Hurry Hard

Par-Tay

Dinner party on Saturday. I don't know if I can really add anything to the rundown offered by the Greek, so I will just recommend that you read his account.

Executive Executive Summary: Oh yeah, baby. Oh yeah.

Sunday morning was a little rough. As the Greek pointed out quite accurately, we weren't sober. Not by a country mile.

Curling Etc.

We got ice time at 1 to practice for next weekend's Curl & Hurl with the lovely Mr. and Mrs. Foran Object. It turned out to be a more realistic practice than I was anticipating, since I was a little hung-over (see above), which is how the Keith's is usually played, traditionally.

The practice went well. I kinda sorta know what I'm doing. Mr. Foran Object spent a great deal of time dilligently practicing and showed some remarkable progress.

After we were done with that, the women-folk went shopping and the men headed over to RJAs for Nascar, where we were joined by two of RJA's friends, one of whom doesn't have a nickname yet, and the other who shall be known as the Streak. Null and Serdic were also present, and delightful, as usual. RJA was the very model of a courteous host, even indulging my hangover-induced desire for a pot of tea.

Serdic brought wings, which received positive reviews, although I didn't try any, not wanting to ruin my dinner. I did partake of RJA's justly famous Feta Pate. Note to self, I promised Pigtails that I'd point her at the recipe. Mmmmmmm, Feta Pate.

After a few good hours shooting the shit and enjoying the racing, Foran Object and I headed over to Sukho Thai to meet the womenfolk for dinner. Dinner, as always, was fabulous. We enjoyed ice cream dessert (mango for us, green tea for the Foran's) and then called it a night.

This has been an extremely busy weekend, but very enjoyable. We were able to spend some time with a whole bunch of friends, which is pretty much my short definition of a good weekend.

OS X Development Hell

The Vampire utility that I mentioned the other day has, I've discovered, a few problems. It doesn't do deck management well. The filtering options don't work quite as I'd like and integration into the deck builder is poor. It's closed source, which means I can't fix these things myself, and it's windows-only, which sucks because I'm not. So I'm going to make one of my own.

I've opted to do it in C++ and QT, as that will give me portability to Windows, OS X and Linux with no effort. Plus, I already know C++ and QT. Unfortunately, getting started on OS X hasn't been as quick and painless as I had anticipated.

OS X has a development environment called xcode. Not to put too fine a point on it, but after spending a bit of time poking around at it, I would have to describe it with words like 'primitive' and 'feature poor' and 'unintuitive'. I've used a number of IDEs and command line development tools, and this sucks.

Unfortunately all of the QT examples, from which I was hoping to steal a working build setup so I can get on with the nuts and bolts part, use xcode. There aren't any example makefiles that would let me just use gcc on the command line, as is my wont.

No biggie, I'm more than capable of getting it working the long way, but I kinda wish I didn't have to.

One other note about QT. Once upon a time I used QT in my day job, and assiduously avoided their GUI layout tool. I did everything in code, in Visual Studio. Having recently spent some time playing with QT Designer, I have to say that I was smart to avoid it. As far as dropping widgets onto windows goes, it works ok, although the layout is ugly and things aren't very clear. But trying to get a layout/resize policy etc. that works the way I want it to? Nightmarish. Seriously, either I'm stupid or it's just fucked.

For me, it's going to be much easier to just do it all in code.

That's It

Seriously, I'm done. So, so tired. Apologies to everybody who saw me on Sunday and wondered why I was doing the zombie impersonation.

Yawn!