A meeting of minds

Wednesday 13th

Today I continued to work on the interface. Although I was able to get the data easily enough last night, there was an issue with converting the binary encoded data into a form suitable for saving in our tables. I work out how to do this today after a number of false starts.

I got my test program reading and displaying the live data feed, converting the date number to date and time and looking up the channel IDs to display the name of the value being displayed.

I left a bit early to go to the Mensa social evening in the city. This was about a 40 minute journey at that time of day. The trip out over the same distance would have been much longer but I was at least going against the main direction of traffic. Even so, there was a fair bit about the closer I got to the central area.

There were 2 freeway exits close together and I got off one too early and found myself on the suburban streets rather than the crossing freeway. Here is where my instincts let me down as I crossed over that freeway so as to get on to the slip road. Once the GPS caught up to the fact I wasn't on the right route and redirected me, I realised I should have stayed on the original side, since I had to recross it. before I could get back on. Embarrassingly, I did the same thing when coming home, I missed the right turn onto the freeway on the near side, because I was subconsciously expecting to make it on the far side to join the left hand lane instead. I then found myself at the other side of the freeway on a one way street with the only turn allowed being to the left, which woudl take me in the wrong direction. I had to stay on that one way street for several miles till I got to the next east-west freeway.

The Mensa dinner is a monthly get together at a grill bar. They kept telling me that the usual turn out was a lot smaller andjoking that they had come to meet me, although, apart from the local secretary, no one knew I was coming, or even who I was, till I got there. As usual, with this sort of gathering, there were a number of interesting people and conversations going on and topics from the trivial and mundane to serious and esoteric. One guy was giving forth on climate change, a topic which he was known to have a passion about. I was told if he had enough beers he'd start singing instead, but that was even worse. I think I counted about 23 people all up, although not all were there at the same time.

I had dinner there. I thought I'd ordered the chicken steak, but apparently I'd order the chicken fried steak instead. It was fine - sort of a crumbed hamburger concoction with a creamy sauce and chips - no Cholesterol of fat there I'm sure. I left about 8 and had some fixes for a client in Australia to do when I got home. I just missed one call in the noise f the meeting and got a second one about 10 minutes from home.

I then worked on integrating the code from the test program into the main application,before heading to bed near midnight. I had a visit from one of the Russian girls earlier who had a problem getting on to the Internet. However as she had a Mac, I wasn't able to help her other than to try a few obvious methods, none of which worked.

I forgot to mention but on Tuesday night, I went to the library after work to return 2 of the books I'd finished. On the way back I called in at the golf course that I'd played that first Sunday and checked the pro shop to discover someone had found and handed in my phone. It was dead, but that turned out to be just because the battery was flat and not because it was damaged in the flood. Once I recharged it, it worked fine, although it had been disconnected. I feel much better about it now.