No rain yet but it’s coming byt he work week.

Good morning! Happy Sunday. Showering and then off to Walmart in a bit to stock up on groceries, hopefully before the crowds. I don’t need a lot of things, as I went to store after doing my wash on Tuesday night but I still to get a number of things. Milder today and the sun is coming out, though we got a few inches of snow last night and there is a breeze this morning.

The upcoming work week looks surprisingly wet it would seem. The heaviest day for rain is Wednesday, the day I drop my truck off at the shop to be state inspected and tires rotated. Going to get wet doing that, but I’ll take the day off to read and work on some code. It’s the end of the year and I still have some time to use up. I am still thinking of taking December 30th and 31st off from the office — New Years Eve this year ain’t a holiday due to being mid-week — but I just have to make sure we have office coverage.

Rode for about 15 or so miles yesterday, which helped break up the day, and then I went down to the library, came home and worked on the geocoding program I am working on writing in C++. Of course it got my inspired to think about also implementing it as a shell script so I can run it on the server at work, using jq as a JSON parser. It’s not that complicated, and while I didn’t neccessarily need the C++ program, it’s a great way to write code and boost my experience as a programmer. Every line of C++ I write, and process using a professional build environment, the better I get at it. Just using regular make, as let’s be honest, this is too simple of a program for CMake or GNU Automake, though maybe because I’m old and grew up building software using GNU Automake, I still am quite partial to the later. And it works excellent on Linux.

Part of my problem I realized is I am not dressing warm enough and get chilled through on the weekends at home. If I am going to keep my heat at 50 degrees most of the winter, except when it’s exceptionally cold, I really should make sure I’m dressing warm enough. I got the space heater out the other day, but I rarely use it. It’s not that couldn’t make my apartment nice and toasty — the electric baseboard heat upstairs can really make things toasty — but it’s been years since I’ve had it on and it usually stinks when you first turn it on from all the dust burning off, or for that matter turn the gas heat downstairs up, but I just don’t like spending money on something as trivial as comfort.

Nice thing about keeping my apartment so cold, is my laptop runs so much cooler, especially since I fixed the fan. Most of the time, unless I’m doing some complicated code compilation, it runs at a very comfortable for it’s components 75 degrees F. When the fan was broken on it, at times it was pushing over 150 degrees F, which I admit was cooking all the solder joints and generally breaking everything internally. All I had to do was unjam the fan, which was probably plugged with dust and crap..