Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

In addition to lots of playing at the park,reading of Harry Potter to Nefarious, and watching UFC 106, I’ve been taking my spare moments to patch in the Kijiji searching code (just USA and Canada for now, because if I remember right the other regions use different sections, languages, and layout, unlike Craigslist which is nice and consistent internationally), including a nice, easy to use interface that I’m quite happy with. The whole thing is sitting at over 3,500 lines right now, and because it’s nicely commented it’s well over 200k of text (making the final executable quite a bit bigger than the compiled program). Everyone teases me for writing in PowerBasic, on account of the “it’s a kid’s language” stereotype of BASIC, but it really is one of the most powerful compilers out there that produces beautifully tight and efficient software.

I hadn’t expected by the way that I would enjoy the Harry Potter books, but to my surprise I really have been, as has Nefarious. I think she likes as well that most of the chapters are so wordy that it can take us as much as an hour to read a chapter! And since I do different voices for all the characters, the ones that have lots of dialog from Hagrid give me a little bit of a sore throat. Today we read the chapter with the first Quidditch game — a shorter chapter — in which Snape seems to try to kill Harry. I expect to be woken up tomorrow morning by Nefarious asking to read a chapter before breakfast.

Oh, and also at the park I saw these big lumps below of leaves in the trees. I wasn’t sure what they were, whether it was some sort of phenomena caused by wet leaves blowing around or DIY bird habitats or something else. Nefarious explained to me that they are squirrel nests, and I looked it up when we got home and she was right. How cool is it that she’s getting old enough that I’m now learning from her at times? It’s amazing, I love it so much.

And the final “also at the park” were some nice kids from the local Catholic school, who did not seem particularly perturbed when Nefarious told the oldest girl that praying didn’t make sense because God isn’t real. The girl told her that since she was in third grade, she knew more than someone in grade one, and therefore was right. Zing! While it was no big deal to the kids, their granddad’s demeanor (he was who had brought them to the park) turned suddenly quite gruff and hostile. Meh. Although I did remind Nefarious on the way home that it probably wasn’t a good idea to tell people at the park that the things they believe in aren’t real, and that there are better times for such debates.

Nefarious has finally stumbled upon the realization that Santa may not be real (although she is not yet totally convinced)l. That said, our neighbor (her friend, also in third grade), revealed it to her in a very sweet way, saying to her, “Santa Claus isn’t a real person — Santa is a spirit that lives in our hearts.” And I think as a metaphorical truth, you could say that’s quite accurate.

Onward…

Since my latest doctor suggested it, I’ve been reading up as much as I can on the subject of muscular dystrophy, and my Internet self-diagnosis — yes, always an inaccurate and ill-advised strategy — says that I have myotonic dystrophy of the second type. This seems to be one of the most minor forms, and I match all the symptoms. It’s been interesting seeing the “why” of things like Gower’s sign in me — because I can’t stand up from sitting with my legs, I “walk” myself up with my arms to compensate. The reason it’s interesting, is that this all happened completely subconsciously and I never gave it any thought — it’s amazing how the body and brain adapt to damage, and even more amazing that your conscious mind is often not informed of it! Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot about physical therapy to see what I should be doing — weights, yoga, swimming, or what?

And now I unpause the PVR and watch Tito fight Forrest, and then hopefully fall asleep very quickly on account of the potential aforementioned morning duties.

I got some new contacts, mostly for amusing Nefarious’s friends. They’re a little crooked in the photo below. I think one of my favorite parts of the day is picking her up from school, because at the end of the day all the kids come down from their various classrooms and hang out in the common room / foyer while they wait for their parents to come and get them (not that many of the kids take the bus), and trade whatever snacks they have left over from lunch. When I get there, Nefarious is almost always playing chess with a small ground of chess regulars — one of them, who I think is one or two years older, has an excellent sense of strategy, but they’re all quite solid for their age — and I join in or watch. I think today I’ll bring in some of the fairy chess pieces that Nefarious and I made for our games here and see if they want to introduce those.

It’s still got some issues, but I have released a beta version of my Craigslist search tool. The biggest improvement is that it’s incredibly fast in comparison to the old one, and can download full entries (also incredibly fast), not just the titles. I’m happy with where it’s going, but there is still a serious bug with “auto deep scan”, and I’m worried about a problem I’m having with a ShellExecute() call I’m making for the “view in browser” call. It seems to make the call, but then just hangs, which means that it doesn’t view the file, and it creates a thread that doesn’t terminate when you close the program. I think this is a Windows 7 issue though, because I have the same problem in some other programs that I have (Eudora, Windows Picture Viewer, etc.) when they make the same call themselves.

Edit: The deep scan bug is fixed, and the ShellExecute problem is because of a permissions error. ZenCLSH must have as high a permission level as the program being controlled (ie. so this is an OS issue).