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i just finished solving an actionscript coding bug that i'd been working on for the past 5 hours. i learned yesterday that flash movie projectors can play full screen and that the videos will scale accordingly. all was good and i even wrote the client saying i'd be able to meet the monday deadline. unfortunately, while doing a bit of coding tonight, i came across a particularly pesky bug: when the video plays full screen, the code can't seem to capture any of the playback events. that's why when the video finishes playing, it doesn't advance to the next screen. i even went as far as installing the 30-day trial version of flash CS5, thinking it might be an issue with my outdated CS3, but the bug was still there. 

 the answer was actually pretty obviously, but took most of my saturday night to figure out: actually it was advancing, except everything was just covered up by the full screen video. that is one lesson learned! hopefully from now on it's easy sailing, i don't except anymore major issues. 

it began raining late last night. rumbling thundering rain, the sort of weather that made me worried about open windows and the possibility of the wind blowing my motorcycle over. it was still grey by the time i woke up this morning, but the weather report said it'd clear up by noontime and might even see some sunshine. 

the rain didn't stop until around 2:00. i took the bicycled and went to belmont. i saw that somebody had tossed an empty plastic water bottle into the back of my milk crate. with all the recent road work being done in the neighborhood, they must've broken something underground because parts of prentiss was street flooded in dirty brown water.

it wasn't long before i saw the new addition in the backyard: a tree covered in purple grape-like flowers - the wisteria had taken over! we were excited to see a few flowers last year, but amazed to see just how much of the elm tree the wisteria had invaded in just a year. beautiful as it was, i saw this as a terrible thing since it meant the wisteria was well on its way to killing that elm tree and would be hard to prune.

elsewhere in the backyard, i'm pretty sure slugs or some other bug had eaten almost all of my sweet pea seedlings. slugs have also been feeding on my lettuce, as half a row of leafy seedlings were entirely gone. back inside, i soaked the peony seeds my parents got from luoyang, a place famous for these flowers. not sure how viable these seeds are as a quarter of them floated. each packet contained 8 seeds along with a small flower photo, but i think it might be a scam as i found one packet with 2 different peony photos. with their slow germination, it'll take at least 3 months before we'll know if they've sprouted or not.

we had pan-fried chinese raviolis for dinner along with a seafood soup my father whipped up from frozen leftover ingredients he found in the freezer. pieces of calamari, squid nuggets, and mussels. he kept saying i wouldn't like it, but fresh slices of ginger made for a spicy brew which masked the fishy taste. i ended up having two bowls.

even though the rain stopped for a while, by evening it suddenly started up again, heavy and windy at times. by the time i left it was still drizzling a little bit. combined with the relatively cold weather (50's), it made for a miserable but nevertheless exciting ride back home.