginning was a little slow, or something, but it ended up being very enjoyable.
I did a pull-up, today, and pulled something in my back. It’s really painful.
I’m going to have some alcohol (nature’s muscle relaxant) and then go to bed.