I've found that being in a cafe early in the morning is quite rather satisfying. Especially if the sun is shining. I'm in Covent garden again, this time I've moved down to an adjacent street into a charming Italian coffee shop. I'm curious to see how the coffee tastes like.

Today is a day off and while they seem short, and far inbetween today, starting them early tends to make them that much longer. My gym session was good, short though as it was what they are calling an 'active rest day' which means you just do half the stuff you'd normally do on a regular gym day. That said they do tend to have new exercises that I don't do usually on a normal gym day. The run in was not as easy as it usually is as I'm finding by the Thursday, I'm getting rather tired and sluggish and that 'snap' that usually I have in my morning routine deteriorates sharply around this time. Thats probably why it's an 'active rest' as this point of the week and I'm relived to tell the truth! Still a good complete session, though I was feeling pooped on the run back from the gym.

One thing i love about running back from the gym, even though I'm tired is that the morning sun carries me along 'till the end as it's ever so beautiful. I think a positive mindset and feeling really can make anything even when physically you don't feel so.

I need to figure out that chill music that they play in cafés.

I had a rough week this week in term of stress, I don't think I'm particularly averse to taking it easy, but have a real difficulty stressing out. We had our development sprint end this week and perhaps it was my fault by I overcommitted and delivered a extra feature which didn't work and affected the Dev team. On the same token apparently Jack Daniels died from an injury sustained from kicking his safe early one morning in the office and the moral of that story was never come to work early. So I'm taking that lesson on board and never delivering more that I need to. He died, I didn't - so I think I'm winning.

I'm off to Windsor castle today. I've not ever been to the castle but have made my way to Windsor before: I wondered the cute streets of eaton riverside in the rain. It rained and I didn't mind. I arrived too late to get to see the castle so I compromised. It was a good compromise.

For some reason I'm thinking of Christmas. Unusual. I watched a film last night called Cedar house rules. It reminded me of Forest Gump. I love simple people, who just emit themselves. Audiosalve said it first, "be yourself" and then my mother said it and kept saying it and now I say it. Funny how that happens. The other day I went for my fairly usual stroll in the city and it was sunny and we sat watching the Thames sparklingly. My friend just got married and I was asking so many questions about it. I'm curious really. I've never really considered getting married. Even as a kid, I remember my kid cousin asking me about when I get married, and I've always considered it as a predefined eventuality. In the same way the society makes it a accepted eventuality. Now, I'm slowly unwinding myself and distancing myself from the idea, as it seems arkward to look for something that you've never really wanted to need.

 

I had a rare interesting early Sunday today. I spent most of last night sleeping, which is good, though I was plagued by my thoughts throughout. You know it's bad when you're dreaming/thinking about your sprint deadline, that feature you should check in, the upcoming assignment, the new project which is looming and android broadcast receivers!

Anyway my Sunday started rather early at 05:00 but seeing as I didn't have anything planned that early, is stayed in bed until about 08:00 but to cut a long story short, I was out the hour by 10 and wondered into Waterloo and over the bridge into embankment where I noticed some commotion on the bridge. This happened to be the London marathon. Lots of banners, colours etc. very pretty mind you. It's didn't really appeal to me, to I crossed the footbridge over towards charring cross to avoid the crowds.

Walked up the strand and at that early in the morning that Classic Italian/Parisian cafe I notice every now in then had the outdoor chairs and tables in the sun and no one was there... So, I figured, why not, got myself a large black Americano and got chatting to this Lithuanian girl who joined me(sun is quite popular in London). Then I got talking to a lady who works in Covent garde market, which was interesting. By that time my coffee was going dry so I thought I'd adieu. Leaving my little sun spot, I felt, yeah that was 30 mins of quite pleasure.

 

I headed off to start the rest of the day, and we'll just that little start in the little coffee shop on the corner of maden street made it a great day for me. It's just the quite little things.

Wrote my first MFC programming app yesterday. Surprising how satisfying it was.
Its kind of weird how a technology such as MFC which I and others, perhaps wrongly, consider outdated, also consider it with particular reverence. That's how it is with the past. Or with respect, I suppose.

The past has an alure to it, specifically in this case, where something in the past(not really my past) that I've not experienced explicitly before fascinates me. MFC is interesting and appealing to me and because its also unknown, I've often felt like I'm missing some magic. That said, curiosity killer the cat but I suspect the cat lead an interesting life.

Thinking about it, its almost like antiques, if you like cars, its quite possible you'll have a greater appreciation for cars that were before your time like an old Lamborghini or something less extravagant. Even better if that Lamborghini still looks awesome and is still lightening fast!

MFC is talked about, often being referred like a bygone hero or age. That just makes it that more intruiging to me.

So I bought, after much consideration, a physical behemoth of a book but you you really must refer to it as a manual like the bible. From what I can tell, it is the absolute authority on MFC programming. It arrived in the office 2 days ago. 1000+ pages, heavy and quite daunting in its hard cover. I'm rather excited as I've too been yearning to put to practise my recent revision of C++, which MFC is specifically geared towards.

The app is simple but simple is a relative term in Windows programming. I have an appreciation for writing a 'simple' Windowed app in C, and making that even easier while using MFC and C++ and learning something new, exciting and is super cool.

As it happens MFC is not as deprecated as I might lead you to believe. In fact, its still being actively developed and used. Bonus. Visual Studio 2013, which us what we use at the office, includes the most recent update to the library(its really a library of objects that wrap the WinSDK which is written in 'Simple' C...). I wikipedia'ed it and was pretty suprised how current it still is. It has however lost favour in the greater development community I feel. This, partly I think, to the upsurge of simpler alternatives such as the .net library which really makes things easier.

Still, I want to know more about MFC. Its intruiging.

From my limited experience with it, I could easily draw similarities to a C++ framework which I've used more extensively, namely Qt. The abstraction of the message loop and having a run() method which handles message dispatch is similar. Also a message map, connecting functions to events/messages in MFC is remarkably similar to QT's signal and slots mechanism...which I've often appreciated. It will be interesting if QT's widget layout managers have a similar concept in MFC. Somehow I doubt it.

The direct foraw into utilising C++ for MFC straight off the bat, such as virtual function overrides is also quite satisfying.

A bit off topic now but, The more I think about it though, programming is not the future of programming. Design is. Effective modeling of problems. Programming is just the footsoldier in the war of concepts.