Random Happenings

I started to put in my second sandpoint tonight. The first one snapped (underground, no less) due to fauly well pipe. The wonderful folks at Menards were kind enough to tell me when I brought it back that I'm not the only person who's had this issue this week. So fine -- drilled a hole and started a second point (this time, with materials from Handyman's). I bent the sandpoint. In sand. 30 inches into the ground. I have no clue as to how I could have bent the point -- it never hit a rock and it went in like butter. But she's bent. At least this one won't stay stuck in the ground! It's out and in the bed of the truck, tomorrow I'll get it exchanged. Yay.

I've started two fun programming projects. I've had a recent interest in fonts for no real reason. So I started making a Font object in pure RB code that gives you more control over your font. For instance, you could override the user's settings and always use ClearType. Or make it strike-through. Or change the precision and clipping. Etc. It's coming along nicely too! Of course, it's Win32 only (part of the WFS, eventually) and it will only work with "real" controls (PushButton, EditField, CheckBox, etc). But then I decided I wanted to go one step further and write support for font linking. However, it requires pure COM support, so I've been making that into a plugin. The only thing I'm attemping to accomplish with this is a font-linked version of DrawString. This would get rid of the problem of having those annoying boxes when the font you've picked doesn't support a particular character set. Note that OS controls already font link -- it's the non OS controls which have issues. So if I get this working really well, I may port it into the RB framework for things like BevelButton and ListBox (assuming it's simple to do so), or even DrawString itself. I'd be happy if I knew even half as much about fonts as some of our users do. I recall learning what a serif was while at RW 2006, which is an awfully small start. ;-) But if there's anything I enjoy, it's learning new things -- so I'm sure I'll research until I know enough to be dangerous.

I head down to TX for a while in about two weeks! Lis and I have a hotel booked on the beach in Rockport for July 3rd (no place has spots for the 4th), and plan to go to Aransas national wildlife refuge for a hike. It should be a blast! The rest of the time I'm down there (until July 8th) is rather unplanned. But we've both got some ideas for fun things to occupy our time.

I'm happy to see that beta 3 is out and working fairly well. There are still some goofy issues that people are reporting, but the majority of them have nothing to do with me. My stuff seems to be working quite well. I had to write a quick function to ensure that windows don't suddenly find themself offscreen, which (AIUI) is one of the last tweaks to my features. The new MenuItem stuff I modified seems to be working nicely (no one's complained about it yet, at least).

I've been on an "oldies" kick lately. Werewolves of London. One Bourbon, One Scotch & One Beer, and the likes. I guess I'm just feeling old because everyone I know is getting married! Yeesh!

Well, I think it's about beer thirty -- time to go make some dinner! Hope everyone has an awesome weekend!