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General update, March 2015

News ·Sunday March 8, 2015 @ 19:26 EDT (link)

It's been five months, so this is just a general update.

Honey expects to complete her BS in Psychology at the end of 2015, and is doing very well in her classes and enjoying most except math (fortunately she has her last math class this semester). She is looking at graduate school options in the area.

As of the end of February, I will have been at Yikes one year, counting initial consulting. While the work is interesting—I have had the opportunity to teach myself embedded development, Bluetooth (Low Energy), and lately develop a flash file system—the politics, for want of a better term, can be depressing. I have written about some of the technical challenges on Code Visions, my technical blog.

Indiana as a state seems a little boring. The parks aren't great and there aren't beaches like Florida; we're not enamored of the cold weather, preferring the South; at least cost of living is fairly reasonable.

I am listening my way through William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which is interesting so far.

I have migrated our home entertainment PC from MythTV to Kodi (formerly XBMC), using a custom video add-on that I developed that reads available show information directly from Sick Beard's database. I did this on a new machine (old case, new MB, CPU—our first Intel for a while), and the old one will be decommissioned after the remaining network HDs are moved off of it. I'm pretty happy with the end to end system now; it's pretty much everything I planned to build and looks good, too. There were some add-on requirements that required Kodi changes, too. I suppose I'm looking for a new project now. I've considered looking at incremental compilation with Clang to use it in conjunction with an editor; KDevelop 5 will be doing this, but I haven't heard much about it of late.

Books finished: The Redemption of Althalus, The First 90 Days, The Effective Executive, Shadowdale, Tantras, Waterdeep, Dragon Wing, Elven Star, Fire Sea, Serpent Mage, The Hand of Chaos, Into the Labyrinth, The Seventh Gate, The Integral Trees, Kane and Abel, Life On the Mississippi, Only Time Will Tell, The Sins of the Father, Best Kept Secret, Be Careful What You Wish For, The Psychology of Computer Programming.