Gobbledygook

I spent the last two hours of my day making a nice example of how to do tray icons in REALbasic for RB 2005 (since it's now a built-in feature). Found a few bugs, fixed them pretty quick though. It's a lame example, but it shows you everything you may want to do (animate the icon, display a contextual menu, handle mouse events, set the tooltip, etc).

When I was done with that, I got people to play a nice game or twelve of 4-square. That was fun, it's been a while since we've played that game.

Then I went home -- with good intentions of getting some more packing done. Instead, I sat down at the laptop and starting a new draft of my truck hacking program. It's got some really nice design paradigms in it (like the observer pattern, good layering, etc). I'm excited to get started on this project again -- too bad my excitement comes at a time when I really can't afford to spend any efforts on the project. Knowing me, I'm sure I'll make time and just be super stressed and packing at the last minute. :-P

It's hard to believe, but I leave for MN in two weeks. Whoa....

I called mom and dad last night to discuss the prices of the bids coming in. I was a bit displeases to see that I cut 150 sq ft out of my house and it didn't save me much of anything on the rough-up materials, which is the largest chunk of cost for the house. But, the good news is that the rough-up stuff includes floor joists (instead of I-beams), which will really cut down on my concrete bid since they no longer have to put in footings across the middle of the basement, and there's 150 sq ft less to pour cement for. I expect that bid to come in about 1500$ less than the estimate. So far, my trimmings have cut out about 4000$ on the cost of the house (but not all the bids are in yet -- in fact, the three of the bids left are big ones: concrete, flooring and cabinetry). It looks like I'm going to be doing more of my own labor though -- I really want to get the cost of the house down a bit more before I can say I'm comfortable. It's not that I can't do it with the current plan, it's just that I'm not too keen on the thought of eating Ramen and not having Netflix to do it. ;-)

I'm taking part of the afternoon off on Friday to spend with Lis. We're going to the Ramada here in town to have a lazy evening of dining in, watching cable TV and just plain having fun.

Next week is Elissa's bday -- she turns 21! So I'm taking her out to 6th St on Wed night, and then I have all day Thur off to run errands (like get the truck tuned up, cash checks, blah blah blah). I'll probably get most of my packing done that day as well. Yay packing. :: grumbles ::

Well, today's fun-plate includes fixing more bugs with the IDE. Wah-freaking-hoo.