maybe it was an innocuous remark, but when the client wrote me a terse e-mail with nothing more than their phone number asking me to call them so they can complain about all the bugs they've discovered and then ask me if i can meet the deadline tomorrow and when they can expect a new version of the interactive, i took that to mean they wanted to see a new version tonight. i was just about to have dinner in belmont, but after the phone call i had no appetite. i quickly ate in less than 10 minutes then headed back home to cambridge to work.

i finally finished by 2:00 in the morning.

the day didn't start out this stressful. i knew the client were expecting a delivery either today or tomorrow, but since i hadn't received some of the content yet, i figured i wouldn't be blamed for any development delays (apparently that wasn't the case).

while waiting for content to arrive, i even had time to go visit my community garden, the first time in almost 2 weeks. there was nobody else there. the leaves of my acorn squash plant were all dead but the squashes themselves remained; i collected all 3. i even had some red tomatoes, and some green ones. finally, i picked an assortment of hot peppers (jalapeño, cayenne, bell). there was no point in watering since there weren't any vegetables growing. after taking some photos i left.

walking back home, i found a perfectly nice front bike wheel somebody had thrown away. too bad i'm looking for a decent replacement rear wheel, but i grabbed it anyway, if nothing else, i could salvage the reflector. further up the road, somebody had thrown away a box of clear glass vases. i picked 3 (as much as i could carry).

content finally arrived, but it'd take some time to implement, but in the meantime i contacted the client to arrange an afternoon visit so i could install the interactive on the test machine.

the client's watertown office is less than a mile from my parents' place, so i motorcycled first to their house to drop off some things (like the vegetables from my garden) before i headed back out to see the client at 2:30. this is the sort of informal office where a stranger (like myself) can just walk in and nobody really seems to notice. i found the graphic designer whom i met last time and she took me upstairs to meet the rest of the team.

the presentation seemed fine until we came across the glitch: apparently creating a full-screen flash interactive will also cause any embedded flvplayback components to display full screen as well, eclipsing anything underneath. i was a little embarrassed because i'd failed to properly test my interactive beforehand.

i let myself out but found myself trapped in the stairwell because all the doors had a security padlock that i didn't know the combination to. so i wandered all the way to the basement before finally finding an exit.

when i got back to belmont i tested both the mac and PC version and sure enough i saw the same problem. the solution was to set the fullscreentakeover property to false but that only works if the flvplayback component is instantiated through code and not manually placed onto the timeline. it took a bit of digging around but i finally found the solution (1 & 2). i only partially understand what's going on in the code snippet but it works and that's all i care about. i packaged up the exe and sent it to the client.

i only had a tea egg for breakfast but there were plenty of things to eat for lunch. my aunt gave my parents some lychees and longans. they're a bit old so the lychees taste a bit fermented and the longans have shrunken. my father made some beef jerky over the weekend but they're not really dry enough, although he said he was trying to make the soft kind of jerky.

while making dinner, my parents found a snail on a bag of fresh arugula my father had picked from my great uncle's backyard. after taking a few photos, i set the snail free in the toilet (i couldn't afford to set it free and risk the possibility of a snail colony in the backyard).

i got back to cambridge and started working again around 8:00. i only stopped for an hour at 10:00 to catch the season premiere of castle. not sure how i feel about castle and beckett finally hooking up. there's enough comedic situations to make me curious to see where the writers take the relationship. unfortunately the show is also on during the same time as NBC's revolution, which i'll have to catch via direct download. it wasn't hard to work, since drew was busy himself, preparing for his class tomorrow. we each toiled from our respective bedrooms; i ended up turning off the living room lights since nobody would be going there tonight.

turns out the fullscreentakeover tweak i made did fix the code, but when i went to publish the PC version it must not have done it because i ended up sending the same version i showed the client in the afternoon. the rest of the night i was working on getting the timeline to function correctly. after i got it to play forward and reverse, i had to make it robust enough that a user couldn't break it by rapidly toggling back and forth. the timeline itself was working fine, but the movie it controlled would stop playing suddenly. the problem was multiple instances of event listeners that weren't properly removed. i tried to find an elegant solution but ended up set flags in an array to let me know when a particular listener had been added so i could remember to remove it when the user reversed course on the timeline.