Mocha alert

I've been drinking this coffee from Wawa (our local chain of convenience stores here in MD). Actually, it's not really coffee per se -- it comes out of one of those hot drink machines as this brown coffee-like goo. But whatever.

The thing that pulled me in was the words "extra caffeine" next to the label. Yeah, no kidding. One 20 oz. cup o' that stuff, and I'm up until 2 am.

But it's gooood.

Who needs sleep.

Watching grass grow

This is the first time I've had to plant grass seed in my yard before. We have a big bare spot around our heat pump in the backyard and other small patchy sections elsewhere. I grabbed a bag of Scott's PatchMaster from Home Depot about a week and a half ago and scattered it around.

Aside from making our lawn look as if it has blue mold, it hasn't really done anything yet. It's been raining fairly frequently (although I haven't been watering myself), but now I'm worried. It's almost at the two-week mark, and I'm not seeing anything.

I never foresaw getting wrapped up in whether the planting was going to work or not, but ... grow, $%&! it, grow!

Google Web Accelerator

Before I even saw ZDNet cover the story, I saw that Scott Yang had tried Google's new Web Accelerator and saved ... well, basically nothing. Funny read, nonetheless.

Experiments with ACL

If you remember one of my previous rants, I mentioned that there weren't many IDEs other than MS Visual Studio that had good GUI builders associated with them. One possibly strong alternative I ran across was Allegro Common Lisp.

I downloaded the latest free version from Franz's website and installed it, along with the license key. No problems there. I started with the interface builder tutorial and began working my way through the chapters.

I encountered a couple of main problems. One is that the IDE is just buggy and doesn't always save your changes correctly. This is flat-out annoying for a 6.2 release. The second is that when adding a new class to the your source code, you have to manually "evaluate" the class in order for the IDE to recognize it in its internal GUI Designer. Come on! Visual Studio and Eclipse have done dynamic code parsing for quite a while now.

Frustrated, I gave up on the tutorial around chapter 4 because I just got tired of fighting with the IDE. Scratch ACL as a good alternative language / GUI building combo.

Right now, I'm back to VisualWx, which I'm pretty happy with at the moment, but I haven't stressed it yet either.