Baseball, milling, and a form

In the last few weeks I have been to two baseball games. I have not been to a baseball game in two years, so I wanted to go to one at some point this summer.

For the first game I saw the Angeles play the Kansas City Royals. I was joined by James, who is a devoted fan of baseball. However, the Angeles lost.

The second game was on Friday. The Dodgers decisively beat the Cubs. It was also Star Trek night at Dodger Stadium. This involved William Shatner throwing out the first pitch and reading the Dodger's lineup. There were also fireworks after the game set to music from Star Trek. I sat in the free food pavilion. This is an area in the stadium where the price of the ticket includes as many Dodger Dogs, soda drinks, nachos, peanuts, and popcorn as you can get. While I ate three Dodger Dogs, it looked like most of the people around me ate even more food. I got the ticket and saw the game with my friend Andrew, who I know from a mutual friend from high school.

Friday was also an Andrew double play. Earlier that day I saw the Andrew I know from college who had just finished law school and the bar exam. He is currently living in Los Angeles, but will be moving home to Orange County at the end of the month. Since I was volunteering in the city, we met at Philippe's. Andrew explained that is the place he always ate at after he went to the shooting range nearby.

Earlier that day the excitement continued at my volunteer workplace. I wrote G-code to mill a box for a circuit board. I wrote the code from nothing and after some testing I had a complete program. I did not have time to run the final version, but I am confident it will produce a successful final product. My program even finds the exact position of the part to within a thousandth of an inch. It then calibrates its motions so the cutting is perfectly centered without any subsequent user adjustments.

The oddest thing I did last weekend was make changes to a health care form. My friend's wife works for an insurance company. Her boss asked her to make some changes to an application form. However, she has no experience with forms or with advanced features of Word. Since she knows I am good at computer stuff, she asked for my help. After trying to add features like drop down menus in Word, I decided it would be easier to migrate the form to pdf. In case you do not know, moving a file with boxes and a lot of formatting from Word to an Adobe format is a disaster. It rendered one straight line as a dozen distinct line segments that were not in a straight line. It also made one long shading box into many rectangles. It was a lot harder than it should have been and Adobe Designer does not have layers. I added fillable fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, and drop down menus. After some feedback and several hours of work, it looked a lot better.