Monday, December 8th, 2014

In the wake of submitting my first college application and several other events, I have decided to rethink what I want from my college experience. I plan to build a new college list based on my decisions. In the meantime, though, I have started a bunch of Common Applications. I need to work on them.

In other news, thesis-related news, I have retrieved and resumed reading an old book that I purchased about a year ago on developing for Android. When I say old, though, I mean ancient - the book teaches developing apps for Android version 1.1. To put that in perspective, Google released Android version 5.0 (the cutting-edge version my phone runs) in early November of this year. This would normally be okay because it still teaches me the basic concepts of Android development if not its current features, style, or sophistication. However, a crucial element to understanding what's said in the book is having the source code provided on the publisher's website with which to work and experiment alongside the text. The source code is fortunately still available, but it is taking me hours to sort out the errors caused by its lack of compatibility with the Android development tools that I am using (which are, ironically, the ones that the book recommends - the book is just old enough that even they won't work). On top of that, I'm worried that Andoid 1.x apps won't even run on my phone. Oh, well. I guess I will just have sort it out. I have to fix the example source code before I can even build the example app, much less install it on my phone. But enough railing on the age of the book and my difficulties starting with it. Quite frankly, I'm relieved - no, thrilled - to be back to work again after such a long stretch of doing little more than fretting about and procrastinating against it.