Fun

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.

The great philosopher Henry David Thoreau once said: “Simplify, simplify.”

I actually didn’t know that Thoreau said that until I saw a reference to that quote in a Calvin & Hobbes comic. But that’s another story.

You might be wondering why we at Saturday Morning Productions haven’t written any blog updates about our Goal Buddy App project. Well, that’s because we have reached a bit of an impasse. Our master-coder Chris has written quite a few updates on the first version, which focused on scheduling tasks and having reminders for those tasks. It was cool seeing the app come together. But we started to wonder: how was this any different than using a calendar app?

Chris and I are late to the party, bidding our fond farewells to Stuart McLean.  But it wouldn’t be right to not pay our respects to the person who motivated us through many a chore.

Long before Saturday Morning Productions or Goal Buddy were even conceived, we were spending our Saturday mornings building a cold storage room under the stairs in our then-new house.  We can honestly say it is the opening riff of the theme music and the sound of the storyteller’s voice that encouraged us to get sawing and painting.  We even emailed him back then to let him know the impact he had on our routine.  Years later, during jam-making and harvest seasons, we have his show to thank for the completed room.