This is the middle of my 4th week of working from home as part of the social distancing process that most of the world has put into place because of the Covid-19 (actually called SARS-CoV-2, I think) pandemic. This is a corona virus that has been taking the world by storm the last month or so. It seems to have started in China last year, and has progressed to the point of being a world wide pandemic in the last couple of months.

This isn’t something I ever actually thought would happen in my life time, thought it was obviously always a possibility, and one that I’d considered on at least a couple of occasions over the years. Because everyone is staying home and away from people as much as possible to avoid catching the virus, and to avoid spreading it, the economy of many countries has tanked. Certainly many industries are suffering: retail, tourism, and hospitality being the obvious ones. But this thing has impacted pretty much all aspects of life from most of the world.

We’re pretty lucky so far here in Australia, as we’ve only had roughly 6,500 confirmed cases of Covid-19 so far, and 63 deaths at this point in time. It looks like we managed to isolate quick enough to avoid large scale and rapid community spread, but it will no doubt be on ongoing thing for several months at least. Some countries have been hit pretty hard. Here are some numbers:

As you can see, Australia has been pretty lucky. New York city has been hit pretty hard. Not surprising given how many people live in such close proximity there. I believe the world wide death toll is over 100,000 at this point.

Personally, things haven’t been too bad. We switch to working from home on the 24th of March, which has gone surprisingly smoothly. It has its inconveniences, but it’s very doable and we’re lucky to be be so minimally impacted compared to those who’ve lost there jobs. In the U.S. there were something like 6.6 million people out of work in the space of a couple of weeks, or something like that.

So for now we just continue to isolate out selves and keep our distance from others while we wait for this thing to allow a return to some level of normalcy. That is likely months away, however, and I suspect that in a number of ways, both obvious and not, this modern day global pandemic is going to cause some permanent changes in the world.

So it looks like I’ve not posted anything on the site for close to two years now. Obviously I haven’t been the best blogger in the world.

Writing

I have written stuff in the last couple years, just not for this blog. I’ve written a handful of informational pieces on some of the little utilities and applications that I’ve written over the years. Those can be found at my GitHub blog. Nothing special, but that is where most of my writing interest has been over the course of this year at least, and even then I haven’t done all that much writing.

Over the last month or two my writing related thoughts have mostly been focused on learning about ways to do documentation via some kind of plain text source file. The one I’ve spent most of my time on at this stage is AsciiDoc. It looks like it could do all that I’m ever likely to want a tool for documentation or book writing to do. The fact that there isn’t really any support for it on iOS is a bummer, especially when compared to Markdown, but it can do so much more than Markdown can. Plus, since it’s just plain text, I could still write it, I just wouldn’t have tools to preview it or generate the final product. Plain text FTW! I just need to find reasons to use it for documentation. I can (and have) put it to some use at work for small personal projects, but I suspect I’m not going to be able to really use it in anger any time soon.

Markdown will continue to be the most sensible thing to use when it comes to writing blog posts, and there are literally dozens of quality apps to choose from when it comes to writing in Markdown on iOS. I’ve written this document entirely on my iPad in Markdown. I started writing in Editorial, but part way through switched to using Byword, just to see if it was a better experience when it came to using an external keyboard. And there are plenty of other options, though I want to try and keep things simple. Some of those apps are a bit pricey (by iOS standards), though if you were to spend much of your time writing they would totally be worth it.

Reading

I’m still all about the Kindle when it comes to reading books. In addition to reading who knows how many articles this year, I’ve finished 31 books so far, beating out my (purposefully conservative) GoodReads Reading Challenge goal of 24 books. Happy with the progress on that front.

I’ve been enjoying the Kindle Voyage that I forked out $300 for, but then they had to go and release the Kindle Oasis, which is what I think I’d really like to be using. However, the Oasis is $450! The Voyage was already a bit of a stretch for feeling like it was good value.

The Oasis looks like it would be a great experience to have in the hand while reading, but it doesn’t really offer anything except a better, lighter feel in the hand. Combined with the eye watering price tag, I can’t see myself being willing to get one for a while. Hopefully the price will come down or something.

Work

Work continues to have plenty to do. With the big v4 Go Live for Queensland coming up in early 2017, there has been a goodly number of projects, both big and small, that needed to be done to get us ready for that. Based on what I know, it looks like that is going well. We’re already positioned well in the market, based on what I’ve been told, and if this goes well then we’ll hopefully be able to consolidate our position at the top of the market.

Apple Related Stuff

iPhone

I had a few cases of odd battery behaviour in the first part half of the year, and when iOS 10 came out around September/October, the battery went to crap. So I caught the train into Perth to visit the Apple Store and they ran some diagnostics and decided to replace the phone for me, which was cool.

