This will be the third consecutive weekend in a row that I’ve written an entry for this blog thingy of mine. It’s looking at least a little promising with regards to turning it into a habit. Once again I find myself typing in Byword. I’ve not had a reason to use it since writing last weeks post, but I’ve been looking forward to spending some more time in the application. It really look nice, and I’m enjoying the focused writing experience it provides.

Work

Work this week was spent almost entirely on converting the Karisma code to work work properly with unicode in Delphi XE. It was a little on the monotonous side, but it was an enjoyable break from having to do ‘real work’, which usually involves fixing bugs or working on new features that can sometimes be frustrating and/or annoying to implement (much like the recent CIG task was). So the bulk of the week was spent working on the conversion, and then Friday was HQ day, where all the devs who don’t normally work on HQ and the new Forge framework get to do so. I continued work on implementing the Work Log feature, in conjunction with Rene. The two of us had a good discussion with Cal about what the UI should look like, and after rethinking what he had initially asked for, I think we now have a plan that should work out fairly well. All that remains is to implement it and refine any rough patches.

Personal

So this past weekend I decided to start putting some more effort into budgeting and weight loss. Neither have gone as well as I would have liked, but it’s early days yet and there is not reason for set backs to derail the entire project. You fall off, you just get back on. As long as I can manage to slowly get better about these things, progress will eventually be made.

Budget

The reason for starting to budget a bit better was, I think, prompted by reading in passing about people who retired really early by cutting back drastically on the amount of money they required to live. This allowed them to put the majority of their income towards savings and rapidly build up enough to retire on, even before hitting 40 years of age. Now this is obviously an extreme example, and it’s not something I’m aiming for, but it made me want to try to trim my spending in some of the areas where I’ve been feeling that I’ve probably been spending more than I should. In addition to the areas that I could reduce spending, there are areas that I don’t actually know how much I’m spending, despite tracking most of my expenditures. The reason I don’t know is because the iPhone app I am currently using to track expenses makes looking at a category break down just a little more work than I can be bothered putting in. To combat this, I’ve switched to another app I read about that takes a slightly simpler approach and will put the numbers for each category in my face in a more prominent fashion. Hopefully this will give me a better idea of what I’m spending and I can then make changes if I feel it’s necessary.

Alcohol was one of those areas I’ve been thinking I spend too much, so I’ve set myself a new budget of $60 a month, and we’ll see if I can stick to it. Starting next month of course, since I’m already well over this month :(. $60 a month gives me roughly $15 a week to spend, which isn’t a lot, but it will allow me a bottle of the cheap port I like each week. Part of the reason for cutting back on alcohol is that it it effectively money down the drain, but a large part of it is also the fact that I tend to eat more when I’m drinking, thus the less I drink the easier it should be to lose some weight (in theory at least).

Weight

Despite starting the week with my good intentions to start making progress on my weight loss, I’ve not been very good about it at all between now (Sunday) and last Monday. When weighing myself this morning I think I was actually up a little bit from last week. Part of the problem for that is being over budget for alcohol this month and the over eating that went with it, but it’s not all the fault of the booze. I’ve fallen out of the habit of being able to say no to larger servings of food, and it’s a skill that I really need to regain. When ordering take out I need to get less (even though I usually do get the small size), and when eating at home I need to be better about things like having one sandwich instead of two. I know that one will do me fine, but I still have this tendency to want to have a full stomach when I’m done, despite the fact that I know that I’ll sometimes end up feeling like I’ve eaten too much.

I think the focus for this week will need to be on keeping myself in check and saying no to more than a minimal amount of food. I’ll also have to try not to buy any alcohol, both to avoid blowing the budget any further, and to help avoid eating more than I might otherwise.

Update time!

Work

Work was a little unusual this week. I’ve been given the go ahead to work on getting the code base for Karisma to compile in Delphi XE, which is much newer than the roughly 14 year old Delphi 5 that we are currently using. Getting the application to compile is easy enough, but the real challnge is getting it to work with and properly support unicode strings. Initially I was thinking that it wouldn’t be a super hard task; sure, there would be challenges and bunch of stuff that needed to be done, but I figured it would be reasonably straight forward. I’ve gotten into it far enough now to realise that I was fairly wrong about that. There is certainly a lot of work to be done, that much I was right about, but while some of that work is easy, much of it will not be so easy. There are a goodly number of library routines that we rely on that need to be replaced or fixed to code with unicode. Fortunately Grahame is working on a bunch of it as well, so hopefully he will handle the stuff that I’m not familiar with.

There’s still a fair amount of work ahead of us, but once it’s all done it should be worth the effort. It will be really nice to start using the new IDE and to be able to take advantage of some of the language features that have been added in the last 14 years. Ranging from something simple like using For Each loops to make writing loops a little nicer, through to perhaps taking advantage of Generics in order to reduce the number of list classes that are largely boiler plate code and only exist so that we can have strongly typed list classes for our objects.

Home

Home life had been fairly uneventful this week. I can’t really say that all that much has happened. I finally got around to doing my tax return, paid my council rates and had to buy a new kettle.

The kettle was a slight adventure. I needed a new one because the old one, which I think is actually less than a year old, seems to have just up and died one day while I was at work and it was sitting idle. Now when I try to turn it on it trips my power. Given that this is the second kettle to die in this fashion since I moved in hear about two and a half years ago, I decided it might be worth getting a kettle that didn’t require power, which meant a stove top kettle. It’s not the kind of thing you see much these days, but they still make them and sell them, so I guess I’m not the only one buying them. I got one that will work on just about any stove top, so I should always be able to use it. It works just fine on my gas stove top (though it does take longer to boil than an electric kettle would) and I now have the added benefit of still being able to boil water during a power outage without having to resort to using a saucepan.

Oh, I nearly forgot. The pens I ordered on ebay finally arrived. After reading about some of the really fine tipped pens that were available from Japan I decided to get some and try them out. So I ordered five black pens with a 0.25mm tip. Looking at the writing produced from such a thin tip it really strange at first, an I’m still not used to it, but I think I like it. It kind of looks like the text was written with a really sharp pencil, an appearance that the black ink no doubt aids. The only slight drawback I’ve encountered so far is that, because of the fine tip, writing can feel (and sound) a little bit ‘scratchy’ depending on how you hold the pen and how hard you press. I’ve found that using the pen a little differently to how I’ve historically used a pend seems to mitigate the worst of it, so it’s probably something that I could train myself out of given a little time and effort.

I guess that’s about it for this week. This has gone on long enough writing about not much at all really, and I’m not quite in the mood to produce another epic like I did last week.