Fun

[caption id=“attachment_1522” align=“alignright” width=“300”] Gift wrapping skill is inversely correlated to software development skills.[/caption]

This morning I made my last shopping trip before Christmas, at least I hope it’s my last trip.

Pro tip: the Costco near us officially opens at 10am but if you show up at 9:45ish they will let you in.  At least they let me in.  Then you can run, grab the salmon, and get out before the hoards descend.

Saturday MP is a small family business and like your local family run restaurant the entire family is involved in some way.  Currently it’s mostly me working at Saturday MP but Ada helps with some book keeping and in the past was a consultant.  Our daughter also used to clean the basement office and shred papers.

Also, like your local family restaurant, when we take a vacation the entire business closes.  Well, mostly closes, we can still be reached virtually but please expect delays in our response.  Thank you for your patience and we look forward to serving you when we get back to the basement on November 27th.

Just a quick public service announcement (PSA) that the Arduino H Bridge is sharp and pointy.  Both my daughter and myself hurt our fingers but only I was lucky enough to draw blood when one of the H Bridge pins got stuck under my finger nail.  I mean look at this insect looking pointy bastard.

All that pain and blood was worth it as we did finally get the lesson 10 (Zoetrope) from the Arduino Start Kit working.  We couldn’t get the example as shown in the book to work because we didn’t understand how the H Bridge worked.

Transcript of my wife talking to my daughter’s grade 6 friend:

Wife: “What is your favourite cheese?”

Friend: “Grated!”

Lately, Chris has been working on Xamarin notifications in Android, which you would have gathered from his recent blog posts. I have been tasked with designing an icon to go with this work. I’ve designed a few things before (Scary Sun being my best work), but this task seemed to be especially vexing.

How would I come up with something that captures the concepts of Xamarin, Saturday Morning Productions,  and notifications? It seemed like a lot to fit into a very small space. Now, when I think of being notified for something, I immediately think of bells. Like alarm clock bells. I drew a few iterations of an icon with a bell, but honestly, they looked kinda dumb. I’m not sure anyone would look at them and connect the three things together that I just mentioned. I wondered if I would get a flash of inspiration if I just let it percolate around my brain a bit.