What wasn’t cool, was that less than a week later the screen went funny on the replacement, and I had to go and get that phone replaced. It seemed to me that the phone was running, but the screen wouldn’t come on and it was completely unresponsive, and the Apple rep I dealt with said as much after running his diagnostics. Rather unusual behaviour, at least as far as I’m aware. On the plus side, none of this cost me anything, and I got what must be effectively a fresh battery for what was a 2 year old phone. I should be able to make it through till the new phones are out late next year, which is when I plan to get a new phone. I’ll have had this one (and it’s predecessors) for effectively 3 years at that point.

iPad

Noting much on the iPad front. I’ve still got the iPad Air 2 which I think I bought in October of 2015, as a refurb. I wanted something a bit newer than what I had, but didn’t see the value in getting an iPad Pro just yet, so I saved some money and got the Air 2, which was a year old at that stage. It’s held up pretty good. My typical iPad work load is mostly recreational stuff that shouldn’t push the machine too hard, so it’s still going fine even now. I don’t use the split screen feature much, but it’s handy to have at times.

I’m thinking about getting an iPad Pro when they do the next refresh, which will presumably be around March 2017. I hope they bring some cool new features to iOS to help make the iPad a more flexible device. I could already do much of my typical daily workflow on an iPad, and I do, but it would be nice if some of the things that are annoying or hard to do could become easier.

I decided that if I’m going to drop a bunch of money on an iPad Pro, then I really should try to start pushing my use case with the one that I have in order to make sure I’m not paying for power that I’ll not really be taking advantage of. So, I guess the goal between now and when the next iPad refresh happens is to try and stretch myself to do more and more with my iPad. Will be interesting to see how that goes.

On a side note, I’m typing this up on my iPad at the moment, with my regular Apple desktop keyboard attached. It works well enough, though it’s not a very portable configuration at the moment, because I have to provide power to the keyboard for it to function. If I was going to do this on a more regular basis, it would make sense to get an Apple Magic Keyboard, or some other portable Bluetooth keyboard.

This Site

Admittedly I don’t do much with this site, but I’m having vague thoughts about changing the mechanism by which its content is generated, with the primary goals of both simplifying it a bit and also making it something that could be more easily managed and posted to when using my iPad to do all the work. Not sure if it will happen, but it’s definitely a thought that keeps buzzing around in my head.

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.

So I am once again, playing catch up for the last two or three weeks since I last wrote something for my blog. On the bright side this is probably the longest period of time that I’ve managed to keep a kind of semi-regular blogging behaviour going, so it’s not all that bad I guess.

As part of writing this entry I’ve just installed Byword and some markdown related TextExpander snippets, so we’ll see how they go. I’ve only just barely started using Byword but I have to say that, so far, it looks quite nice, but from an appearance point of view, and the nice simple functionality that it provides. Only time will tell, but I think I could totally see myself spending a decent amount of time in Byword if I continue to so much writing. I’ve just enabled the paragraph focus feature and it looks nice, though I’m going to need to spend some time experimenting to find out what really works for me. I’ve never really bothered trying to get into the “fullscreen, not distraction” kind of writing, but if my initial impressions are anything to go by, I think I’m going to like it.

Huh, what do you know? I just realised that some of the reviews that I’ve read must have been for older versions of Byword that had different functionality, as this version doesn’t seem to have the option, to configure the number of lines that are included in focus mode. Instead I only have access to Paragraph mode and Single Line mode. This isn’t a huge loss, but it would have been nice to have the flexibility to experiment and see which suited me best.

The Textexpander snippets I installed were developed by Brett Terpstra, and nifty dude who tends to make some quite useful stuff. You can find them at this url if you are so inclined.

Recent Goings On At Work

So what’s been going on at work? Well, we had our performance appraisals last week, and I seemed to get through that without any negative feedback, which is always nice. Granted out reviews are fairly informal, but still, it’s nice to think that you’ve performed well enough that your superiors don’t have anything negative that is worth mentioning. I’ve finally checked in the CIG work for sending request forms from Karisma to iSite via a combination of HL7 messages and DICOM messages, and it’s great to have that burden off my shoulders. Initial testing indicates that it works as expected, so hopefully the roll out will go smoothly.

Last friday was the first of our new HQ Friday’s, where the developers get to spend some time working with HQ and the new C# code base. It made for a nice diversion from the normal maintenance related tasks, and it’s something to look forward to each week. Also, now that CIG is (hopefully) out of the way, I have the opportunity to get started on some newer more interesting tasks, one of which is to spend some time getting the Karisma code up to snuff so that we can potentially move to using Delphi XE instead of being stuck with Delphi 5. D5 has served us well, but it’s around 14 years old now and I think everyone would be happy to be able to move to a newer IDE and the benefits that come from doing so. The main initial thrust of getting the code to work with the newer IDE and compiler will be making all of the string related code work safely with the new unicode strings. That won’t be too hard, hopefully, but there will definitely be a number of places in library code that will need to be fixed. On the up side, with access to some of the new language features such as Generics and (if memory serves) ForEach, it may well be possible to make a larger number of places in the code a bit simpler and easier to read. Generics especially should provide the option to get rid of a large number list classes that only exist in order to provide a strongly typed list for each type of object that we deal with. Not all list classes will be able to be cut because of Generics, but I’d be willing to be that at least 50% of them could probably go. I’m not sure that would affect the compiler performance in a positive manner, but it isn’t likely to hurt and less code to maintain is always a good thing.

