Goal-App

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.

Update: My last blog post was about my unsuccessful attempt at the APREP, which is the physical assessment part of the Edmonton Police Service’s hiring process. I passed on my second attempt, which was on February 13! It went so much better the second time, and not just because I didn’t wipe out (although not wiping out did help).

Here’s what was really different: my attitude. The first time I attempted the APREP, I was thinking about all the people I was afraid to let down. Ultimately, I was afraid of letting myself down, and not just all the people who were supporting me. It was the worst possible attitude I could have approached the situation with, because if you tell yourself “don’t screw up” then chances are, you are going to screw up.

I’m currently working on a notification plugin for Xamarin Forms and wanted to setup some unit tests.  The problem is my code accesses the device-specific notification systems in iOS and Android.  This means I can’t just run my unit tests on Windows.  Instead I need to run the unit tests in a iOS or Android environment.  In my case this means an emulator.

How to do that?  Use the NUnit 3 Xamarin Runners.  It was not clear how to correctly create the test projects but the way that worked for me was this.

On January 16th I took a flying spill when I tried to drag a huge dude-sized dummy for 50 feet. There I was, lying on the gym floor, elbows bloodied and pants torn, with an astounded audience looking just as horrified as I was. How did I get there?

*sound of a record needle being ripped off the record*

Wait. Let me back up a bit. That Monday I took a run at the EPS physical assessment. The APREP. It stands for “Alberta something something something.” Maybe one of the P’s stands for policing. Probably. I should look that up. It’s a two part test, with the first part being a timed obstacle course that includes walls, stairs, nefarious equipment and - yep, right at the end when you’re tired - dragging a dummy. You have to finish in under 2 minutes and 10 seconds.