...more recent posts
It's Hannah's birthday, so we ran to the store to buy her the Harman Kardon iSub subwoofer to go with the Apple pro speakers that are hooked to her new Quicksilver G4. The guy at the store assured us that this was impossible. The iSub (packaged alone, not the bundle with the iSticks) is clearly marked on the box as only for slot loading iMacs. But this would even exclude the new flat panel iMac, and I know it works on that because Stephen has it hooked up to his. So we bought it anyway, and I'm presently listening to some amazingly bass rich sound. Weird. I guess Apple just doesn't want to support it. But it defintely works. At least under 9.2.2. Definitely worth the money.
If I'm not writing here much you could assume I am hard at work. And this time you wouldn't be wrong. As I've said many times before, I love the meaty middle part. First I start making a bunch of little pieces of code. It's like assembling a tool chest. And then I start linking them all together. That's fun. But then past a certain point the big picture has emerged from the connected parts leaving just a lot of small details to be ironed out around the edges. Not so fun. Things like polishing the user interface, writing documentation, and testing testing testing for weird errors in unexected situations. You might think you're 90% done when you hit this turning point, but then after a few weeks of getting bogged down in these mere "details" you realize you were only 60% done. Yuck. Details take time, and you're not moving so fast over the finer grained terrain.
Anyway, I'm not quite to the turning point yet, so I guess I'm in the fun zone. Hence not much writing here. The only thing I can add to these observations is that with each additional time I go through the process the big picture becomes more and more simplified. Since I've used previous versions of the system I know what is necessary and what is superflous. And I've gotten better at writing it. This makes for smaller code that is more understandable. And my guess is that this will result in the turning point being closer to 90% done than way back at 60%. We'll see very soon. This week probably.