(Wow, would you look at that. 788 words and I’ve not really gotten into the personal side of things just yet, or even finished with the work stuff. I guess I really do have a bunch of words bottled up inside me at times. Perhaps with some time and thought I really will be able to make a go of starting a blog at work.)

And speaking of blogs and works, Callan gave me the OK to make a start on a work blog, so I’ll have to spend some time trying to get that up and running at some point. Putting a blog in place is easy enough (I’ve already got a Wordpress installation up and running) but the real challenge will be getting people to pay attention to it and coming up with suitable content on a sufficiently frequent basis to keep people’s interest. I had some ideas on the type of content to post about, but I’m having doubts as to whether I’ll be able to have enough of right stuff to make it worth while. I’m going to have to sit down and have a serious thing about it at some point. I should probably also try to get at least one person from the support team involved. Having involvement from the two major teams will likely make it easier for everyone to take it seriously once it’s up and running.

Things In My Personal Life

As to the personal side of my life…hmm, what have I been up to?

Movie Night

I went and saw the finally Harry Potter movie with doug last Tuesday. We just saw regular session, no Imax or 3D, and it was fine, though the film had a rather noticeable set of “run lines” on screen for a good chunk of the movie. I’m guessing they are the result of the film having been shown a lot, and it wasn’t really a problem (they were restricted to running down the left of the screen, rather than in the middle), but it would have been nice if the screen was clean the whole way through. Since I shouted Doug for the meal and last movie that we saw (Transformers 3), he shouted me this one. We ate dinner at a sushi (kind of) place that have the conveyor belt of goodies. We ordered a main meal that didn’t involve the conveyor belt, but we did end up grabbing a few things from it. I hadn’t eaten at a place like that before and it made for an interesting change. I’d do it again, but if I was going to go back to the same place, I think I’d like to do so when the weather was a bit nicer. It was a cold and wet day, and the restuarant had had some issues with a leaky roof, and because it was kind of outside the cold breeze was a bit annoying. Still, a nice meal and a positive experience all in all.

(phew, and now I’m up to 1283 words and counting. That is quite probably a new record for words written in a single sitting. Maybe I’ve written more at some point in the past, but it isn’t likely. This would certainly be the most that I’ve written for a blog entry since I started back into the recent series of blog posts.)

Well, bugger it. I’ve just discovered that my TextExpander snippets seem to have disappeared at some point. If I had to guess, it was probably something to do with upgrading to Lion, though who knows, as I don’t use them that often. Hopefully if I start writing some more I’ll have an increased reason to use them, especially if I end up doing much writing for the work blog. There should be enough repetition and annoying to type words while doing that kind of writing, that I might finally have a real reason to take some shortcuts with the typing that I need to do.

Census

I filled out my census form today (2011-08-07). I did it online and it took less than 15 minutes. I think they really nailed it for this one. The presentation on the web site was fairly clean and easy to use, and it sure as hell beat having to do it on paper.

The End

It’s probably time to call it quits on this particular, as I’ve just crossed the 1500 word boundary. It looks like I’ve had a quite a ramble this time, so I might have a quick read over it and get it posted.

Until next time.

Again it’s been a while since I wrote anything for this journal/blog or whatever the hell it actually is turning out to be. What’s been going on in my life?

I’m older

Officially that is. Naturally I’m constantly ageing, but this past Thursday was my birthday. I’m now 32 years old, and still have no real idea in what direction I ultimately want my life to lead. Not that that really bothers me. As long as I can keep myself reasonably comfortable and off the streets, I’m not too worried about not inventing a cure for cancer or anything like that.

Upcoming Annual Review

Speaking of not having any plans for myself, my annual work review is on Wednesday. That should be interesting. I don’t think I’ve sucked too badly at much, but I guess we’ll see. As part of this years review we’ve been asked to provide an indication of goals and plans we might like to work on. Since I didn’t have anything big or specific in mind, I put down my interest in trying to write more and possibly doing some web or iOS related development. Who knows, maybe something will come of it. I’ve had the desire to try and write more for a while now (and this ‘blog’ is part of trying to make good on that), so having the opportunity to do so at work would make it a lot more likely that I’ll be able to get a feel for whether it’s something I really would like to do more of, and also whether or not it’s something I have much talent for. If the chance does come up I’m sure I’ll need to work on what skills I do have, but I think I can turn out a fairly readable bit of non-formal text when I want to. Whether or not I can do so on particular topics, which I may have little actual interest in may be a different matter though.

Anything Else?

Umm…no, not really. Not that I can think of anyway. It looks like I’m getting towards the end of my tasks for the CIG project at work, which will be good as the DICOM related task I’ve had hasn’t been something I’d describe at fun. Something of a learning experience for sure, but I’ll be happy to see the back of it.