kareina

I got up a little later than I might normally have done this morning, due to staying up too late typing too long of a post for LJ (apologies for only putting in one cut--that one I put in as a typed, but no other category to be cut occurred to me as I typed, and once I was done I was too tired to consider where one should go). Therefore, as I sometimes do I decided to just eat breakfast in my office. So I packed up lunch and headed to uni. It snowed a little last night, and when I arrived at Uni, a some time before 09:00 (of which I am certain since the grocery store I pass to get there was still shut, and they open at 09:00) I noticed that there were only two tracks going to the door of my building--one set of prints to the door, and another set (same size) leaving the door. I added my prints to the snow and walked up to the door, pulled out my ID card, and swiped the card in the reader, and the little light blinked red at me. I tried it again, same result; door still locked, no option to enter my code into the keypad. Darn. I *could* have tried the building with the main uni reception, but I was hungry, so instead I went home and had my breakfast there.

Since I was home I decided to start a project lord_kjar and I have talked about doing--design the interface for the app I want to make to keep track of my food log on my phone. I have been tracking my food for years, and have the system in Excel down--I know what information I put in, and in what ways I want to look at it later. Therefore it was a fairly simple matter to create a drawing of my phone in CorelDraw and sketch in the graphs and totals that I want to be able to see, and the fields for data entry. Once I got that project to a breaking point, read my 1000 words from the geologic literature, had some lunch (while reading a story book in Swedish), I decided I had done enough procrastinating for the day and I should try heading back to uni. This time I tried the door closer to the house, thinking that if the door was unlocked (it might have been), I could test my card on the door to the tea room. However, that door was locked, and my card reader worked properly.

So I have no idea if I imagined the problem (probably not, given the other set of footprints), if the problem was just the card reader on that door, or if everyone had a problem and the IT folk fixed it. (The uni is in the process of getting ready to switch everyone over to new ID cards after the first of the year (the new cards will have our photos on them), so there is a chance that someone changed something somewhere with respect to that that caused issues.) I could have also gone to the door that gave me problems and tested my card there, but I couldn't be bothered.

I did accomplish a few useful things at the office, but only in the category of "administrative" stuff, but it has to be done, so I am ok with that. There was no one else in my end of the corridor at all, and I saw only one office at the far end occupied at all--I was not expected to be there, and only went in at all since my sweetie was working, so I may as well. Since I wasn't accomplishing much I also left early, stopped at the store to get some fresh veg, and went home and cooked some yummy food.

I strongly recommend dicing left over palt (see yesterday's post), re-heating it in the microwave with butter and spices, and then mixing in steamed broccoli, snow peas, zucchini, and artichoke hearts, plus raw spinach, tomato, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, sesame seeds, and pumpkin seeds. There is some left for lunch tomorrow, yum!

After lord_kjar got home I first read him another couple of chapters of the Name of the Wind, before we settled down to computer entertainment. First I showed him the interface for the food logs I designed, and we discussed what the database needs to contain, how the various fields relate to one another, and he suggested some very important edits to the first draft. Once that was done we started playing with his project in progress, a web-based grocery shopping list, which after tonight's session, is pretty much done.

Because my handwriting is dreadful I have usually used a shopping list that exists on my computer as a Word document, which I would print and put into a plastic sheet protector, and then keep in the kitchen next to an erasable marker. When something ran out we would use the marker to tick the box next to that item, and when shopping we would erase the marks when the item went into the cart. However, I never got around to doing one of those here--we have just relied on memory to get what we need. This works, often, but not always. I don't recall how it came up in conversation that I used to do this, but he liked the idea of creating a web app that would do the same thing, but be usable on our phones.

He has been programming on that project for the past couple of weeks, and today it was together enough that we were able to edit my old list to be appropriate here. First of all we broke some of the larger categories into more than one category (baking supplies and spices are now two different groups), and then we changed all of the group names into Swedish (those two are now "Bakning" and "Kryddor". We then spent a couple of hours moving things into the appropriate categories and changing them to Swedish, and deleting the things that neither of us will use but former housemates did (or you simply can't get in this country). The project is nearly done--we ran out of energy before fixing the "other-non food" section, but that can wait till later. The list is now usable, and we can access it from either of our phones, or any computer we happen to be on. There is no longer an excuse to forget things while we are at the store...

Some people might think it is strange, but I enjoy working on computer projects with him every bit as much as I enjoy doing art projects and sewing projects with him...