We’re pleased to welcome Felicia and Edison to the Watkins family. Molly and I adopted them last Sunday and they’ve been slowly settling into a routine here at the Watkins Compound. It’s delightful having kittens around the house again. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching them to hunt toes under the comforter–much to Anna’s delight. … Welcome Felicia and Edison

For someone who professes to dislike writing unit tests, I seem to be writing a lot of them. In addition to the tests on my Markdown converter, this evening I started building a template engine. The syntax will be similar to Liquid, but of course, it’ll be written in Objective-C. The scanner now has a … More Unit Tests

I’ve been working on a little Mac application in my limited spare time. The component I’ve been tackling lately involves conversion between Markdown text and an NSAttributedString. There’s no good way to test the process, but what I’ve settled on is the following: Convert from Markdown to NSAttributedString Convert from NSAttributedString back to Markdown Convert … Unit Tests Suck, But They’re So Important

Today I spent almost two hours on the phone with Chase Bank trying to get my money back. Being on the phone for that long is bad enough, but I had to call twice, because the first time, I was put on hold and abandoned for more than 30 minutes until I finally hung up. … Doing Battle With Chase Bank

I’ve been working on a converter from Markdown to NSAttributedString and while running my unit tests against John Gruber’s Markdown test suite, I couldn’t understand why one specific test was failing3. Here’s the test Markdown source: Just a URL. URL and title. URL and title. [URL and title](/url/ “title … The Importance of Equality

What the hell is going on with all the kids dragging rolling backpacks to school? It’s bad enough many of them have huge backpacks (which are mostly empty judging by the way they swing around) but an incredible number seem to have rolling backpacks.

I just finished reading Circle of Enemies by Harry Connolly last night. I first heard of his work when he was the guest blogger on Charles Stross’ Web site. Stross writes the excellent Laundry series and also the Merchant Prince series, both of which I’ve enjoyed tremendously. So when he recommended Connolly’s work, I took … Circle of Enemies, by Harry Connolly

This morning Molly returned to Kindergarten. The rule is kids have to be fever free for 24 hours before they can go back. She woke yesterday without a fever and drove Anna nuts all day long. I was delighted to be able to walk to school with my sweetie again.

Poor Molly brought back some sort of plague from the wilds of Seattle. Yesterday, she woke around 7:30 (about an hour later than usual) and declared she was still tired. After drinking some juice and visiting the bathroom, she went back to bed and slept until almost 10. When she finally woke, she complained of … Plague Victim

Anna and Molly returned last night from their overnight trip to Seattle. They went up to attend the preschool graduation ceremony for the school Molly attended until we moved down to California. In addition to visiting with Molly’s old chums from preschool, they also stopped at my favourite place to have breakfast: The Crumpet Shop. … A Crumpet for Breakfast